Dartagan Shepherd

I like Pam's minimalist approach to her signature. Sometimes there is genius in not over-stating a business. I'm often tempted to advertise in mine, but because horse sense is is in danger of becoming extinct, I stick to Heinlein quotes. Horse sense not to be confused with common sense. As Heinlein himself once said "There's nothing common about sense.". +1 for green eggs and Pam.

Michi Lumin wrote: This is getting just a -little- ridiculous at this point... Six listings, stuck in "Charging, cannot edit.." -- *two months* even after acknowledgement of the problem. Can somebody, anybody, on the LL side tell me if this is even still being actively worked on? Or are these listings just simply going to be stuck in this state forever? Do we need to remove, and remake the listings on our end? Would this even fix it? Support keeps telling me its a "dev issue that is known and being worked on." That's been -- a long time. It appears that some of our listings have been 'stuck' this way since late July/August. Support keeps saying "Support cannot help you with this issue". If they can't, and nothing's going on here - who can? Please, even just a status update, CommerceTeam Linden? Oh! Can I say the the words? Please let me say the words... We are investigating. Can we interest you in a new category? On a more or less serious note, I took this question to my desktop oracle and paperweight, the Magic 8-Ball. M8-B says: "Don't count on it". Also, not that I put much stock in omens but after forgetting to turn the television off last night, this morning I woke up to Forrest Gump.

Not to stalk you, but again find myself agreeing. It's night and day compared to other content sales vehicles. Search that works, transactions that don't fail, advertisements that aren't oversold and are easily tracked, decent reporting, and on it goes. Add to that minimum price requirements, being able to earn more commission for products that adhere to higher quality standards as incentive to produce better goods and generally rewarding the best in quality and hard work. The main difference between here and elsewhere is that these other sites have a symbiotic relationship with their sellers. It's in everyones best interest not to turn the place into a dollar store and there are things in place to prevent that from happening. You both make money together and it's in everyones interest to make more money. Here in SL, it's less a buyer/seller environment. It's a company with multiple revenue streams simply monetizing content for their own ends with just enough of a token relationship between company and sellers to barely make the content creating churn worth the time and effort. I also don't believe it's only about drawing in new users. The less people spend on merchant goods the more they spend elsewhere (theoretically on premium accounts, land, etc.). Except even that bit backfires on them. The tools are inadequate as is the business relationship. It's simply not professional by any standards. Hell, you can't even trust that your advertising dollars won't disappear or cancel ad subscriptions or that your products will successfully make it to the buyer. And of course no guarantees of anything, ever. No protection when something goes wrong. But right, there's no incentive for LL to forge that kind of professional relationship and tools. That's the difference between a company that provides a proper buyer/seller environment as opposed to a company that wants to partake more in clever monetization than commerce and use content that is not their own as a tool to sell their other stuff.

Medhue Simoni wrote: All I have to say is, It's been a fricken roller coaster for sales over the past week. Thank you, LL, for screwing us all again. You know, the part that gets me is, if people want freebies all they have to do is change the Sort By option. Yet LL employees can't seem to understand that creating a relevance algorythm that caters to the cheapest items is retarded. And people actually wonder why SL is in decline. To me it's obvious. We have a bunch of people running the show who have no idea what they are doing, with management just as clueless. Also agree. Unfortunately in the larger picture we ARE the loss leader. Or at least that appeared to be their thinking and the admission of at least one Linden ... that lower priced goods will attract more new users than not. Given that we've had time to see that SL continues to decline, I'd say we've proven that this isn't the case. SL boomed on its exclusivity days (a nod to Sassy for some good recent insights on pricing and exclusivity) when land was harder to come by and goods were easier to find but of higher cost and less plentiful. Perhaps it was worth a try for LL. They just need to learn to give up on things sooner that don't work. Also there's a detrimental effect to a market that trends toward too many cheap goods. It's a perception thing whether you're buying great products from a great mall or finding deals in a flea market or dollar store.

Marketplace advertisements appear to be modelled after magazine subscriptions from hell. You could have sworn you cancelled only to find that you're subscribed to 10 other magazines and a something-of-the-month-club. The only thing missing is for LL to have the power to put non payment on your credit report. I'm waiting for the results of the investigation into these bugs... We're sorry, not only can we not manually change the active/inactive flag of these advertisements, the machines have locked us out and decided to take over the world. We don't know why the machines like to eat your virtual currency as they really have no need of currency, but there it is.

