Dartagan Shepherd

Amazed at that price. And you know I had to ... That'd buy me 2 1/2 full page ads in my local newspaper for 4 weeks and generate something along the lines of 100 times more views or better. Talk about value for dollar. Low tech wins this one, so much for newspapers being dead.

They didn't promise me one, but they're still trying to tell me it exists. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/The-Second-Life-Economy-in-Q3-2011/ba-p/1166705 Which is why I think my cable bill is more honest with me, and that's pretty bad. What is this "couch potatoe" fee?

Tiered ads, like everyone else? More business-like, more ethical than letting some poor sap blow hundreds USD a week on an ad, and gives more value by those who pay more for higher level ads getting a more feature rich ad/placement than the person who pays L$5. I mean, who does that?

You had me curious the first time, and you were right about a long thread Please? Open Sesame? Bankruptcy? Going to really make us work for this one aren't you? Sadist.

Oh, meaning the concept of economy in general. Fixed rate on the exchange rather than this floating against the dollar thing, sinks that give the illusion of needing to juggle economic conditions, flat fees everywhere such as classified ads. The elements that contribute to SL having an economy. It doesn't need a "sink" to balance economy, if you want to fee something, fee it. Auction elements of land, floating prices. It's not really an economy as much as a manufactured set of charges. Besides contributing to adding more cost, these mechanisms add cost to operations to maintain them. Why would LL need an "economy" in the first place. Entertainment value? Good idea at the time? Simple pricing plans and fees. It's not an economy. How economic are the new fees for mesh upload? Its a sink? No, it's a fee. Should get for instance some of these features in a premium account. My web hosting company doesn't sell me on economy, it gives me pricing packages. My cable bill doesn't sell me an economy, although it does give me a pretty itemized breakdown of fees. It's a fiction applied to real money.

Voted worse primarily because we're shrinking and "tier will not be raised in 2012" and "we're getting into new projects unrelated to SL in 2012". Solution to improving the economy is to get rid of the "economy" for sensible flat fees and lower tier. Less sinks. Can't see that happening in 2012 to the degree that it's going to provide the necessary stimulus it would take to recover in 2012.

Madeliefste Oh wrote: Dartagan Shepherd wrote: L$ are money, things are much clearer when you stop thinking of it as tokens and think of it as a global pool of real money. There are still fictional elements as it can still be "printed", but that's a matter of accounting and how much money they decide should be in that pool. Money bought goes into a pool, in the case of the marketplace, that money was originally purchased by someone, somewhere. Marketplace takes out 5% of real money. Not only that. The marketplace also sells our goods for USD. In Xstreet you could choose as a merchant to be paid in L$ or in USD. That is one of the first things that changed when LL bought it. Customers can pay in USD, but merchants can no longer receive them, all goes to LL´s pockets, who gives you the number of L$ you ask for the item. You have to pay LL commission for changing those L$ back to USD´s. LL profits two times here. The customer pays the (much higer) usd price for the item. The merchants get charged commission by changing his lindens (so he is able to pay those usd to LL for the tier of his land). Ah, didn't realize they changed that part. And here I am wondering why they're not making use of the newer PayPal Micropayments where virtual goods can now be sold for a fraction of the transaction fees, and they could actually make a profit on a 25 cent sale.

