[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

27 minutes ago, Jo Yardley said:

What about clearing inactive accounts?

I'm in favor, as long as they get to keep their inventories. And one year may be on the short side, especially if you're repossessing their land. But those are details -- if this has the potential of improving performance for all of us, I say go for it.

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

1 minute ago, Jules Catlyn said:

I was avoiding that elephant in the room

 

Probably wise. It's quite possibly an illegal copy, too.

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

15 minutes ago, Jules Catlyn said:

A million Russians and number of people online barely peaks over 50.000. Plus open sim is far behind compared to Second Life on almost any level.

Except maybe content theft.

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

Just now, BelindaN said:

Which way did he go? *coughs*

Isn't it implied which way a vector goes? (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

19 minutes ago, Froukje Hoorenbeek said:

Please keep in mind that it takes a lot of work and commitment to be a good innovative content creator, it is a full time job that most of us can barely live off. Skimming more of our income will force us to look for other jobs.  Not because we want to, we love this world, we have given it a lot. But we have families and rent too.

Well said, Froukje!

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

48 minutes ago, Callie Cline said:

so, will you reconsider? 

My question exactly. Doubling the fee seems heavy handed and mildly disrespectful. So please?

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

35 minutes ago, Beth Macbain said:

That's how it works. I'm a consumer. Go ahead and raise those prices. You have my permission. Please.

Oh, I will, if I have to. I'm lucky enough to have a limited number of products, so the effort is quite manageable in my case.

Longer term, I will also try changing the product mix, tweaking my promotion strategy, and eating fewer carbs. I have not given up.

I am, however, asking Linden Lab to rethink their strategy for recalibrating the SL economy a little.

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

1 minute ago, Blueberryxx said:

Please remember to be kind.

Hear, hear.

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

1 minute ago, Jo Yardley said:

It might be a good idea for LL to send people an official warning when they haven't logged into SL for say a year that if they don't respond soon their account will be set to non-active meaning their groups vanish, they are automatically removed from groups, they lose land, prims returned, etc.

Are you taking notes, Linden Lab?

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

3 minutes ago, Mollymews said:

a question for you WFT and other merchants.  Would it be viable or useful to you if LL were to charge a fee per offer/notice sent to your subscribers ?

It's not a bad idea, but the downside might be that it favors the big, established brands and becomes just another barrier to entry for new, small brands. And I think the playing field is a bit uneven as it is.

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

3 minutes ago, Jo Yardley said:

If you own a group you can actually remove members who haven't logged into SL for a while.
Simply sort all members by date they last were online, select the ones you want to eject and do so.

Good idea -- but why not also let the back end do this? That would also handle cases where the group creator no longer is active. Plus, some group owners may prefer the inflated count...

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

1 minute ago, Kat Linden said:

While that is certainly something to consider, there is not currently a way to do that. 

I understand that it requires coding. But it does seem like a fairly simple task, and one that might have a significant performance benefit if the member count is as important as it seems. So please put that on the to-do

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

10 minutes ago, Kat Linden said:

This is important because all members of groups contribute to lag, even inactive group members.

So... why not automatically eject members who haven't logged on in years?

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

30 minutes ago, halebore Aeon said:

Creators are getting hit? How about the consumers, who are also gonna get hit with a price increase?  In a perfect world, a business wouldn't expedite its costs onto the consumer. However, to make ends meet, pay overhead and to essentially be able to live, since I know some cash out to RL. These costs will be expedited to the customer, in a price increase on goods and services, within SL.

That's exactly right. Even if the direct impact is on the creators, in many if not most cases the extra cost will be passed on to the consumer. That's how it is in any life.

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

4 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Actually, it most certainly does if the person cashing out cashes out less than $400/owned full region/month.

Fair point -- although I'm not sure how many creators that applies to? I would imagine that those who cash out less than $400 / month may not have a full region, as tier would account for over 60% of revenue. I do agree that it doesn't hit all creators equally, though.

In any event, I'm surprised that LL didn't increase the Marketplace fees first. The current 5% certainly is below "industry standards" and raising it might provide some revenue as well as having the positive side effects of encouraging creators to maintain in-world stores instead of only being on Marketplace.

 

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

5 minutes ago, Mollymews said:

a thing that helps merchants a little bit is that the cost to your customers to buy L$ hasn't been increased. In a where is the good news in all this for merchants then I think that's good.  Had LL increased the cost of buying L$ then that would have hurt the customers, bleeding thru to merchants on top of increased merchant fees

I agree. But that's maybe more in the "not worse" column than in the "better" column?

[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

I am aware that LL is trying to shift the economy away from a tier-based economy. I am aware that this is not easy. I agree that it is long overdue and vital to the long term survival of SL.

However, the last few rounds -- including this one -- have targeted creators disproportionately. Doubling the credit processing fee actually is a huge deal, and directly affects the livelihood of people who make a living or supplement their incomes here. It may seem like peanuts compared to "industry standards", but that's beside the point; people who depend on SL income are affected by SL fees, not what others might charge. (Reminder: most creators are not wealthy elites who wade in cash and sneer at the riff-raff.)