If this process were applied to RL we'd have enormously reduced shipping costs by sending empty boxes, utility bill envelopes with no bills in them and pizza deliveries with no pizza. Disruptive technology will save the planet. To the folks with the commerce team t-shirts: It appears you may need a product checksum of sorts in your planned delivery receipts or your verification process.

The marketplace being "free" does bring up a good point, but it's a two sided thing. For someone that doesn't pay anything into SL, it's free upfront, granted. And the commission, agreed ... it's very reasonable compared to content sales sites (although not very good compared to some real goods sites). On the other hand, all the free aspects of SL come from people paying into the system, right? If you're familiar with game monetization you know that whales are the people who pay most into the system, minnows less until you get to people who pay nothing. Merchants are content contributors, which gives them that ownership or whale expectations as well. If you're a whale you don't really care that the Marketplace is free or not, you're paying money or valuable content into SL. You expect everything to work. Not just the marketplace. I know when I was paying out that monthly estate money before I abandoned it on principle that I felt when something completely unrelated to land didn't work, like group chat, my first thought is "what am I paying money to this company for ... the product doesn't work". The principles I abandoned that land on were precisely because of non land things and business practices of the company. If you notice, there are much higher expectations among the "whales". If you're familiar with game monetization you know whales are the ones that pay into the system the most. So the whales actually are paying for the Marketplace, as are the people making the content that LL monetizes. As are the people that purchased virtual money for real dollars to buy the content. The only person the marketplace is free to, is someone that doesn't pay anything at all into SL. Everyone else foots part of its bill. All of LL's money comes from our pockets in one way or another, and that includes Marketplace development. The marketplace may be a sub product internally to LL, but SL in general is one product. It's either a good product overall or it's not. If part of that product isn't good it reflects on the entire product. It gets strange because someone that lives completely free in SL, never spends or buys may not care about any of this. Others may feel by their contributions that they're entitled to much more. Most of us do pay for the Marketplace though in one way or another, it's part of the product that is SL. I'm not sure why some people insist on thinking of it as a separate entity or that it needs separate funding, etc. Even if I hadn't blown tens of thousands here, or paid tier, or had premium memberships and had just made content for SL, and I knew that the company knew some people relied on this to make a living, I'd have the same expectations of a quality buyer/seller environment and software, trust with funds, professional behavior. If it were strictly a game, I might have a different view and just play or not play or spend game tokens or not spend game tokens. But it's not just a game and game money for everyone paying into it. And yet it doesn't play by the same rules as the rest of real world and internet commerce. LL used to say challenge us, we love even the most critical feedback, that's how we grow. They don't say that or grow any longer, I wonder if the two are related.

Innula Zenovka wrote: How much do you think we need to raise? One foot to buttocks level. Seriously though, I prefer to keep crowd funding to a small group of people that need it to get a business going, otherwise a charity will scratch that giving itch. On the other hand, as in all commerce or companies claiming profits of $75 million, you just expect it to work to a reasonable standard that is the rest of the online consumer/seller experience. Or at least half as well as a WoW or Diablo III auction house. Or content sales sites like Turbosquid and friends. Amazon may be reaching, but one can dream a Phil dream and say that there shouldn't be any reason not to launch a solid business in these days of cloud hosting and services on a smaller budget. At some point you just expect that a company can handle what it took upon itself to handle. That's why we give them money in the first place, after all. And time. And content. Lots and lots of content.

