Dartagan Shepherd

Rya Nitely wrote: Dartagan Shepherd wrote: Came here to escape the RL stress of being the boss, and having to ask questions like "do you want to work, or do you want to go home?", "can you handle this or do I need to replace you?", etc. You want to know what STRESS is? Try being one of Dartagan's subordinates. I don't have subordinates, I have people that can do what they say they can, which are pure gold and treated as such and those who can't, which don't last long enough to stress. Very few but simple rules. Here's another one with years of usage: "no call, no show, no job". Meaning that if for any reason you can't make it into work, you call in or you come in to pick up your last paycheck at your convenience. But never once have I been called unfair, or afraid to do anything I would ask others to do, including cleaning toilets. But no, generally not the milk and cookies type, more the results type.

Lasher Oh wrote: I prefer to preserve what semblance of sanity I have left rather than accelerate the the degradation process by collaborating in the messy hell hole they call a Jira. The whole Jira system is a confused farce and a PR con created to make it look as if LL are paying heed to bug reports whilst systematically doing what they have always done - mainly , address those issues they feel like dealing with. I've observed over the years that the best way to get LL to react to a problem is to kick up an unholy stink everywhere else - so that it is both embarrassing and impossible for them to ignore. The quicker the Jira farce is disassembled the better - but I won't be holding my breath for that. ^L^ Used to be on the other side of the fence, believing that if we could shut the "complainers" up, that cooler heads and constructive feedback would prevail. The reality: We lost office hours, situation hasn't improved in a year, delivery problems got worse, replacement system intended to fix everything (DD) wasn't the biggest problem after all and takes a year or more to implement, delivery problems in-world haven't gotten better yet and now we have llGiveInventory() with a block that hints that new inventory work isn't up to being able to handle the load and therefore must be choked further. Given up on Jira, because at the end of the day the work gets done or it doesn't. Came here to escape the RL stress of being the boss, and having to ask questions like "do you want to work, or do you want to go home?", "can you handle this or do I need to replace you?", etc. Thanks LL, for bringing that special brand of ineptness back home to my virtual experience. Have yet to see a pro company that can't filter its own bug reports and figure out what to work on themselves without needing voting and hand-holding by their users. How many bugs need votes and watches and fixes? Clue: All of them. Does seem to be true that Jira is more a placebo than a working mechanism, especially as the company has their own internal Jira or list of bugs not available to the public, which doesn't get published and isn't up for voting or watching. Hopefully now that Rod did see and respond he's got enough of a pair to show them the way or show them the door. Throw the fluff and TAO out the door and make the features work properly. Don't need babysitting by users once a bug is reported, just need to fix it. Odd to me that the "complainers" are as justified as the ones who play nice according to the placebo systems, and generally correct in their methods. I think "farce" pretty much sums it up.

Oh, I know you've been pointing that out for a while. Only the conspiracy bits I disputed. It does "seem" like there's a lot of skimming going on such as mistakes in the marketplace that don't get reported, currency never refunded from old and inactive accounts, etc. I'm not the one to make accusations like that though, at least not without a lawyer in the wings. At the very least it's highly unethical to me that LL doesn't have the same attention to and security of purchases with customers money (and deliveries) as their own billing. In terms of commerce, virtual or no, this is an utter joke, because it's still real money with failed deliveries and less than optimal reporting of funds. Which is why I'm doing my part to try to bring virtual currency under the same laws and restrictions as real currency, so this kind of nonsense doesn't happen when people try to treat real money with play ethics. In the real world, paying 5% of sales for a service that doesn't work as advertised is actionable, and far more transparent in that you can request certain bits of information without some company trying to force an insane TOS and arbitration requirements on you because they can with the "fictional" elements of the system. We'll get there, one step at a time as more companies overstep their bounds with fake currency, and try to pretend they're banks-but-not-banks. I think Zynga and Facebook are going to help speed that along.

Expecting laws to eventually change on how virtual currencies are handled. Some companies are starting to see that virtual as opposed to real currency in escrow is a bit risky if not quasi-legal. Microsoft is dumping its virtual currency in favor of real, Paypal supports real-currency micropayments, etc. Watching this one case, to see how Google does with closing down a venture and leaving users with worthless virtual currency: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-virtual-pet-owners-sue-google-over-lost-gold/ Virtual currency needs to go completely or fall under the same laws and consumer protection as real currency. That day will come. Not soon enough that lots of people won't lose lots of money, but it will happen.