Chelsea Malibu wrote: If Linden Labs makes no money on the market place as they claim, why did they pay Anche so much to buy it? Or why did they buy SL Boutique from the Electric Sheep Company only to close it down? Is it to drive merchant revenues or to have more control over the SL economy? My feeling is that the best thing to happen to LL is also the worst thing that would happen to we merchants but I feel it is how things will be some day. Everything will be free or close to it. More free means more stuff to residents. More stuff to residents means more land sales. More money spent on goods means less money for land. Yes, it means killing to golden goose but we have seen this before. L$ are money, things are much clearer when you stop thinking of it as tokens and think of it as a global pool of real money. There are still fictional elements as it can still be "printed", but that's a matter of accounting and how much money they decide should be in that pool. Money bought goes into a pool, in the case of the marketplace, that money was originally purchased by someone, somewhere. Marketplace takes out 5% of real money. Rumors (although some rather convincing ones) that in times past some Lindens were paid in L$. Theoretically Marketplace employees could be paid bonuses on performance of the Marketplace out of that 5%. But all told, when you add up every sink, you're adding up the real dollars that SL takes out the economy. Plus the conversion in and out. Double, triple, quadruple dipping. But even L$ are not an LL idea. Like the Marketplace in-world money was originally done by Gaming Open Market. When this person refused an offer by LL to be bought out, LL opened their own version of currency. http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/will_linden_competition_kill_user_innovation/ The acquisition of those independent marketplaces wasn't about providing service any more than the original currency was, it was about getting ahold of that 5% of real-money-turned-tokens. Had a conversation with (a now ex) Linden about some gaming features, (and no this wasn't an under NDA conversation LL) she said listen, discussion is open and we want some skin in the gaming game. Can we provide Linden owned land .... blah. Backed out of the conversation by saying no, can't think of anything and I can bring in my own game talent if needed. Mentioned their land sale. Where did the users come from that took advantage of that sale? Some were new probably, others were customers of land barons. From the latter, those customers now pay tier directly to LL, which is more than the discounted price they offer to land barons. To this day I won't bring what I "think" are great ideas into SL because they might be worthy of acquiring someday and I'm not interested in acquisition. I believe if I did that and didn't take the offer, they'd do it on their own anyway. Hello Linden Realms ... where are you going with this exactly? Should I give up game dev now or just wait and see? So yes, the more our prices are lowered, the more goods are devalued, the less opportunity for us, the more for LL. Perhaps it's a slow burn into a consumer only market, or just bad choices that end up taking opportunity from users.

Speaking of land, not sure if you heard they had a fire sale on private regions in october. I forget the details, no setup fee, first month tier free or something. Made a comment here after the fact about it not being wise. From what I understand, they sold 600 sims. ACS dropped 200 sims. Posted again that this was not wise and that it would continue to bite them further. As of yesterday another land baron reports that they dropped 70 sims last week as a direct result of that fire sale. Keep on dipping into the "economy", what do the uninformed resi's know? Marketplace commission needs to go completely. It is the only way you'll focus on the features that users ask for fully without your own agenda, which is not in line with your customer/merchant needs. Shouldn't have acquired the thing in the first place, it was never your money. Then we could deal with our own and reason with them to focus on delivery and important issues rather than how products rank in Google and Facebook and how advertising is laid out.... and all of this without at least the sales charts we used to have.

Caught some of those comments, didn't want to reply directly about my business. Doing ok all things considered aside from my failings and disenchantment. Waiting for further announcements from LL to see what that future plans entail, aside from working on the next version. These days it's as easy to build a game here as to build your own and do your own marketing from scratch. I would imagine if doing the latter, I would be knocking on your door for tips. Not changing keywords to lime green anything. With the kind of feedback I've been giving lately, they'll tar and feather me for a keyword violation!

Won't disagree that came off as pretentious. The only reason I proposed the question about the right to give things away for free was to try to expand on the point that they were so focused on building culture, both internally and with us, that they dropped the ball on a more traditional and simpler model that would have been less of a bubble for virtual goods. They didn't build a model that'll last and there aren't good enough controls for a market like this to sustain a level of value. It's a bubble. So are virtual goods in general, but that's currently an expanding bubble that they're also missing out on. It started to become a bubble last year (actually 2009) at $2 billion, estimates for this year were $4 billion I believe. And here we are with a small portion of that bubble for merchants, and yet we have the greatest ability to succeed ... users generating virtual goods. The IMVU example was a good one, that you don't need a model like SL has to succeed. It applies not because it's similar to SL, but because it's in the same virtual goods industry. SL is not generally mentioned in virtual goods industry analysis and reports. It's a blip. All they need to do, for all their stats and valley wisdom is to make the correlation between their decline and holes in their model to fix things. That and focus on improving what they've already got. Rod says we get a whole quarter of focusing on bugs. Same thing as the last two CEO's. Tried to put out a warning in case Rod happened by to read it that CEOs that get project minded don't last here. So rather than stick Linden Realms on the beta grid and develop it like any other feature, now it's another new user strategy. New projects in 2012 that have nothing to do at all with SL. This isn't "SL is gonna die", this is LL putting a shelf life on SL. I mean, even expiring goods would have worked, killing free isn't the only way. To whoever said something about dictating what merchants should do ... that's impossible, no one here has the power to dictate anything, it's just a discussion. Also talking about the whole model and grid and not just about the Marketplace, and some of these as mistakes as in past tense. Much of it is moot, because it's just too late to change some of it. If they were to overhaul SL to a better model overnight, it would only do more damage.