Couldbe Yue wrote: ... changing the subject completely, has anyone heard from Dart? he hasn't been on here for 3 weeks. Still here and watching. I figured I'd sit it out and wait a while to see what happens and needed to catch up on some things in the background. Didn't buy into the sincerity bits in the first place, but I'd hoped that LL knowing that the other side is at least aware of the nonsense would provide enough incentive to stop with the games and focus on the practical tasks. Watching Rod or someone posting as Rod throw down the "we come into work caring about the users" card was at least a gesture. Problem for me as a New Yorker who's been around the block too many times is that I've seen this kind of "sincerity" before many times. We're sorry we've mis-billed, over-billed, cross billed, multiple billed ... and yet the stuck advertisements continue, so even with refunds they're still coming out ahead. So long as the money keeps coming out of peoples pockets without a way to cancel they can keep "ooopsing" and refunding to their hearts content. This isn't a new or particularly clever game to play with billing. I think the solution would be for LL employees to give up their credit card numbers and trust us with recurring billing. Because we wake up in the morning thinking about Lindens and how we can serve them better. No, really. To get back on where the topic has been going, I'm not seeing real investment into SL. I'm seeing a continuation of projects, pulling back on resources like closing one data center, SL events, more sims stuffed onto newer hardware than could be managed by older hardware and moves to limit the amount of resources that their servers have to stream out over the last months. I'm not seeing any new investments in time or money that really cost much of anything to LL that they're not already paying for, and not yet seeing increased effort here on the marketplace that extends past an hour worth of time posting some minimal bits of info. Would love to see some indicators other than lip service and small token changes that a real game studio could handle in a month. I'm still seeing lip service and milking and pulling back of SL resources.

Pamela Galli wrote: the marketplace is SL's Vietnam: they can't decide whether to bomb Hanoi or just throw in the towel and go home. ... I any case, It seems that LL bought Xstreet without a very clear idea of how much they would need to invest in it, both long and short term. Just wanted to acknowledge the Vietnam comment, because it's tending to veer toward an non win for an acceptable resolution. Still some days left to this week, but it's starting to remind me of a little bit of attention Rod got on Twitter concerning the Lab's product with this tweet thrown in as a seeming aside to "SLers". "And off to another meeting. Sorry Should be a new SL blog this week just fyi SLers." Rod posted this on September 19th. Needless to say there have been no blog posts aside from the pic of the day since that date. It doesn't have to be a non win, but because we're asking for deeds and not words and deeds that result in more than chipping away at low hanging fruit, indicators aren't good. Personally I just can't get past this charging and refund nonsense in light of the new products and company direction. Now supposedly people that ask for refunds on multiple billing will get them, which is a positive except ... It's a bit hard to believe that LL has absolutely no way to track multiple billings for ads, identify EVERYONE that should get a refund and do so without any reports from customers. If there are cleanup issues AFTER that on individual cases that slipped through the cracks that would be more understandable in reporting them through an unspecified method (is it duplicated Jira's now for a known bug, support tickets, email?). There are many people who don't know what they were charged for, can't figure out what they were charged for or are unaware of the extent of these issues that just get banged on recurring. These people that should get refunds .... won't. A mass reset of all advertising has been completely ignored. But right, it shouldn't take long to see if these are token solutions or a real attempt at providing quality services to customers or whether we're off to fight another war with new products and waiting for the announcement in 2013 that no one wants to hear. Virtual Vietnam indeed.

Innula Zenovka wrote: Leaving aside the vexed question of whether the L$ is convertable currency or not, I cannot believe that the 5% transaction charges on MP sales amounts to much. How much is a cup of coffee in SF -- US$2 or thereabouts? So every L$10,000 spent in the MP amounts to enough commission to buy someone at LL a coffee at lunchtime . Lord only knows how much people have to spend there in order to pay the salaries of people who're tasked with maintaining and improving the MP. Originally just went to look up that actual number for marketplace gross sales that was in the last quarterly report to be published: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/The-Second-Life-Economy-in-Q3-2011/ba-p/1166705 Of course the charts showing those Marketplace numbers are now gone, but after some digging I was able to get it from a comment I'd made on Darrius blog where I referenced the actual amount. The $1,183,000,000 for that quarter is from their stats: "Quarterly gross Marketplace sales: $1,183,000,000 5% quarterly commission in L$: L$59,150,000 Converted to real dollars at a rate of 260 (just because), it’s roughly $227,500 USD for the quarter. Roughly $76,000/month USD gross earnings from the Marketplace commission. This isn’t complete because it doesn’t include advertising sales or purchases in real dollars (PayPal purchases on thr marketplace, which are inflated substantially from items purchased with L$)." Agree the point has been made about sinks, value, currency and the important bits now lie in where do we go from here, but knowing the volume of sales the Marketplace is helpful in this context.