So not sure if this is in context, but being about commerce (note that label has been discarded in favor of "merchants" for this forum) and business: A little bird tweeted an LL job opening. Along with some logical bits that you'd expect of an employee, roughly half of the job requirements included: Organizing the weekly lunches.Handling travel expenses.Handling travel arrangements.Ordering office supplies (and more food and drink).Events.Ordering the "company swag".More normal employee requirements mixed in, but mostly food, events, travel, more food, etc. Good oral skills are required, but who wants an employee with bad oral skills? The saving grace was this: Ensure that visitors (employees and other) have workspace and other relevant amenities so that they can be productive on arrival. Productive on arrival is good. Thinking brown bag lunches and those seats with the built in toilets you get for toddlers are even better. Playpens to make sure they don't get out and that they're all accounted for and being productive. How can anyone work with all that crunching and chomping and wrapper rattling going on? LL has an eating disorder.

I get the same kind of errors when trying to pay tier, upload textures, audio files and mesh and paying on a premium account or two or buying L$. Wait, that's wrong. In years here, I've never had a billing error go in my favor. Please disregard. Maybe you'll get a free ad or two for the inconvenience. I hear some companies out there try to make things right for their customers when the fault is theirs (as in nearly all of them). Or you may get lucky with those new ads and not get billed for them due to an error. Or maybe you'll get a couple months with no commissions on sales. Who needs consumer protection anyway, we get open source shopping carts that kind of work and crowd funding. Please keep up!

Toysoldier Thor wrote: They said all this about Microsoft and how it cant double and double but it did..... THEN it started to stop. You can only market limited technology for so long before people wake up..... plus now that Jobs is gone... some of the Apple Cultists might wake up and realize they have been bamboozled all these years on over paying for under-delivered technology. They cant be stupid forever. But its great Apple built their second industry bubble.... like i said... it will burst. Economics dictate it. It's not a bubble, I think. It's based on a solid electronics consumer market, and the numbers don't lie in that they've got a good grasp of what makes a satisifying product to their customers. A few things I leave at the door, one of which is what I think of the product (when it isn't mine). What I think is irrelevent. Whether I like it or not is irrelevent. What makes a product valuable to its customers isn't always about whether it's better, but whether it's more satisifying. With Apple, there's not a lot of secrets there. We've got years worth of analyzing what makes an Apple product different from something "better". The thing this should say to LL is that there's more money to be made (especially in third-party content) by being Apple than being Google. There is more stable and long term income in maintaining value and a product that satisfies its market, within a reasonable price range, than there is with all the "reach" in the world. In fact, I'll go one step further. A company that tries to make reach and "open" a priority is far more greedy than any Microsoft, or Apple. The main reason being is that at the end of the day, this type of startup, tech mentality creates far more failures than successes and devalues or "disrupts" markets that they touch. It exploits people to do much more for much less by dangling a whole bunch of creative carrots, in the name of freedom and empowering individuals. It creates far less jobs in the real economy, and funnels more money to the companies than the people, than say Apple. Apple contributes back more in taxes, jobs and a slew of other economic factors. LL can continue to let what we have here devalue and shrink, or they can be an Apple and say hey this stuff is worth something, and we're going to protect that value. It's not a matter of exclusion, it's a matter of people being able to make a little money with a lot more risk and a lot more time, or a lot of money with a lot less risk and a lot less time. Time for LL to grow up in this regard and stop short-changing their Merchants.

Gavin Hird wrote: A disturbance was felt in the force, as fandriods across the globe suddenly cried out in terror over 37,040,000 external memory card slots not being sold. BOOM! BOOM! Indeed. A little more BOOM to put that in perspective compared to "everyone else" ... http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/24/boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom/ Regardless of what you think of the product, and I say this as a mere PC and Android user, that's the way to create products and markets that have real value, which in turn creates oodles of jobs besides a $4 Billion dollars to its developers. If LL can grasp product as product, the rest as cruft, and third-party product as a value market, we might get somewhere.

