Dartagan Shepherd

@Rya Firstly, sorry Rya for dumping that on you ... I get escaping RL crap for SL, and I think my angst comes from just that LL forces that RL nonsense into my SL. Darrius Gothly wrote: Rya makes a good point Dart .. about you "Once Upon A Time" being steadfastly positive on LL and SL. Someday if you get the chance, I'd love to read the full story of how your attitude was changed as I think it would make not only a very educational read about what NOT to do to customers, but also because I like the way you write and would love to read something with more meat than just a forum post. Ugg, ok ... as short and sweet as possible, you can probably guess this would fill volumes. To everyone else, this is a two part post and it's tldr; so don't bother if you don't want to be bored to death. Background first not to be pompous but because it's impossible without the context. Was always into "virtual worlds" user generated content, etc. Started with Interactive Fiction and BBS game dev, then the internet came along and with it early MUDs, Talkers, IRC (which was originally intended to be a MUD rather than a chat network), etc. Built tons of these things, hosted them, ran them, hosted archives of codebases and patches and hacks and all of that "stuff". Together with some awesome minds and creative people we built every type of system you can imagine. Currency? Been there done that. Economies and multiple currencies, different currencies for different regions, different currencies that only worked in parallel planes of existance within the same space, currency exchanges, and yes ... a thousand ways that you can monetize virtual currency and goods. To this day, the scripting engines and languages we used were more robust (and faster and leaner) than LSL, so you could experiment pretty eassily with all this conceptual stuff. These were mostly free ventures, open source with custom licenses before open source came around and later a bunch of open source and quasi commercial stuff. Nevertheless as a bunch of different groups of developers and communities, we learned about everything there was to know about world building, user generated content, currency, virtual goods and more importantly what makes successful communities and what doesn't. What lasts and what doesn't. Early on we were experimenting with and then VRML comes along, so on one project (forgive me for not naming names here, although public information if you can find it, I don't want to go throwing names around of people without permission who were pioneers of all this stuff from various universities, game studios etc., who now work at places like Adobe or current game studios). But anyway, on one project we merged VRML with MUDs and ended up with something like SL, except it wasn't a commercial project. 3D ... check, user generated content, check, currency, check... blah. One thing I learned back during the dot bomb days when you could pitch anything and get funding was that user generated content and virtual worlds were an extremely hard sell. There's no corporate value in them, as you can see from SL. It won't help Mercedes sell more cars or cause enough people to buy more Pepsi. It's just one of those really difficult concepts to peddle and monetize for business use. I pitched the concept to high heaven and while there were some commercial use cases and implementations it wasn't there yet in timing, computing power, scale of the internet and sheer numbers, etc. So at some point SL gets on my radar, (I vaguely remember something called LindenWorld and a LindenScript language way back but I'm not sure if that was an early LL venture or not), and while at first SL wasn't designed to be a virtual world (the joke back then apparently was that SL didn't know what it wasnted to be at first ... the goals would change almost every month), it eventually started using more of the concepts that had gone before and coalesced into more of a proper virtual world. So when SL started forming as more of a virtual world thing, it got my attention and I'm happy. When it generated traction to me this is awesome, finally virtual worlds created by users are getting their day in the sun. Except LL was winging it. An experimental management mingled with culture. People hired that had no experience or knowledge of virtual worlds and communities and worse they don't understand the "people" or the driving force. Thankfully the hype covered all of that up, and I'm still a happy camper because the hype buys LL time to learn all the stuff we learned 10 years before LL came around. I'm smiling at their growing pains and mistakes. So this was supposed to be short right? Fast forward to a company that over monetizes, this automatically puts a end of SL into play. Why? Because if you're taking too much of the revenue for yourself you create an unsustainable "economy" for your users. When growth stops there simply isn't enough money out "there" for the users to keep it going. Mix that with a lack of checks and balances, let a glut of goods over saturate the virtual goods market and you're shortening the lifespan of the world even further. And another big lesson that further shortens the lifespan of SL ... the complexity of the business model. I mean this in a good way and not at all insulting. The model is too complex. Users of virtual worlds relate better to simple business models, not complex ones. While SL monetizes for its own benefit and it's a great financial success to be sure, it creates this disconnect with users who would trust it more and grok it better if it were a lemonade-stand model. In other words, no exchage, flat rate currency prices, sinks structured as flexible and more understandable fees, etc. In other words the monetization model is overly complex, unfriendly, harder to maintain and more costly and less "honest" than simpler models (Example: Cloud Party is closer to the mark here with flat rate currency and no sinks and a more easily understood accounting of resources. In cloud party it's polygon/material count and size. Simple, honest, no underhanded monetization). This complexity while profitable is not best for longevity. A lesson that they're refusing to learn in favor of keeping existing profit margins to the point where it looks more attractive to diversify into new products (and possibly sacrifice SL in the process) that they can in turn monetize to the hilt later. So like most of you, I'm also watching one stupid mistake after another as they follow tech startup mentality, culture and monetization rather than focus on what's actually a more traditional model that would more closely match the needs and profit of their community. But they're not interested in a more humble but very profitable and long term niche, they want the startups and millions and billions. In all of this, they held back virtual world development by years, because creating a new virtual world in the shadow of SL isn't really a driver. Good for them, bad for virtual worlds in general. As can be seen in virtual worlds that try to follow in their footsteps too closely with flawed design elements (Opensimulator) or worlds with their own spin (Blue Mars, Lively, etc.). Ending this post here, will work on the next part where I'll share what my personal beefs actually are that tipped me from cheerleader to critic (although still positive in many ways but not vocalizing it) in the next post hopefully shortly ... lots of distractions for me today though.