Rodvik Linden wrote: Hey folks, just dropping a note to let you know I have read the thread. The team reads the boards every day so they asked me to pop in to acknowledge that they read the boards and I have also read this thread. I appreciate the feature requests and bug notifications in particular. For sure we can up the tempo of communiation in blog posts and notifcations to upcoming changes & fixes. We remain commited to our merchant community and I appreciate you taking the time to write down what you would like to see in the future for SL. It took sacrificial goats, bulging veins and much reasoning to exasperate the commerce team enough to conjure you to tell us that they read the forums every day? Isn't that kind of boneheaded? They could have posted themselves and said "hey guys, we read the forums every day". When does a communication problem turn into a comprehension problem? Someone said they were afraid of lynch mobs. I think you need to tell them that the lynching part isn't real. More seriously though, if it weren't a bit bigger than the team communicating or a handful of strongly desired feature requests, it wouldn't have had your name on it. Communication is great, but it's become an issue of production, implementation, stability and trust in a buyer/seller environment. Suspects are often incompetence, management problems, development methodology, etc. It's the follow through and delivery times to get there. A disconnect between here and the level of quality and features we're used to elsewhere when it comes to buying and selling goods. Also you may want to read the post over on New World Notes about land barons and how the Marketplace has affected them as well: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2012/10/sl-land-threatened-by-sl-marketplace.html There are billing error issues that a more focused and communicative commerce team can (probably) handle and then are issues related to overall "economy that the commerce team can't handle. High tier and dinking around with monetization is dated, taken it's toll and in need of a rework. Personally I can give you a big Obama style pass and say that you inherited the messy bits. But to us it's an old story. Most of us who have met individual Lindens like them. Indicators keep pointing up the chain to them having a serious lack of solid direction and focus sometimes. That would be your turf?

Just finished that, it is a good read. Thanks as well.

Deja Letov wrote: I've stayed out of this thread for the most part because quite honestly the legality of it all is probably way over my head and I would most likely be making guesses and inaccurate guesses at this. But I have seen the TOS about L$ not being real currency. So I guess my question is...if L$ isn't real currency how are people filing for losses against people and taking them to court for actual financial losses due to theft or whatever in SL? When someone files a DMCA and gets their contact info to take them to court...how can they sue for any damages or loss of revenue, if they in fact haven't really lost any real money? Only L$? Heheh, that's a point. I think it's enough that there are two real money endpoints, purchasing them and the ability to cash them out and what created the value to the real money that was cashed out. It's not so much whether they're currency as whether they have worth to people in real money terms, or probably more specifically does the use or abuse of them relate to real money earnings or losses. In the middle we have our content that can easily be proven to have worth. When you cash it out, for an item of yours that you sold that you had IP rights to, where did the value of those tokens come from? That bit is a pretty clear path. It's the value of the tokens that means more than whether it's a currency. There's more than enough to connect the "value" dots. The banks are more concerned about the tokens role as currency, they're the ones missing out on the "transaction" fees. As far as taxes, hitting the payment provider is enough so far. It's the cashing out part that puts it in another class than game money that doesn't have any worth. Just a note about our liability and taxes, etc. There are plenty of content sales sites out there, Turbosquid being a great example because we're talking mesh content sold directly for real money. Even when it IS real money and has real value, they easily deal with liability, tax issues and consumer protection without any of the nonsense we see here. Of course they're on top of their game and treat their sellers with respect and responsibility without skirting all of these issues with funny money. So that it's more "dangerous" or costly than here if it had real value or had to obey real laws or to be treated as real money really doesn't hold a lot of weight. It's not going to destroy SL any more than it destroyed Amazon and sellers.

