Dartagan Shepherd

It doesn't get much ineffective than that, rediculously obvious and blatant theft. The redundancy of de-listing and then contacting support to figure out why or where to put it comes close, though. I've never subscribed to the fact that DRM doesn't or can't work in SL. It may not work perfectly but it works better than nothing if you're the kind of company that can implement solutions in a timely and reliable way. Better would be implementing one or more of the merchant suggested solutions to help combat it. The downside of some of those might be mildly painful to some, but it doesn't have to cost us any extra fees and would surely cut some of these cases by half, which leaves that much more honest dollars to honest merchants. I remember a roadmap that we had once upon a time, promising better solutions for theft. I'm guessing tackling these kind of solutions are akin to LL not picking up a shovel for fear of blisters. I look at the recent news of Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer nixing all work-at-home employees, and then look at LL and issues like this and nod. And think perhaps it is time for another CEO. A woman that has experience in running a business would be just the ticket to develop a working trust environment. At least she'd be more understanding of stolen clothes and hair and less likely to recreate the Etch A Sketch with physics as a new product, and less likely to choose pathfinding and Linden Realms over commerce and virtual goods that make up everything in the world besides land and people. So there we have it, the answer to everything is a woman, however emasculating that might be.

LL wrote: ... since the sellers are the ones who are paid for the sale of their products.It will be necessary for you to contact the seller directly inworld for assistance with receiving a refund for your purchase from them. Not entirely true, LL is paid 5% commission on the sale, which is in their power to refund should they choose to do it. By their choice, they do not. Meanwhile, another virtual world out there in the virtual universe has this to say about the difficulty in implementing user to user transactions with virtual currency: "After massive fraud in other virtual worlds, no bank or billing provider wants to risk working with another virtual world in the same capacity.".

Ciaran Laval wrote: I like the idea of MP vendors and agree that a commission should be taken from inworld vendors but at a lower rate than the MP itself. The vendor idea would be useful, but why on earth would LL need a commission when vendor owners are already paying tier and LL provides a free service of user-to-user delivery? Should all transfers be taxed now in world? Of course it would also effectively put all independent vendor creators out of business, the way it did independent marketplaces. Also way back when Rod became CEO at SLCC he said no listing fees would be implemented because "LL is doing fine" and didn't need the fees. Has that changed?

Personally I mostly thought it was just ironic, because of those ads being in direct opposition of their TOS to us linking to external products. My immediate reaction is that it was a bit tacky, because LL is still eluding to millions in revenue and the most self respecting companies that are in profit mostly don't make use of the extra advertising. Secondary thoughts were whether they just want click-throughs and not purchases and do they grasp the concept of a finite amount of money from their users and how purchases on that advertising may take spending dollars from SL? This doesn't seem to matter when they try to upsell Patterns and friends to SL users to them. Perhaps it's just more revenue to pump into new day old bread masquerading as retro creative products. I can live with them, and it certainly beats some new feature with new sinks or laying off a third of the company again (although of course they recently got rid of a third of their data centers and called a reallocation of resources and funds an "investment in hardware" with no further information on said hardware and dubbed it Project Shining). I imagine them putting them on the existing user pages spares them from any negative image it might cause on more public facing pages. For all I know it just scores sympathy points by making users think they need the money while Phil goes around saying SL is still a profit success. I've heard people say they'd click them to "support" SL, and that's fine. I'll click on them when tier goes down, and when they clean up their act on some of the other money bits which should happen any day now. Any ... day ... now ...

In the news today: Unidentified Lindens were seen being led from Linden Lab's headquarters in handcuffs, their heads covered by Linden swag for illegally violating TOS requirements for linking to external sites selling non-virtual goods. There are indicators that Linden violators will be held without bail and breakfest burritos.