Snow Frostwych wrote: Asking other merchants why the "right"? Well, you're talking to the wrong people. It's LL you should be hollering at. It's their marketplace & they set the rules. I'm trying to be clearer about that lately. I do NOT point any fingers at any customer of SL, merchants, free users and even most employees at LL, or bear them ill will. Hard for me to get context and full meaning across in these forums. It is the leadership and management at LL that I lay every bit of blame on. Some investors of Yahoo! want to see a new board re-instated because they're botching things horribly. When I pay these kind of costs and I'm told it's my world, I kind of feel vested in it. And I want top level things to change, that includes getting rid of some board members that allow things to keep getting botched or interject the wrong things into the product. This stuff we're talking about now can be solved, but someone has to pay attention up there.

Rene Erlanger wrote: Second Life is free to join as is IMVU....with the latter being the inferior product! So 1 platform continues to grow in a recession, its equivalent Shopping site continues to grow....and it doesn't offer Freebies, whilst the other platform (SL) remains stagnant. There lies the root of the problem and hence why freebies have become prevalent. More competing Merchants in SL with no growth in concurrency (or Consumer pool)....so Merchants are having to undercut each other to be seen or make sales......it's not done for the goodness of mankind ...or because of the RL economic conditions! Had Second Life continued to grow like it did up to 2007.....you'd see a different type of Marketplace. Look I don't rely on Marketplace for income...all I'm trying to highlight is that Freebies weren't really necessary in SL....but rather it was forced upon (as a kind of marketing tool) due Second Life's lack of growth ...and lack of effective in-game marketing tools. The same can be said with price dumping.. To all of it, but especially this ... bingo. They're still misfiring on startup mentality and overly complex models when in any other industry but tech, it would be an amateur mistake to apply overly complex business models to customers with a lemon-aid stand model. I learned this literally at 16 years old. Had they kept it simple with land and scaled around that, and focused on the core product, we'd still be growing like IMVU. But no, give it to a bunch of employees and tell them to be creative. It's creative, all right. And declining.

Fair enough, good old sinks in action. Talking about the overall model still though, please don't take it personally. I pay those as well as tier, premium, etc. That doesn't make me better in any way, it just makes me contribute more to the free model. But if I sell on the Marketplace, I have to pay those as well as the 5% commission. Another good old sink. Why the "right" to distribute there? Why the right to distribute at all if you're not concerned with sales? I get that it feels good to share all the content for free, and the company loves nothing more than when you do that, you pay them in one way or another for the priviledge of them making money off of your content. But where is the justification that it's a god given right to distribute it to as many people as possible?

Well, there you go, a working example that a free world can work without the goods having to be free. IMVU having far more products than SL says to me that there's a healthy market for non free goods in a free world. It says to me that if you were able to get people a relatively ( free) way to get L$, that this still allows some people to get "free items", even though they aren't free to buy. I agree with the bad habit of entitlement being bred by LL. Can't fault people for taking advantage of what they're given for free, but this is the part that I still don't get. Why as a freebie creator would someone think that they're entitled to distribute that on a Marketplace? If that item really had value to the community in some way, and I mean "real" community value, I could understand. If you're talking about a free couch, for instance, it has no community value. It has enjoyment value if someone really likes the couch, but no community value, just like my RL furrnture does nothing to contribute to my local community. So why the opinion that not only should it be free to create, free to give away in-world, free to market on your own blog, that distribution to the masses should also be free? I think that kind of entitlement is a bit selfish in some regards, because it must be paid for by those who pay tier and/or those who do sell and must pay 5% commission. These people are paying for you to have a free distribution point. And those people are somehow wrong for to expect you to distribute under the same conditions of commerce. Not that this even happens in RL either as an example, but if a mall were to allow free space for free goods, of course retail stores sales would suffer, it's a given. And those retail stores would be very resentful that they're paying leases while those who don't pay anything at all dilute their value. Actually like that model where it's possible to create for personal use and limited distribution, where L$ are able to be earned for "free", but distribution is not. Don't resent the people, but LL has created a model that those who pay must support those who do not, and that's not fair. [Edited for typo]