Not sure how you mean. Maybe as an Amazon associate link to LL product? Now that would be something new ... forget being a merchant, just link to LL's own products on Amazon and earn some change for those vehicle packs. Who needs merchants anyway?

Still nothing to report on the account that was disabled rather than bumped down to basic, but like a dog with a bone I come bearing further thoughts ... Didn't mean to put you in a box of die hard user, I really do try not to put people into boxes based on forum posts. And with the disclaimer that I know you've made some great contributions and feedback to the marketplace (wink, wink, nod, nod). Perhaps your thoughts on SL's latest tactic to suck more of the finite spending dollars from our "economy" rather than reduce costs or prevent mishandling of advertising funds, as this one affects you directly: Click on the Deluxe Vehicle Pack http://www.amazon.com/Second-Life-PC-Game-Connect/dp/B00AM2IOL8/ref=cm_rdp_product So now you're competing with LL. For the today-only-super-low-price of $14.95 you too can have not only a sailboat but a hoverboard! Or perhaps it's a hoverboard sailboat which is something different completely. You can't tell from the wording of the ad or the picture ... they probably should have hired an SL merchant to do the ad. But you also get L$2,000 If I were a new user, I might turn right around and buy yours, but probably not for a some weeks if I'm still around. (Don't tell anyone but I'd actually buy yours before I paid LL for any "stuff" ... you get better customer support with merchants than LL and most likely a better product). Although I'm not a new user that matters to you, because while these deals ran last week, we also lost 80 something regions. In fact, if regions and/or concurrency continue to decline or stay flat, I'm actually an existing user taking advantage of this deal and not in the market to turn right around and buy another sailboat. Unless I'm really into sailing ... which might happen that I turn around and buy your sallboat. Then again, probably not ... there are so many things to buy! The likely scenario here is that it's biting into that finite pool of spending available to merchants and in some (small?) way biting into sailboat and hoverboard (or sailboat hoverboard) sails .... err, sales. I'm still digging for optimism, though. It's just that somewhere along the way I caught something contagious from LL and I wander the ruins of SL malls and corpses of campers that used to make hundreds of L$ a day. My knees won't bend, my arms stick straight out as I wander the land in search of management with a clue and I go "braaaaainsssss" a lot.

And here I was about to sneak rubber tubes into your veins to siphon off some of your optimism, while LL was sneaking up behind me to insert a suppository of account cancellation because a credit card expired thereby rendering one of our premium accounts completely invalid rather than bumping it down to a basic account until we discovered the issue. It's harder to be optimistic when you're puckered up at both ends. Will get back to you for more optimism after I figure out if they've broken any anything on that account after I give them yet more money.