Right, not so sure that it's an act of desperation so much as a way to gamble on the LL's new products earning revenue before the piper needs to be paid, because at some point that cash that they're holding back needs to be paid out again in full. They are selling the new products in a fairly unfinished (and beta) state before they're actually ready for prime time, with the intent of further monetizing peoples "creations" later. If the new products pay off, the gamble worked. If not, then it has to come out of the profit of the company, which is probably enough to cover the bet. Either way, they should be gambling with their profits, and not by increasing cash on hand by delaying payouts, which only yet again contributes to their decline as they erode trust. Of course we can't see their books, and even at the height of their statistics and quarterly reports they never showed real financials such as company gross earnings, net revenue and the real effect of their sinks as profit. Or how the Lindex is not auctually a "dollar for dollar" correlation that makes it a true exchange ... the Lindex has always been doctored and seeded and tweaked enough to be just another liability dodge by claiming that it's a user-to-user trade. Just that it's a likely candidate, and coupled with their other business practices of broken recurring billing, steep tier doubling on land parcels, the dodge you get to apply to take out money that you've earned if you exceed the base limit, the way they double and triple monetize on the same currency, and promote the marketplace with new tutorials in the same breath that they claim some of these snafu's are "bugs", it's all the same flavor. Their whole system smells pretty bad though, as opposed to straightforward pricing and fees and responsible handling of users goods and funds. Lumping it under, if it smells like sewage, and if it's squishy like sewage, and has un-mentionable bits floating in it, it's probably sewage.

Same here with the cashing out delays. If they double the payout timeframe they effectively double their cash flow or cash on hand, which gets invested in new products. Not a new or particularly clever trick, but there it is, at the expense of people who provide them with said cash flow in the first place. Also agree with what Amethyst said about the over-selling of advertising in general.

Agree, and oddly enough had just finished a semi-related article: http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/18/developers-choosing-conscience-over-profit/ I liked the "makers vs. takers" bit as it applies to the over monetization here and the imbalance of features that are good for the company as opposed to its merchants. While the economy here suffers they invest in new products rather than being content with the core product, and stabilizing for a currently non-growth market, because it's the millions that matter. Not being able to cancel anything recurring is a farce. Or to get biblical on them: "By their fruits ye shall know them".

Made even more ironic by the free Valentines Day gift LL is giving out today: "To help you have even more fun in Second Life this Valentine’s Day, we have a surprise gift for you! You must log in by 7:30pm PT today to be eligible, so don’t wait!" Made more confusing because you don't actually get the gift, it just makes you eligible for some mysterious gift. Hopefully it's not a valentines day bear, because the world is already over populated with those. Surely LL must be cursed by some old ghosts that inhabit the bodies of board members and employees.

Not the best of examples, but stretching keywords like warm and cool to describe color while seemingly harmless to the dress, do harm search results to products that do have a more legitimate use of those keywords. In some cases it not only serves as keyword spam, but also search result spam. Silly relevance, tricks are for kids, magicians, escorts, halloween, practical jokers, cereal, politicians...

Sort of agree. An alternative would be to remove the minors from SL, replace maturity with work-safe flags (or content specific flags such as violence, sexuality, etc.) and make the Gorean content a copyright issue. According to Tyche Shepherd, by the end of the month, adult regions will outnumber general regions. Besides, everyone knows that people only read Juggs for the articles and visit Gor for the scenery. Think of the innocent rocks!

Cincia Singh wrote: I checked with Live Chat support and it's a known bug. I've given the same "I know" response to my wife for years when she reminds me that it's garbage night. I'm up to about an 85% success rate in actually getting the garbage out. If known bugs were garbage however, LL would be a landfill. This obviously makes me feel pretty good about taking out the garbage, Not that this has anything to do with stalled traffic counts, which is more like forgetting to get gas.

Did your mothers never teach you not to feed such ambrosia to a narcissist? It makes them swell.

It would appear that when a company builds features that the customers want, rather than what the employees or company wants to build, customers are much more appeciative. I'm stumbling over my own feet to find the door with this newly found knowledge. Who knows? It may even make for a better longer lasting product more suited to the customers that use the product. I've got goose bumps on my goose bumps.