Thank you very much for that bit of wisdom. I guess when you see a set of problems and you're looking for solutions (in the context of this thread, discussing a need for some form of representative body) and don't feel empowered enough to help make those changes it comes to this. If, however, that becomes a form of exclusion and it makes people feel bad or insecure, that needs to be taken into account, especially with something like SL, where part of the dream is to start from nothing and evolve. In that regard SL is amazing. Taking a lot more away from this. Ouch. Never my intention to remove the opportunity from zero to business, or zero to fulfilled dreams, or whatever anyones journey in SL happens to be. I think everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. I can model and code, but according to my mate I can't texture or make things look good to save my life. I don't agree with her that my world consists of mustard yellow, those happen to be manly earth tones, but that's another story. Would hate to have anyone exclude me because of it or make me feel inferior. Liked the suggestions in this thread that a representative body is best for helping others.

We're pretty small in the breedables market, not a big player and not after competing with the largest. The core concept of breedables is good, but suspecting like LL it's a bubble that will scale, but like I say its market isn't sustainable without chasing down add-ons and nickle and diming our customers for extra fees. So we're undergoing an overhaul to get out of the strictly "breed and feed" mold and that's months behind, including our website. Wholeheartedly agree with you that solid marketing is key, but we simply haven't needed it. We worked by word of mouth in-world, and focused on building as stable and bug free product that we could manage. Working on getting the next-gen out to public beta and then maybe we'll get a plan of attack for proper marketing. Interviews? Eh, will leave that to the big boys. Willing to share information, but an interview would feel more like an ego trip to me than a marketing tool. I'm not associated with Wyrmwood here or in my profile front and center because of a few reasons. I don't put it in my signature here because I'm talking, not advertising and I don't want anything I say to come across as an advertisement. I don't really deal with the public at all, our staff does that, although I do listen to everything, read every support ticket, etc.. Breedables generally take a team effort. I'm just the /owner/mechanic and I'd never get anything done if not for being able to focus on only code, the server, strategy, etc. Thankfully we've found some awesome people for staff and recently took on a couple of them as partners. Items I have on the Marketplace directly as Dart are for testing. I keep up on Marketplace issues via our customers who sell on it. I hear of most problems that they have with sales, business and other conditions. Most of my views and opinions are based on the needs of our customers and general populace rather than myself. One thing I've never done though is hide. This is my main avatar and Wyrmwood is for business, ownership of prims, etc. and does also does not go out in public. Assure you the only agenda is that when everyone else is successful, we are too. The more people in SL that can be successful, the more we can be. Perhaps that doesn't make me a prince, but it does put me in your corner, rather than advocating for the company that keeps letting me down. Some of my staff right now as we speak have not been able to get into our support group chat for an hour and a half. These things are everyones problem. Recurring billing yesterday for an annual premium account. Haven't checked to see that it's under the correct payment info that it was last year. If not, perhaps I can chalk it up to a bug and they'll understand and not destroy my account because of a late payment. Suspecting the LL payment system is far more stable than the handling of Marketplace funds though. You don't need accountability when they're tokens.

