Dartagan Shepherd
-
Posts
1,956 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Forums
Blogs
Knowledge Base
Posts posted by Dartagan Shepherd
-
-
It's what happens when you teach your children that they're special no matter how many times they fail. They become specialists at failure.
I'm thinking of a writing a childrens book called The Little Shopping Cart That Almost Was.
ETA: An embarassing omission on a childrens book title (just forget it).
-
tikitai wrote:I am jsut glad it doesnt seem to be affecting the delivery of our stuff to customers but where the heck is our llindens gone?
A: Where all L$ go when they don't go to users. Into acquiring new LL products like the recently acquired Desura.
Wait ... I meant in escrow pending refunds ... yes I'm sure I meant escrow.
-
If I had a nickle for every time an employee/owner/manager of a company in my country bent over backwards to correct a mistake, misunderstanding, refund, generate some good will and trust or made sure a mistake never, ever happened again, I'd have more money in a day than LL earns in a year.
Most working employees have had multiple experiences in having to keep outstanding and ongoing customer relations.
LL just doesn't have enough incentive to provide what most of the workforce supplies their customers.
By the way LL, what are the odds that this issue will be completely resolved before the timer runs out on the transaction history? And how many people download their transaction histories? 10 percent?
So far it's looking like it's going to be just like your last financial "oops" with enhancements, it's ongoing and profitable.
-
Good question. Personally I've been trying to be blunt and honest in an opinion without being inciteful toward any particular action except for expressing customer angst.
I do however try to be active in the larger picture, which is that government needs to treat virtual currency with the same regulations as real currency. To me at least, virtual currency exploits financial loopholes and has little accountability to consumers. I try to keep that somewhat outside of LL and SL, although they make that really difficult at times when LL makes such a fine example on why it needs regulation. So far we can point at Bitcoin as the primary example.
Problem is that Phil Rosedale is attempting a next-gen SL and planning on copying Bitcoin "mining" with L$, so they may end up putting themselves right into the middle of that particular fray.
Then there's legal action, which is a mostly unspoken one and rediculous that it needs to be considered when LL could just bear more responsibility for how they handle funds.
Or trying to promote more in-world sales.
Third party marketplaces unfortunately aren't much of an option, as it's hard to compete with LL on having direct access to L$ and integrated promotion of the SL marketplace. We were much less prone to these types of bugs with independent marketplaces, though and a slew of better features.
Or boycott, which really isn't in anyones best interests to lose money for the sake of protest, when that money is sorely needed by some merchants.
Or doing what we're trying to do here, which is to bang your head against the wall trying to get them to see what a huge burden their mistakes put on their customers (merchants in particular), and that they need to treat merchants products and funds (which don't belong to LL) with the same respect that they treat their own products.
This latter is a 3 year battle that only makes minimal headway. Contacting the CEO and getting Rods attention here in the forums didn't seem to do much good.
Some areas seem to be improved like server side development and possibly the viewer. The marketplace though, still reeks of incompetence and disrespect to customers and the reselling of their goods.
It'll improve at some point, whether by LL's doing or by regulation, regardless. At this point, the ball is in management and the commerce teams court.
So we just rant on, I suppose and expect them to listen to their customers.
-
HisaDrug wrote:So I know for a fact they're working on it n they're not intentionally screwing us up. I can see them paying us off within a month because they're usually very helpful when it comes to problems. At least for me. And Today, the issue didn't happen, which is a good sign.
Yes, they're intentionally screwing their customers up, although possibly not with that specific intent. When users have been telling them for their entire history that the level of bugs are due to either incompetent development or more importantly inadequate testing before they release something and they refuse to correct their methodology at the expense of trust and stability, it might as well be intentional.
The decision to not test better is an intentional one.
The decision to not test better and to use the community as free labor to test software inadequately tested by LL developers is an intentional one.
This opinion is not only shared by many users, but also ex Linden employees as can be see from comments on sites like glassdoor.com
Like I'd said elsewhere, a small bank in Podunk can manage transactions without these kind of problems, as do the vast majority of sales sites and RL businesses.
Their development methodology and decision to release potentially buggy software into production is very much intentional.
If they tested better, while it costs them less initially, costs everyone more in the long run. It is an utterly amateur way to handle a product that handles peoples funds and erodes trust, which is the most important factor in an ecommerce environment.