I get the point about complaining, believe me. Used to think it was a contributer to SL declining and thus was against it completely. When we lost enough momentum in growth and new users, and given the reach of the complaints, it appeared to not be an issue of the decline at all, and of course many of the complaints turned out to be founded, even when overly expressed, Personally I think that SL will still decline more (not in a sky is falling kind of way) but that there's still a way to stop the bleeding and that's through SL standing on merits of stability and reasonable price and catering the product more to the users than company goals (which after all this time should be more in synch). The kicker for me is that I know there's a great demographic for SL still ... intelligent people with lots of time to get into something like SL. And some of them have lots of money to burn. The problem is that I know these people have a low tolerance for what they would perceive as incompetence. The first time they clocked 500 hours and ran into a few bugs that caused them 5-10 extra hours of work due to SL being buggy or not up to a certain level of quality, they'd be gone. Some of us die hard users are here because we believe in SL, that it has merit and that it "can" be a good venture, whether that's on a hobby or full time level. I think in trying to reach the millions they've lost what any virtual world that came before SL has learned ... it's not the day old users you need to capture, it's the ones that have lasted more than a few months. Those will be the ones that if the relationship is pleasant between the company, the technology and the user .... will be here for 10 years. They already know how profitable long term users are, but in seeking the millions and billions they provide the long time users with costs, bugs, lack of communication and bad management with something that will make the difference in whether or not they come back in a year, or two, or 5 years from now. I think this is the play to stop the bleeding is to up the quality of the product before they can't afford to put so many resources behind it. Because of the lack of the communication the only thing that seems to stand a chance is to keep them aware of it. I want to see SL here in 20 years ... the rate of decline doesn't support 20 more years, so you know .... bang your head against the wall until someone that matters in LL management has that light bulb moment ? Phil Rosedale had said with his "fast, easy and fun" strategy was to get LL to not grow by bringing people in but by tearing down the walls that are the pain points to using SL. I saw some wisdom in that and then LL turned around and added more pain points, less communication, etc. We plod onward in this world or the next.

Sassy Romano wrote: Trinity Yazimoto wrote: I just think its a really shame that there is no way to contact the Dev team than waiting and hoping they read the merchant forum and eventually comment. Dakota IS the right person to contact, it's not normal for a company of any size to publish direct contacts for their software developers when there is a Customer Service contact. The failure though is when Customer Support suggest to customers that they go and create or add to a JIRA. THAT is the job of the Customer Support team, they are the customer/developer interface and it is they who are responsible for that process in any other organisation. The failure here is not with that process though but in the inability for those within LL to empower ther customer facing staff such as Dakota, with the authority to address these failures since LL can see that the item was delivered, they can see that the item transaction occurred to Commerce Linden escrow account but then flat out refuse to reconcile. How about this... LL Employee: "Excuse me payroll dept, I didn't get my salary this month, is there a problem? Payroll: "Well we sent it to the bank, we can show you the transactions that prove it, how about you contact your bank?" Bank: "Well we agree that it was received from your employer but for some reason we just don't want to send it to you, we suggest you contact your employer and ask them to pay you some other way *shrugs*" Payroll: "It's not our fault, file a JIRA with the banks payment processing system" It just doesn't happen does it? Agree on many points. Bug reporting is not a customer support tool, it is a function of customer support to pass on issues that can't be handled to the development team or managers of the project. We did try to bypass people like Dakota who don't have the power, by contacting Rod Humble who DOES have the power to handle marketplace developers.. His response was that they come to work every day thinking of us and that the commerce team does actually read the forums, which doesn't address much of anything. They accepted some suggestions, said they'd work on some, ignored others and then the work that was done in the last 3 months was to add some new categories. Apparently categories were turned into rocket science because they took 3 months to do while other low hanging fruit hasn't gotten touched. Dakota mentioned that other software also has bugs that sometimes takes years to fix. Yes Dakota, that's true and that would be understandable on "some" issues especially with server or deeper viewer issues. On the other hand, it is in no way true with ecommerce sites and especially not true with reseller sites such as yourself that sell other peoples goods. In that case, issues that affect peoples funds, reporting and delivery of goods are given high priority in order to create a trust environment for commerce. Issues aren't this blatent on other commerce sites or they wouldn't be in business. Indeed you have the entire history of the internet to bear this out. The internet itself didn't take off on a mass level until consumers started trusting it enough to use their credit cards online. Only then did retail and direct sales drive internet usage to the scale we see today. Years long bugs sometimes yes ... blatent years long user facing bugs on commerce sites? No. This particular corruption problem may be one of those particularly sticky ones, but in light of all the other nonsense, it's just more of the same. So Dakota isn't the person to get a fire lit under the team or the developers, if the team is too small Rod isn't interested in throwing more developers at it or replacing them with competent people, who's the point of contact .... the board? I feel for people like Dakota. On the other hand there are some ineffective and tainted employees that obviously can't handle coding a relatively stable marketplace like most of the other commerce sites on the internet. More of an issue than the actual bugs are the people who keep releasing software with so "many" bugs. It's almost like you guys are incapable of releasing something that reasonably works the first time around. You release something buggy, fix part of it and live with the rest of the bugs for years. Years for Direct Delivery, it only partially works, you won't support the old part that people still NEED for no copy items and put off a deadline indefinately, leaving a wake of confusion and misunderstanding of your own product. Quit it, you're doing it wrong.