I'll limit my response to: Good deal. Commenting further would be fraternizing.

For some reason this reminds me of my freebie pink flamingo pogo stick. It doesn't do anything for me in particular, I never use it, but there it sits in my inventory being free and pink and springy.

I've ordered more sacrificial goats. They should be here early next week at the latest.

Well, like Darrius says, it's one of the product capabilities of the Spree shopping software that the marketplace is based on. http://guides.spreecommerce.com/products_and_variants.html The flexibility of Spree was one of the reasons it was chosen. The commerce team did express willingness to implement it some time back. As to when, it's part of the Second Life 2013 roadmap, that beast of an encouraging and detailed goal oriented document, I'm pasting the roadmap here in its entirety: ...

Agree, support is costly and time consuming. I mean the feel good part of all this is making people happy and you get a great chance to do that if you can manage really good support (which you can and do). Torley was mentioned ... he was actually responsible in viewer 2 to head up the built in viewer help. He was doing a bang up job of it single handedly but then I think he got pulled in too many different directions. The idea was to really flesh out the help and make it much easier to find, than the wiki and knowledge base and answers and forums. If only we had a proper manual with user comments on topics. Telling people to RTFM (nicely) and pointing them to the right topic would save everyone time and money. It's a shortcoming of LL as a parent to teach their children how to tie our shoes. Thankfully in RL we don't need to teach customers ... "No, wait ... don't wear the box, open the box." "You need to push to get out. No not the wall, push on the door." "You do realize that at the moment you look like someone ran you through the nearest particle collider?" "Most of your foot should go INSIDE the shoe ... no, your OTHER left" "I'm sorry that's broken for you but we don't make steampunk flamingo x-ray goggles, let's find out who did."

Madeliefste Oh wrote: Thanks for sharing your story, Dartagan. Dartagan Shepherd wrote: So V2 being the disaster that it turned out to be, LL turns around and admits this, fires M Linden and over 1/3 of the employees in a really tacking display of Phil Rosedale announcing this at SLBB and coming in like a white knight to save the day. Hmmz, I never have seen it like this, the M. was fired for the V2 disaster. In my idea was that he was hired to make this SL behind the firewall for corporations a succes, and that project failed like nothing had failed before. But looking backwards, I doubt. I think he might as well been hired to do the dirty job for Philip, who's compagny has grown him above the head, and where sooner or later people have to be fired. When you start small and devellop a succesful idea with some geek friends, and it grows most likely the twork of friends. But it grows too fast in a short time. party because Philip does a great job in promoting the platform in the media. (the next big thing: 3d internet, we envision the future). But he does not do a great job on the internal organisation of the compagny. It simply grew too big for his idea about how he wanted to work with people (use your talent, do your own projects, do it with passion, and send each other love points for well done jobs). It might work in smaller settings for a while, but not for a compagny of this size. When it became clear that SL behind the firewall was not going to bring the next ship of gold, the workpower, that it would be need to support it when it would have been a succes, became supernumerary. It was for M to do that job, because Philip just couldn't. Oh no, I don't think M got canned because of V2 alone, just that the SLBB incident seemed about as staged as it could get and the biggest outcry at the time was about V2, so it appeased the populace somewhat. Which I suppose we needed but not in that way. As near as I can tell, he either caused too many waves internally or his plan in general spent a lot of money and didn't pan out. Agree Phil did have the touch with the media. But as is common enough and something he admitted to, that most of the time entrepreneurs make lousy CEO's. I think he tried to wear that CEO hat again when he came back and also said he felt more seasoned this time around to lead the company but then seemed to bail after a few months until they found Rod. Who knows? I wish him luck in everything but breedables.

