Dartagan Shepherd

Look at the bright side, now you won't have posts about what Jira's are being investigated for months on end with no results. You'll just get no results and no knowledge of outstanding bugs. Ignorance is bliss? Next is the part where they claim it's due to people asking for it, or because of the lack of participation. If producing a better product were the end result, I'd be all for people not having to report so many bugs in the first place, as many of them shouldn't happen with proper testing, but I'm not sure that's in the cards.

Overpriced stuff still exists in large numbers being purchased by those with alot of money to burn I suppose. Otherwise they still wouldn't be priced at such exorbitant prices would they? It is true that with competition some old things naturally have come down in price to make way for the new as they get purchased out, but any implications that 4000L avatars and 20,000L castles or whatever can't be bought anymore anywhere near that price is nonsense. ;-) No, trust me, prices today are not even close to what they were. Not by half. Yes there are still relatively high price points. Case in point on the castles, there used to be a great guy who made castles exclusively. He made a healthy full time income. He went out of business, sold his sims. Actually there are more merchants out there but they are focusing on The Marketplace more and more and in many cases exclusively. There are more things beings being sold on a daily basis as peeps are more able to afford more things now that more things are being represented by cheaper prices (along with higher quality). Maybe you haven't noticed the long steady decline with SL over the years. More merchants and sims lost than gained. They've just been consolidated now. "There were also more people earning full time incomes". That I doubt. More likely there are fewer peeps making 'large' sums every month but more making just enough to get by amounts. On the contrary, there were more of both. I have never heard of SLX. Perhaps it was intended to be a publicity stunt all along that didn't work because 'they' didn't want it to work? ;-) It was the top independently owned and operated marketplace at the time. It was bought out by LL and became the Marketplace you have today. Freeplay? Never heard of that one either. Sounds like just another phony publicity stunt though. As good a description as any. The model is all about the free carrot. Nonsense. Have you ever heard of volume? A larger consumption base? 'Dirt cheap' products tend to be very low quality, but because there is a substantial market out there for them, that only means that there is a group of people not willing to participate in SL at higher prices. Would it be better for the SL economy if they just disappeared? As it is, the only thing keeping the daily user statistics elevated is the existence of some price deflation. China agrees. Also I'm not saying that free, low price AND higher prices can't all happily exist at once. In a very healthy environment, they can. We've seen healther. This is less. Nonsense. The vast majority of merchants out there are not all that interested quitting their day job to try to survive as a full time merchant on SL, but still make very nice products even if at a greatly reduced rate (as well as price usually). Again, I'm saying that there can and has been more of both. Free and low cost isn't going to draw in users, they're getting more numb to that by the hour. Creating a degree of demand with a pinch of exclusivity on the other hand is secret sauce. Land in SL at one point was hard to come by. LL just wouldn't "print" any more mainland. If you'd seen the prices on small waterfront plots compared to the vast empty mainland we have today you might see it in a different light. On the other hand, it was possible for someone with no L$ to earn a few hundred thousand in a short amount of time. Healthy economy not to be confused with China vs. U.S. furniture manufacturers, the latter being out of business now.

Spica Inventor wrote: Yeah those ideas would make things much more convenient for many merchants. But why don't the merchants just price their stuff cheaper permanently so SL can actually start growing again for the betterment of all? Once upon a time, when SL was booming and SLX existed you could sell an avatar shape for L$4,000 and a complex widget for L$50,000 and people could still get volumes of freebies. Things are no longer booming, prices are a fraction of what they once were, and there are less people and merchants now. There were also more people earning full time incomes. At one point, one of the SLX partners decided that they were going to hire full time employees and crank out goods all priced at L$10 and suggested all merchants do the same. For volumes of reasons and pages of posts, common wisdom was that this was an extremely bad idea. The idea was shelved and those low priced goods never provided a viable business model for that partner. If this was a serious statement, it's off base. All markets degrade unless controlled. If LL changed its prices to reflect modern times and got rid of the invisible monetization bits, and controlled the market, the entire "economy" would be stronger once again. Freeplay seemed like a good idea at the time (when in reality it's just a competitive response to a saturated market), but even that begins to degrade. Ask Zynga. SL is already free, a world full of dirt cheap products guts the lure of opportunity for creators. It's one of the few things they haven't completely destroyed. Merchants and land barons are the last business opportunities left. If they go, it's game over.