Gadget Portal wrote: The real issue is the amount of money lost. Not whether L$ are worth money (they are) or what the TOS says (those are tossed out of court all the time). The fact is, nothing in SL is worth significant amount of money except for regions (and you notice you get support if you have problems with those?), which means unless you have thousands of dollars to spend over an issue worth just a few dollars (2,000 L$ is only 8 dollars US, after all), LL knows you won't be taking them to court. So, they bend their users over, without so uch as a reach around, with this knowledge in mind. It is pretty sad that the conversation needs to be about nitpicking over the details over where actual value and worth lie. You'd expect a company to protect themselves and the occassional mistake or bug isn't the end of the world. The real conversation is that the company doesn't respect the people they monetize (in time, dedication to LL's product and a host of contributions) or the products that LL does not own that they monetize as if it's their own, disclaiming away all responsibility for anything that doesn't benefit them directly. By respect I mean enough of a give and take to build reliable systems which cater to the needs of the people whose goods they sell in good faith that their funds and products will be handled by a responsible company. Were this a company in the "real world" it wouldn't last a New York minute with lack of proper reporting, mishandling of funds, overbilling on advertising, etc. I don't think it's possible to have the real conversation. To LL it's a minimal exercise in lip service. The only conversation that it seems likely to provide a marketplace as responsible and reliable as any other real world reselling service is one of legal issues and legislation. By the way, thousands of dollars to be noticed is correct. You agreed to arbitrate for anything under $10,000 USD. So according to LL, it'll cost you more than that to see a court room. In fact, for anything under $10,000 you get to do it over the phone far removed from those pesky courts. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Terms_of_Service_Arbitration_FAQ Thankfully there's more to the law than a document some company whips up.

Pretty much on target, while it can be argued whether L$ are currency, the monetary value is there for LL. Users buy $50,000 worth of L$ ... LL has $50,000 in the bank. The more sinks against that $50,000 the less users cash out and the more of that $50,000 USD LL gets to keep. Best way to understand it short of studying up on game models such as free-play and game monetization strategy is to do a simple example on paper, pretending you're running a game with simple purchased currency and sinks and let your calculator tell you how much you get to keep when people purchase your funny money. Currency aside, L$ are real money value to both LL and users.

Pamela Galli wrote: The same thing happened to me -- $60 USD delivered in one day, not paid to me -- and I knew about it ONLY because the Magic Boxes reported the deliveries. I was told it was my fault because I was using Magic Boxes, which I should have known would do this sort of thing. And too bad, because Magic Boxes were no longer supported. So now we have part two of the story, which is that our stuff is being sent out to buyers, and the money being kept instead of paid -- and it is not the fault of Magic Boxes, and LL support is still unwilling to make good on their part of the deal to deliver AND PAY US for our products. And when all is said and done, they've only gained a small amount in the reliability of Direct Delivery over Magic Boxes. This was sent out in an email and posted in a couple places by the commerce team: "Direct Delivery purchases are successfully delivered more often (2.5% greater success rate than Magic Boxes)" The main benefit they claim is increased speed of delivery, not reliability, thus the reason why we still don't have Direct Delivery for unique items. And why we still don't have a receipt of confirmed delivery that has been asked for.