Czari Zenovka wrote: Couldbe Yue wrote: and how much do you pay blizzard a month? A damn sight less than you pay these monsters I bet but then that's the difference between a company that's thriving and LL. WoW costs $14.99 USD/mo to play and, like Dart said, their customer service is AMAZING!!!! Right, also took advantage of last years deal, so by agreeing to pay the next 12 months I also got one of their other games, Diablo III for free. And that one comes with no monthly fees. And I got the second game on good faith, not by pre-payment. And some Diablo III perks. And a special edition mount for WoW. Had I backed out of the agreement by missing a month, I would have only lost access to Diablo III and the special mount. No other "penalties". This last LL error that affected my card would not have counted against that 12 month agreement. Another interesting comparison is that both of those games include auction houses that move massive amounts of virtual goods per day in game items. One of them allows selling and cashing out game items for real money. While not exactly the same as LL and the marketplace, there are millions of deliveries and transactions, with little to no errors. Diablo III auction house first had problems when it came out. Within a few months most of the bugs were fixed and it is now stable. @Couldbe That show was indeed eerily fitting, heheh. Forest Gump said: Life is like a box of chocolates.". We say: "Second Life is like being force fed bloody eggs and something that tastes like battery acid through a plastic tube.". I think we'd be ok if the food were better.

Couldbe Yue wrote: Dartagan Shepherd wrote: All told though, I'm actually still pro SL. We all are lovey, we wouldn't be here otherwise. The thing we'rve stopped doing is giving LL the benefit of the doubt. Did you ever see that Japanese game show called endurance? That's us more than anything, I think. That's certainly true, didn't mean to elude that we're not all here because we don't support the world, although probably not the company itself at this point. Haven't seen that show but will try to look it up later today, sounds fitting. So just when you thought it was over with my card issue and paying for the premium accounts? Noooooo ... So after paying LL to re-up 2 annual premium accounts and a 3rd quarterly account LL flags that card we payed with and we can't use it until we call the card company. Probably caught by the fraud prevention for paying for multiple premiums under a single card. But let me repeat that so that it sinks in ... AFTER they take our money, it's flagged as potential fraud. Not BEFORE they take the money, but AFTER. Busted. But this cloud has a silver lining, although it doesn't belong to LL. So how do we find this out? Because we're playing WoW (which is not stressful and likely to hit you with bugs at every turn for entertainment) and we both get booted out of WoW at the same time as billing on the card kicks in for the Blizzard accounts. So we call the card company, find out it was LL that flagged it, get it unflagged and then go back to Blizzard to explain the situation. In less than 10 minutes and letting Blizzard know what LL had done (a few jokes on both sides at LL's expense, because Blizzard support is always "fun" and prompt and generally solves any problem in a single support call, doesn't send you off with no solution and doesn't suggest filing a bug report as a support tool). So Blizzard says "yeah, we generally don't get couples and family accounts flagged, we understand multiple accounts under one card". While it will be sorted out today, Blizzard says "Here's what we'll do, we'll give both of your accounts 5 free days so you can get it sorted out and the 5 days will get you through the holiday weekend, because we understand you'll want to be enjoying your game through we weekend. Enjoy! May you earn tons of loot!". And that my dear LL ... is how it's done. Not by holding a premium account and its inventory hostage until you cough up the cash. I mean god forbid that I would have gone tooling around in an unauthorized premium sailboat or dune buggy until you got paid! Also, in RL when a company botches things like this on a professional level, my company turns around and sends them a bill. In RL, I'd be sending LL a bill for the partial handling of their mess. Amateurs. Edited to clarify that it was 3 premium accounts, not 2.

Rya Nitely wrote: Dartagan Shepherd wrote: I'm wondering where I put that cheerleader outfit. It's here somewhere. uh oh, is this yours? :smileyembarrassed: I appreciate you keeping the outfit warm for me ... but what did you do to this thing, use it for a sail? I'll need to mend and wash it you understand, which is something like wiping the mouth of your bottle before I share a drink, but not meant to be insulting. Patchwork sails made of cheerleader uniforms though, it's a thought.