Kyle Lebed wrote: Has this been communicated yet? No, they've been told that DD has to fully work first, which was kind of depressing, but not nearly as distracting as the missing Flip Flop problem at LL, which is currently being investigated. It will be released right before people realize that in-world delivery systems that residents are able to build are still as unstable as Magic Boxes and that fixing the overall problem would have killed two birds with one Flip Flop.

Rose Mackie wrote: It is really frustrating when a customer types in something like "Steampunk boot" in the search and gets everything from flying houses to buttplugs. I suppose the merchant justifies this by thinking something like "Well, a steampunk dude might use a buttplug" or "The house is sorta shaped like a boot and it does fly and don't they have flying houses in steampunkland?." A common mistake. While similar in form and function to buttplugs, these are actually experimental steampunk devices to collect alternative fuels .... both methane gas and solid waste for bio-fuel. A clever 2-way valve allows both materials to be extracted separately at the same time by simply sitting on an appropriate fuel collector. Theoretically a family of 5 can produce enough fuel to fly a house. The boot shape is simply a design statement inferring that all innovation starts with "a good swift kick".

Nalates Urriah wrote: Everyone playing SL made an agreement with the Lab. If you want to change that agreement both sides have to be willing to make a change and negotiate a new agreement. That is the free market, which is already over regulated and not so free. In a free market it is the job of government to prevent extortion, monopolies, false advertising, and other misrepresentations and things society considers criminal. In socialist governments and controlled markets the governments force people and business to do things. Neither side gets to negotiate. It becomes a matter of how many people can influence the politician... or even worse what the politician's person belief is that gets imposed on everyone. The result is less freedom, innovation, prosperity and more government control and poverty. The Lab is not falsely advertising in this case because the high bandwidth is a mistake and in law this problem is treated mostly as an accident. The Liability of a car maker is not comparable because the laws governing the manufacture of cars and the maker's liability have been defined differently and can result in the loss of life. Whatever the case the losses in regard to this problem are so small no one can afford to pursue the matter. So the legal side essentially moot. Those people that did not pay attention to their bandwidth use are going to be stuck paying for their negligence and having agreed to the SL ToS. That people want some third party, like the government, to come in and regulate for their benefit so they can remain negligent after they made an agreement is partially what the nanny state is about. It seems some think the government or regulation could somehow prevent mistakes. Several people here would prefer someone make the Lab do something. The Lab will live up to their agreement. At least they won't be in the forum crying about having to live up to their side of the areement. Several seem to think this screw up is a deliberate act of the Lab to increase bandwidth use. But, as pointed out in one post, this mistake is costing the Lab too. So, the idea it is deliberate I’ll attribute to clueless people being frustrated. I think the thread has made it very clear which people want to place all responsibility on the Lab and lack any empathy for mistakes. I find it interesting how many people see no responsibility to live up to the agreements they have made and want changes forced on others for their personal benefit. Look, claims of wanting LL to issue monetary compensation aside and the fact that technically (although not proven in a court) that the fault is with the user for not monitoring their bandwidth aside ... I work with lawyers every single day. When the fault is theirs for not providing adequate information and their ducks aren't in a row on their paperwork, or they're not providing the proper information in a timely enough fashion to provide them with what they need, these lawyers aren't threatening legal action. They're not threatening legal action when the fault is ours. It's not about that, at least to most users. However, when the fault is ours, these same lawyers will leave for another service in a heartbeat. Why? Because competence, like not letting a problem happen in the first place is expected. No one is nitpicking over the technicalities, lawyers included. If a problem IS our fault, we're expected to fix it, whether we legally have to or not. We're also expected to communicate that we did make a mistake immediately if it's going to affect them. It's not a legal thing, it's called being a professional. That's completely aside from the fact that the more professional you are, the more you tend to go above and beyond what's expected but not required. People can keep making excuses for this for the "next" 10 years, but the numbers of decline don't lie. And the reason is because this company doesn't provide a professional enough product and doesn't provide communication and support that people expect from a professional company. It's either something you get or you don't, but the numbers tell you what's really going on. So whose fault is it ultimately if a company goes out of business? The company that had everything within its power to present the product, fix the product, provide quality control and a level of support. Aside from that, perception is also truth. If the perception is a second rate offering, it's a second rate offering no matter who was right or wrong. That said, even perception is with the power of a company. Management that doesn't get that eventually go out of business. When you have no viable competitors, the process is slower, but will still eventually happen. If you think a customer is at fault because they don't monitor and control their own resources, then surely you think a company that leaks users are that much more responsible for not keeping their own house in order. Decline is what happens when customers are not satisfied with product or service. Whoever was to blame, customers aren't satisfied enough. This isn't a virtual world experience, culture, opinion kind of thing. This is a fact of real world business.