They acknowledged the stale shopping carf problem, suggestion was to just have the total update with the current price of the item. From: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Merchant-Update-October-2012/td-p/1704699 In addition to the above, the community raised the following issues which we are either investigating or evaluating the best way to address. Enhancements for “charging, cannot edit.” Price change problems with the cart. Listings that have the wrong photos. Merchants should be notified when a review is written. Categories should be reviewed and updated. Make preview image larger when editing a listing. Centralized reporting. Better association between a demo and a product. The ability for Merchants to merchandise their stores. Better sharing of products. A more detailed explanation of how search works. Although the Beta and Current release notes pages show no activity whatsoever since they were addressed back in October. I'd say it's like watching paint dry, but that doesn't take long in comparison. Perhaps it's more like watching a tar pit full of dinosaur bones dry.

It seems to be a bit of a stretch to connect the dots of one botched (and seemingly desperate) LL promotion on Amazon to using Amazon as a replacement for the marketplace. The Amazon offering doesn't support reselling of virtual goods, so the weak points would still be LL's delivery and accounting, which are buggy at best and suffer from inapropriate billing practices at worst. I wouldn't be against it because it would bring us a few steps closer to real world laws and consumer protection for both merchants and customers. The downside is that you can be fairly sure that merchant costs (or commission) would go up substantially, which in a declining "economy" only makes the matter worse. I'd had a conversation with a couple Lindens some time back on marketing and promotions and it appeared to be a goal at the time to make SL more stable before throwing marketing at new users. A lesson they've yet to learn, to test better and make more stable releases rather than roll out buggy code and then fix only parts of it as you go. Their technical debt ceiling has been reached and equates to their retention problem, as do their high prices ... both points which they seem determined to ignore. Of course if these types of promo's end up selling more to existing users than new users, then this is just LL picking at the bones of their decline and "stealing" yet more sales dollars from their merchants.

We are investigating, can we interest you in a new category? We may have given away too many free L$ in our Amazon promotion and now we're waiting for enough L$ to be purchased so we can start giving it out again. Or ... a hamster chewed through the wire that connects us to PayPal. Your World, our Imaginative exploitation.

Happy Holidays back at you! Another vote for the best in the best forum around. And a bit of seasonal advice: We may share ups, downs and battle scars, but the chocolate covered cherries are mine.

Heheh, glad to give your nostrils a good cleaning. I'm tapping on your monitor now with a dirty rag and a hand out for tips to clean it. You know, after finally getting an acknowledgement from Rod and the commerce team that they're going to address and work on some of the issues, I'm watching paint dry. Being patient until after the holidays on those because it came up about not disrupting sales during the rapid fire holiday season. I would expect that at least during January that they'd start lighting a fire under the team and get cracking on those. You know, the stuff besides adding categories. Not that categories aren't good and they were certainly asked for. As a priority though, going to say they would be on the bottom of most companies list, and of the least interest to establishing a better and more professional environment for merchants and customers. I think January is the "show me" month. You've developed an SL marketplace, how long would it take to fix a bug where users can't edit their ads? Oh, and I've got another idea for a new book. It's called "I Paid you $90,000 a Yeear for WHAT?!!!"

Pamela Galli wrote: Madeliefste Oh wrote: Dartagan Shepherd wrote: An ironic little twist is that now Phil Rosedale himself is investing and partnering with Ozimals to bring breedables outside of SL (as if breedables didn't exist outside of SL before one was ever spawned in SL), so now we've got the chairman of the board using Strangelings from within SL to upsell a venture outside of LL. Right, that is thebig joke of 2012: Pip embraces the breedables. Maybe it's just that people who seem to be great visionairs for a period are at risk to get demented at young age. I guess he had a Tamagotchi when he was young. This is what Phillip tweets every day: Philip Rosedale ‏ @ philiplinden weight = 188.3, goal = 180, meditation count = 10,300 He counts to AT LEAST 10,000 every day, as meditation. Can you believe that? Oh how I love to monetize thee, let me count the ways? Really though, those tweets have been going on for months with no real progress, a diet plan not to invest in. But the next time someone claims to be a visionary and it involves working off the backs of others, or of others goods and turning people into product, I'm filing it under fiction. Watch those new LL products, the monetization bits haven't kicked in yet on currency and/or selling your creations.

