Toysoldier Thor

Follow-up on the new @ SupportLinden Twitter account. Lets see how helpful this person in LL is. My tweet to this account... "ToysoldierThor Toy Soldier @SupportLinden Can U get LL Commerce to deliver on their promise to finally Forum/Blog Direct Delivery details to Merchants & answer Q&A?"

I just checked my MP inventory and all my listings are Available. I have 0 unavailable.

yes I noticed that on Twitter. I followed to see how many actually use it. We should start twittering all the open unfixed Jiras to LindenSupport

So Pamela, that further comfirms that LL Commerce is continuing to deploy DD under the covers without ANY information from the team to us on how it exactly works, when things are happening for deployment, and without answering all our questions on how their CURRENT actual on-going DD deployment might risk our MP business operations. What a sad team.

Brooke has promised this BLOG POSTED full disclosure update to the forum and merchant community several times and has to date has not delivered. Countless forum topics, threads, postings, questions, requests have asked, begged, pleaded for Brooke or even ANYONE from the LL Commerce Team to finally come clean and shed light on the details of DD. All we have got was more broken promises (as is a fact since Brooke promised shortly after her team's Sep 13th disaster of a change that she would very shortly post the details). Myself, Darrius, and several others opened a thread in this forum asking formal legit questions about DD for her team to answer. No one from LL responded to any questions. So we are still stuck making educated guess from the little details we have heard (i.e. from what Brooke mentioned in the August SLCC) or from insider leaks from those Merchants in the know of inside LL operations or Beta testers that are quietly leaking details outside the forum. Based on LL Commerce history, we have to assume that LL Commerce will deploy DD as soon a they feel the risk to Merchants and Shoppers is at a tolerable level (not gone - just at a level that LL's shoot from the hip deployment gut feel says IT SHOULD BE OK). This would likely be before Xmas / holiday season. BUT I suspect that because it looks like LL Commerce Team screwed up the MP DB / Index so bad that 6 weeks later the problem is still growing, that even for LL deploying DD with a corrupted indexed MP DB might be too risky. So their Sep 13th screwup MIGHT be the Merchant community's saving grace that it MIGHT force LL to deploy DD after the new year and not destroy the MP during the busiest season of the year. Sooooo we all sit and wait for Brooke to keep her promise.

yeah watching the last 3+ years of LL history - specially within the LL Commerce team... it moreso seems that a position at LL is like a Store Rental at a SL Mall.

What really does worry me about the SEP 13th screw up that you are detailing Darrius are: How did the LL Team not catch this major indexing screwup when they tested it on a test (non-production) MP DB? Did they even test applying this new index on a test DB? If they did, what was the purpose if they didnt even take the time to see the impacts from applying the new index? Does anyone in the LL Commerce Team even have test Merchant accounts with about 100 products in MP that they could have gone into to see "what happened? No QA. Regardless of the huge mess they created over a month ago, the fact that 6 weeks later LL has still not been able to clean it up / fix it... I agree with you Darrius... they MESSED IT UP BIG TIME. My big fear is that - in true LL fashion of meeting deadlines as a priority over quality of deployment or mitigation of risk to their customer's operations, the LL Commerce Management (we know we are talking about) will still forge ahead and continue to execute on deploying DD into production - if this mess is fixed or not. What will the screwed up index do to any MP listings that are migrated over from Magicbox to DD distribution? I am sure LL doesnt know and they will just cross their fingers that this mess will not affect them. My prediction is that LL Commerce Team's Sep 13th Ghosted MP Listings will become a permanent legacy for all us Merchant's of MP to just have to deal with. They will just give up and chaulk it up to ... "ohh well we tried to clean it up but in the grand scheme of it this is ugly but doesnt hurt anyone - right?? Let cross our fingers and let the next generation of LL Commerce Management / Development figure it out"

