Toysoldier Thor

es0 Torok wrote: Ok, if I understand this correctly.. The market is stuck at 248 because most people are using the 248 exchange rate when selling. It seems to me that very few people here are willing to go for the 247 or 246. What if for one week, people here were to go with the 246 instead of their 248 comfort rate? Would /Could that impact the LindeX? Its mainly stuck at 248 because - as I understand it - LL places a ton of their own Lindens on the exchange at this price to keep the currency rate stuck just around 248. Its not at 248 for all this time because the SL Residents all agreed to this price. Most of that bulge of Lindens at 248 is LL's. They are manipulating the currency and they can because they are by far the largest holder of Lindens - the King of Institutional Currency Holders.

you cant currency trade / speculate on the Lindex. As has been said, it stays at 248 constantly. LL manipulates the currency to stay right at 248 for the longest time. I am not sure why ppl wait and put their price at the huge bulge of 248 and wait days unless they use the days it takes to complete the trade as a back out. Even at 100,000L exchange, the 1L means a $1.62 difference. Big whoop. (Made figure accurate for Zanara) I completely liquidate my SL account as soon as my account reach about $27000L (thats $100US). I set it at the $L higher than the big bulge - this is normally at $249. My currency exchanges in about 2 minutes or less. Then I immediately remove it from my US account to my paypal - this process takes LL about 3 days. I do this because I dont trust how LL designs and operates their systems... We saw this week why I dont trust LL to hold too much of my REAL earned $. $100US is the maximum risk for me. When I liquidate each cycle I bring it to about 100L because I know SL sales will fill up my account pretty quick.

Porky Gorky wrote: CommerceTeam Linden wrote: In appreciation of your patience, we will be offering free commission on all listings less than L$10,000 starting NEXT Friday for three days starting at noon PT Friday, February 24, 2012 (through noon Monday, February 27, 2012).* This is just weird, Have pigs started flying too? It was based on a suggestion I made on another thread. I was surprised they actually listened. Pigs havent started flying but they might have sprouted wings!

This was a very interesting thread and gave me a better understanding about OBJ and Collada that I surely didnt know. A few points.... 3DCoat does not support Collada. I had many email conversations with the product team and told them as amazing as their tool is... one limit is that it doesnt support collada for export to SL. They said they are actually working on it BUT it has been a very complex process. Supposedly they find developing a collada exporter to be very confusing and so it has been slow going for them. Why does Zbrush and Sculptris not do it? Well my thoughts on that is because Zbrush has a very powerful 3rd party plugin api that seems to be very popular with 3rd party creators that develop Zplugins for Zbrush. One is of them is ZSculpty from shiny life I believe is the maker. It already has a simple mesh and sculpty support. Sculptris Photoshop and a couple other 3d Model vendors all support GoZ too. So for example, now Sculptris can get Collada export support via Goz to Zbrush thru the Zsculpty plugin. There are some limits though since GoZ does not transfer Sculptris's painted model to Zbrush only the model itself. The concern I have is if the makers of Zsculpty go poof and SL changes the rules on how Collada is used, I am screwed using Zbrush. That is my bigger fear about LL and Blender having a stronger cozy relation... They may start making improvements that changes the use of Collada's export which maybe only Blender will be able to support. i.e. if you are doing mesh models fro SL... your best option will be to be forced to use Blender... a tool I started with when making sculpties but abandoned long time ago in frustration. I guess based on what I have read, the possibility of a stand alone 3rd party anything to Collada exporter utility makes no sense since the exporter to collada needs to transpose the tool's proprietary formats and modeling to the collada format. Anyway... as long a Zbrush and in the future 3DCoat keep have 1 option for exporting to Collada and hopefully that collada becomes the next generation industry standard like OBJ has been for the simpler models... then I am happy.

so if OBJ is universal but not flexiable enough and Collada is not industry wide supported by most 3D modeling tools, then what format would be much more endorsed by all the 3d Modeling tools? Why do zbrush and all the other tools need 3rd party plugins or dont even have collada?