Directed at no one in particular. One Linden employee did actually admit that they'd like to see the average price of merchants goods to be around L$160 I believe. Sure there's market manipulation going on. The balance between ad and commission sinks to suck money back out of the pool of purchased L$, attempting to maximize spending, luring new users at reasonable price points for goods, over selling and over billing advertising, etc. Relevance nearly takes a back seat to other factors in both marketplace and in-world search. The icing on the cake is that now other LL products are a competitor for instance Patterns now competes with merchants on customer spending. An ironic little twist is that now Phil Rosedale himself is investing and partnering with Ozimals to bring breedables outside of SL (as if breedables didn't exist outside of SL before one was ever spawned in SL), so now we've got the chairman of the board using Strangelings from within SL to upsell a venture outside of LL. It's so far removed from anything resembling an economy that I get the elements of economy and there's not really a better word to describe it, but basically it's a mess of over-done game monetization mechanics, mixed in with subscription models (ads and tier) along with LL monetizing merchants themselves as well as their goods. I think merchants have become the least attractive necessary evil at this point, they're out of ways to reasonably suck more out of them, thus the billing games, extra products and competition with their own user base. If they ever do go bust it will be one of the best examples of what not to do, if it isn't already. Of course on their end, it's a great success financially, even while declining. But economy this isn't.. There are too many manufactured factors and very few that are naturally occuring.

Perrie Juran wrote: Dartagan Shepherd wrote: ........It has no real practical value in education, or corporate business or as research, or even as a prototyping applications these days....... While education in Virtual Worlds is still in its infancy, there are many educators in SL who might take great exception to your statement. Especially when if you look, there are as I recall, over 400 accredited institutions registered with Linden Lab. I did say "practical" educational uses. Seriously though for networking and internal uses SL may be of value. I think in producing anything useful outside of acedemia though, it's less so. Unless students have proven to learn better and faster within virtual worlds, or they've disrupted the high cost of education with a multitude of free or low cost virtual learning resources, I'm ranking courses involving virtual world research or social networking up there with courses in pole dancing. Not exactly where you'd like to blow your savings on your son or daughters future.. The only difference is that pole dancing courses will at least earn them a living. I do have thoughts on the matter, though ... see the chapter on How To Take a Survey in my upcoming book: Virtual Worlds for New England Rednecks. I'll be giving free copies to all LL employes. (10% discount for select Martians). Thanks to you guys in this thread for showing the humanity behind the avatars in time for some holiday spirit. This forum and people in it are probably the only thing that keeps me around SL. Happy holidays to the lot of you pervs and misfits.

Couldbe Yue wrote: Dartagan Shepherd wrote: For what it's worth, I believe that the only redeeming value that SL has ever had is to provide the ability for people to earn an income. I'll disagree with you there, SL has always been a place that gives people a chance to touch the stars. (and not in the dirty way you lot are probably thinking.. tsk!) Ouch! Last I heard adult regions are gaining during the decline (up to 13% adult regions), so can you blame me for an impure thought or two? It leads me to romance as a guess, but that's not an SL exclusive, and neither is creativity or art. I'm either coming up empty or intentionally feigning ignorance.