"As someone else pointed out, those freebies and those creators handing them out, aren't even your competition. So if you really want to see what's hurting your bottom line(aside from spending too much time worrying about others) look at the people who really ARE taking the lindens that would be spent with you, if they didn't exist. Those are the folks you're competing against for income. Creators who offer freebies may be your competition as far as space, being able to be seen by the masses and such, but they are *not* taking income from your pocket. They're not making income, lol." You must mean LL, because between 5% commission and various sinks LL is a bigger competitor than any profitable merchant. No need to demonize anyone but LL who put the models into place. It's the model itself that needs tweaking, and software that doesn't work. Meanwhile the majority of merchants don't make substantial profits but LL continues to lose sims every week, regardless of a fire sale and adding thousands of LL owned sims to buffer the numbers and indicators. Haven't even seen anyone bother to ask for a Q4 report, why would you? You know what it's going to contain. Keeping your head down and only being concerned with what you can do better doesn't do a darn thing to stop the global bleeding. None of that is any merchants fault. Free isn't a direct problem to any single merchant and many merchants find ways to make free profitable. A model that depends on churn though, and neglects to keep the value of churn up, and takes too much out of the churn while breeding customer dis-satisfaction with inferior product is just going to eat itself, regardless of free/not free, merchants who assume their own responsibility, etc. Whatever it is? It's not working. We continue to decline week by week. And that's not any merchants or freebie givers fault.

SL services addiction. I think they still call it immersion. Not sure what the gaming industry term of the moment is. Basically when something is cool enough to do for long periods, you've got something good. That's everyones choice to do what they will with their time.

Answer is probably in my last post in the other thread. I don't care who controls what. The issue to me is about business conditions and someone, somewhere needs to make sure that gets addressed. Perhaps it's already coming down the pipe, I don't know. If SL could be unionized (which it probably can't), I'd stand behind it because nothing else is working at the moment. And I abhor unions.

Howdy stranger, good to see you back. If I could use your post to springboard off of ... I can prove that undercutting and free is harmful. We do a breedable. Now before anyone slams them as lag inducing ponzi schemes, let me remind that there is indeed a market for them, otherwise people would not willingly buy them and that any product can be slammed as equally. The biggest problem breedable producers face is a devaluing market, much like SL In many ways we're a microcosm of and directly tied to the SL economy. The "majority" of breeders would like to if not profit, make back their investment or direct costs, which is exactly like SL merchants ... there's an entire economy to each line of breedables, and the reasons for "profit" are the same. Some sell for profit, some for costs and the enjoyment of being successful at the breeding game and others purely for pleasure. We tend to let the market run its course and don't support one type of customer over the other. However, all of these markets degrade, and it isn't because of lack of interest, or the willingness to pay those prices, it is because people will undercut each other and eventually devalue the entire market. And I don't blame them! They want to be competitive and reducing prices is the easist way to do that. But make no mistake, the second the market does start to degrade, the majority of customers do not like it and place the blame upon us to keep the value of the market up, much like I'm asking of LL. People who do it for fun aren't affected and don't care, except that they'd like to see their favorite breedable company supported for the hard work that they do. To compensate our people who breed just for fun, we may make a "pet only" version, where there is no cost for food like some other breedables do, because we understand that their intent is not to sell, but to have fun on their own residential land with their "pet". I would suggest that like a "pet only" version, that the same mechanism would work for people who are only "merchants for fun". Also slightly resenting the digs that not making a profit is more noble than profit seeking merchants, this is completely untrue, or that we're taking more than giving. To the Linus vs. Bill Gates comment I would say that the profit of microsoft has funded Bill and Melinda Gates to retire by giving back far more to the world via non profits than Linux will ever do. We pay half a dozen people the equivalent of a part time income. We give to charities. Our breedable alone has contributed to people buying full islands and has probably contributed to 100-200 regions worth of land sold, because you need more prims if you want more breedables. We create opportunity for new markets, for merchants to create new breedable related products, to participate in the economy without being a merchant, which means they buy "more" goods from you merchants than they would if they were competing with you directly. Their homes, furniture, etc. At last check over 4,000 of our customers products were listed on the Marketplace. No single free item has generated as much in donations for non profit than a commercial item. Which just happens to be a breedable. That's what profitable merchants can do for the economy, if you want to swap nobility for nobility. The problem we face in order to try to solve the huge problem of stabilizing our markets, just like LL, is to figure out how to provide more distinction between "free" and not. You can only mix them together so much before the profit potential is gone for everyone, including the majority that are fine with the prices before they decline to nothing. I wonder, would merchants who are doing this for fun only be willing to accept an alternate form of currency that could not be cashed out or used to pay for tier? Nothing wrong with fun only, I do this more for fun than money, as do the majority of you. This year we'll be figuring out how we can not only solve a declining market, but includes a strategy to spread the wealth, meaning we're aiming at our customers making far more money than we do. In the process, we will in turn grow and make more than if we were too greedy. It's a myth that you can just innovate and survive. You cannot innovate faster than a market can undercut itself, and you shouldn't have to innovate at the rate of an 80 hour work week. The only thing I'm advocating is that LL takes the same share the wealth strategy and solves the exact same problems controlling a market to be profitable enough to survive. And there are some very difficult choices to make to accomplish that. That this is a merchants forum, implies that it is for profit, because that's what a merchant is. That it's for fun is implied because it's extremely time consuming for lower profits and it's a virtual world, not a desk job. Please don't take that as pompous, it really isn't. It's a hard reality. Continued survival, growth and stability cost money. Free goods do not directly accomplish that, lower cost goods do on a lesser scale. In the end though I don't think anyone wants "free" or low cost to go away, only to not dilute the value of those who believe in the power of commerce and business. We should talk more about how that can be done, but make no mistake, SL cannot survive as a consumer only market, and if those problems aren't solved in the next year or two, there probably won't be an SL, and if there is, you will be paying for what you now enjoy as free.