Kylie Jaxxon wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: For those SL creators / merchants that have building input materials or clothing, its relatively little effort to move your content over to these grids and set up a satelite shop to generate a bit of extra $ income. I have done it for a year now and i barely log into IW and it just generate about 5% of my total virtual sales. So for near-zero effort to maintain, it was a good investment to diversify. Just some thoughts. I wish more would do this. That's what holds me back from participating there. It's been a year for me since I logged on at IW...my problem is that I don't create or build. There wasn't anywhere near enough content for me to choose from to furnish/landscape my land...which is what I'm most interested in. If there was the selection that SL offers, I would over there in a flash with my own region The reason I made the decision last October to move all my sculpty packs to IW was because of receiving several requests from my customers and potential customers to either allow them to buy & transfer my packs to IW OR that I set up a store there to offer my packs to their build community. Since my policy on my sculpty packs is clear that customers cannot take my maps off the SL grid, I had no choice but to take about a week and export my packs to IW. My customers demanded it enough that I felt there was enough demand for added revenue. The nice thing was that I was even given free & substantially reduced store rental offerings for moving my content there. I am surprised that many other merchants dont take the effort to offer their stuff within a grid that is starved for quality build, furnishings, clothing content. But its good for me as I have less competition there. As for the size of the competing grid to SL, I think if the competing OpenSim grids would get together and meet (like all the crime bosses did to divvy up a city) and agree to merge all their grids into one larger grid, there would be a much greater chance for a competing grid to SL to evolve that would benefit them, us merchants, and even LL in that they would likely be forced to acknowledge that they have serious competition and change their current culture of NO CUSTOMER SERVICE. But I am just wishing as I could never see these grids agree on something like that.

Yupper... competing opensims like IW do offer much much more cost effective Sim Teirs with much larger prim counts and they have always had scalable prims (contrary to what SL finally started offering a month ago). But that is the biggest limitation with the competing grids....they still are far smaller in size to the SL grid. So they all struggle at this time for reach / maintain critical mass to attract much larger movements of populations from SL. i.e. of actual examples I know of since am a resident and sculpty maps merchant in IW as well as SL... A friend wanted to leverage the far lower sim costs to open a Karaoke / Live singing club. She is a popular singer in SL and hoped she could generate a cool leading Karaoke club in IW by using her popularity and followers in SL. After a couple months of tryng to get IW and transitioned SL residents... she gave up as there wasnt enough of a critical mass of online IW residents that wanted to attend. Right now - a lot of the IW and other open sims are Niche grids for those that want either privacy, and/or a much lower cost place to build, or to have a beautiful sim to live on and that have little dependence on the grid's population size. For those SL creators / merchants that have building input materials or clothing, its relatively little effort to move your content over to these grids and set up a satelite shop to generate a bit of extra $ income. I have done it for a year now and i barely log into IW and it just generate about 5% of my total virtual sales. So for near-zero effort to maintain, it was a good investment to diversify. Just some thoughts.

The only one that comes somewhat close is called Prim Perfect. The problem is that they focus more on finished interior / exterior design and not really build material that builders would use to landscape or create their final home and garden solutions. I had looked for a SL magazine that focused on Home and Garden and Sim building where I could promote to an audience of sim / home landscapers. Never really found one. I did have a small snippet of my landscape sculpties in Prim Perfect but it was too small to be noticed in the magazine and likely not exactly the right audience.

actually i checked again and none of my MP items actually have a # in them. They all have a DASH special character but I am assuming that is not affected by the search bug since even though my sales slumped ever sing August, they did not stop dead like you noticed Ann.

when did this new search engage that would have fallen to this "numbers in the SKU" bug? If it was early August, this could explain why as of the first week of August my sales plumeted to about 50% of normally highly stable weekly sales. They have never recovered since early august. My MP products all have SKU info of which there are #'s in the code - not pure numbers like "32423" but like "sculty-water-1" And why is this little tidbit secret of a MP Search bug only coming to light within the forums and only now? Is this a Jira that I missed? Is LL fixing this bug?