Daniel Raventnest said.. At the moment COLLADA is the best we have for a conversion that works between multiple programs..... Collada is the best compared to OBJ? Why didnt LL use OBJ? Pretty much EVERY 3D modeling tool uses the OBJ standard.

Its good LL Commerce does ocassionally listen to the Merchant threads and its a nice gesture. But... I am sure most of us Merchants would also like it it LL Management or anyone at LL add to this thread and explain exactly what happened and provide us Merchants somce confidence that they will be taking action to prevent this from happening again. Critical application servers to LL's operations should be fully redundant. A failure should not bring down any critical service or system. The other deep concern is what Sassy brought up - the architecture of MP that a Sales Transaction is so loosely connected that LL could allow part of the transaction to complete and yet the 2nd 1/2 gets separated and orphaned. This seems like a very poor immature design and makes the up-coming DD deployment more scary. Please LL Commerce.... provide us a full account what happened and what changes LL will make to make sure this wont happen again.

Well I guess the LL Staff does actually read these threads and ocassionally listens.... "OK and here is a bonus that some Customer Driven companies would have seriously considered.... offering the impacted community a "we are sorry" credit offer for all the pain they created. Can you image the community response if LL would have handled this major incident like I suggested above AND then offering a "WEEK of NO COMMISSION SALES on MP" as a small token of LL's appreciate for the Merchants patience during this unexpected outage?" LL Comerce Team has just announced 1 week on no commissions for sales of items less than 10,000L ! Nice Gesture

LL could have and still can stop a lot of the criticism against their handling of this entire terrible event by taking full public ownership of the problem, being transparent and honest with its customers that they badly impacted, and show their strong desire to want to improve and provide confidence to the Merchants and Customers. IF while the event was happening someone even a low in the management foodchain like Brooke were to make a BLOG POSTING provide open and clear statements of what has happened, where is LL on detecting and resolving the problem, providing instructions to all affected, and just as importantly... showing some compassion with a simple apology for the size and scale of the disruption LL created.... this would have INSTANTLY reduced the anger and frustration by 10 fold. But nope... as has been proven by Brooke and the Commerce Team, NO COMMUNICATIONS or at best bare basic cold termed brief forum posted statements have become the norm. A Blog posting from Rodvik on the Merchant forums and a link on the MP site would have had even more impact to show that LL is on top of it and that they take it seriously and to assure all that LL will be performing a post-mortem to figure out exactly how this happened and what they can do to prevent this from happening again. OK and here is a bonus that some Customer Driven companies would have seriously considered.... offering the impacted community a "we are sorry" credit offer for all the pain they created. Can you image the community response if LL would have handled this major incident like I suggested above AND then offering a "WEEK of NO COMMISSION SALES on MP" as a small token of LL's appreciate for the Merchants patience during this unexpected outage? See - this is how LL could have come out of this event smelling like roses and shutting down the magnitude of frustration and anger and accusations that they are still now enduring from their customers.

You call it a witch hunt... I call it trying to perform forensics on the limited information available with little communications from LL on what happened and what they will do to prevent it from happening.

BTW.... Knowing how LL operates, you all better read my las posting fast unless you get email alerts on all forum postings. LL doesnt like having egg on their face and it wont surprise me if my posting of facts that the LL Commerce Teams explanation of the problem was wrong will be removed by the moderator. Not because it violated an posting tos rules.... just because... Stay tuned