Innula Zenovka wrote: Unless you're seriously expecting Rodvik to say, "Good heavens! You've persuaded me that the L$ is, in fact, a form of currency. I shall direct my legal department to rewrite Section 5 of the ToS forthwith, in the hope we can thus stay under the radar of government regulators", which seems a bit fanciful, to my mind the only thing that's going to persuade LL that the L$ is, in fact, a form of currency would be a judicial ruling to that effect. Making claims is one thing. Persuading a court to enforce them is quite a different kettle of fish. Has anyone, in fact, sought profession advice from a competent attorney about the likelihood of a court being persuaded to set aside the ToS in this respect? It seems to me rather a specialist area of the law, I have to say. Professional advice? No. I almost hesitate to bring it up ... I agree with you, this whole thing isn't about a legal argument really. But yes, I've had the occassional and casual water cooler type of conversations about the legal issues with some of this stuff about IP, virtual goods, currency, etc. We're maintaining some legal support software and services and I get to have casual conversations like this in passing. I wouldn't repeat any of it, mostly because of the ethics ... they were second hand non professional hypothetical conversations, opinions vary, they're aren't my attorneys, or ours and one set of answers can be moot depending on the legal strategy involved and what angles and how many are being targeted. It's best left to official representation In the end no one can offer legal advice but your own attorney(s). My personal opinion is that the biggest bang for the expensive or crowd sourced buck are things like regulation, lobbying, awareness, watchdog organizations, etc. I think you could get more done for the same price on a global scale for the money that you could in a case that will probably end up as a settlement anyway and you get to address what you're trying to address at the heart of the matter ... which is a something you believe is bad practice or lack of protection rather than legally nitpicking at details with one specific company. That said, I think if this were framed not as a threat, but as a warning that these things "can" be challenged, which they know already, so it just serves as a reminder that legal action does cross your mind as a solution when things get this bad. Legally who knows until it's resolved, but we feel led to believe that this should be more professional and responsible to customers and those self employed. And that the idea is that no one wants to go down that rabbit hole, but that there are avenues available to consumers of SL to try to protect themselves, if need be. It's not a threat, it's a response to looking for a solution to what we perceive as an over burdening problem while trying to get the company to step up and solve it themselves.

That's seems to be true over there. That and it's more of a socializing space than it is a special interest group like we have here. If they want merchant feedback, this is the place to go. I remember Rod posting some "help me with feedback" issue over there I believe about drawing new users. A few days later his response was something like "that's pretty much what we thought, thanks bye". The path of least resistance to get the answer you wanted to hear all along without Rod ever mentioning what the plan of attack actually was going to turn out to be. Just a token LL kind of thing. @Toy, tried to interject some fact over there. They said it was reasonable but I sounded like a Linden, one of our own came to my rescue on that bit and I narrowly escaped. You just need to carefully pick off the tar and feathers.

Faye Feldragonne wrote: I knew someone would ask why I lowered the prices. But I'd just decided to give out some pretty clothes that might otherwise be buried in MP...and it was buried. The cheap prices gave me sales and people got nice shoes. LOL. I still offer customer service if they contact me. I do remember a merchant complaining about stores going out of business and having 10L sales, further glutting the market, and did feel a bit guilty about it...but I've given so much away anyways in hunts, amazing beautiful things, that I just felt like WTF did it matter? It might be wrong, I don't know, and I hope I don't get people hollering at me. It was all very tramatic for me and I just didn't want to have any more negative press. I have gone back and upped some prices again (about a month ago). I can't explain the emotional rollercoaster I went through over this... Ultimately, as I tried to explain in original OP, I just ran out of steam. I was burned out, depressed, and had put 3 years of my RL into something that wasn't really real in the end. I think LL pretty much lost their window on fixing product glut and and overall market value. Someone posted that a Linden had said they like the average price range to be around L$150 anyway and it became clearer that they just cared about pricing to make goods cheap enough to draw in new people, but enough that it'd be profitable for them in sinks and advertising with enough of a taste that merchants will still grind.. It just doesn't matter as much these days. The fingers mostly pointed at LL for not controlling it more than an individual for pricing too low, or should have. I think you would have found sympathy here, regardless. There are just so many more important things like bugs that prevent people from being able to do what the product is supposed to handle, billing errors, over billing, incompetence, pricing, a no-show CEO that won't back up customers more than employees, etc.

Medhue Simoni wrote: Well, if I were CEO, lol. Not that I don't agree or wouldn't be glad to have you as a CEO, but I'm not sure you're understanding LL management style. You have to overspend, come up with a $50,000 enterprise version of SL for corportate use on a hard drive and disappear taking 1-2/3s of the employees with you in a mass layoff. Or come up with something inspiring like Fast, Easy and Fun and then 3 months later as your product still declines disappear and do a startup, claiming to know how to change the face of employment and how people work. Or get an island, a toga and a raft, tell people you love this passionate user base and that you've got a thick skin from prior game company experience and then disappear to go build a better Minecraft. First you need to learn how to tap dance. Because gleaning wisdom from people who understand the product and its users is just silly.