You were an excellent straightavatar for my point. Thanks

Mickey Vandeverre wrote: Balance is a Good Thing. The problem is that Rodvik does respond to the negative bloggers. It's encouragement to continue for more attention. Unfortunately. Dead On Mickey. A wise Sr. Exec or PR Team for a company would tackle negative messages if possible head on as opposed to ignore them. 1) It allows you to to counter any statements that are false, 2) it shows to all that you are not afraid to openly engage and willing to listen and address legit concerns that are brought up, 3) Its great optics, 4) It acutally quite often turns critics into qualified allies if the critics know that their concerns are at least being listened to - it shows to them that their concerns and criticisms are heard and respected even if not agreed to. And when someone is not heard... what does one do next? Speaks Louder. I have no problem speaking louder if LL cant hear me. Seems that is what LL Management wants me to do. An ancient proverb: Keep your Friends Close and your Enemies Closer. Rodvik is falling in line with all previous Sr. Management and LL culture of only paying attention to those that are "friends of LL" and completely ignoring any criticisms from anyone that exposes the weaknesses of his company. A sign of a weak leader when you only surround yourself with those that bow to you.

Whew.... thank goodness I never used the SALT megaprim packs. I checked my Gallery and home above my store and all were ok. I do feel really bad for the incredible damage that LL did to so many of their customers. All the work that must be redone - if some of them fix it up at all. And for LL to make such a massive mistake again and not even have a high ranking LL official at least blog with his apology to all his impacted customers and give all LL Customers a sense of assurance that this LL Staff / Process mistake will be fully investigated and controls put in place to ensure it will not happen again? Well it basically equals the poorly handled action of RIM after their 3 day outage of service. If Customer Service was really a key aspect for Rodvik, he should have immediately stepped up as CEO and at least blogged to his customers. Of course, this didnt happen. anyway..... /ME gets back to srubbing the walls of my store from the grafitti that Sassy left on the wall..... and NO Sassy, I am not a Popcorn-Eating Noob!!

Admittedly I did have a couple of digs at you personally, sorry if I offended you, but part of the point I am making is that you have a cult like undying disdain for all things LL and it would be difficult to put this across without mentioning you personally. It's unfair to suggest I didn't debate the topic, I think the arguments I made in this regard are quite clear. Actually contrary to what you believe, I do not have a hatred for ALL THING LL. First of all I like that you said "LL" vs "SL". I love most things "SL" with regards to the experience, the countless ppl I have met, the close friends I have made around the world, the doors in my RL that my experiences in SL have opened (i.e. I was able to formally realize and actually hone my creativity, artistic skills, and technical skills to fromally become an "Artist" over the past 18 months), and even the significant additional discretionary income to RL for doing something I love doing (creating 3D modeled shapes in SL). It is because I love virtual worlds like SecondLife so much and for the countless reasons like what I mentioned above, that I speak passionately and intently against anyone, any group, any organization that tries to damage it or destroy it - even if that enemy of SL is the owners of the actual grid that threatens it by their organizational immaturity and their resulting damaging actions to the virtual world I love so much. I find LL is most often the biggest threat to the grid that I love so much. As such, whenever LL strays off the path of trying to improve SL (which is about 90% of the time), I will use whatever powers available to me to expose their bad strategies, stupid repeated preventable mistakes, poor customer service culture, and weak organizational structure. Since I cannot sit on the LL board... Since I am not one of the "favored friends" of LL with a back-channel voice with key LL staff... Since LL's staff has a culture that only learns & listens from being publicly embarassed for their mistakes... The only power I have to defend SL from LL's stupidity is to publicly flog them whenever they do things that risks SL. Unlike you and a few others here that truly believe the best apporach to make SL healthy is to hide LL's stupid mistakes, defend their actions at all costs, compliment LL staff for trying so hard, etc. I see these actions by Customers of a poorly run operation as harmful to the progress of the product/services this company offers and even a form of Customer irresponsibility. So.... there you have it. The moment LL does something to SL that is clearly positive and impressive, I will be there to pat them on the head. The moment LL treats their customers with respect and wishes to work with them, I will be first in line to work co-operatively with them ( I have had a few good back channel private talks with sr. LL staff - I dont brown nose with them - I had straight forward one-on-one topic discussions with them). But until then, this is my strategy to protect SL from its owners actions.