And, if it were RL, would probably be violating a consumer law or three.
-
Phoebe Avro wrote:Also the comment about 400,000 new signups a month and a 20% retension rate, so thats like 80,000 permonth new residents that stay in sl and yet the login numbers remain the same as they were a year ago
Not to go too far off topic, but the reason I'd somewhat sarcastically mentioned those numbers is because they aren't real. Or at least not real in the sense that they're atl indicitive of painting a true picture of where we're at with SL.
Rod is on-script in his latest interviews and one of the latest press releases.
Assuming 400,000 new users a month is accurate, the 20% figure claims those are the amount of people who "are going to be around a month afterward". So Rod is saying that 20% of people who sign up, sign in again to SL a month later.
It doesn't indicate retention of users, it just says that many logged in 30 days later. It also doesn't provide any context whatsoever. How many of these are actually unique? How many are alts? How many are agents or bots? I've personally known people who have had between 25 and 100 alts. Alts are so common that context needs to be provided.
It doesn't tell us how many of them remain active users. Or how many log in after 2 or 3 or 4 months.
It also doesn't tell us a stat that's just as important ... how many people leave that offset this number.
The story used to be at various times with SL that the retention rate is actually more like 1% or less and that these newer users don't affect concurrency and other indicators because these new users spend far less time in-world than they used to. They certainly don't make up new purchases in land, because land is declining (currently holding even for the last 2 weeks, with minimal losses).
So even if the numbers are correct, it may as well be fictional. Signups on the internet really don't mean a thing. A new social or adult site can generate 20,000 signups a day and not make a dime or convert users to customers.
It's the same with Rod saying that to date SL has done 3.2 billion dollars USD in user transactions and that the last year it did half a billion during a decline in land sales. This points to some sudden boom that didn't actually happen. Or if it did an explanation is nowhere to be found as to how that could happen.
This is also without context. A user to user transaction can be anything. Another personal example is that I gave money to someone one time. They gave it back, I gave it back to them. We did this a bunch of times just playing around. Each of those counts as a user to user transaction. As does every L$ that goes into a game, or any time a L$ passes from one user to another or to a scripted object.. It doesn't at all indicate economic health for SL, it just indicates churn.
It's the same with the claim of 1.2 million a day in transactions for virtual goods (that would be us merchants). This is probably taken from the marketplace alone as it would be very hard to differentiate in-world sales from something else. Again, there is no context because these transactions could include freebies.
At any rate, you get the point. We and the public get spewed numbers that are basically meaningless, even when they used to publish quarterly reports.
There's no shame in real numbers and it would gain trust even if we're gaining or losing a couple thousand people a month.
LL doesn't know how to publish numbers that reconcile with each other or reality, they never really have. I get that most companies give you sugar instead of meat, but we kind of expect different behavior in "our world". An honest and trustworthy environment could be one of their biggest strengths, but they want to play start up for the rest of their lifecycle, which is fine too, but a shame when they've got a respectably sized product.
References:
http://www.lindenlab.com/releases/infographic-10-years-of-second-life
http://joyardley.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/the-rod-humble-interview/
And of course the one Pam pointed to in the OP.
-
Previous practice with you was to file support and Jira for refunds, except for the time with enhancements when you blanket refunded and people got multiple charged after the refund. And then refunded, and then multiple charged again. That problem persists to this day.
And your initial response to this particular issue was: "We’re working on a process to make payments to Merchants affected by this issue, which will happen once we have released the fix for this. If this has affected you, please file a JIRA and let us know which orders were impacted, and we will make sure you get your payments.".
You can see how this can be interpreted in one or the other, or both ways.
Hopefully you're seeing the larger problem of inadequately tested releases making their way into production with no way to immediately halt a release from making further time consuming transaction errors.
This is not our first rodeo with financial errors, as you know.
-
Some of my favorite funny quotes from that article:
"I believe there will be a day when you’ll log in to your social network and see, “Oh, I got five bucks because I posted my silly cat picture.” What I’m trying to do is position our company to take advantage of that and facilitate people being rewarded for the time they put in."
and (speaking of those 400,000 new signups every month) ...
"It’s usually about 20 percent are going to be around a month afterward. That’s a massive drop-off, but it’s still not too bad compared to other services."