Cincia Singh wrote: Do you also blame your car manufacturer because you got a speeding ticket; after all the speedometer goes up to 190 kph so it's the manufacturer's fault if you do that and get a ticket, right? If you over-draw your checking account do you blame the retailer for selling you something and you wrote a check you didn't have the money to cover? People with bandwidth caps know full well they have a limitation and it's their responsibility to monitor their use and stay within their limit, not someone elses fault if they exceed it; not anyone elses. And thank you Ay for making it personal and insulting. Actually yes, if the car suddenly started accelerating and you had to slam on the brakes by the time you noticed (which might be a short while, 20 MPH can sneek up on you), the liability would be on the car manufacturer. It's happened and settlements of this nature aren't uncommon. If we're doing the blame game, the bug was on the side of LL, not the user who didn't notice it right off because the user was so immersed in SL (immersion after all, is part of the experience that the company strives for). Not targetted at you, but I do see the pattern of people that consistently, no matter what the issue, will turn the blame back on the user. I used to be one of those people. My SL was going great, there were no issues that I couldn't shrug off or fix myself and everyone else was a naysayer. Went from expressing my distaste about naysaying, graduated to advocate, which eventually turned into daily "damage control", for LL. There were "regular naysayers" I couldn't pass up. If they posted I knew it was going to be negative in some way and so as soon as I saw these names, I was prepared for battle! Of course I told myself I was helping to debunk the negativity, being pro SL ... all for the good of avatar-kind. Problem was in RL I knew otherwise and didn't apply it. In RL I know that when my customers complain, it may or may not be about the issue that they seem to be annoyed at, it may be something deeper. In fact many times a complaint about one issue is a culmination of smaller issues that led to every issue being magnified. Finally I had some negative experiences of my own, and while I feel I've been most definately shafted by LL, I found that every little annoying thing was now a bigger issue. It may not be just this bandwidth problem or whatever the complaint of the moment is. It may be that over the last 3 years user X has lost inventory, couldn't rez things once a month, group chat glitches every time they get into the middle of a conversation, or that building things seems to involve working around one SL quirk after another. It keeps adding up. It may be that they don't know hardware, or tech. It may be that they feel uninformed due to lack of communication. They may be intimidated because they don't feel qualified to be part of the solution. What casual user should "ever" be exposed to JIra, and meetings and hours a day scanning forums and blogs and scattered information and half information? None, this is the sole responsibility of the company to communicate and develop software that doesn't need half the user population as their personal unpaid testers. These things aren't requirements to the average user. Even the hardware issue, user X hits hard times and doesn't get why their hardware runs everything else "except" SL, and why should they have to keep spending more, more more on their machine when SL is the only thing in their life that needs it.. This is a failing of the user? No, this is a failing of a company that's supposed to be an innovater in virtual worlds not knowing how to develop a virtual world that runs on older hardware. Or even current hardware. Yes it's deeply technical and difficult to do. On the other hand, this is what we pay them to solve. If SL is only for those who can afford higher end machines, guess what? They've missed their demographic completely. People with oodles of spare change to blow on hardware don't have time for something as immersive as SL in general. Hardcore gamers supported by their parents who are too busy to play SL themselves notwithstanding. SL depends on the "whales" to support everyone else. And it's not attracting the whales who have little time or want more instant gratification for their money. Bottom line, be careful in the desire to play advocate and turn everything back on the user. Numbers are proving that SL is declining, declining, declining. And when they can't vocalize without getting blamed, when they can't vocalize it well, or when they don't know "how" to vocalize the issue properly, they go away, which contributes further to the decline. At any rate, blaming the user and not the company robs the company of the opportunity to figure out what the real complaint is, which often is NOT the thing being complained about. And the real problem is overall ... high pricing, expecting too much from the casual user, lack of communication, over monetization of the platform, and a serious lack of quality control and stability. It shows in a thousand different ways. When you have to reason every ... single ... day why it's the users fault? It should be a clue the there are serious larger issues that are the fault of the company and not the user. Some of have to make 10,000 excuses for this company before we get that through our thick heads. I know I did. But right, consistently pushing responsibility back on the user ... not helping solve the real problems. User is here to have fun with something that works reliably for a reasonable price. Or free if the company works off freeplay models. If the company wants to push it all back on the user, then let the company say it.