Gavin Hird wrote: Fact is that in 3Q11 Apple took 53% of all smartphone profit with a 4.2% market share. Fact is that iOS developers makes 6 times the profit per App compared to Android app makers (same app traded in the 2 markets) Fact is that iOS significantly grew market share in November and December, while Andriod saw a 14,7% decline. (US figures) The business model you support has generally led to razor thin profits for the box and now increasingly phone assemblers, making them unable to invest in R&D for new products, but rather stay in a cut-troat raze to bring cheapest to the market and copying each other. This approach might work to some extent in a fast growing market (which is why it is failing in the PC market which is shrinking, and still somewhat viable for smarphones which is growing), but SecondLife is a stagnant market. There is no year-over-year groth to spot at all. So your receipe will lead to an accelerating sprial of lower prices, and copied goods as nobody sees much incentive to develop and create any more, where everyone is scrambling for a cut of the market that exist. This ie exactly what we witness in SecondLife Marketplace. Good example, as pertains to SL. Building business vs. building bubbles.

Good point about mesh and value. I'm kind of in that boat. I've had some mesh content outside of SL for quite a while, and there's no temptation to bring it into SL. Some of that content outside SL is worth hundreds or dollars per item. Now, granted, most of it is higher res and makes use of normal, specular, occlusion etc. maps, so couldn't be made to work with SL without some tweaking. But to devalue professional content worth hundreds and thousands outside of SL to sell here for 50 cents? Thanks but no thanks. I don't think many professionals in the 3D/film/game industries would be willing to devalue their content to that extent. Even a volume of sales isn't going to approach the out-of-SL value, nor is it going to make the income possible to justify the time and expertise. It's nice for LL to devalue content and work and skilled labor, great for the consumer in SL, but not good for the creator of that content from a professional standpoint. It smacks of greed on the part of LL (their own employeess wouldn't work for those rates) to devalue expertise and labor this way. So no, I can't see the draw for outside talent to go jumping into SL, or going with this whole micro-payment scheme, especially when values can be below one cent. LL is unable to deliver the buying power these days to even approach realistic incomes for professional 3D content. [Edit, small typo]

Rene Erlanger wrote: That's another aspect to consider whilst Commerce is being driven away from the Grid. Fear not, Rod is on the job, mentioning that you can run a business in SL in this interview (ignore the addiction waffling). http://www.metaversejournal.com/audio/kylejackieo17012012.mp3 The usual disclaimers that I'm fine with the adult aspects of SL, and have never harmed a poseball that didn't deserve it. But way to reverse a stigma that says that's all that SL is to the outside world though. Thinking though that inventing breedable pole dancers that smell of upchuck and baby oil, or breedable ex EA employees that get put out to pasture in SL might be one way to follow along in this new corporate strategy.

Josh Susanto wrote: >Re-designing it so that it works for the majority in non growith periods is a more stable business model for everyone.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Agreed. There are things which could be done which I think might be an over-all improvement. Even an opt-in to include freebies listings which are filtered out as a default is something I don't see any immediate problem with. Providing users with greater or easier control over whether or not they're seeing something, be that freebies or something else, is a better service for them. I support better over-all service before I support higher revenues for myself. If SL can really do better for users, I should probably adapt to the changes it makes rather than just complain about how badly they fit with my existing business model. You're onto something there. I think some of the complaints about marketplace vs. in-world shopping comes down to the fact that you "used" to be able to have more business models. The variety of models in SL was (and still is to some extent) amazing in SL. Between LL intent on capturing the majority of sales via the Marketplace and stuffing every type of model and seller into one big dumping ground, they've eliminated many models. Optimially you should be able to keep your model as well as 5,000 other strategies people can use to succeed. LL dabbling in their own economy .... every .... single .... time has the end result of limiting opportunities and choices further. If I can't be seen and I can't sell, what am I going to do personally? First thing is to lower prices. Second thing is to give out lots of stuff for free. The third thing I'm going to try to do is to spam wherever I can, in keywords, search, etc. That's why I can't lay the blame at anyones feet but LL for narrowing the choices and forcing people to make those decisions. But it shouldn't come down to a choice that you would have to completely change your model either, assuming I kind of get what that is.