I'm sure professionals that are selling 3D models for between $25 and $1,000 USD will be flocking here in no time and appreciating the level of professionalism compared to the sites that they currently sell on. In fact, those film and game designers may give up their previous careers for SL.
After all, that 20% of 400,000 new signups every month that stick around for more than a month means 80,000 new customers for merchants each and every month!
-
For what it's worth, in one of their more recent legal battles, they "lost" (or rather settled) in a class action against them for $172,000 USD for keeping peoples assets after suspending accounts.
-
Hey there, missed you around these parts.
Agree on the points. No matter what their pipeline, they've got access to the same exact discrepancy data that merchants have.
Beside the fact that that any marketplace is the last place you'd use a "fix it as you go" methodology or that they should have had some way to immediately roll back a release with transaction errors, there's no indication whatsoever of rigorous testing
There's still the little issue that they can indeed track all of this data on their own and figure it out for themselves. At any error point, they could roll back and use that snapshot before the rollback as their debugging data.
No Jira issues needed, or support requests that end up pointing you to file a bug report in order to get a refund.
No one "needs" to file bug reports and no one needs to go without a refund.
There are small banks in Podunk that can manage this.
On the other hand, Rod is claiming that to date there have been 2.5 billion dollars worth of transaction, BUT now we're all of a sudden up to half a billion a year in transactions. This kind of claim would make any auditor drool with glee.
I'm wondering if Rod has the stat handy on how much in transactions is lost due to SL buggery. Land revenue continues to shrink, while user transaction errors increase. Sorry Rod, looks like skimming to me, and that's not what you want. Only because the level of incompetence needed to pull this off is that much harder to believe. Or that after making these mistakes, there's no immediate rollback, correction and that these mistakes, like the enhancement overbilling seem to continue for quite some time. And that only the people that specifically jump through hoops to document and ask via bug reports actually get refunds.
Not to mention that this new payment system which has been in use for two for two years without obvious problems suddenly grows substantial bugs when applied to the marketplace.
At any rate, great to see you again, Darrius.
-
Belated congrats!
-
Exactly. Love the "only a couple of reports" comment. The nature of numbers says that if we're hearing multiple accounts of it here on the forums, then it is indeed happening on a larger scale to the total of tens of thousands of merchants who don't post on the forums or file Jira's.
No company should be doing this to their customers, mishandling funds in this manner.
Will be harping on this to them and to the government until we're afforded the same consumer protection as the rest of commerce in the real world and in online commerce. Unacceptable, LL. I suppose it's useless to ask why all these mistakes are always in your favor.
About those enhancements some people can't cancel ... is that fixed yet?
Or to the unanswered question on whether we can receive cash for payments to LL made in cash.
-
Pamela Galli wrote:We have begged, tearfully, for this kind of thing, as well as the reports and graphs we had with Xstreet. Our pleas have been met only with stony silence.
Not true, communication is great! We have a nearly week old sticky thread where they asked us to ask questions about the new payment system, and they've given extensive answers to every single question!
No wait, that didn't happen as of this writing. A reminder to self to read up on all the side effects before taking prescription drugs and posting to the forums.
Still waiting for those reports and charts and laundry list of features they said they'd work on. It's embarassing that one person with XStreet could do what an entire team can't in a few years.
-
Careful what you wish for!
They'll give you a new calculation called World Impact which gives you 30% less triangles to work with, and squeeze yet more regions onto fewer servers with the savings, all the while convincing you to convince others that optimizing for World Impact is the trademark of a good citizen-resident.
They'll provide the pitchforks so that you can freely poke others into World Impact submission, without being called out for the harassment that you're actually guilty of.
And then they'll charge more L$ to upload it.
Since every cause needs a name, we'll lump it under Project Sunshine. As in blowing sunshine up your ...
Sorry, these things just come out. Accurate numbers would be nice.
-
Given this from your blog post on the "new" (2 years old, outside the marketplace) payment system:
"The Marketplace will begin using the same payment system as the rest of Second Life. In addition to providing a more consistent experience for our customers".
I'm wondering how it's at all possible for a discrepancy to occur between marketplace and account transactions. There are still billing errors occurring.
Is the failure point your proxy account (Currency Linden) that can still allow multiple purchase errors to occur and not be reflected in the account transaction history?
What is the need for a proxy account in a (now?) centralized payment system?