Toy, for the record, I have no preference one way or the other with mesh in SL. Regular prims are often the resource-cheaper way to go and sometimes optimized mesh might be better ... just another tool in the toolbox. I don't think mesh was ready for prime time ... even though they announced that they were going to bring mesh support to SL ... back in 2006! And here we are 6 years later with not only badly done partial implementation, but they use it to cry resource poverty, while at the same time charging for it. I started with mesh some years before SL existed (well before 2003), so mesh isn't a big deal to me, it just "is". The only thing that boggled me when I first saw SL was why you'd build a virtual world and not add mesh support from day one. Regardless I keep my mesh work separate from SL primarily because as some Lindens have admitted, it is in SL's best interests to keep the price of our goods down to retain new users (and unspoken ... to free up more money to go to SL and less money to go to merchants and other users). Mesh for anyone is a choice, make it work for you or don't like any other aspect of doing business in SL. Mesh sales "outside" of SL don't require me to pay for the priviledge of listing it or putting it up for sale, the priviledge of using it, and it's in both our interests for these other entities to keep prices reasonable and not on the budget end, because we all make more money and people are worth their time. Because LL has no such values to their users (they want more than their fair share, they charge you for uploading, charge you for hosting, charge you for selling, etc.), they're not attracting mesh creators from the outside. LL doesn't value peoples time, rather they ask for content for free and then charge you on every single aspect of its use. Talk about a deal! If LL employees time were so devalued for programming and other skills and they weren't capable of making their 80k salaries, they wouldn't be working at LL. Not exactly balanced there, just asking us to bend over would be a time saver. Regardless, it was more about a financial decision than mesh with Ami. Otherwise I don't care whether something I like is mesh or not.