Ciaran Laval wrote: I think we wore him down! He was certainly Mr Positive at times, although always reasonable and well worded, even when people were preparing to mob him with pitchforks and torches for being so positive! Heheh, that you did, and I'll gladly face those pitchforks again, the debates were great. Update on the account because I made a big stink of it. A glitch or two accepting the card and a short time with live chat cleared it up. Business account is renewed at annual premium, as is the wife's account, and Dart is bumped down to quarterly just because. The reason it particularly irked me is that it was the account I need to pay staff with and those guys deserve it. Still stand by the fact that it's dumb as bricks not to not downgrade accounts to basic ... that's not how you keep people. It makes them feel second rate and they go away. Now that I paid at least enough to stock a Linden beer fridge, I'm wondering where I put that cheerleader outfit. It's here somewhere.

Blather and Babble Part Two SL is now booming and I'm ecstatic. Finally, like horror and fantasy finally made their way into mainstream film, Second Life validates user generated virtual worlds. It's still a walled garden and will always be by design, but it's all good, despite the warts. As will always be true users of virtual worlds will be highly independent, critical and the best of all, highly creative and endlessly suprising in squeezing new uses out of the technology that the makers of that technology never envisioned. I was in love with (and still am) SL, although management is not budging on the things that matter most, which are the pain points of using the viewer and the world and the economic issues of the merchant/land baron/clubs/services communities. Fast forward some more and I'm seeing the endless negativity work its way into the press, they start to parrot their own interpretation of random feedback and I think it's hurting SL. Having a love for virtual business and goods especially, I'm looking at the merchant community as the most powerful driving force of both the primary virtue of SL (the ability to change lives by creating jobs and incomes) and the greatest source of negative publicity. So I start debating with all of you on the virtues of business-folk putting our best foot forward and promoting SL as only we can do. Content creators after all are the largest of the monetary communities and the best suited to understand how positive press, publicity and "selling" our world to the public can stimulate growth. Along comes M Linden as our newest CEO. For the record, while many of you have issue (as did LL employees) with M Linden, he is the one that started the ball rolling on getting old promises of features. Mesh, media on a prim and other things were promised before M was hired. It was M Linden that finally jump started Mesh and other features and at least an attempt on a viewer re-write, not our newest CEO Rod Humble. Rod was picking up where M left off. So apparently LL likes my positive attitude and points because they invited me to the Viewer 2 beta. Which was a really, really big deal to the Lab. Every employee was involved in testing it or giving feedback (and in a couple cases caved into peer pressure to like Viewer 2). So this is awesome, the energy seeing so "many" Lindens in one place and getting to see how bright and passionate these Lindens "can" be. Along with me were some other advocates, that's why some of us were chosen after all, because if we liked it in beta, we were sure to be helping promote it. In defense of the V2 beta, I can say that the first thing we heard and our prime directive was to only look at V2 in the eyes of a new user, not existing users. Ouch, but fair enough, because now M and LL have a plan to really make a push to drive LL further and to remake itself. All great stuff. And it was understood that LL would be focusing on the pain points for existing users with V2 after its unveiling. Ouch again, but fair enough ... my recommendation was to push it out as the official viewer sooner rather than later to minimize the outcry and pain of a completely different interface. Do it in a blast, get the drama over with and fix the rest quickly. For that (not that it happened based on my recommendation) all I can say is oops ... sorry guys? About that time Pink Linden was here and if not always agreed with, she was a mover and shaker and was at least communicative with us. Also about then, V2 was launched at SLPro, a merchant/solution provider event, that had great positive energy and a sense of renewed direction for SL. So I'm advocating hard, debating with you guys, trying to say things that I couldn't because of the beta ... just relax guys, great things are coming down the road. Stay positive. So V2 being the disaster that it turned out to be, LL turns around and admits this, fires M Linden and over 1/3 of the employees in a really tacking display of Phil Rosedale announcing this at SLBB and coming in like a white knight to save the day. Effectively throwing us advocates under the bus. That's fine, I can live with that. Not so fine for some of the other people in the beta who are no longer with us