A few of the other changes will also indirectly affect creators. Reducing the group count will make it harder to reach customers. Reducing the number of offline IMs will make it harder to communicate with customers. (As a side note, taking away benefits is a very unfortunate way of treating customers/users -- google "loss aversion" to see why this is a psychological blunder even if it saves a few pennies.)

No, I have not forgotten about the $20 cut in full region tier. It is a step in the right direction, although it will clearly not lead to dramatic changes. And it does not come close to making up for the doubled credit processing fee.

It is worth remembering that almost all of the content in SL is not made by LL. It's made by us -- some for free, some for profit. It is starting to feel as if LL is taking creators for granted (where else are they going to go, right?) and by extension, taking consumers for granted.

Because in the end, this affects consumers as well. If this trend continues, creators will be faced with some unpleasant choices: cut cost through outsourcing and more cookie-cutter products, raise prices, or close shop.

Dear Linden Lab: If you want to preserve the creative vitality and healthy economy of Second Life, it's time to rethink and rebalance your strategy. Continuing down this path is not good for creators, not good for customers, and ultimately not good for your business.

[Since when can customers do an MP redelivery by themselves?]

On 11/30/2018 at 6:08 PM, Grumpity Linden said:

I think we should do the more generic case - allow a merchant to disable redelivery for 1) their entire store or 2) on a per-listing basis.   Otherwise, we may get caught up in carving out a variety of exceptions.  Thoughts? (I don't mean from Dakota, I mean from everyone  ).

Yes, agreed. There are tons of use cases here, and valid reasons for wanting or not wanting this feature; letting the merchants decide is the simplest and most flexible solution.

Should we understand your comment to mean that this is actively being worked on? (That would be awesome  )

[Transactions Page shows multiple days transactions]

5 hours ago, Grumpity Linden said:

Ohai! check out those good looking filters in your transaction history... 

It works! I had to clear my cookies first, though. Prior to that, it kept appending the date range to the URL, thus overriding the filters and showing a week regardless of which filter was selected.

After clearing cookies and restarting Chrome it now uses URLs without date ranges, like so:

https://accounts.secondlife.com/transaction_history?days=0&lang=en-US#/

I'm using Chrome on Win 10, in case that info is useful.

 

 

[Transactions Page shows multiple days transactions]

38 minutes ago, Grumpity Linden said:

Alright! while we're on a roll, tell me please: is there still a (strong) use case for the URL on the transaction page to change when the selected date range changes (basically allowing you to bookmark a specific date range). 

I've personally never had a need for bookmarking date ranges. It's so rare that I'm interested in anything other than today or yesterday that I don't mind using the calendar controls for those cases.

Plus, given that only the last three months' worth of transactions are available, date range bookmarks have a limited shelf life.

[Transactions Page shows multiple days transactions]

23 minutes ago, Grumpity Linden said:

Now's the time to tell me how much you hate that idea. 

Hate? Zero. 

Love? A lot.

Response time? That was awesome.

Major kudos!

 

[Transactions Page shows multiple days transactions]

8 minutes ago, Arwen Serpente said:

It can be found here: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-214748

Nicely done! Voted and watching

[Transactions Page shows multiple days transactions]

On 3/13/2018 at 11:37 PM, Grumpity Linden said:

... implemented a feature request to show 7 days' worth of transaction history by default, because it seems like a much more sensible approach

Maybe I'm missing something, but I really don't understand how this is a much more sensible approach? At first I thought it was a bug and expected it to be fixed in a day or two.

My guess is that the users who check their transactions most frequently are merchants, and they would normally be much more interested in daily sales than in weekly numbers. For us, this change simply means that we need another two mouse clicks to get to the information we want.

As for non-merchants, I'm not convinced that defaulting to a week makes sense for those users, either.

I agree with Arwen that letting users choose a (persistent) time span would make sense if you wanted to offer an improvement. This change, however, is not an improvement. It's an ill-considered change on what seems to be the strength of one person's request.

I strongly encourage you to roll this back and engage with your users in a meaningful conversation first. Then roll out any resulting changes.

 

[L$ Transaction History failed at SL Website]

Yup, same here. Manually editing the URL doesn't help, either.

[Process Credit Fees Raised. Again.]

42 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

And once the Linden Lab Marketplace took over the others it pretty much became mandatory to BE on the Marketplace.

I'm surprised LL didn't try to increase their MP revenue before resorting to yet another fee increase. The 5% commission is actually very low, and I think an increase would be easier to swallow for many merchants. It might:

• Generate some revenue
• Encourage merchants to keep in-world stores, thus possibly increasing tier revenue
• Avoid angering a key demographic

I haven't attempted to do the math, so it's quite possible that this would not be enough -- and the impact would of course depend on how much the commission were increased -- but it's still odd that that this wasn't the first option.