Medhue Simoni wrote: I'm not going to go on arguing what I consider ridiculousness and ignorance. If people want to trust in what you say Toy, they have all the right to believe whatever they want to believe. My motive should be plainly clear, and that is to help as many of my fellow creators as I can, inform the public as to why their world sucks and is laggy, and to try and help make this SL world a smooth and enjoyable place to be in. Sculpties do not fit into those goals, and actually goes against them. For what it's worth, I agree with you wholeheartedly. I get what others are saying, if you're only into SL, there's no interest in creating content for outside of SL. That makes perfect sense, especially where income isn't the priority. However, when it comes to seeking a full time income, and if you can handle mesh, SL alone is far too risky, the platform is too buggy and mesh content requires far too much babysitting during the creation process. Add to that the unknowns of a completely idiotic and convoluted land impact calculation designed around offering less resources for LL, thereby reducing their cost and the greed factor of charging yet more costs for uploads. As a "career" SL isn't it. Besides an unstable platform, LL is a lousy business partner. Personally I see them as a dishonest company because they've been dishonest in their dealings with me, disclaim all liability, offer no merchant or consumer protection, etc. But agree that if creating content is more important than SL itself, and higher level income that you can depend on (given the obvious risks of being self employed) ... SL isn't the place to do it. Put your eggs into baskets where you have far more control, reporting, sales, stability and customer service. And it's of course really, really nifty to get paid real money for real work, at something resembling modern wages. Personally I've brought no mesh into SL. Not worth the crazy implementation and wacky calculations and extra work. There's just no way I'm bringing a mesh into SL for pennies that sells outside of SL for $25-$250 and up per model.. @Ami ... if these free sims are integral to upselling your products, hold out as long as you can, would be my advice. If it starts dipping into your pocket and not your profits, dump the sims at will. Better to sell less at profit than to be paying out of pocket for something you're not sure you can recover from There's just so much RL "stuff" to spend $300/month on that re-invests in other ventures or gives you longer lasting satisfaction than a piece of virtual land.

I assure you that I'm asking this purely from a potential agents standpoint. So I have this friend, who was curious about these pics with an autograph. You see, he was afraid to ask himself, and he was wondering ...

Oh, that is awesome! I'm now your number one stalker, that is to say ... fan. @Darrius sorry, I'm fickle that way. At least I know what to put into todays play list.

You give me chills. Shades of the announcer in "Paradise by the Dashboard Light", which overall is descriptive enough to be the theme song describing our relationship with LL. Will you love me forever?

That is a sneaky bug. I thought ANS was getting off too easy and that didn't seem fair at all. Buggery should be an equal opportunity kind of thing.

5% commission alone doesn't cover the Beer and Swag fund. You know it doesn't come from love machine bonuses and investigating bugs is thirsty work! This is called disruptive ecommerce. Your content, your time, your bug reports, an occassional item for the B&S fund, your texture and mesh upload fees, your tier, your fees on L$ purchase and cash-outs, etc. In a way, negative reviews are a badge of honor and a show of support. Disputing these involuntary donations is a bit selfish, don't you think?

Spica Inventor wrote: NM is not a charitable organization but a business. So is my store. Why anyone thinks that I would pay the slightest attention to the opinions of people who are not and never will be my customers I cannot imagine. You know the real sad thing about greed in S.L. is that the merchants will make less money in the long run by catering exclusively to the rich which is perhaps as a deliberate policy is purposely keeping out the 'riff raff' to their own detriment and stagnant profit margins. ;-) Poor greed isn't getting a fair shake. It can be just as greedy for someone to undercut another merchant for the sake of sales. Or to come up with a product that is copy, to compete with a niche that has no copy items. That competitive edge might be greed driven. What if someone sells inferior product and offers them for next to nothing in order to make money anyway, because at least something will sell? Is china greedy to devalue against the US dollar and offer lower priced goods with cheaper labor? If NM is successful and dollar stores are successful, is the dollar store more noble? How about a whole chain of dollar stores buying goods by the ton from the cheapest supplier? Are they less greedy? Which is greedier, Girl Scouts for offering unique cookies with exclusivity and higher prices, or cookie manufacturers for mass producing some of those flavors and putting them on supermarket shelves?

