Josh Susanto

Indeed. It was so useful, in fact, that there must be a very compelling reason for no longer providing it. What might such a reason be?

Plus every one of the images contains a subliminal text that says "kill them all". But we can all see that... right?

I'm not having the same problem. OTOH, the trees have bits of sky behind them. OTOH, OTOH, they are mostly done and I can always just clean them up before I load them... if I load them.

VERY clear, thanks. I don't sell any other vehicles, so when I clicked on the appropriate category and the system acted as if I had selected it, I just assumed there were no further options. This also happens frequently when I try to put items in sculpted prims creator tools landscaping or architectural and the system thinks I have selected a higher category. I'm aware of it because I use those categories quite often. I have considered bothering to fix such entries, but I figure it should be easier for the people who actually care to prevent it from happening in the first place, unless they'd rather spend their time answering complaints by people whom they have continued to confuse by not fixing the system. Your response shows that you're actually looking at flaggings in some cases, which I'm delighted to see. I was getting all kinds of crazy flaggings a few months ago, but something seems to have deterred the flagger or flaggers, so if it was you who stopped them, thanks again for that.

My stuff is only free if people find it for free. Mostly they don't, because I have over 500 items. Making things full perms means I don't have to pay to market anything because the items effectively market each other. Usually what happens is that someone sees one or two of my items in-world and comes to the market where they eagerly pay up to 9L for each item they buy because that's the easiest way to get what they actually want from the total selection. When I only had about 200 items, there were people at least once a week who would buy almost everything, even though it could potentially be found in-world for free. It is worth paying a small fee for something that is free when found, but not easily found. I have over 100K in student loans, and I've had no luck trying to pay them off with multiple jobs in RL, but if I can make my current rate of sales growth in SLM sustainable, I should be able to at least get out of default in 2 years with SLM, alone, just by gradually adding simple 1-prim items at a rate of 1 or 2 per day. That's nothing to shake a stick at, and the work I'm doing to produce most of the more profitable items is something I could probably train a monkey to do for me. I only do the harder stuff because I like to, and if I stopped now, SLM would continue accumulating money for me while I sleep because my baseline operating costs are practically nil. I'm gradually WINNING, at least in SL, and ridiculing my methods is not going to persuade me to change them as long as they continue to work as well as they do.

