Paladin Pinion

I described the usual course of software development, Josh. It's pretty standard.

That's a really good data point. Do they know?

Valid points, Dartagan. All of them. The QA was very poorly done. I don't disagree with any of the merchant complaints, only with the idea that it was intentionally orchestrated to do harm. I don't know any company that does that on purpose, it's just bad business. I suppose this company could be an exception but it just doesn't make any logical sense that they'd be aiming for that. In short, conspiracy theories rub me the wrong way.

There was no NDA involved in the public beta test. Anyone could participate and many did post here on the forums about it. LL imposed no restrictions on that. The complexity of the setup couldn't be avoided; to test, you had to set up a temporary storefront, get a test magic box, and conduct all transactions on the beta grid. This protected your real storefront, which was essential. I don't see any way LL could have made it less trouble, but because it was complicated I'm not critical of those who didn't participate. I have written automated software testing systems. It is extremely time consuming, it took a large team, it is very expensive, and no matter what you do you can't catch every edge case. That said, automated testing would indeed have found some of the issues, and LL could have chosen to do a subset of an automated test suite, which would have cost less (and maybe they did; who knows.) But the ROI was likely too steep for LL in the current economy. These systems are extremely time-consuming to write. I'm betting they didn't have the funds. By "serious" testers I didn't mean to imply that others were at fault. Remember that my background is software development. I do voluntary testing for the company that makes the development tools I use. It is simply self-protection. I want to find all the problems in any pre-release because if I don't, my own software will have bugs. So I consider myself a "serious" developer with a personal stake in the stability of the tools I use. I test voluntarily because I will make far more trouble for myself if I don't. There are people who use the same tools as a hobby and I consider them less serious users. My terminiology was unfortunate, and I apologize. But I do think that if your income depends on SL and the outcome will affect you in a significant way, then you are hurting yourself if you don't test in self defense. In an ideal world you wouldn't have to, but software is a quirky animal and it is what it is. It's your choice, and there's no requirement to do it, and you are not at fault if you don't, and yes, LL has a responsibility to not screw up your store. But still. Finally, it is common to outline a set of tests that need to be performed, and bugs found by these tests can be easily fixed. But the cause of many bugs are in actions that the tests could not predict -- things that happen rarely, or only in a specific set of circumstances, or only in a specific order. These crop up all the time and they're hard to anticipate. That's why large test groups are desirable; someone in a large group is likely to do the unexpected.

That's one theory I suppose. On the principle that the simpler answer is usually the correct one, I'd posit that: Boxes that worked in a smaller market did not scale well when applied to the much larger LL-sponsored market. The substantial scripting and server interactions that boxes required were not suitable for large-scale commerce and were subject to failure. Boxes did in fact have issues from the beginning, including the inability to deliver when the recipient was offline or messages were capped, or they were in busy mode. When scaled up to the millions of transactions that occur in today's marketplace, the servers increasingly dropped scripted transactions and deliveries had a decreasing success rate as the servers struggled to keep up with the load. Reports of non-deliveries increased and "stuck" transactions became common. Unrelated to magic box delivery was the side issue that new users were confused about unpacking boxes, and one of the most frequent questions was why they were wearing a box on their hand. All these issues could be solved in one move by implementing a direct server transfer, simplifying the process, eliminating scripted transactions entirely and thus decreasing server load, and as a side benefit, making purchases easier to understand for new users. Tests went well enough in the alpha test group that LL called for a larger beta test group and opened up the process to anyone. A few serious people went to the beta grid to try it and give feedback. Unfortunately a common response here on the forums was "hell no, I'm not going to do their testing for them for free." Consequently the test group was not large or varied enough to catch all potential issues or edge cases. In fact, I suspect very few people took the time to try it out. Beta grid testing was a hassle and inconvenient, it took quite a lot of time, and required a special setup. Many folks haven't ever been on the beta grid and understandably didn't want to start. When the beta group was done and reported issues were resolved, the feature was considered stable and released to the public. Errors occurred. In fact, disastrous errors occurred. The market is now in turmoil. LL has to scramble now to fix it. I don't expect they're any happier about the problem than the merchants are. The failure here is that the tests and QA were not sufficient, and the test group was not varied enough to find all the potential issues. There could also be some incompetence involved but I have no idea who's working on this or what happened; from what I've read in the JIRA the developers seem to know what they're doing. In a system as complex as SL, I'd fully expect some glitches and last-minute scrambling. Unfortunately this one was big and not easily repaired. People got hurt and are justifiably angry. This makes a lot more sense to me than a group of cackling businessmen in a back room plotting to make your SL life miserable, and breaking things on purpose on the theory that you'll decide to invest more if they hose the system.

I've migrated a few things and so far it's gone okay. I don't have the marketplace issues others are reporting, so I'm one of the lucky ones. I released two new products as DD last night ,sold one today, it was successfully delivered and I got paid.

I wonder why LL would intentionally break something their business model relies on.