You only need two numbers that you'll never see. The USD amount of purchased tokens and the USD amount of tokens cashed out to know how overly monetized SL is, besides fees that they charge for an actual value service like land hosting.. If it weren't sold as "economy", "sinks", "sources" it would just be a series of costs for a hosted application. Unfortunately, the statistics were as fictional as the economy, so the intent is far from honest transparency, otherwise you'd have seen RL quarterly reports from LL as a company like any other quarterly financials from any other company. Not in L$, not as economy, not mixed in with other "game" statistics and numbers that cannot be verified. Who needs to steal or siphon when you've got a free license (TOS) to do whatever you like, print your own money and control the amount of monetary churn that ends up back in users hands? Not giving refunds or keeping money where the seller purchased and the merchant wasn't paid is just more of the same. I wouldn't say it's theft, because in their case they define theft until the law can cover more of what they're allowed to do. You've got 300 or so employees, all ramped up to be startup/profit minded, making an average $80k salary, none of whom pay a steady $300/month for any game or recreation that resembles a virtual world in their own personal spending.. Priority question CEO asks is "how do we get more users?". What did you think would happen? To make a broad, not technically accurate statement, their model is too pyramid-ish to be sustainable at a level that would satisfy them. A straightforward pricing and quality product would give them something to grow. This won't. Mainstream doesn't buy into it. They've always tried to take the concept of a virtual world and mold it into a startup, an ideal, a "disruptive" company, an experimental thing both internally and externally. But yes, the entire concept of sinks and fees in L$ are "destruction of Linden dollars". Lindens are purchased and anything purchased with L$ that doesn't end up back in users hands is a loss for users, and more already-purchased L$ to keep. If there were an employee skimming, they'd want to know about it, If the commerce team were skimming, they would probably know. What's more likely is that they're paid bonuses against the marketplace gross.

Marcus Hancroft wrote: And they just keep pushing the drop dead date back further, and for what? They can't get the merchant permission issue fixed so that the breedables merchants can use Direct Delivery? Those silly breedable producers have it easy. Land impact penalizes for good looking mesh, mesh with scripts, mesh with physics, coming soon will be hoping that region idling won't mess up all the stuff that has to constantly run on time and timers and whether HTTP calls will continue to run smoothly. Or whether pathfinding is worth the extra land impact and increased bugs. Oh, and previous features that used to not birth them if there weren't enough prims on the land are now worthless due to the changing nature of Land Impact. Not being able to sell them on the marketplace is just a teaser. Marcus Hancroft wrote: And, because I've been accused of this in the past... *DISCLAIMER* I am not now, have never been, nor will ever be an agent for Linden Lab, it's subsidiaries, employees or company. All opinions expressed in this post are mine alone based on my experiences with the Direct Delivery system. So you say.

I tried to watch those again. I got as far as how they're trying to make the "user experience" easier with getting people to spend money and how they wanted to streamline the Lindex. Which is the whole point, want an easier user experience with initial "economic participation"? Nix the Lindex completely and move to fixed rate purchases/cashouts for L$. Wouldn't that be oh.... easier, faster, funner (and cheaper)? It's a shopping cart. There's a time to get algorithmic and metric on a problem, and then there are pretty straightforward projects like building a shopping cart with an integrated delivery system in a "game". Will say it again, less people that think stuff up and more people that roll up their sleeves, stop overthinking and just do the basics of producing stable software and not turning into rocket science. LL could do without 4 of those people on the 5 person panel. On the other hand, if I were as into buzz words as I was in the 1970's, I would be extremely aroused. Less think, more do.