So what bothers me is why LL seems to be trying to cover up the root cause of LL Valentines Massacre instead of being transparent and honest and taking ownership to what likely was a problem they triggered by a scheduled DC HW Maintenance problem. Here is what i mean.... Following is a posting from from the LL Commerce Team within the MP DOWN?? thread that they posted late afternoon on the 14th.... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ MP DOWN?? posting # 128 CommerceTeam Linden wrote: Starting at 11pm SLT, February 13, the Second Life Marketplace experienced two separate hardware failures which resulted in delayed deliveries and Marketplace downtime. While the site has been back up since 1pm SLT today, some merchants may see delays in order completion and merchant payout. We continue to investigate the cause of these issues to prevent this kind of failure from happening in the future. We apologize for any inconvenience. So take careful note of the date/time that LL Commerce states that they had two unscheduled hardware failures that were the root cause to MP delivery coming to a griding halt. They say the problem happened at 11pm SLT on the 13th. Yet the first time that ANY Merchant of MP first noticed and publically reported something was going seriously wrong was not until shortly after 5am SLT. Following are the details to prove this first detection... Teagan Parnas opened up the "MP DOWN??" Merchant forum thread just after 5am SLT on Feb 14th. I dont have the exact time as I cant find it in my email logs but very shortly after Teagan's thread opening post indicating the first Merchant detection of the problem, Shiva India made the 2nd post to the thread and I have the timestamp to this 02-14-2012 05:25 AM PST/SLT. Now as you all know very well, when a system failure like MP of this magnitude happens, it does not take long AT ALL for the MP Merchants to notice it and start posting about it.... specially on the busiest shopping day of the year on MP. So one can safely assume that if it was first detected just after 5am SLT by Teagan, the root cause of the failure / the trigger to the failure happened shortly before that. So... if it looks very clear that MP Deliveries went WONKY just after 5am, how could two hardware failure at 11pm SLT (6 hours earlier) not impact MP operations for 6 hours ??? So lets look at what other event prior to 5am SLT might have been the REAL root cause to the MP Valentines Day Massacre..... Here is an alert from the SL Grid Status.... [Updated 4:51am PST, 14 February 2012] We will be starting our hardware maintenance shortly. Please refrain from rezzing any no-copy objects or making any L$ transactions during this time. Notice the time when LL announced that they would be performing a "HARDWARE MAINTENANCE". At 4:51am SLT.... Only minutes before the first merchants noticed the MP Deliveries coming to a grinding halt. So LL Commerce Team, do you want to explain a bit more clearly how your explanation that two unplanned hardware failures 6 hours prior to the actual start of the MP failures were the cause to the MP outage and that it was not the scheduled HW maintenance that LL executed only minutes before the failure? This is why Rodvik or some member from the LL Executive Team needs to come clean and be honest to their customer base. Because the LL Commerce Team seems you be making excuses and stories up on what the cause was.

To date we have not got the REAL TRUTH from LL on what they really did that screwed up all their systems. Evidence shows it was related to their scheduled HW maintenance work at 4:51am they announced on grid status. They have not giving a complete status if all have been cleaned up. Most importantly they did not provide their customers any answers and assurances of how they will prevent this from happening again - Like implementing CHANGE FREEZES on critical events in the year. And finally they owe their customers some sincere apology that all can see (not Rodvik making a lil Tweet because he was embarassed into it from some of us). Until LL steps up and takes responsibility and ownership on this problem they caused.... THEY HAVE NOT RESPONDED RESPONSIBLY.

I think Nalates was kidding since I am sure she knows LL's response so far to the disaster they created on the Valentines Disaster is an utter SHAMEFUL JOKE. she is pointing out just disgusting LL's response has been to this poor avoidable incidence they caused. Any responsible customer focused company would have been out front on this issue and trnasparent on what happened and had the leader of the company providing clear messages to the customer base that he is sorry on behalf of the company to assure his customers that he will be seeking answers to assure this can be avoided in the future. I had a lot of respect for Rodvik at the beginning but it has become very clear over the past year that he is just a Gamer Geek and really doesnt have a good grasp of the critical skills on Customer Service and responsibilities of leading a company that badly needed leadership on improved customer service and matured business processes. Its sad... and how he is dealing with this incident says so much.