For what it's worth, I believe that the only redeeming value that SL has ever had is to provide the ability for people to earn an income. There are still people here who are living success stories from all walks of life with no prior experience in tech, graphics, programming, CG and business who have been able to start a business and that is the beauty of SL to me. It has no real practical value in education, or corporate business or as research, or even as a prototyping applications these days. It has social value, but I can't lay that at the feet of SL, any place (including RL) that has a handful of people will develop "community", that's a people thing, not a virtual world thing. My real gripe is that greed oozes from LL in terms of over monetization (no secret there by now) and sucking far more from the "economy" than is their fair share in "your world". As we decline and slowly as SL changes, it contributes to further harming the opportunity to create incomes. Whether it's greed or the single feature that would have saved SL at one point (fix the bugs, the singular most asked request of all), it all points to a lack of desire to connect with the customers and more to chase down that elusive public offering. LL is about millions and billions or bust. I look at a succession of moves that all contribute to harming the business environment for everyone by LL as a loss. I'm babbling, but my point is that people with money or already blessed with health, ability and funds to be able to earn an income can easily move on. Losing people that could have earned incomes from SL who have the hardest time outside of SL is a loss I doubt the loss of some older viewers will destroy SL, but if we lose people (maybe like yourself) due to it, we're losing the one thing LL has to really contribute to the world besides hokey taglines and overpriced product. People can find entertainment anywhere. Opportunity ... not so much for people who need it most.

Sorry about that Medhue, in being too cute with a reply, I meant that there's no money in it for LL. As it is both marketplace and in-world ads are oversold (and over-billed in the marketplace). Absolutely agree that a getting a new product forum back again would be a great benefit to everyone. Then again SLX knew more about err ... showing the love than LL.

I once told my wife that I loved her but not in a Linden Lab kind of way. She replied: "that's romantic of you". I don't think she was serious about the romance but at least she understood the sentiment. LL's abuse of love, community, resident and friends can cause hives. While I like many of you (not in a Facebook sort of way), I prefer forums to hives. In my world relationships with a company are always primarily about money and product and quality of service and friends are things that happen unplanned and unintentionally and I've a limited storage capacity for loved ones and close friends. This probably has nothing to do with the topic at hand, except for not having a product forum any longer because there's no money in it.

Exactly so. 1) Stated problem initially was that the system wouldn't bill recurring at all. 2) No statements ever released about multiple billing on individual recurring items. 3) Users sometimes cannot see what outstanding active ads exist. 4) Users sometimes cannot cancel ads. 5) Refunds for the "glitch" period didn't seem to cover multiple billing. 6) During and after the refund period people were still getting multiple billed. 7) Multiple billing continues some months later to this date. Given LL's penchant for internal statistics, if I weren't a New Yorker I might say that their own statistics are flawed and that they have internal accounting on advertising that absolutely will not reconcile. (Books won't balance on advertising), which is the only thing that would prevent them from taking the responsibility upon themselves to refund mistakes as they happen. (It doesn't, no one gets their money without jumping through support hoops or public outcry). Aside from the fact that in the real world these types of billing practices are not legal, and that mis-trust in virtual finances further contributes to the decline of SL. Aside from the fact that the practice continues and has been given a pass by Rod himself with no rolling heads anywhere to be found and being the naive fluffy person I am, I could maybe-kind-of chalk it up to willful ignorance about stability and trust when dealing with others money. Except that the "oops"factor has extended beyond the marketplace recently as well. And except that no matter how you slice and dice it the house always seems to win. If only someone had told me years ago that Second Life meant a parody of First Life, things might have been different. (Edited point #2 to be more specific about unaddressed single ad multiple billing and not mutliple billing over a merchants spread of ads, which are two separate examples of over-billing.)

Truelove Infinity wrote: I'm wondering if more ppl have the same problem as I have - today they have billed me 8 times for the same listing enhancement that should be billed today. Octo-billing: The latest craze in virtual monetization. Bill 8, refund thrice, repeat.

Czari Zenovka wrote: What is an Atlas member? A sekrit class of land barons given bulk discounts for their volume. Some locked into grandfathered rates as well. Rumored to have their very own version of pant-less Linden bear. On the goodwill thing. Goodwill is good. Trust in financial systems by large companies where it doesn't happen in the first place is better. Unless more people may have lost more money to the system than the goodwill given back out, in which case it's a dance as in refunding merchants who are still being billed for ads that they can't cancel. By the way, belated answer on the Magic 8-Ball question ... it has 20 possible replies.

So the punchline is that users can develop a feature faster than LL, and LL can develop new products faster than features for SL. At least this one got done without paying an ex-employee $5,000. Great job getting this from concept to fruition one way or the other. If I were a cobweb gathering Marketplace release notes page, I'd be embarassed, though.