Dartagan Shepherd

And here I thought the days of getting television reception by coat hangers on the antenna, sticking your left foot out, your arms bent in a C shape and alligator clips on your tongue were long gone. It's great to see LL keeping retro technology alive. Or, when is ecommerce like playing Twister?

Couldbe Yue wrote: Dartagan Shepherd wrote: Never again though, will I advocate for a company that doesn't put their customers needs before their own profit, or socially engineers them in any way. I think it's worse than that. I think they see us as a resource to be exploited (free labour) when they need it and for the rest of the time they studiously ignore us, except to blame us when things go wrong (although recently they seem to have stopped that so I suppose we should be grateful). There's an intellectual disconnect between understanding that their customers generate their paypackets that has always eluded me. Even the most rapacious of companies will occasionally throw their customers a bone to stop them whining (except for microsoft, whose business practices LL has tried to emulate down the years). They still don't appear to have any business people working for them and until they do (and introduce proper project management), things aren't going to change, they'll keep putting in sub standard features and ignore us until we give up complaining about them. hey ho. Just so. They went out of their way to make users feel vested, take every available resource from time to money to content and give little in return. As business partners they make great gerbils. When they've got an actual product they don't need to be omnivores. Because I'm finding it fitting to quote Mad Men, I'm sharing what I imagine to be Phil Lindens favorite quote: "What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons." -- Mad Men Because throwing customers and employees to the wolves when you don't have a clue and calling it a love machine is fashionable in a retro 60's television show kind of way.

WADE1 Jya wrote: This is too funny. I checked out the image just now and it is now relabelled as 'MadStyle.jpg'. So after you spotted it, they changed it. Now that's a sign of guilt if I ever saw one :catsurprised: LOL everything around here is just getting too ridiculous. "It wasn't a lie, it was ineptitude with insufficient cover." -- Mad Men

Griffin Ceawlin wrote: Well, if you want to get technical about it... "MadMen5" is not "Mad Men"... hell, it's not even "Mad Men 5". We're talking about the name of a JPG, for gawd's sake. True. I think it's just a validation for some people that it was indeed based on Mad Men and not a more loosly based association. Next up, Sesame Street or something off the Discovery channel. Perhaps the latter would fit breedables.

Copyright no, trademark yes. http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=78849761

Pamela Galli wrote: Oh it was already game over when Darrius and Dartagan hugged. Got pointed to this. If I could stifle a chuckle, even though it is a serious issue. Game over in the sense that the social engineering, head games and over-hyped product are over. LL has to stand on whether its product and practices are worth the money, time and effort that they expect from people or it isn't. Game not over in the sense that user generated content and the ability to sell that content is only just beginning. Every year it gets easier and we get closer to truely empowering individual content creators and creating success stories. The real value of SL to me has always been that it's a step in the evolutionary chain of gaming and virtual worlds to empower people to create content an run their own businesses from that content. The value has always been with the content, not the company. LL has always been about their own monetization over a generic framework to allow that to happen for others. Greed has always been the major downfall. Won't get into the details here, done giving LL ideas unless they re-org the company at the board level, which to me is where the real problem has always been. As far as content creators and merchants though, we're only at level 1 in the scheme of things. This is about people, not the companies that butcher opportunity. Never again though, will I advocate for a company that doesn't put their customers needs before their own profit, or socially engineers them in any way. Some of you have seen things long before I was able to get it through my thick skull. I should apologize to Toy too, for dropping the F bomb on him a ways back. Not sure if I'd want to meet Darrius or Toy or a few others in a dark alley!

They updated the sticky post today, aside from this: "The most significant issue that has been addressed over the past week was slowness on the Marketplace website, which occurred intermittently between April 18 and April 21. Page loads should be much faster now." Which doesn't appear to be true since slowness has been experienced since the 21st, every other issue listed there is still being worked on. Basically nothing is changed as yet.

But then there wouldn't be any need for crowd sourcing, job security or a love machine. You teach 3rd graders to excel. LL begins re-training them to fail from the moment of hiring and culture beginning with the TAO. It's OK to fail, as long as you're learning and growing. LL is an enabler. Will vote but not watch. If votes mean nothing and they're too clueless to disable it, can't begin to help them with common sense. Their antics aren't worth the space in my spam folder.