[When you buy a product from a Merchant’s inworld store, the sales transaction is direct between your Avatar and the product vendor (for basic vendors). This reduces the chance for a delivery delay or failure. It can still happen but far less likely than the frequent delivery failures that are occurring between the SLM website to the Magicbox to your Avatar inworld.] So I should buy in-world as a way of helping LL to avoid fixing the delivery problem in SLM? [Your product delivery will almost always be instant after paying the inworld product vendor.] ... who will be, more than likely, someone with a paid account paying LL either directly or indirectly for substantial land use, rather than paying to rez one prim. [if you have a purchase problem of any nature whereby you are entitled to a Refund, the Merchant is able to provide you 100% of your purchase price back. If you have the same issue from an SLM sale, the Merchant can only offer you 95% of your purchase as a refund. Why? Because LL has the other 5%. So if you are looking for $1000L refund, the Merchant can only offer you $950L of it – he doesn’t have the rest.] Unless the item costs 9L or less, as do my items. [When you come to the inworld store to buy the product you found on the SLM you often will get to see the product live or in action (i.e. I sell Landscape Sculpt Maps – you see many of them rezzed in my store). You can’t get a good experience of the product from photos on SLM. ] People can see my items well enough to know they won't find anything better for less in-world. Paying to rez them would mostly only remove doubts which don't much exist to begin with, and people can already see my stuff rezzed all over the place anyway because it's full pems and too good not to share. OTOH, if I decide to sell a line of marginal quality no-perms items at inflated prices, I suppose I can both use land rental costs as a rationalization for doing that, and also use SLM competition as an excuse for doing it unprofitably. [When you take the time to visit the Merchant’s store inworld, you will often get to see several other products created by this Merchant that you might also like or that might even better work for you than the one you initially found in SLM. I have had countless of my Customers that changed your selection of products after visiting my landscape sculpty store.] I think it might be cheaper just to keep my 500+ items in one little box, thanks. Especially since most of them are only compelling when rezzed at 10x10x(whatever). If I just stacked everything vertically... well... maybe you see my point? I pass the economy and convenience of not doing that on to the customer. You're welcome. [Often when you visit the store, you might bump into the actual Merchant / Creator. This is a great experience as you can engage him/her and learn valuable tips/tricks of the products or find out deals in the store that were not available on SLM. I have met many inworld customers where I have engaged in great chats and often came to their sim to provide them advice on how to solve their landscaping challenges.] Or you run into a bunch of noobs who won't let you look at the product. Or an impostor who directs you to his own merchandise or otherwise abuses your patience and trust. If people want to talk to me, they can talk to me. My name is right on the product and on the listings. [When visiting a Merchant’s store, you often get to run into other stores as many of stores are in malls. You might just find an amazing gem of a product you were always looking for or find something that you didn’t even know you wanted! ] Plausible. I'll let you know when it happens. [THIS IS A BIG ONE: When you buy from the Merchant inworld and not on SLM, you are making a powerful contribution to the SL’s general economy! Why? Because 100% of your purchase stayed within the SL economy. When you buy from SLM, you are assured that 5% of all your purchases instantly leave the SL economy. That is because LL takes its 5% and removes it from the SL economy – that is their real life $US profit (a complicated source / sink model but it’s gone from SL). It’s not to say that the Merchants don’t take your $L out of SL – because many of us do. BUT, unlike LL, almost all of us Merchants spends a good portion of the $L they make to pay rent, buy other Merchant goods, donate, pay tips, etc. ] Again, 5% of 9L is how much? OTOH, if I had an in-world store, I would NEED to charge more than 9L in order to meet operating costs. And where does rent money ultimately go? [When you shop inworld you help the Merchant support his/her inworld store. Remember that LL considers their Merchant’s inworld stores as direct competition to their SLM operation. SLM sales are funded risk free by sale’s based commissions. But inworld, the Merchant takes on big risks by renting or buying land that charges tiers to the Merchant – even if the Merchant makes no sales! If the Merchant’s inworld store costs more each month then it generates revenue, the Merchant has no choice but to close its doors. This has ripple effects in the economy since the rent stops at the mall – the mall owner needs to shut because of no rent…. etc.etc. etc. So, buy inworld and support the SL economy.] OR it keeps land prices high and large regions tedious to visit by filling up potentially good locations with annoying commercial crap foisted on SL users by clumsy dilletantes who have nothing better to do with their apparently bottomless trust funds. So, yeah, it keeps money coming into SL... some money anyway. It just doesn't assure a better total SL experience. [Finally, when Window Shop in SLM and then go inworld to buy your products, you are sending the LL Commerce Team a powerful message – a message we Merchants have not been able to send to LL. You will tell them that they will not be rewarded 5% commissions for running a SL Marketplace with terrible service stability, development priorities that do not have the Shopper & Merchants in mind, and making poor decisions that are often half baked.] OR, the message they get from it: "You have succeeded in keeping merchants paying rent rather than paying the 5% which would ultimately be less in total; make SLM a little worse and maybe you can collect even more rent next year while also making mercantile activity harder for the deadbeats who don't want to pay for their accounts."

It's a functional car and it was listed as a ground vehicle. Had it not been textured with scanned raw pork ribs, I can't see any possible reason why it should have been flagged at all.

Sure. OR... they could just change things back to the way they were when keywords actually did work for me (and they DID).

Freebies also provide a default content stratum, which I think SL needs both to have and to allow to gradually expand. The users are the money and the new users are the new money. Step one is getting people to start accounts, step two is persuading people to continue using them, and step three is persuading them to pay for things. If you try to change the order of these things, it won't bring as much money into SL. It just won't. And there is always more money to bring into SL, because people could just as well spend it on gambling, prostitution or drugs. We are not talking about millions of otherwise-directed entertainment dollars; we are talking about billions. The persistent expansion of freebies in both variety and quality keeps people coming back long enough to want something even better, rather than logging off and spending their money in places where we, as SL merchants, will probably never get a piece of it. (Which outcome do you prefer?) Freebies also provide material for modification and recombination, so they actually help keep commercial content development a little more robust, and give newer developers a chance to hone their skills without paying a lot in the process. Bottom line: If you feel like you are losing because you can't compete with freebies, your stuff can't possibly be anything very special; is it really fair to try to punish other users for your own failings by discouraging freebies?