and have moved onto other things. Things like trying to promote media on a prim to people only to have it with security holes that LL would not address or fix later. Ah well, it really would have been a game changer to some people to bring the full power of the web "into" SL. So now I'm a little less optimistic, but hanging in there. At the same time I'm preaching to you guys how great of a business investment LL is and taking some flak about mistakes and issues with LL and SL> Fine, you bunch of half baked whiners just aren't seeing the vision, so I'll keep at it a while, we can DO this! To make sure I was capable of practicing what I preached (having been all out of pocket thus far as a merchant myself and just dabbling with this and that) I decided to put my money where my mouth was. Looking ... looking ... ah, there! Breedables seem to be a good target project ... I certainly understand the monetization of them so we'll give it a go. And there were less than a half a dozen breedables at the time and certainly enough room to grow without biting into other breedables markets. No harm, no foul. Sucess! Doing pretty well financially, probably grossing about $50k USD per year and it's looking good. Except that coding these little buggers was more about working around the bugs and quirks of LL and LSL than it was about building. Not a problem, I'll build them to last and avoid as many quirks of SL as possible. And to be fair without an update in 2 years those fairies are still ticking. Of course because of the lack of upgrades due to my increasing awareness (and decreasing enthusiasm) of LL making the wrong moves (at least to me) and seeing the complaints prove true more often than not, I'm becoming a bit more cynical and less optimistic (and SL starts decliing at a steeper rate). So I decide to wait it out and do a new version after mesh comes out (which took longer than expected and was convoluted with Land Imapact and yet more sinks). My problem, my fault ... LL was not and is not responsible for my profit or success level, such is business. So as we're doing better financially we request to get more money out. After jumping through hoops, we were finally approved. And then we try to get more money than our current limit out. And we get more run-around. And more, and more. At that point I'm feeling ripped off by a company that won't let me take out the money that I'm earning, that's also letting other people earn a lot of money (the breeders) and paying hundreds of dollars USD to staff. I'm "good" for the economy in a way that LL can relate to in monetization and applications that entertain and keep people vested in SL and breedables cause people to buy more land to breed more critters. And yet they give me the run-around on approval to get money I've earned. Told my wife to give up trying. So I'm invited to the earlier marketplace beta and I'm less enthusiastic and I can tell that suggestions for the marketplace are only going to go so far, mostly I feel like a glorified bug reporter on decisions that have already been made. Not enough enthusiasm left to re-up for the next generation marketplace beta, so I let it slip by and didn't sign the next beta agreements. Nothing negative to report on marketplace of course, just that I felt that you could handle more issues in marketplace feedback on the merchant forums than you could in beta. In the forums you can at least have discussions about LL management, goals and deeper issues than talking about bugs on pre-conceived features. So here I am with a dated product, not making a lot of money these days and still paying staff about $100 USD a week to support issues on our product. And that's ok, except that I'm supporting bugs and quirks of SL more than flaws in my own product which were built to be as stable as they could possibly be in their own right. SL isn't dead, I'm not saying it is ... it's awesome, some of the people at LL are awesome, it's not going to die tomorrow and there's time to turn this boat around in a better direction but they have to be willing to listen where it REALLY matters and some of that involves the money and the business model. They do seem to be focused in some areas in fixing old bugs and that's great, because it's the pain points of the software that's already here that causes people not to stay, not a lack of features. And then of course there's the Marketplace which comes off as amateur hour in the world of commerce. All told though, I'm actually still pro SL. They just need to stop letting employees make decisions that have anything to do with product. They're not good at it, they don't understand the community and they need to be technicians not conceptual monetization freaks. The market is already here, the profit is already here. It'll last 20 years if they play fair, don't be too greedy and don't have an over inflated ego over what they've got in their hands. It's a virtual world. Their job is to build an abstract yet reliable framework, nothing more. The rest will take care of itself, perhaps not to 2006-2007 numbers, but in time that may come again in a world that structured not upon dependency of growth but on finite resources. Whew ... nuff said?