So as for GoZ... I installed it into Zbrush, Sculptris and Photoshop and it is pretty cool. Works pretty good. The tests I did had a bit of a limit. When I was in Sculptris, GoZ is only available in the Sculpting part - not available once the model in Sculptris enters PAINT mode. i.e. you cannot send a painted sculptris model to Zbrush to continue being painted via GoZ. Sending a Zbrush model to Photoshop for texture map painting is exactly that... you cannot send PS a Zbrush model that has not had UV map applied and/or that has only been polypainted. The polypaint is a cool feature only existing inside Zbrush. Apps outside Zbrush only understand texture maps. If you want to send a polypainted model to PS, you need to clone the polypainted surface to a TEXTURE MAP (in the TOOLS section of tools). Then you can send that to PS... alternatively you can also use ZAPLINK but GoZ is a bit quicker and cleaner to send back than ZappLink. As for the answer about Zbrush's Collada exporter from Zsculpty plugin. I guess if it can only export a static mesh then that answers my question on how you can have two objects in a single model where one object can have a script that can move the object inside the other object. What you are saying is that two objects exported to SL are basically one single mesh and the two objects do not exist independently?

JeanneAnne wrote: OMG !! A rational poster on the forum.... ~faints~~ ~ *thud* Owch!! Jeanne SSSShhhhhh... dont say that too loud. There are many in this Merchant Forum that think I am only a LL Hating, angry, bullying Troll who wants nothing more than to see LL go down. You will instantly gain a lot of enemies from those in LL that will defend LL whenever possible. heaven forbid one would vocally express his concerns and frustrations at a vendor that makes as many business / I.T. mistakes as LL does and to challenge them to step up their game.

JeanneAnne wrote: Keep in mind that LL is a for profit corporation and that top executives will get their salaries & bonuses regardless of how badly LL is managed. Keep in mind that their own profit is all they care about, not yours. Don't bother building or scripting or selling anything in SL. If you're sufficiently talented to build marketable stuff, turn your talents to a more lucrative venue than SL. Have fun in SL rather than thinking of it as a business. LL has the deck stacked against you, in their own favor. Just decline to contribute to making LL executives rich while you struggle and get treated like this. Play SL for free and never spend a cent of real money on it. This way you get what you pay for and needn't complain about stuff like the Great MP Valentines Day Debacle. LoL Jeanne LOL 100% agree. Its every Avatar for themselves. Limit your risk with LL and the SL service. Since LL Executives are only in it for themselves and really have proven not to care about their customers... nor should you care about them. Use SL for what you can. Dont invest in premium accounts. Dont buy land unless it is purely to satisfy you personally. If you buy land to run a business - you need to fully understand you are operating a business on a high risk / low level of stability base of sand - that is LL and their management of the SL Grid and services. The good part for the way I am a customer in SL and a business on SL is that my #1 priority is to enjoy myself in SL. My #2 priority is to protect my interests and limit my liabilities from a Vendor's service (LL's SL) that has proven to have very low customer service, poor stability, and knee-jerk policy changes and business decisions that have damaged their customers countless times with no concerns by LL. To put any serious RL $US into SL would be a foolish decision. If LL and SL were to go under tomorrow... I would primarily be sad for the social aspect in my life that I have loved and lost. I would be sad that a sweet low burden no cost revenue stream into my RL bank account would finally come to a end. But I would not be injured or at risk for them going under.

So Medhue I am gonna be blunt about this... I dont give a S??T what the CEO of LL or any other company likes or doesnt like being told. Cry me a river. I also fully understand that if Rodvik's feelings are hurt because of what his CUSTOMERS demand and expect of him, that is fully in his court to take what ever response he wants to take.... then let the response of his CUSTOMERS fall where it might. What you and I have seen so many other SL residents keep forgetting... Rodvik heads up a company who's prime role is to maintain and grow a business .... and in order to do that the CEO of the company serves two masters... The Company's Board of Directors and the Company's CUSTOMERS. Guess where you fall into this equation Medhue? We are all Rodvik's Customers. Without us Rodvik doesnt have a job at LL since LL would not exist. As such, this might shock you Medhue but... WE ARE RODVIK'S ULTIMATE BOSS. So when Rodvik's company screws up as bad as it did and since he is the head of this company, we CUSTOMERS have 100% full rights to demand and expect the CEO to step and take a leadership role that he is being paid to do and explain to his ultimate bosses... us CUSTOMERS what went wrong and what will be done to make sure this wont happen again. What frustrates me about the SL Resident community is how such large % of LL Customers do not feel like customers of LL. They feel like they are just loyal servants to the LL Gods. If all the screw ups that teams within LL were to happen by RL business you are a customer of, I am sure you would not sit back and say "well the phone or cable or retailer is an idiot but lets not demand they clean up their act... afterall at least we should be so lucky as to have the service they provide us - no matter how bad it is" Why do so many of you not expect LL to treat you like a customer when you all in your RL expect RL vendors / business to treat you like a customer? WHY?