{Brooke Linden wrote: {March experienced an expected seasonal dip and some shift in purchase dynamics resulting from the maturity related changes. How would that explain a more than 50% sustained overnight drop-off among a selection of over 400 items not marked as moderate or as adult?

Liquify is a kludge. What you need is a smart stretch function.

WHAT TO DO: 1) Open a paid alt account on the premise that if you actually pay for SL, it HAS TO WORK. 2) Move all your merchanidise to the paid account and sell it through the paid account. 3) When it still doesn't work, move all the merchandise back to your free account and cancel the paid account.

The reason given is sometimes not the obvious reason for removal, so I suspect that it is quite often not the real reason. I recently had removed a Ferrari made out of meat and a collection of 3 spoofed ad images from the SLM, both for being "not as advertised". In what way could these things not be as advertised? The ad images, you can see just by looking at the posted photos; I was offering them for free so people wouldn't have to grab them and pay to load them. The Meat Ferrari is a Ferrari and it is mostly made out of meat. How could someone be confused about that, especially with a picture of the thing?

I had the same problem, but it finally cleared up after I repeatedly reset my box. Then I just had to deal with the error messages when I needed to upload photos...

Based on comparative view rates, it's my current belief that keywords, statistically speaking, don't actually do anything. Can anyone prove me wrong?

I also had record profits in March as a whole. It just makes me wonder what would have happened if this hadn't been in spite of a profound drop off to a new low right around the middle of the month, which was basically repeated a couple of days ago. In total, it's my guess that I could be making almost twice as much money if "problems" didn't keep getting "fixed".

One of my wish-list Items for Mr. Devitry at Lunapic is a smart-stretch function that will strech to the frame, vertically or horizontally, arbitrary line segments such as would be cause by a circular punchout or such. The next step after that would naturally be a function that stretches a rectangular image vertically or horizontally to fit an arbitrary frame. If that happens, we should be able to make a frame for each part of the avatar template, and for clothing templates. That should solve the basic problem with vertical stripes. Devitry has to set his own priorities, though, so this may be a way off yet. If he manages to make the first thing work, at least, I'll let you know. So far, he has put a 2-directional skew tool on the site at my request and it's been working great for me. The next thing I suggested is a tool that pushes the color in every pixel to perfectly match colors on Wikipedia's list of traditional Japanese colors, basically turning any image into a Japanese painting. I have considered starting a thread just for possible tool ideas for Lunapic, so that Devitry can just check the thread instead of having to answer a bunch of emails. What say you all?

<In the first case you get twice as many polished turds. Good luck proving that.

>"How many people are working on the Marketplace Codebase?" If you hire 1 person to polish 2 turds or hire 2 people to polish 1 turd, the result will tend to be about the same either way.

Asking for new utilities is only going to distract LL from the more important matter of returning to its previous state that which did at one time work better.

March decline may be a real phenomenon, but I think it's an interesting coincidence that all the inventory and delivery glitches seem to happen at exactly the same time that we "should expect" people to be making fewer and/or smaller purchases "anyway".

Now people are finally seeing why I price things at 9L rather than 10L? Just to clarify for anyone else... If you have 2 identical items, one selling for 9 and one selling for 10, and someone buys one of each, you get paid 9 for each, but the buyer pays an extra 1 for the item priced at 10, and that 1 goes to LL. Why charge your customer more if you don't even get to collect the difference?

That looks like a great technique for seamless frabrics and similar items. My thing is mostly seamless rock and ceramic surfaces that are then use for RGB relief sculpting of seamless columns. I lose some photorealism, but, OTOH, I also lose the seam.

I run Ghosterys on Firefox, and Lunapic doesn't appear to be any more dodgy than its competitors. I've been using it for years with no apparent problem, but I toss cookies and otherwise clean up my computer several times a day anyway, since the sites from which I have grabbed raw texture have often given me little problems. As far as I can tell, it gets its revenue from advertisers. There is no fee, but there is a slightly better premium version that the admin offered to let me use of a $10US donation, which I think is fair, although I have not used it yet. Either way, they've been quite responsive to my suggestions, and I am making good use of the new skew feature which I had suggested.

(fnord)