Josh Susanto wrote: >But I actually could prove it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------But don't you get it? It's the freebies on SLM that are making me bald and fat in RL. SOMEBODY BETTER DO SOMETHING!!! Rather an overall discussion that sometimes gets pinned on freebies on the marketplace, but it applies to glut of products in general, then freebies, then low cost and the unsustainability. Has nothing to do with fear of going bald. In fact, some of the ones saying some action or other needs to be taken aren't firm on what exactly action that is, there are multiple solutions, or that they're not doing well, when in fact they tend to be merchants that are doing ok and not individually threatened one tiny bit by freebies directly. It's also not the protectionism that you've eluded to before. It's not going to immediatly make the "elite" more "elite". It's just about the general model, that while it worked during a boom it's severely flawed when there isn't a big influx of new users (and therefore the current system is designed to be pyramid-ish). Re-designing it so that it works for the majority in non growith periods is a more stable business model for everyone. Or you can take the naive approach and say it's just for the elite, the threatenened or those who are struggling, in spite of the fact that this isn't true. Need 65,536 square meters for a signature for disclaimers that it's a business to business discussion and not an agenda, or dictating to people, or a cure for baldness.

Gavin Hird wrote: Luna Bliss wrote: The only solution would be for LL to limit the amount of freebies each merchant could offer on the MP. It's a good thing to impose limits/laws on people sometimes if it preserves the whole - this freebie problem seems to be one of those cases. Agreed, but I believe indirect regulation rather than direct regulation would work better as certain parts of the market is all about open source items (like scripts.) As I have stated before I believe this can be accomplished with the following mechanisms: To be able to list your products on the marketplace you must be a registered developer. Registration has a cost, and it must be renewed annually. A minimum price is established for priced items that can't be undercut by anyone. This is a mechanism that has worked pretty good both on iTunes and Apple App store, and has also been adopted by Microsoft for their mobile marketplace. Alternatively items can be listed for free. If you list items for free, they will not be profiled or even returned in any regular product search. You have to explicitly search the free items category. Search results in the free items category are not given any boosts or relevance, but are returned in random list order as default. The shopper can then sort the list according to newest / oldest. This is to prevent both gaming of the list, but also remove some of the merchant clustering in the search results that we now see. Demo items are not returned in regular product search, but can only be viewed via a regular item that has a demo item linked to it. If you search for the word demo, the search engine will only list regular products that has demo items linked to them. Access to the demo is as per above. For in-world search I don't see any particular need to impose any of the above, because you would actually have to move to the location to see the item in question. This improves in-world mobility and presence, which is good. Overall a pretty solid plan. Always thought minimum pricing was one good way to go, as well. Coupled with LL bringing back some solid reasons for paying people, such as camping would offset that. We do fine seeding our own, and we've proven that by the sheer amount of merchants that got their start by camping, aside from buying their own personal goods. Flawed as they were, some merchants are still here because they got a start with investment money from in-world stock markets. It bought them full sims, and gave anyone with a decent business plan a shot at an SL venture. I still say expiring goods is the single best one to get rid of old goods, put a ceiling on not only freebies but the total amount of goods. That wouldn't sit well with some folks, but it's a solution nonetheless.

Not sure what you're referencing here, understand if you can't explain. Caught those pages going missing, assumed it was LL, but then I figured it was you, deleting your posts, taking out all the replies that went with it. Wasn't going to comment on it, because it was your choice to remove your post(s). Fun.

Mickey Vandeverre wrote: good grief, Rene. Why don't you find out circumstances before you label a sim closing as a failure, or at least imply that. People's lives change. Or just leave well enough alone, he gave a nice gesture and said he would still have marketplace store open. Geez You need to hook up with that Hamlet guy and get yourself a job reporting for the Death Sim Watch or whatever the heck that guy calls it.. You would be good at that. How many overall sim losses would it take to give you an idea of conditions? The 170 sims lost last week? The 150 sims the week before? A real sim deathwatch would be more than a full time job. I'm sure some were lost just because people change and move on, but all of them? And always trending toward losses, is that a solid business indicator that things are fine, or that the model is eroding?

Rene Erlanger wrote: Tari Landar wrote: The concurrency rate is, well, sucky, at least at times, but freebies are most definitely not the top or even a big, culprit there. There's just far too many other obstacles in the way. Take the recent change of no longer having a basic account, and an advanced one...that whole mistake played a huge role in why some chose not to come back. We even saw lots of threads on the forums from confused newbies, because of that issue. Glad they did away with that. But LL has made an awful lot of stupid decisions that have had a much larger impact on the concurrency rates being what they are, than any of us merchants could ever make. That part i'm totally in agreement with (bolded text)....and it really kicked in few months after M.Linden became CEO. Might as well get in a snipe to make a point about quality of product, but it doesn't help concurrency ... During the M era, noticed you couldn't sign up, it was broken. Came back 3 days later to create that business alt I'd been thinking of, still not working. Capcha wouldn't take even a correct value. Couldn't choose a last name. One email to Amanada and Blue Linden and two days later, signups were working again. 5 days of no signups at all. Mesh is an improvement, but a partially working virtual world in what "might" be considered an aging beast isn't helping matters. Devaluing products by people isn't so much the issue to me, more that LL intentionally devalues labor and time to produce those goods, and then says "merchant" in the same breath.