Not sure LL has listened to a mass outcry in quite a while. I remember years back when people did the first "open letter" after LL seemed to do nothing but let problems pile up for a couple of years. They did respond and communication improved but I haven't seen that kind of response since then. They're already declining and they're doing the other ventures as insurance against SL failing (just an opinion), so I'm not sure they're threatened even by a protest that'd hit them financially unless it was a large scale thing. Most merchants aren't going to sacrifice their income I don't think, and I don't blame them. Agree with you though ... "if only". Something needs to be done though, and I think that needs to be off-SL. As in forming some sort of group that can eventually have some legal help at their disposal. Contacting politicians may help. They're always looking for a new torch to pick up to score points with and this is juicy in that it brings more revenue to government, theoretically.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: @Dart - remember that I make sculpty terrain packs.... making a bubbling mud pit would not be a tough request for the grand re-opening event.... as long as someone can create a 2 person mud wrestling animation. Then we can get two people (I would gently suggest ladies in bikinis but I am a bit biased) to be the front of stage enterainment during all the live singing gigs. Uh oh. Darrius said that, not me. After he bathes off that icky Dart feeling and gets his shots, he'll probably be having words with you. Great idea about the landmarks by the way. Except for the charging money for it. It's a landmark TAX, I tell you! Sorry, had to do it.

Darrius Gothly wrote: And therein lay the crux of the issue. The bank is regulated by various state and federal laws and they are required to meet certain standards of performance. LL isn't. They are allowed to set their own operating laws because the legal system hasn't caught up with the Internet. I find it interesting that they are required to declare VAT and other taxes, yet are NOT required to obey other financial transaction laws. Must be good to have it that easy, huh? That's it in a nutshell, Outside the laws with the "virtual" aspects in too many areas. My "last straw" moment was when we exceeded the amount you're able to cash out, and we applied for more. After getting an obvious run-around to discourage that from happening, support tickets, requests, etc., (As if we had to qualify to get money we earned) told my wife to give it up, this isn't business. We're both no strangers to doing collections in RL, and this was literally more like collections than doing business with an up-and-up company. That precious little bit cost them $300/month in tier for an island we no longer have. But right, ludicrous prices on tier, the scaled tier increments, money charged when you get fake money, when you sell fake money, more fake money taken out at every turn (texture uploads, mesh uploads, group stuff, ads, 5% of marketplace ... all designed to take back even more of money that was already double purchased). And of course they have no consumer protection, liability or accountability. Most every company we deal with works off of an "if in doubt, refund" policy. It generally doesn't get out of hand and it pays off. And of course now we know they manipulate things to keep product prices down to a level they think draws in newbies. More likely that it also means more spending goes to LL, not its merchant users. And Rod is wondering why they can't retain users with an overly heavy product they can't develop fast enough to keep up to date, with insane pricing. So now he's asking users that have to go through this nonsense to help get more users. Which as someone pointed out, isn't the goal to retain them, the goal is how do we retain them long enough to get them to spend money. And that's ok, that's business except for trying to sell people on the idealism of it all. Because a sucker born every minute just isn't enough. Content creators need a union and a non-profit watchdog kind of thing these days. Seriously. And some spiffy new laws to cover virtual goods and "fake" money. And audits, lots of audits.

Couldbe Yue wrote: Back in 2009, I had a chat to Blue Linden and he said (and I paraphrase here) that LLs aim was to have people sell their wares free or cheaply to encourage newbies to stay. At that stage I think the their idea of the perfect relevance score was either 300 or 350L on XSL. I'm wondering now if they've dropped it to around 150 as I had a quick look at my last months sales and the overwhelming majority of them were around that price - a few higher (500-1000) , an even tinier amount of my expensive stuff and almost none of my sub 100L. So (this month excepted so far) I'm maintaining the same turnover but doing it through increased sales of my lower priced stuff. Whatever it is, I think the market manipulation needs to go. If newbies are getting sticker shock, it's not from virtual goods, it's from tier prices. Also ... because retention hasn't budged, market manipulation doesn't work for newbies. It may work for maximizing their 5%, though. During boom times, newbies didn't blink at L$3,000 for a shape. Also, market manipulation has the opposite effect on merchant profit margin, which in turn makes being a profitable merchant less viable and more an exercise in playing the lottery. One purpose seems to be creating a spread for merchants. People get "turns" at sales in order to either hide the lack of a previously healthier market or to create the illusion that at least most people are selling "something". They should probably focus on writing decent software and leave the market alone, but it does seem clear that it's all about influencing the market purchases and not about just providing people the best results. Masters of the universe, they can't do something unless they overdo it. I just did a search for "relevance" on the marketplace and the top result was a "spank me harder" product, and that certainly seemed relevant, though.