I said it in the other main thread on the "V-Day Massacre" and I will say it here. The CEO of the company needs to show his leadership execute on his responsibility as the head of the company and step up on behalf of LL to formally and very publically: Apologize to all these LL Customers affected by this fiasco Explain very transparently what actually and factually happened (no lies or blames or excuses) as well as the root cause of the problem and how many LL systems did it actually impact The current state. LL Grid Status states its RESOLVED but as many Merchants can confirm this is not the case as LL has a ton of incomplete transactions that THEY have in their account that is owed to the Merchants Most importantly, what is Rdovik going to do in the coming days / weeks to assure this mistake cannot happen again. Will LL finally identify and enforce change freezes for the most critical business periods of the year. Will he force LL Commerce to review the architecture of the Payment Transaction System so that a sales transaction is not logically split that allows 1/2 the sale to complete and getting the last 1/2 lost in their system (i.e. the part that pays the merchants). Will there be some changes in the LL Commerce Team to improve the lacking service levels and communications his team has been allowed to get away with all these months? fThis should be posted in the main blog by Rodvik and a clearly visible link to the blog should be on the MP pages saying "LL screwed up & we are sorry - please read message from LL CEO" We all know that LL never owns up to their mistakes unless heavily prodded. So it is the responsibility of each of us Merchants and even the affected customers of MP to contact Rodvik directly. Send him a notecard. Tweet him (like I have been doing). IM him. Send him an email. Complaining about it in the bowels of the Merchant forums will show no results. Rodvik doesnt read the forums and even if he did he is very happy that all the complaining stays in this one small forum that most ppl dont read. He needs to know how badly his company and staff screwed up and that he owes us all an explanation and a plan to make things better.

whew good. Thought it was just me. And I find it funny how "LL Commerce" is saying that they are blaming all these problems in 2 failures of hardware from yesterday but the MP started showing problems right around their announced scheduled HW MAINTENANCE at 4:51am today. I guess they are trying to cover up that it was all because a freak of bad luck and not something they did. But sassy is right... all the problems about merchants not getting paid for delivered products is horridly stupid System Architecture. Who separates a transaction?

and here is a weird thing.... ever since my last submitted posting in the forum, all my forum subscription notices to my email have stopped. I was wondering why the forums went so quiet and looked into the forums and noticed that the forums were still active but I am no longer being email notified. Is it only me or are the rest of you not getting email subscription notices?

Sassy, You and I and several other SL Merchants who have RL experience in Business IS operations can point at countless immature business and IS practices, architecture, planning, deployment, and customer service aspects. Solutions and practices that are Grade 6 common sense industry standards seem to be completely out of the grasp of comprehension of LL Development & Commerce. Sadly, we also have Executive and Senior LL management that condones these practices. What I have already done very publicly to Rodvik on Twitter, but it is the responsibility of all SL Merchants that they take some time and voice their frustration at how LL is allowed to continue these practices and demand answers from Rodvik when he will sit down with his Sr. Management and demand answers and an action plan. Questions you should be asking include the points made by Sassy on solution development, but even more importantly, you should ask Rodvik: Does LL have any identified business periods like V-Day where LL is not allowed to make ANY system changes unless they are to correct an active disruption. i.e. ask Rodvik if LL has any recorded CHANGE FREEZE windows and is V-Day one of them? If not, ask Rodvik why he allows Sr. Management to risk any service disruptions by performing any system upgrades only hours before one of the busiest shopping days in SL? There was a scheduled HW maintenance done by LL at 4:51am PST. Likely the cause to the MP failure. If V-Day was a designated Change Freeze, why did he or his sr. management allow this staff to violate this change freeze? What will Rodvik be doing in the next couple days to get to the bottom of this, demand changes to their processes to ensure this doesnt happen again, and report back to LL's Customers how LL will prevent this from happening again. As LL Customers that were impacted by this LL screw up, we have a responsibility as customers and SL product & service providers within SL /MP to demand that Rodvik take some actions. Rodvik on Twitter is chaulking this major screwup to "SODS LAW" when he knows full well that this was "LL's LAW" that was the root cause to this problem. We need to hold his feet to the fire and demand action. Rodvik.... stop focusing on the shiny new LL toys and focus on fixing the major fundamental immature processes and management within your current operations and staff.