Josh Susanto wrote: I'm already on Chrome, thanks. I completely restarted. Same problem as before. Lacking a stronger hypothesis at this point, I'm naturally defaulting to "borked by Malefactor Linden". That Malefactor Linden is a sneaky one. Apparently affects not only quoting but your own responses from being able to contain line breaks and paragraphs.

Profiles and the SLUM features taking more away from in-world communication. Nifty for some people yes, less costly for LL, yes. Group chat and groups are more costly and chat still doesn't work properly. Also true that while we were weened on long hours in-world, the next generation, or current generation of social networking and mobile folks don't have the attention span. Get them to interact more and spend more without going in-world. People will buy goods without ever actually using them. Shopping itself is a pastime with its own rewards.

Didn't say it made sense, it's not my model But they do own 5% of income from web sales. I'd expect the next phase to include in-world sales after Direct Delivery is done, the mechanisms are now there for LL owned/operated vendors (something sadly I suggested they do in a former life). Agree there isn't enough incentive to own land, unless you're finding ways to make it more attractive for pure consumers to own land rather than merchants and land barons. Then again, if you're willing to accept that SL has a shelf life of another 5 years while you explore alternative new products, it's a plan.

Gavin Hird wrote: You just said people would do this when getting home from work after having shopped on the marketplace. So which is it? ;-) But you (perhaps unknowingly) hit the nail on the head: People used to do things like that, they used to sit camping or have some other presense in SecondLife while they worked, or slept or something. That is how many of them earned their Lindens to afford your sofa. The effect was also that the grid was not a ghost town, so when a noob entered the scene, they saw others they could ask "how can I make money". Now people don't need to do that. They just sign up, hit the marketplace in the viewer, and go spending for free! With direct delivery, they don't even need to rezz anything – coming to a viewer near you any day now – another incentive less for owning land. This free spending spree gets old very fast, so they leave bored. Hey, did you know that at the rate LL takes daily signups, the SL population takes on over 5.8 million new accounts every year, while at the same time, time spent in-world goes down. Concurrency goes down. Go figure! Lots of indicators that it's being optimized to minimize in-world activity (more expensive to maintain than web/out-world), a long term plan to take more business from independent ventures with a strong hold on SL, cause maximum spending with LL for minimal resources in-world. Keep concurrency at or near current levels, amount of sims at their current levels and to coast as usual. Suspecting that it's unrealistic and too costly to scale in-world resources, so rather than solve the problem, there's just enough forward momentum to add features that come with accompanying new sinks and costs. I tend to relate the Marketplace to that formula as well. Enough free and low cost to keep it hopping, balanced so that merchant profit is a spread rather than features that work on the individual level. LL comfort zone, profit is good, size is acceptable, slow phases to more control and more costs. I don't see real growth anywhere in that formula. Growth isn't necessary. Would love to be proven wrong.

Not to take anything away from some great advice you're giving there, but just wanted to pick at one thing. You're right about doing a search and sometimes not having freebies in the way. Here's where the volume of freebies becomes apparent ... I'm shopping along, not sure exactly what I want but I know the kind of thing I want, so I'm browsing categories. I'm budget minded, so I'm sorting low to high. How many pages of L$0 do I have to get through in any given category before I spend anything?