Medhue Simoni wrote: Did any1 else summit a request for early adoption of pathfinding? I sent my request last week and I haven't heard anything back from LL. I don't quite understand why LL makes announcements and then doesn't follow up on the requests. Haven't applied, sorry. In the meantime, please enjoy our Second Life Pic of the Day! It's the only thing we do reliably to put a smile on your face and get some love from your wallet. Formerly known as Flickr Pic of the Day until Flickr got back to us and said "Do your own image hosting, LLeeches!". Ugg, sniping again. At this rate if SecondLie really is going to retire soon, I'm going to start wearing a bag on my head and make a career of it. Will strive to be a poor imitation to match a degrading experience.

Linden bear traps. Meshes that scream bloody murder at being ripped off for Land Impact resources when they're resized. Meshes with 1024 polygons that count as one prim regardless of size. Meshes that count as the same regardless of whether they contain scripts or move. Meshes that don't claim to save resources because of triangle count/size/scripts and yet allow 8 materials on what ends up being a push toward smaller mesh sizes, making small mesh with multiple materials a greater resource hog than large mesh with fewer materials on hardware that hasn't been updated in years. Basically a way to utilize mesh like you would use it outside of SL, rather than poor implementation by a company that by their own admission doesn't even own a copy of various commercial 3D packages, let alone being able to provide plugins for these products. Dunce caps. Ball pean hammers to tap foreheads with. Steam powered reality checker. Non avatar rigged mesh. Goes yummy with pathfinding. Packs to re-create ruins of malls and shopping centers. Partially sniping, but right ... check out existing builder packs and items on the marketplace and look for what you can do better, or for inspiration as well. Ideas breed ideas and browsing those will get thousands of examples in front of you. Or try to identify popular or great niches and then determine what parts they might share in common.

Marcus Hancroft wrote: Dartagan Shepherd wrote: Medhue Simoni wrote: Heck, with all the BS, they should just drop the commission they get all together. It's like we pay them to stress us out. Apparently Direct Delivery means to be administered as a suppository. Fairly direct, but a bit uncomfortable. Not something you'd normally consider paying a commission to a middleman to do. LOL! Thanks for the laugh first thing in the mornin, Dart. Oh sure, laugh now. Who knew these things would so long to disolve? That's the real bug.

Medhue Simoni wrote: Heck, with all the BS, they should just drop the commission they get all together. It's like we pay them to stress us out. Apparently Direct Delivery means to be administered as a suppository. Fairly direct, but a bit uncomfortable. Not something you'd normally consider paying a commission to a middleman to do.

Ela Talaj wrote: It is indeed strange to say the least that The Lab which pioneered a 3D environment of such complexity cannot efficiently debug a trivial e-commerce application. However you must agree that The Lab has no obligation expressed or implied to support income for its users. SL was originally envisioned, designed and implemented as a game and a means of social interaction not as an income opportunity. Must also respectfully disagree, partially. Obligation no. That they've expressed or implied income opportunity, absolutely and in many ways. When they first started figuring out what to charge for they saw the value of virtual goods. When they started charging for prims instead of land first they were looking at the value of virtual goods. They saw the value of "us" sharing and selling when someone cooked up a currency exchange for SL so that people could buy and sell. They saw, implied and expressed it when they acquired the currency exchange. Even moreso when they bought the marketplace, talked about improving our sales and visibility, sold us advertising, Colossus starting a forum post asking for RL sucess stories. They knew it when a little ad in Business Week created a boom and a huge hype curve that lasted for 3 years. And it was about one person making more than a million dollars USD in SL. Rod implied and expressed when he said that 2012 will include plans to help merchants specifically with better tools. I think he's starting to see that you can't move forward if the resources aren't there, or the methodology is wrong and that your own people are holding you up. 2 years and counting with this mess, Rod. Since the day you guys put your hands on it.

JohnMiddlefield wrote: . I have this foolish hope that LL will sell back the MP to the original owners, and let them run it properly. Missed this before. Yes, SLX Reloaded could be the best thing to happen to merchants. LL is a sequel to The Big Lebowski without the payoff.