Just caught up on that full story, sorry to hear about it. Probably one of the biggest points that they don't get is that they generate burnout due to their lack of responsibility with a stable product. Had many of those moments, endless hours redoing things due to their negligence. Work that takes more time to research and work around the bugs and quirks than actually getting the job done, and on it goes. Thankfully I've never had an inventory loss as great as yours. I've had my inventory steadily chipped away to the point that I didn't know that it's missing until it's really too late to do anything about it. They do burn people out emotionally, financially. To exist for 10 years and not be able to handle inventory in too many cases. You can't get them to give up their projects in favor of building a better product no matter how hard you try it seems. Sometimes I wonder what they tell themselves is the reason for their decline. It seems to be everything but an all too often inferior product and a lack of responsibility to the people that pay them money.

Ela Talaj wrote: The reason is obvious: our litigation society. While having superficial control over merchants' wares and business conduct the Lab has much deeper pockets than the merchants have and the cost of defending whatever frivolous lawsuits would be impossible to bear regardless of their outcome. Should the Lab devise a whatever scheme of executing strict control over merchants, most of them would not be able to comply with the terms. Therefore the current business model of treating the merchants exactly the same as other paying and non-paying customers is the only one reasonable and moreover imperative for continuation of business. Those merchants who wish otherwise are pushing themselves on a very slippery slope. I'm not sure that they do provide us with any more legal protection. We're on our own defending our content and LL isn't going to protect us or help us much. The liability they skirt with the virtual currency may afford us some protection, because people aren't directly paying us with real money, otherwise we're on our own. It could be said that in fact, they don't do enough to police and protect our content precisely because they do dislaim away all liability. There's a bare minimum of compliance on LL's part. They're covered, we're really not by much. It's common enough to treat commercial customers as well, commercial customers, partners, affiliates or whatever you want to call them. Commercial customers are valuable in that they tend to have an equal or better finger on the pulse of customers and trends than the provider of the service. The issue really isn't trying to get them to treat us better or as higher priority than everyone else, it's to get them to treat us as what we are: business people. That's what we do. In matters of business. We share many of the same concerns, issues, trends and profit and loss than they do. As do land barons. I think all we're asking is that a CEO act on concerns that their employees won't or can't.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: (snip) OPTION #2: LL encourage 3rd Party ecommerce sites to return to SL - open the DD API - Gracefully slide out This would be hard to transition to but I think it would have the best overall value to Merchants and Customers. If this transition could somehow be orchestrated, competition is what is missing now and competition is in bad need ! Maybe - to add incentive for LL to gracefully bow out of the market, the agreement would be that LL get 1% of all sales transaction from all sales as compensation for the 3rd party vendors having usage access to the DD API or whatever delivery mechanism. (snip) I've lobbied for this option since they first publicly announced Direct Delivery. It would maintain LL's income stream for offline sales, divorce them from the majority of support costs and result in several competing sites that could challenge each other to grow better than anything else we have now. I also like to think one of the features they could experiment with are methods of linking in-world sales with offline sales .. but this would also require having connections with in-world vendor systems and/or the SL Search and "Sell from a Prim" API's. All in all, this opens the whole segment BACK up to the wonder of End-User Creativity. That's a concept that SL grew strong from, that they then lost and have been suffering from since losing .. and should strive to regain .. especially based on Rodvik's statement that he wants to implement ways to increase. Ugg, I remember disagreeing with this and citing security risks. If not for trying to support M Lindens plan of attack at the time, I'd probably have agreed but they were at odds. Pam had a point that it was too late, and it probably is, I think due to a shrinking customer base and ratio of buyers to sellers, speaking of independent sales sites. The situation now is fragile and fragmentation would be pretty painful. Not that I don't think there's a better path involving trashing the Marketplace software completely, but of course we know how migrations tend to go around here. I still like the idea of an API-ish integrated system far better than this external shopping cart software, and agree that if there's a way to give commerce back to us, it should be done, if it can be done without shrinking the merchant/customer ecosystem. That's really hard to do without LL promoting it as much as the Marketplace is now as their own property It's a shame that we may not be able to get a do-over and just keep the idea of a folder-to-folder delivery system and go from there.