Is there a resolution timeframe in sight for having these two sets of records actually reconcile reliably?
What part of this provides a more "consistent" experience when it's handled completely differently from the billing page in my account where I add a payment method and then link it to a product. For instance I can't add a credit card and then on my billing page link it to marketplace. Where is the consistency bit about this other than multiple payment methods?
Shouldn't there be a breakdown of exact fees and charges when paying with cash/credit?
Are there any plans for merchants to receive cash for payments that the customer has made in cash without converting them to L$ for the merchant?
-
Here's to hoping that those new payment methods don't require buttons of any sort.
@Sera: I'm wondering how you knew which buggy Linden to report.
-
I suppose under the new payment system, if you order a couch by credit card and get a merkin instead, at least you'll be able to do a chargeback.
-
Some good points there. Personally I'd rather receive real money too if that's what the customer paid with.
It is kind of a farce with the concept of an "exchange", when the customer pays with real money and never intended on buying L$ and then LL converts it to L$ to pay the merchant.
It also hints at another issue ... is there really a legal right to resell my goods for real money and give me "worthless" tokens in exchange, that I then have to turn around and pay token "fees" to convert those tokens back to real money.
Not sure of the impact that it could have on the float of L$, but there is another impact, which is that if more people use more real money (and you know that LL is going to make a "transaction" profit on each real money sale), does it take yet more spending dollars from a finite spending economy and give it to LL.
Either way, this concept of virtual economy always wants to fall apart if it falls below a certain threshold. Something that would never happen in a simple real money escrow type of setting.
Very interested in seeing what LL "charges" above the merchants set L$ price. If the current PayPal rate is any indicator, the real money price is going to be a good bit above the L$ value.
-
Well, if they do indeed implement it properly it will still handle PayPal and credit cards to boot.
Proper implementation though would mean adding another option to your billing page: http://secondlife.com/my/account/billing.php where you would have to register your payment method, and then link that payment method to the marketplace. Decoupling that particular choice and turning into payment options in the marketplace defeats the purpose of globalizing it into your profile account options.
If so you would think that there wouldn't be any fall-over if something goes wrong with a single payment source.
It will be interesting to see how non L$ payments are calculated and paid back out to merchants. I'm guessing merchants aren't going to be getting a direct Dollar to Lindex exchange rate though.
Must love those user to user transactions though. If someone buys an SL house with a credit card and the merchant gets paid in L$ ... where is that "user to user" exchange trade again? LL is a proxy for their own L$ trade? Things that make you go "heh".
Possibly one step closer to consumer protection by purchasing with real money though. And possibly having a fully unified reporting system later on.
-
Someone who starts every conversation with "can I help you?".
Or, someone who caused you to buy 3 of something you never knew you needed, along with insurance, an extended warranty and gift wrapping.
-
Not unlike going off on a bender and coming back to an intervention in your living room.
Now if we could only ban alchohol in the workplace at LL, we could probably measure marketplace bug fixes in months and not years.
-
Theresa Tennyson wrote:thedissappointedmerchant wrote:However 3rd party exchange services managed to reliably do it with ease in 1-2 max 3 days,andwithout limiting us to paypal.They really should improve their service... even while it would be a investment...
This is because the 3rd party exchanges are in the business of giving out money - that's what they do. Linden Lab isn't - the give out money only because they feel doing it would assist their core business.For example - take where I work in RL. It takes me a while to get paid. BUT - where I work doesn't exist strictly to pay me; they are in business to do something else and they pay me so I will do work for them in order to help them with their core business. They want me to stick around and keep working for them but it doesn't help them to pay me instantly.If I needed instant money I could go to one of the "payday-loan" establishments that are only in business to give out money. However, in order to do this they charge fees and have other conditions that mean it's not in my best interest to rely on them for day-to-day living, so I just wait for my regular paycheck.Your Lindens have real-world value ONLY BECAUSE LINDEN LAB CURRENTLY WANTS THEM TO, and they want them to only because is an incentive for some people they think are useful to their work . They definately DON'T want Lindens to be considered a currency for a lot of reasons.Actually they do want it to be a "currency" without the legal liability of real currency. You're right in that L$ have value because LL wants them to, although anything thet costs real money has real value in the real world according to most real governments.