Spot on, half awake or no. I think you just hit all the vital bits. It's not about the commerce team, just the product. Does seem like they need to throw more hardware/resources at it. Also agree that Rod really needs to see the sense of how important this is. Cutting corners is what gets them into lots of messes. From the start after acquiring XStreet they should have gone straight for developing shops and products as an integrated part of SL proper. Had they gone that route (and they still could), they could have then mashed up shops and products on the web, in-world, multiple storefronts, as a products/shop tab in profiles and a thousand other ways. But right, Spree was free and there for the taking. Never heard of Spree before that. Heard of everyone else from ZenCart to OSCommerce to Magento. They need to learn how to read a list of existing clients before they pick a technology at the very least. Stop cutting corners. Also your point being if I could paraphrase a bit that "content is king". Amen to that. If I could babble for a bit, that's something that's always gotten to me about LL. They didn't come into this game/virtual worlds industry, they stumbled onto it. Some of the employees have come from game companies but I'm still hoping that Rod gets some of the basics and that this has nothing to do with social algorithms and the data they spend too much time analyzing. But never in their history have they really understood it, which is what people have been trying to tell them for years. Come on Rod, you know this stuff. Gemstone IV is one of the last commercial MUD holdouts that has history longer than the internet. People still pay $100 bucks for a wedding over there and $60 bucks to get into special shopping events to buy staff/user created content. Rod mentioned MUSH from the old days (LSL looks about as much like modem line noise as MUSH code there, Rod, think it might be time to drop in a modern language?) But the same thing in the 90's ... users creating their own homes, objects currencies. Rod gets the evolution from Interactive Fiction in the 80's to here (I'm hoping). It's all about the content and when it has value it's even better. The new Little Text People venture LL is doing shows that he understands the correlation between old style Interactive Fiction and virtual goods. Clue Rod ... you guys finally bring in mesh and neglect clothing and rigging? Did you miss the part where since the 90's wherever user content is, wearables rank number one? @Rod ... you were brought into LL to bring your understanding of this stuff into SL, right? Forget this lab thing, time to bring it out of the petri dish and grow it up. Don't control it, just an abstract framework that sings and dances, we'll do the rest. Need to stop saying you're listening and coding like you're not.

They gave the all clear (on grid status and of course Twitter), but it was still slow for me afterwards. Agree on the bugs and treatment, customer service ... only in SL, or projects that are duds out of the gate. Don't know, they measure success in terms of revenue in the context of startups, have heard Phil rave about how SL bucked the odds and very recently that it's a $75 million success. A leading virtual world has never had to buck startup odds. It's a given in this industry that the newest virtual world with the best features takes the prize. Which is why I never, ever take any success advice from one hit wonder-preneurs. Meanwhile it lacks in just about every area on a pro level, support included. It's an experiment in how much you can push on people. Still working on getting enthusiasm back, even for pathfinding as a feature, these are the kind of things that should have been in place years ago. But that either isn't unique. In this case, it's a page out of Unity's handbook. They'll start waking up one day, whether they have the revenue left to recover is another story. Needs a serious re-investment into top notch development and support and if they're not willing to part with their profit, it's not happening.

Oh sure, still a huge believer in the potential of virtual worlds in general. Just that I'm not going to look like a fool with friends and associates because I know the kind of experience they're going to have is far less than their expectations on quality, ease of use, pricing, support, etc. Plenty of things virtual worlds had/have going for them such as the socialization, music, etc. (SL isn't the first or only one to do this). The one thing I can't get past is the fact that they won't upgrade hardware, stop stuffing sims on old machines like sardines and offering less in the way of resources and seeking further monetization, when they've already got enough monetization games going to choke a horse. The hardware and pricing says it all for me. If they're not upgrading and continue to run on these aging resources they're going nowhere but milking it for the next 5 years until it runs dry and we become There. I just don't mention it to anyone anymore because in the scheme of things it's a yesterday technology. It came up recently in a RL conversation. My advice? Wait a couple of years and see if they actually pull it together. And I just won't support a company to the outside world that condescends to its users and treats them like second class idiots while crowd sourcing them. I think more of my friends and associates than that, and my own reputation. Sorry, I guess that qualifies as a rant.

Lately I've taken taken this approach to explaining how SL as not a game. No, it's not a game. It's work. In the time it takes you raid a town, you may have produced an item. In the time it takes you to complete a dungeon, you may be able to package your product. By the time you've earned 10,000 gold, you may have earned 100 linden donuts. By the time you've earned that epic gear, you may have gathered a few linden bears. By the time you've gotten a GM to answer your question and fix your problem, you got someone from LL to tell you to file a ticket. An expansion pack in LL costs $300 ... every month. SL is NOT a game. It's serious, buggy, costly and condescending business requiring far more patience than a game. You people out for entertainment value and relieving frustration from RL need to get a clue.

Myrylyn wrote: Well, look out, because Diablo 3 just entered a completely open beta at 12 noon today and it will last through the weekend. We'll probably lose a lot of a cross-gendered and male avatars this weekend! D3 beta is great. Report bug, bug gets fixed. Report bug about auction house, bug is fixed within days. One male here that will be "gone fishing" on 5/5 opening day and enjoying direct delivery from auction house to inventory. May get lucky and find some of those in-demand items to sell on the auction house. Cashing out for real dollars looks like it will be pretty painless. Imagine that.