Ricky Zhichao wrote: But sure we all pay huge state taxes to our governments for all incomes so sure everything should work even better to compare if we only paid LL 5% fee "tax"..how much in your country you must pay tax? And do you pay it? I don't think the dispute is that direct delivery doesn't work, I'm sure it does (except for no-copy items which says it's not ready to handle goods that might be lost forever yet). It's more that marketplace doesn't do basic stable ecommerce as well as any other commerce site. Sales tax in RL? Yes 5% is comparable. Should it be? No. I've also (and still can) buy a few acres of undeveloped land in RL for less than the setup fee for an island here and pay less taxes a year in RL than $300/month. Factor in all the sinks, upload fees, mesh fees and decreased triangle count (resources) and you've got costs more comparable to RL than a virtual world. Not to worry, some of us complain about RL taxes, inefficiency in government and things that need changing in RL too. I tend to be more critical of someone with their hands in both my pockets and handling my money for me.

Oops, replied to myself instead of you, Czari. Hail, queen of netsplits. You're probably a channel war vet too. I think SL was using IRC as their group chat in the early days. We still see the remnants of IRC commands like /me emotes. Probably should have stuck with it, group chat still isn't stable. Awesome story, a plus for SL fulfilling the more immersive experience we were looking for in these other places. I think that's something they don't get about a portion of their users. They didn't hook us on the experience, we were already involved in "heavy" experiences such as games, IRC, MUDs, etc. We just wanted something with better scenery and an endless supply of props. We were already creating the experiences we create here socially. Of course LSL still reminds me of TCL scripting for eggdrop IRC bots. IRC is actually part of virtual worlds history. Originally IRC was meant to be a MUD, thus the concepts of "rooms" (which became channels), until it formed into pure chat. MUDs of course were the forerunner of virtual worlds with all the features of say SL, minus the 3D. Later VRML mixed with user content until we finally ended up here. Phil thinks he invented the stuff as an idea in the bathtub in 1952 while playing with err ... legos and that virtual worlds didn't exist before 2003 when what they set out to create with SL originally wasn't a virtual world at all, but a test for hardware. Thinking if SL came from people with experience in the actual history of virtual worlds, SL would have been much greater than it turned out, but it still beats many alternatives that don't have all the props. We understood what people were trying to "do" with things like turning an IRC channel into a game, or a social space for various niches, etc., and that's always been the missing link with SL. They don't get it. They get startups and monetization. Sort of.

Josh Susanto wrote: >The stunted growth and behavior indicate that it may be a mule. In reality it's just a lamah. Based on the spitting behavior, I would have guessed camel. Maybe that would also explain why it doesn't drink. Well, the bonus lamah reference was for Darrius. Suspected as a programmer he may have spent some time in programming chat rooms on IRC. I think he got it. Lamah is IRC-speak for lamer, but pronounced like llama. http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/lamah Example, going in the Ruby on Rails chat room on IRC and asking: "Hey, we adapted a Spree shopping cart to a virtual world and we broke it. Can you help?" In which case a room moderater might type: /mode #rubyonrails +b *!*@lindenlab.com "Try rm -rf / lamah". ... which means, we can only hope that you actually try that command to wipe your hard drive, lamer. Your domain is now banned from this room. On the other hand, you may be right and it may be a camel since finding a resolved bug is difficult these days. So we're camel spotting. Most assuredly it's not a bear, who does have the good sense to drink from the Pool of Merchant Wisdom and can squash bugs with a single claw. Unless it's a plushie bear, which has no sense, claws or pants.