You're right Ann. What's happening now is a disaster. I was just saying that Magic Boxes were in fact broken and and same people were saying the same things about it back then. So I take some time off, come back, and the only change in the forum posts are that the subject nouns have updated. I did like your comment in another thread: stfu and let them fix it. That pretty much sums it up.

Of course, this completely overlooks the fact that Magic Boxes were in fact broken. It's tedious to read through these forums after a couple months off and find that the primary whiners here are still the same people who haven't a clue how software development works.

I don't have a problem with "new" items going into a received items folder. Actually, I tend to lose things like notecards and textures that people send me, and I have to go digging for them. I have often wished those things went into a convenient place where I could find them quickly, so for me that would be a plus. Sorting by date is a must for that folder though. New stuff has to float to the top. Returned items should go to Lost and Found, or maybe rename it "Returned Items". Those things are not new, they are old things that got left somewhere. I don't want to have to sort through them and figure out what's new and what's returned. Things we rez and take back again should to to their original folders. The current behavior is correct. New builds are trickier. I don't really want those in a Received Items folder. I could live with it, but better would be a way to directly save new builds to a folder of our choice in Inventory. My first preference would be a right-click menu item that says "Take to..." and lets me choose a place to store the new item. Maybe there's another way to handle new builds, but dumping them into Received doesn't feel right. They may be new to inventory but they aren't new to me. I could live with it though; it isn't really much different than dumping them into Objects as they do now. I never much liked that either.

Sassy Romano wrote: send an IM first, if they don't respond, you know they either don't want to or didn't take the small amount of time to forward IM's to email. This is good advice, but not until after LL fixes the latest bug where IMs aren't being delivered. I have been trying to respond to a customer for over a week and none of my messages are getting through. If a customer is having trouble and the merchant is unresponsive, I hope they read JIRA. It may not be the merchant's fault.

Does anyone have an idea how many items are too many?

Thanks very much for this info Rolig. That would explain a problem I'm having with a customer who doesn't respond when I try to IM them.

Myra Wildmist wrote: I tested it by standing around in my home and switching viewers. I'm not sure why Firestorm would be different, but I get totally different performance results with it. FYI, I d/led and tried the lastest V3, last night, but it didn't help, in fact it seemed worse. If you are keeping different cache folders for each viewer, that could be the reason. If items aren't in the cache performance will suffer.

Sorry, I didn't mean that you'd use it for evil. I only meant I'd be surprised if it were possible, because it could be used for that by some people. I'm curious how you'll do it, actually -- and I don't grief either.

I'd be curious how that would be possible. It could be construed as griefing.

I agree, and I voted. It looks like LL acknowledged the problem this morning and will fix it now. Glad you stuck with it, you did exactly the right thing.

I run on an i5 iMac and it scoots right along at about 80-90 fps, so I don't think the problem is with the Mac. It could be you need to open some ports in your router. Here's info: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Configuring_your_hardware_firewall Another thing you can do is open the statistics window while you're logged in, that can tell you if you are dropping packets or where the blockage is.Type Control-Shift-1 to see it. What you're describing sounds more like a communications issue than a viewer or OS problem. I've heard complaints recently that the SL servers aren't being very responsive, and you may just have hit on one of those days while you were running on your Mac.

Another common reason for getting unlisted is that you put it into a top level category instead of a lower level category. If you listed it in the top level "Home and Garden" section then that's not the right place, you need to choose a furniture sub-category for a chair.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: Paladin Pinion wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: On the note of DD, the Open Beta has been running.... and yet not one word from any of those that were playing with it? WOW... is it really that clean and smooth running?? Or is there some kind of gag order in the open beta grid for DD as well? No, it doesn't start until December, and the exact date isn't known yet. No one has had a chance to see it yet. As clipped right from the SLM Merchant homepage "technical Announcements" November 04, 2011 BETA TESTING NOW AVAILABLE ON ADITI! Beta Now on Aditi: 11/3/2011 Beta Release Notes are posted on the wiki. But of course, how could I have been confused. Guess I need to read the fine print since LL's big lettered title says its NOW Yes, I went there during our last discussion and saw that the merchant stores and magic boxes were set up, but DD wasn't there yet. I went back to the announcement and re-read it, and saw that the DD segment won't be available until December.

Catwise Yoshikawa wrote: A friend sent me a picture of her direct delivery folder few weeks ago, so you are not the only one ;-) We tried to find why she had that, but couldn't. She was using viewer 2 and the only unusual thing is that she use to stay on a RC sim. Some days later DD folders just disappeared ^^' It sounds like it is in testing and the folders can only be seen on the test sims.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: On the note of DD, the Open Beta has been running.... and yet not one word from any of those that were playing with it? WOW... is it really that clean and smooth running?? Or is there some kind of gag order in the open beta grid for DD as well? No, it doesn't start until December, and the exact date isn't known yet. No one has had a chance to see it yet.

I'm stunned, having just come back after the holiday and realized what's happened. Best to you Void. I always read every word you wrote here and I'm so sorry there won't be more.

Wherever she is, the scripts could be very useful.

The problem with that theory is that if the person made a copy using only LL tools, it couldn't have had your name as the creator.