Thanks for that. At the time for me there was a plan. Was a very good plan if it could have been followed through with. My take was that it would have generated a good amount of new users, some new commercial opportunities and at some point, driven prices down for land/hardware and such. So, trust the management, get some energy going, get behind it, it's worth ignoring the things that are wrong today if tomorrow has the potential to make it all better. A few months after the big bang, a bigger bang with a CEO and 2/3's the employees out the door, in. Moments after M Linden lands on the birthday cake at SLBB, out he goes and in comes phil ushering in a new (3 month) era of Fast, Easy and Fun. Not sure where that went exactly, but finally starting looking like that might be possible with Rod. Back to the economy thing though as the evil itself in not matching its userbase though. Was a bit scattershot last night. It's not so much an economy, but a sales pitch and mechanism to to justify massive sinks. It's so manufactured as to not really resemble economy. LL's customers are more traditional in nature, expect a bit more. They expect a company to do what they do well, give a quality product for a reasonable price and to keep things simpler. If for instance you were to nix the exchange and put a fixed fee on buying and selling tokens, it can be adjusted and it's pretty straightforward. No one needs to bother with conversion rates and it generates more trust, it's not an unknown. The same with pricing and sinks. Presented as fees, they're a simpler and more manageable thing to put into packages and adjust. A premium account that comes with a very specific level of classified ad. parcel search fees, a certain amount of uploads, etc. Multiple packages can then be offered. And so on. These can be adjusted rather than playing with them with sink mechanisms. They can be integrated into the dashboard, etc. The thing about a sink also, is that more always get added and they're non-negotiable. They never change. It's an entire part of the system that users don't get any say or input on, and most are ignorant of how much they actually ad up to. That's not a trust atmosphere. Get rid of the economy mechanisms and now you have pricing points that can be managed, given feedback on, adjusted accordingly as time goes on. Let's face it, the number one concern a paying userbase has is how much does it cost? That prices overall between "normal" costs such as tier, a premium account, a setup, etc. and costs as sinks are too high. And half of that system is not really designed to be adjusted in a way that we users can appreciate. It's a nickle and dime system, the economy. Fine, we need tokens. We don't need economy, it's a useless obfuscation. Some of those differences are subtle, some are not. But that's one way that SL is currently a mismatch for its own users and their business models.

Madeliefste Oh wrote: But what are they actually telling in those stats? They are about 'the economy between Linden Lab and its users', not about the internal SL economy. How often they log in, how many hours, how much land they own, for what amount they sell on the marketplace, and so on. Nobody at the lab, is able to show us for example: How many SL business gave up in 2011? What was the amount of money those businesses made in the year before? How many land was abandonned because creators gave up? How much new SL businesses entered the market in 2011? What is the percentage of sellers on the marketplace versus those owns an in world store? How do the sales on the SL marketplace related to the inworld sales in 2011, preferable split by sector. What amount was the top selling business worth for in 2011? Nobody has any clue about these things. So as a merchants you are just walking blindfolded, you have no idea how you are doing compared to others in your sector of the market... or with an idea mainly formed by what you hear about how other businesses are doing. But is long as nobody can provide the bigger picture of what is actually happenning you will only have a look at it from a small perspective. Sorry, completely missed this post earlier. Agreed, not the kind of information that's really useful, and they've never painted the real picture. Aside from some things that are able to be verified, like the amount of land/regions. Sadly I don't even believe some of them any longer. For years they've glossed over the picture that most informed users couldn't match with their own experiences. Had to stop advocating for LL, because the more I did, the closer I got to spin. Toward the end, I was rightfully accused of waffling and spin. In fact I think, Rene here accused me of waffling back in the M Linden days and he was right. (Oops, I had my reasons, and was being fed Kool-Aid intravenously at the time!). He got Jack Linden and M Linden fired though, so I figured I should clean up my act before he came gunning for me. If he can get Phil and Mitch off the board we might actually stand a chance at professional integrity, reasonable prices and useful stats. Everyone knew concurrency figures were off, but most of us would still debate about them, as if they weren't. We do see gross Marketplace sales, but that tells us nothing (except to figure out how much 5% commission is out of that). They have all the numbers available to them, so I'm not sure why they won't show merchant based figures both for the Marketplace and in-world. Then again, they've never treated their customers as adults in any professional sense. I harp on the lack of sales charts, because I don't think they want to give them. What would the average merchants charts look like if they were to show 90 days by individual product and overall sales? Too easy to track at a glance how Merchants are performing. We used to take screenshots and share those on SLX forums so that we could compare each others sales and trends. Hoping though that something useful is coming that rather than indicate economy (no secret that I think there's no such thing here), we just see useful statistics and information.

Just in a silly mood, but hoping they're getting the point ... in my REAL economy I can pick up some acres of land for less than the setup fee for a private region, pay less taxes than tier, and sell it off in 10 years for a profit.