yeahhh ... after some angry pointed tweets at him on not having good control of his team. Making changes on the night before the busiest one-day shopping spike on mp. My Tweet to him prior to his apology: Toy Soldier @ToysoldierThor @rodvik Your LL Commerce Team screwed up again. On 1 of @SecondLife busiest shopping days they break MP? Come on Rod, deal with this team ! Toy Soldier @ToysoldierThor What company other than #Linden Lab makes system changes on one of their busiest @SecondLife shopping days & not around when it breaks?

This is nothing new from the LL Commerce Team. Ironically I have recently been involved in the SL MESH Forums and the LL team members there are very engaging and interactive with the Mesh community. Heck... they even run a weekly inworld mesh usergroup meeting !! To bad they cant teach Brooke's team how customer service works and how to leverage the skills talents opinions of the Merchant community like the Mesh team seems to have done. Also, isnt is a Classic Flub by the Commerce Team that one of the more critical and busiest MP and inworld shopping DAYS of the year and LL screws up the site. I am pretty sure on my assumption that the MP did not break completely on its own. LL wont admit this but I will bet they decided to put in a background change into their server enviornment earlier today that screwed this all up. See LL... in the Real World of I.S. and I.T. for businesses, there are certain periods of the year where the business tells I.S. "CHANGE FREEZE" or "CHANGE CHILL".... dont make ANY CHANGES to the systems during this time as an unplanned outage can cause a lot of disruption to our business. For LL... this would include Valentines Day as it is a busy social event day that generates a lot of added shopping and inworld scheduled events activity. YOU DONT MAKE ANY CHANGES ON DAYS LIKE THIS!! Lastly, the fact that LL runs a truly 7x24 operation and yet it has been proven time and again that when a failure of MP happens outside of LL's normal SLT office hours... there is no one around to even look at the problem until the LL Commerce Team shows up to work in the morning with their coffee in hand realize that the MP has been down for 12 hours! And then some of the LL CheerLeaders wonder why merchants like me get so head-shaking frustrated at LL and their immature business practices.

Speaking from the perspective of a SL Mesh Modeling Noob and one that is quite new to this SL MESH Forum, these are just my thoughts.... The Mesh forum should be sub-divided to sub-forums like: "General Concepts & Q/A", "Mesh Workflows to SL", "Mesh Futures" and then a sub-forum for each 3D modeling tool "Blender", "3DMax", "Zbrush / Sculptris", "3DCoat", "Maya", etc. It would be great if there was a growing list of successful Workflows for any Mesh Noobs to follow and use as a seed of knowledge to grasp the end-to-end flow. These Workflows could be in each product sub-forum and pinned to the top as a suggestion. Maybe the workflows are better suited for wiki pages BUT then the workflows wiki link should be pinned to the top of the sub forums. I think a lot of the Mesh Experts might take for granted just how critical it is in the steep learning curve of creating mesh for SL a very basic simple step-by-step workflow is to a noob of a new concept. i.e. even though Blender to a new user of Blender is as daunting as taking on Brain Surgery, one of the Blender Gods/Godesses must be able to provide a sample end-to-end "down to the button press" workflow. Anyway... just wishful thinking. I am happy I finally broke through the first major show-stopping hurdle and I did my part for the Zbrush community.