Ah, it did have SL in the name, dug up the original post. It was renamed to XStreet SL (sorry Darrius) and the business strategy was to start expanding beyond SL to other grids and worlds, so the plan was for something like an XStreet SL, XStreet InWorldz, etc. The brand usage policy was what started the ball rolling, the plans to expand were already in the works and the policy helped that along. Purchasing XStreet SL put an end to those plans and Apotheus was assimilated into the LL collective. Original announcement: https://www.xstreetsl.com/forum_archive/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=66541 On the OnRez front, part of the reason we didn't see much of that code is because Electric Sheep was more involved with bringing corporate clients into SL and other platforms, than maintaining OnRez. The last mess for them was when they brought in the TV Show CSI for CBS. They wrote a custom viewer and tried to prepare for the massive load except that LL dropped the ball working with Electric Sheep. I think CBS was less than impressed. I believe that was the last project they used SL for with their clients. Electric Sheep went on to do a web based version of virtual worlds that could serve their corporate customers far better than SL. SL is still not capable of the basic needs for enterprise use and can't handle the load with avatars, etc.. Worse these days because the hardware sims are on is the same hardware as back then and there are more sims on them than there used to be If memory serves only one person from Electric Sheep joined LL as an employee. The rest couldn't be bothered to be assimilated as they had bigger fish to fry with their corporate clients. Which brings us to date with half of the ANS functionality and a buggier marketplace than either of the two they absorbed. More irony points for Zanara. Edit: Changed NBC to CBS (lack of caffine)

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: Just browsed throught the Madstyle items. A tiny percent percent of what i saw has anything do to with Madstyle let alone the 60's. Of the two designers of the avatars on the banner, one doesn't have a store on MP the other has 6 items that are actually variations fo the same thing that has nothing to do with the 60's, If the goal is to attract people into SL with this style they are going to be sadly disappointed. Other than an occasional club event for best of the 60's i don't really see many people wearing or using 60's style clothing items. It wasn't all that attractive the first time around and it hasn't improved with time. Its just kitsch. Madstyle looks like a massive fail to me. It would seem so, although I'm sure some people made something extra from it. The take-away should be as with all things that doing something properly on a professional level, with proper tools is the way to go. Would love to do a proof of concept and challenge the commerce team to let any decent merchant pick a promotion out of a hat and see if it didn't get the same or better results ... and then to try it again with tools dedicated to promotions where everyone can track results of their promoted items. But ... you know a leisure suit with just the right nylon shirt and platform shoes was a Studly Spewright in the making. Confess! Edit: Mistake, it's Czari that needs to come clean about the leisure suits, but it still applies.

No "SL" though. That was the point, getting rid of SL in the name. Sorry, that's nitpickery kind of but there it is. XStreet alone got around the icky bits in: http://secondlife.com/corporate/brand/trademark/reference.php and http://secondlife.com/corporate/brand/trademark/unauthorized.php Edited to add more relevent restrictions.

I think the deal with the name change from SL Exchange to XStreet was due in part to the policy change during that time on how you could use "SL" and "Second Life" and friends. Up to that point, LL had pretty much allowed unrestricted use of their brand, or at least didn't enforce it. Apotheus and partners renaming to XStreet was to bring it in line with the new policy. LL did purchase OnRez as well, which definately had some great features going for it as well, but Electric Sheep at that point I think was just coasting, having been somewhat disenchanted with LL and had already started moving on to other ventures.

Thanks, bud. No slur intended ... silly me thinking these were official docs, so context and tone had something to do with it as a company statement. Great to hear about it being more or less a post-processed reporting if that's the case. The only downside is that I was under the impression that ANS would have, if not at the least a delivery confirmation receipt that it would happen after it had received a delivery confirmation event. Meaning that all payments are made, there's no adjusting left, any errors would be caught before the ANS notification, and that only after the item is verified as received by the customer would the ANS event complete. Still a tad flawed if it doesn't include delivery confirmation. The assumption is that DD is "there" and that delivery is dependable at this point. Still wondering on this point about the stability of DD, but time will tell. If the last bit to work in DD is no copy items, it tells me that it's not solid enough to depend on for "one off" objects that could be lost forever should there still be delivery failure on no copy objects. I suppose that's a smart move, although I haven't heard the "why" no copy items are being held back.

Ah, I see the original post had changed to explain user generated docs on that page. Basically blame Darrius for that, so be it. Tapping Darrius on the shoulder on that bit. Still tapping on yours commerce team about the flow, where the transaction happens and whether it's after any other possible points of failure in the transaction/delivery chain, or before or in the middle.