Merchants are arrogant? When did that happen? Most of them actually are narcissistic money grubbing L$eeches with an attitude but that doesn't make them bad it makes them skilled capitialist artists. Just a warning, if Pam finds out you're copying her products, she's going to be whacking your knuckles with a ruler. I'm having a "probably shouldn't hit the Post button moment" ...

Toysoldier Thor wrote: PS - to the Merchants of SL, if you are going to post to this thread, please provide the concerns you would like to see Rodvik address. Only just noticed your PS. Some of it has already been said, and some of it shouldn't have to be said, however ... 1) Whether Magic Boxes or Direct Delivery, there are multiple notifications that should go out at the users choice. Some of these can be consolidated. Notification of reviews. Notification of shopping cart additions, and/or shopping cart items that update to the current price of the item, not the price it was when put into the cart. Sales notifications, especially for Direct Delivery (embarassing to mention to any commerce provider). And one often neglected, a delivery confirmation notification. This one is important because notification of sale is NOT notification that the customer actually got the product so far as the system knows. Surely under the hood Direct Delivery already indicates a success/fail event when it attempts a hit on the customers inventory. Purchasing a real world item for instance, even though the delivery is handled by a third party to get the product to your doorstep, the buyer and seller can almost always check where that item is, what state it's in (whether pre or post delivery) and exactly where it's at and why. This should be the case across the board. Any merchant should know the EXACT state of the item at all times. Is it pending, locked, is it in an error state (if so what kind). Aside from notification this data should be available on the buyer/seller account pages. The seller should know mostly the same information from the moment they put it in their cart or click "buy". 2) Finance and reporting. You guys need to consolidate all of this into a more centralized system. General transactions and Marketplace transactions are decoupled. This is one root of a problem providing separate sets of records that will not reconcile. Which brings me to another point. Everything should reconcile. If it doesn't you're not doing it right, period. The end result of reporting is that it should be able to be imported into accounting software and be at least sophisticated enough to set up multiple general ledger accounts with the data. You provided transactions, splits, SKUs, etc. and yet do not provide the kind of simple accounting data that would satisfy any bookkeeper. 3) Overall business. The disconnect here is that Merchants are not treated as business partners, they're treated as game/virtual world users.. Regardless of how virtual or "real" the money and the goods are, the reality is that it is copyrightable material bought and sold. You need more than lip service here, with a commerce team that has substantial prior experience in commerce, accounting and general business practices, or more preferable ONE manager of the product that can help filter product requirements to the developers. I don't need to tell you guys about the amounts of money translated to USD that you're moving in sinks and advertising, etc. If you didn't know this, you wouldn't have wanted to acquire it in the first place. You need to buck up here and stop treating this like toy items from "residents". Except when it comes to your internal discussions, then you're the masters of the universe. The conversations you have internally about goods and monetization are not always the same conversations we have, thus the disconnect. You know what I mean. It is not your responsiblity to influence sales, or optimize sales, it is your responsibility to provide the technical framework to enable your business partners to sell effectively. Simply put, it is your world, but these are not your items. And that needs to be understood, "really" understood. Being an enabler means being proficient enough to provide the stable technology. We don't need "business development" from LL, we need technicians that understand the challenges and know how to implement them, nothing more. There's more, and this input has been with you for years, but you need to quit with the clever bits and prove that your loyalty lies with your partners, not your teams dreams of how to manipulate monetization of virtual goods and the people that create them for the company. The rest will take care of itself. If you make a little less because you're letting the market run organically then so be it. A clear example of misguided wisdom shows when people try to tell you relevance means relevance, not sales history.

Just a note, I agree with you 100%. The only thing that needs highest priority is that we had office hours, two closed beta programs and the result is "this". Priority must be on doing, not talking. What good is an office hour if they can't handle implementing any of it for instance? A good faith effort would be to get people who "can" handle any of the suggestions and feedback that they get and to implement stronger policy, such as reasonable refund and transaction assurances. They're just hiding behind an untested TOS and arbitration clauses while developing other products with our money. Then maybe they can begin to build better reporting tools so that people actually know what's going on with their transactions and funds and deliveries like all other commerce out there. Just saying that personally I think we're beyond words and token gestures at this point.

Agreed, I know I'll certainly be sharing this with other ventures out there as a textbook lesson in what NOT to do for practices, as well as becoming more active in trying to promote more legislation on this nonsense. For what little it's worth, changed my signature in their honor.