Here are things I'd like an entity to address. If I'm going to fully engage in the economy as a merchant these are my costs and conditions. Fee to buy L$ (Insurance against elbow injuries) Fee to sell L$ (Insurance on the other elbow) $200 for a mainland sim, $300 for island, etc. (As stated, comparable with car and house payments for land that can be walked across in 60 seconds or less, shared on a machine with over a half dozen other 60 second land masses, with too restricting limits on prims/code/etc.) L$30/week to advertise my land which may or may not show up where expect. Classified ads. (Dump as much as you wish here, the more the better to outbid everyone else for an ad with no extra features than the person I'm outbidding. Great fun, it's only tokens). Marketplace advertising. 5% of Marketplace fees. L$10 to texture each face of every object that needs it. Mesh (moved away from calculations that make it easy on users (Fast, Easy and Fun nowhere to be found) to a floating system. Costs are undetermined without extra time investment. Obfuscated to put the burden of each triangle and its cost to the world on me, and so I understand why I'm now paying extra to upload "more efficient" builds.). In the mesh process, I'm directly or indirectly now also paying for scripts, and the size of an object. Expect land impact to make its way into all prim calculations in the future, making all building cost more either in $L or in land costs if I want to build big and script heavy for the $300/month in resources I'm already paying for. It's $300/month, if I want to tap all of that machines resources and bog my sim down with large and heavily scripted items, that's what I'm already paying for, why am I paying twice on hardware resources? If I become successful, I have to apply with LL to be able to cash over a certain amount out, at their discretion they may stall or refuse to give me money that I earned because it's over the limit. This is incremental, so each time you jump to a higher successful stage as a merchant, you must jump through hoops and sacrifice a small goat that you're actually able to get that money out from LL. Global conditions are such that money churns from one user to the next to the next so that each of them are probably banged one fee or another, thereby reducing my potential profits futher. Those customers who are merchants are also under the same substantial operating costs as myself, so we're feeding on each other, which is great, but under operating costs that are designed to keep both our profits to a minimum the more we churn on each other. Only here do I have to compete with free in a way that I don't in RL. I don't mind free, I don't mind people who don't want to pay anything or who just want to have fun. I'm not evil, I was led to believe that being a full time merchant in SL is part of my world, my imagination and that a full time income is a success story and a testament to the ability of this virtual world to improve lives and opportunity. Merchant is however what drew me to SL, new business opportunity in a brave new world where costs are less than RL. A dictionary however tells me that a merchant is someone who sells something for a price and potentially a profit. I'm sorry, I cannot get it out of my head that a dictionary is wrong in this context because it's a "virtual" world. Because of free, the overall value of goods drops each year. Perhaps L$6,000 was too much for an avatar shape in years past, but it is still no excuse for something that takes considerable time and skill to produce, devaluing year after year. There could be checks and balances to maintain a minimal value and market conditions without hurting the precious right to or existance of freebies, but there are none. Even cheap imports in the real world are eventually taxed so that they aren't as harmful to domestic business. Generally too little, too late, but an acknowledgement of that problem nonetheless. Business tools are not up the the task or volume of goods to smoothly move those from creation, to marketing, to consumer, to the extent that in most cases I cannot know whether an issue was my fault, the customers, or the providers. I'm now being asked to donate a fee of over $5,000 USD to an ex employee to provide a feature that a company with millions in profits will not provide. In RL, it would be an embarassment to my local business community to do this. This is known as sheep-funding. It may be great for sheep, it's not great for grown-ups. It increases costs further and takes away $5,000 of potential profit (or entertainment dollars) from my world. There are other fees