Even if LL didn't allow cashing out, there's still a case to be made that whether it's land or $L or a hosting service, there's still a certain level of accountability to provide the service or product that people pay RL money for.
In RL, there is ALWAYS value when you pay for something, whatever that something is.
However, L$ is designed to be a product unto itself. It makes profit on your money with every transaction, every sink, etc. To LL, their "currency" is just as much a product as land.
In fact, as Phil Rosedale, Linden Lab and a handful of others invest in the next generation Second Life, High Fidelity, the goal becomes even clearer that they want to up the stakes with their currency.. This snippet from the High Fidelity website proclaims:
"We're building a new virtual world enabling rich avatar interactions driven by sensor-equipped hardware, simulated and served by devices (phones, tablets and laptops/desktops) contributed by end-users.
...
If we can successfully build this collective cloud, we think we can enable audience sizes for shared experiences that are orders of magnitude larger than what is possible today. Imagine contributing your computer to a project like SETI, but instead having it simulate part of the virtual world, and earning virtual world currency in exchange for helping to power the grid." -- http://highfidelity.io
The goal here is to re-invent SL and in the process loosely copy Bitcoin, which bases "value" on computer processing power and to expand the reach of the L$.
It's not a favor or convenience, virtual currency is monetized real money. It's a product that makes LL much more money than using real currency because they can chip away at it with a thousand sinks, charge when you buy it, sell it or just sit there and look at it when it remains uncirculated. And for all that, it still costs real money fees for those transaction bits that exist outside of the "virtual" bits.
Again, L$ is profitable product.
-
Let's just say it's been a long week.
And now it's Friday, which used to mean payday and parties but is now but a distant memory in a future where everyday is payday and the work week is 7 days. And that's what I love to hate about being an entrepreneur.
The great thing about necro-posts ... you get to ramble on and you're not really off topic.
-
Well, it's true some merchants can be worse or as or as controlling with their business as LL. It's also true that there are many merchants that handle their business far better than LL.
The big difference though is the general business model of LL vs. Merchants.
The former is a corporation that runs itself like an eternal startup. It's a "cake and eat it too" company. It just wants it every way you can imagine ... both high subscription and free play style monetization, all their content is free to them, bypassing many RL laws with its virtualization, generally chipping away at anything it can financially. It monetizes people.
Merchants on the other hand, are lemonaide stand businesses. Not to be insulting about that, I just mean that they often work for themselves, they're entrepreneurs at their respective levels. When they're on top of their game they run with very traditional concpets ... good product, good service, regular updates, quality for the price, etc. We monetize our products.
The LL model and the merchant/land baron model are a mismatch ... complete opposites.
Some of these types of discussions while interesting tend to miss the point completely though, which is that selling online or offline follows business and consumer law. There is no fake money and charges against fake money. Because it's real money there are certain assurances and protections that do not apply with LL.
I don't care personally if LL manages to be rolling in profit margin. What I care about is that they way they go after profit and bypass law only serves to suck the life out of the product they've created with a bunch of loopholes. It isn't good for the opportunities that drive this world. You can't respect it on a business level, because it's not a two way street. And it should be, because it's not their "stuff" in the world, it's ours.
They have today profit, enough to invest in new products as a gamble, and Phil scrambling to build a Third Life and yet the world declines because of the way they run the business and their pricing.
This latest issue is a prime example. As others have said LL has had 10 years to add more payment methods for cashing out and improving the speed with which you can get your money. But until recently it hasn't been "money", it's been err ... tokens with no value.
Now that it is declared virtual currency, it comes with more responsibility and forces the company to better respond to its customers regarding this virtual currency. This is a good thing. It's a start. Perhaps one day they'll have to face the fact that if you're going to enable people to sell their stuff with value, for money with value, you need to be a responsible partner ... yes partner.
Perhaps people need consumer protection against merchants as well, but it's far less of an issue than what LL does to far more people for now.
And I'm out of coffee again, which makes it a good time to cut and run from this post.
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
YouTube
Flickr
still broken after one and a half years?
in Merchants
Posted
Surely it's only a matter of time before a "unified" payment system with two proxy accounts and two sets of records that still don't match up start bugging and sending all of us money and the marketplace commission by accident.
The odds are certainly in our favor of this happening, given that they've all gone the other way so far.
I'm a firm believer in equal opportunity buggery.