thats true it has no roof just floor, huge mega rock sculpty walls and mega prim waterfalls. IS my floor and walls up? Thanks for check

seems that is the end result from reading the Jira. LL has un blacklisted but if your content was one of the victims of LL's latest stupidity... all you can do is rebuild if you didnt back up your build. If my store is damaged - I never backed up my store build. It will be mostly gone if those megas were the ones I used. And then ppl wonder why ppl like me are truly scared when LL Development plans to roll out DD. LL culture has proven once again.... they ACT FIRST and THINK LATER. This is just so frustrating. In the jira... a university was about to hold classes on the sim and they classes are gone. no back out . Tell me how many LL customers will now say "screw it I am not building this here in SL again..."

WOW this is a MAJOR F??K up. And the Jira comments from LL so far are indicating that they wont be able to back out this huge mistake over the grid - they are asking customers to file lost content support tickets and to back out private regions. My store, gallery, home is on mainland! I cant log into SL until tonight but i am afraid to see what is left of my parcel of land. I have used megas all over the place!!

Ralph, I do agree that a major factor of what is eroding inworld Grid activity and inspiring several SL Grid customers to strongly consider and actually execute on a strategy of moving more or all of their activities to other open grids like IW is the high cost of SL Teir for sims. If land costs were much lower and prim counts per sim much higher (i.e. look at the monthly costs and prim counts on IW vs SL), then this would likely stimulate a significant resurance of inworld activity. I am very comfortable is saying that if LL has lost teirs for 655 sims in the past year (due to customers closing or abandoning sims) its mostly due to the cost of maintaining them not being worth it anymore AND/OR because they could get an equivelent sim on a competing grid for a fraction the month costs with double the prim count. The potential problem is (and I do not know this figure - only LL does) is that LL must charge a minimum fee per sim that is tied directly to the RL costs of operating the physical server it runs on as well as all the associated costs to operate that server in their DC. If they could lower this cost and pass the savings to the customers by way of reduced teir costs then LL could do a lot to stem the flow of their customers migrating their activities to lower cost open grids. If LL is reducing these per sim costs (i.e. more virtual sims per physical server, faster cheaper servers, etc) and not at least passing down a portion of these savings to the customer (i.e. LL is being blindly greedy) then they are consciously ignoring their competition and causing their own demise as the SL Grid erodes in use. If LL has done everything possible to reduce per sim costs and their teirs reflect a near break-even pricing, then LL is in deep trouble since that means they are not running a competitive product to their growing competition that can operate their sims at much lower costs and in turn offer sims to us customers at much lower teir pricing. I think its more option #1... LL is ignoring that they have competition and does not want to pass on any of their cost savings to their customers and basically they are Fiddling as Rome burns.

One of the major problems with the LL Q reports - that I pointed out in my blog - is that there are so many stats that LL could be providing in the report that would be of much much greater value for more effective interpretation of the healthcheck of LL's SL grid and supporting products (i.e. the SL MP). Even some of the stats provided are not exactly clear what they represent or the scope of the stats. The number of SL Account transactions that occur has really little value. If I hand you a gift or inventory? If I transfer funds to my Alt? If a vendor sends out split pay to multiple recipients? Are these all transactions that should be counted or counted many times? A few stats of many that I am sure you all can come up with that would be much more insightful: Monthly L$ Buys from $US vs L$ credit processing volumes (i.e. how much RL $US cash is entering the SL economy vs is formally leaving the SL economy by the LL Customer cashing it out)? Tied to New Registration count, % of these registrations that login 1 , 5 , >10 times within the month. Some kind of factual indication of how many of the supposed 10's of thousands of new registrations are "sticky" Also, somewhat related to new registration but a much larger picture... a running tab on "# of Registered SL Accounts per registered IP address". This ratio would provide an estimate of how many aALTS are actually on the grid. (This is an important stat to see it trend because if this ratio is increasing from Q to Q, then LL could actually explain why the Avg. Hours Logged in Per SL Account seems to be sinking. If I used to have 1 Alt but now I have 5 Alts and since I am only 1 person, 4 of my Alts never login too often. This would skew the avg hours logged in per user to look like its sinking when its just that there is a growing number of idle "utility" Alts on the grid.) Number of Active SIM paying Teirs to LL per month. I am sure LL does not want to show this number but it is the strongest indication of the health of the Grid. We all have seen a visible rise in sims that are closing down / being abandoned. I would like to see this stat tracked quarterly. I would like to see a bigger breakdown of SL MP sales and traffic stats in addition to the volume of L$ sales on MP. I would love to see # of Transactions in addition to L$ so that the avg price of an MP item being bought was tracked. This would show if content value is in the increase or continuing to be on the decline. A breakdown of sales per major category. GP, Adult, Mature / Product Categories / Sculpty vs Mesh items / etc. A stat I cant see how it would be possible to track is Sales volumes of Inworld vs MP. I suspect strongly that MP sales have been on a constant rise at the cost of inworld sales. Hence a major erosion of inworld stores, malls, and closure of sims. But no actual stat to show that. I could go on but those would be some stats I would like to see. Chances are they wouldnt show up in the report.