that involve a hundred bucks or so, to change the name of my land in a database, or its coordinates, etc. Could go on and on, but generally this is not the bill of goods that I feel I was sold on, or led to believe. I'm happy that it is for some people, and that's great, SL is many things to many people. So I should pick up my toys and go home, or expect LL to start acting in both of our interests on this business thing. I succeed or stand on my own. Business environment and tools are crude or partially non functioning (down to communications where group chat is hit or miss). Costs that are rediculously high to fully engage in a merchant economy, no restrictions on things that protect stability in business. Someone at LL needs to let me know that business beyond a certain level is not really wanted here, and that I shouldn't take it at all seriously. Is this world just for costly fun if I engage in the economy at full tilt? I would love to know. I love the business that I can do here as a feel good venture as opposed to a RL business where I could make much, much more but enjoy myself less. And I still believe in a future where "work" is right up there with "play" in a virtual world. That would be a "second" life. But please do enlighten me as to whether I belong here or not as well as anyone else, LL. But if I do belong here, perhaps a BBB isn't the right function, what I need is an *intentionally bleeped* union and better legislation to protect myself and my customers, or for them to stop playing around and treat this like a real business environment with reasonable operating costs. Or both. Because what you're giving me just isn't very realistic to work with and is just as expensive, if not more to be fully engaged in the economy here than RL at this level of cost vs. income. And it's far more time consuming. This at the expense of other important things in RL. I've got a lawnmower in my shed whispering to me that it can turn into a landscaping venture with equipment and employees in a year on a 40 hour week, and it's proven to me that it can with 20% less operating costs relatively speaking. Taking advantage of tier, misc. costs and advertising for what the going rates are will run me roughtly $7,500 USD a year. I need to be provided an environment that an average merchant doing everything right, with a decent product can gross $15,000 USD a year. Without saying as much, LL allowing me to be a merchant is basically telling me that this is possible and not uncommon. Lonely Merchant seeks business partner. Must be compassionate, trustworthy, stable, enjoy long walks on flat green and not charge alimony "before" the divorce. Is that you, LL? Answer and stance on that last would be nice, so I don't have to argue with my peers and customers whether I belong here or not and whether or not I'm a shark for doing something that I enjoy for profit. Rod announced better tools coming in 2012 to help us be more profitable. Still blindly assuming yes it's ok to be here on that level. Those are the things I need help with.

No, no. I mean I want one of the board members personally to rake my lawn for $15 in crowd funding! Better yet, change the world, give up other income and come pay your bills by being an SL merchant! Heck, I'm upping it 50 bucks, however many $L that comes out to be. I don't even care what products they make as long as it doesn't violate Marketplace listing guidelines. Just to see what business models that involve creating as much churn as possible with token currency is like from this end of things. But seriously, I think they could really use more resources and manpower.

Go, Commerce Team. We either make it in 2012 or we die and all those nutcases with the signs about the end of the world were right, right? Finally an excuse to loosely quote from the film 2012! Might want to consider cross linking more into the Marketplace release notes on the wiki? And tell them to get you guys some more help, you've got an important department. If the board gives you flak tell them Dart said I'll crowd-fund them $15 coffee and flower dollars to come rake my lawn to make up for it!

It may be against policy to put out a document on features that don't fully work yet that contain spelling errors. I think any value from closed beta's has pretty much proven ineffective anyway. Generally what goes well in closed beta, once put out into public beta or production gets a fresh round of insight and often doesn't match the input gained from closed beta. Had an experience with that. Loved the beta, so did everyone else. The public gave it 2 million thumbs down and they ended up being correct.