my licence agreement covers the use of UUID usage in scripts and such usage of my map's UUID is generally not allowed except under special conditions and permissions by me to that requesting customer. No-Mod hides the UUID - and that is the rare reason why I have got a customer requesting for a full perm access to my pack so they could use it for a script that needed my map's UUID. Anyway.. this is off topic. I am backing out of this thread.

OK thanks... because I agree that input porducts like sculpty maps have clear reasons for being no mod. Thanks for clarifying. /ME backs out of the thread conversation..... goes back to eating popcorn.

You poo poo'ed on any merchants that sold NO MOD without clarifying your criticism. my master builders packs of sculpty maps are NO MOD so as such you were slamming merchants like me. As for your question... My sculpty maps are no-mod and have an alpha layer on it. The only LEGIT way to export my sculpty map texture would be to use the Viewer's Save Texture As feature under the File menu option. If you are attempting to use any other means to remove my texture off the SL grid (and violate my Licence agreement that explicitly does not permit my customers to remove my sculpty maps from the SL grid) then you are taking extrodinary illegal actions to violate my agreement on terms of use. I didnt say that if you were technically smart enough you could leverage the weakness of the viewer to STEAL my content. Nothing is perfect regarding protecting IP in SL, but by place an Alpha layer on my map textures and making them No-Mod, I have made it difficult enough for the vast majority of SL residents who might intend to violate the agreement that they simply wont. For those resident that both do not have the morals and do have the smarts to steel my content, there is nothing more i can do except to DCMA them if I ever catch them. Lucky for me, in my 2+ years of selling my full perm and no-mod packs of my landscape sculpties, I have had extremely honest and highly respectful customers that honor and value my creativity and work. So my protection is only for very very small percent of SL residents whom may not be as respectful.

Actually the reason for the significant increase in Q3 registrations over all previous years is related to that 1-2 100% spike of daily registrations. As another Merchant in this forum pointed out in her blog, that 100% 2 day spike happened on the SLCC weekend. Obviously because of the major PR and advertising and media attention on SL from that event, LL lucked out and got a huge spike of registrations. This would have been a significant impact to the Q3 stats as that was the equivilent of two additional normal days of registration (about 45,000 more registrations over normal). This was also clearly an anomaly as it happened because of a directed event that caused it. It was not because there was a trend of increased registrations as LL was trying to imply or brag about. Sadly for LL, Q4 will likely show that registrations will have declined over Q3 since this anomaly will now not be there. At this time LL will report that registrations declined but it was within the x.x% range and downplay it. So in this situation, what comes up will come down. (OMG... I cant believe it... I am being negative in my posting of the stats.... let me add a positive to my posting.... ON THE GOOD SIDE.... LL was able to report in Q3 that they noticed a major increase in registrations - I have to assume this must mean that interest in SL is catching on in the RL!)