Toysoldier Thor

Pamela Galli wrote: Not much good (economic) news except the MP seems to be doing well. More registrations but not as much time online, etc. I just looked through the latest charts and I agree with you Pamela. What is just as interesting is how the author from LL downplayed the bad news and waved the flag and bragged about the little good news there was in the report. I took some time this morning to perform a full TOY ASSESSMENT of LL's Q2-2011 Economic summary. It is detailed enough that I decided to create a blog posting on it. http://toytalks.weebly.com/1/post/2011/08/ll-q2-11-results-bad-hidden-news-with-sugar-on-top.html I went through each stat reported by LL. Tell me what your thoughts are. Toy

When you look at the Transaction History, I would not use the Marketplace Orders "Transaction History" to determine if you are missing a paid order. Its chronology of listed transactions does not synch with the reports I mentioned below that should be used to compare... Compare the Marketplace - REPORTS - ORDERS report with the www.secondplace.com - Account - Transaction History. Line up the order numbers between the two to make sure what was order and delivered and paid in these two reports are in synch. Example, is yesterdays transactions. If I listed all transactions in both these report for August 11th I would see a correlation. But if I do the same filter for the Market Orders Transaction History - one of my orders processed yesterday would be missing. Why? Because this order seems to have been placed on Aug 10th and then not delivered for almost 24 hours (I assume she bought it while at work or somewhere and did not log into SL inworld for 24 hours). Just a bit of info.

PS.... as per LOST LEADER ... I know full well about what you are talking about. But the concept of LOST LEADER is not as much about advertising one of your products - its about offering it at a rediculously low price that draws in customers wanting that deal... and ohh by the way while they are in your store buying the product - they see the other products and buy them too. This is what MIDNIGHT MANIA and all the other inworld destroying marketing gimmicks are all focused on. Of course you need to promote / advertise the product you are cutting price on.... but LOST LEADER is about price cutting not advertising it. Regardless Sassy, every time I tried listing enhancements - its not that I didnt see ANY increase in that product's sales volume during or after the enhancement period..... I saw NO INCREASE IN ANY OF MY PRODUCT SALES IN SLM OR INWORLD. This happened on every one of my 4 attempts. Then I finally smartened up and realized that my customer base is not influenced by pretty pictures flashing in front of their eyes. To get to my target market I needed to put all my efforts in understanding how to get my landscape sculpty map packs into the forefront of SLM search. And over the past year since SLM was released - I have accomplished that. That is why - with ZERO SLM ADVERTISING EXPENSES - my sales in SLM has been rock solid steady even on my oldest packs that are now 2 years old this month! They are still my best sellers. and its not because of listing enhancements and even if I paid 3000L a month to put them on the top of the main page of SLM - it would not change my sales volumes. If you and Ziggy believe so strongly in Listing Enhancements and want to prove me wrong - then put your money where you mouth is. YOU pay my 1 month of product Listing Enhancements on one of my 6 premium packs. I know my sales volumes weekly since they are as steady as a rock almost all the time (unless LL screws up SLM like they have the past 2 weeks). If the listing enhancements increass my overall sales by more than 10% over the 1 month vs the past 3 previous months - I will pay you back x 2 the costs of the listing enhancements. Seems like you both are so sure Listing Enhancements are such a valuable tool.... here is a way you can prove me wrong and make an easy ~ $3000L (or however much it would cost for 1 month of enhancements) of extra money. The offer stands. PROVE ME WRONG!

Sassy Romano wrote: Here's how I do enhancements... I pay money, I don't care. End. By definition, i'm stupid. Let me explain how I shop... I open MP, I *ONLY* view the enhanced products on the front page now when i'm casually browsing and if I like the look of the item, I typically view the rest of the creators products. I find I don't often buy the enhanced item but will buy others and often i'll TP inworld. This style of shopping is difficult to track at best and MP provides very very poor, to zero methods to do so effectively. Advertising/Enhancements are sometimes at a loss leader, especially where branding is concerned. From my inworld vending system, I can easily determine the full value of a mall spot, including those sales at my main shop due to someone seeing the mall spot and tp'ing to main to buy. The mall spot might not sell enough to cover its cost, main store sales as a result of that spot are a very different picture, other mall spots do much better but do I immediately do a simple report of that one location and say "OMGZ I lost s few L$, I must close it?" Not usually no. Only if the compound value is just pointless over an externded period of time will that happen. Then there are also the places that i'm affectionately attached to, like a sick animal, just hard to put down. So as was mentioned by me and also Josh... for some market segements - SLM enhancements might be effective and I agree that CLOTHING is surely one of them. Why, because there are shoppers like Sassy that are bored and have nothing else to do so they decide to open up SLM and simply watch the SLM listing enhancements go by and buy whatever pretty Merchant picture is placed before her. This type of shopper is very clearly geared toward clothing shoppers - those the have the instinctive urge to BUY - and Clothing is usually what they want to buy but they dont know what clothing to buy so they will let the Merchant that advertises best - influence them. Now see Sassy... my market segment of customers DO NOT come into SLM because they are bored and simply wanna buy something. I sell Landscape Sculpty Map packs and my customers are very busy and have projects to get done and they come into SLM with a specific purpose. They are specifically coming into SLM to use it as a SEARCH ENGINE and they LOOK for what they need. They dont come into SLM because they are bored and sit and watch the screen fly by with Merchant ads to influence them. In fact I dare say that to them the Listing Enhancement Ads are more of an annoyance - like they are to me - and uses up valuable search result window space. So... If you are a Merchant that is selling in SLM to a marketshare dominated by the SASSY Shoppers (i.e. typically and this is not an insult - a female shopper that is just window shopping for a neat new outfit to wear) then Listing Enhnacements are likely value to you. If you are a merchant with a customer base that you know uses SLM as a tool to search for a product or options for a product they need (and not as a form of entertainment), then Listing Enhancements are a completely waste of time. Its not a lost leader, it wont improve your SLM or Inworld sales enough to ever recoup its costs. And pumping money into listing enhancements is a waste of money. I learned over the past 2 years that my customers do not care about listing enhancements. If you want to improve traffic and sales to your SLM listings.... focus on your listing content and get your listing to the top of the search results. THAT is far better use of your time than using expensive SLM enhancements as a crutch.

Thank you Brooke

Haveit Neox wrote: Am I doing this right? I just opened a page on MarketPlace as a merchant and noticed right away that my items would go to the outer worldly page number 111,758 in Search. As that seemed to guarantee invisibility, I decided to try out enhancements. Put up my pavilion on main page, but never saw my ad there though I looked for 30 min, hitting refresh after scrolling thru all the ads on display. I’m sure to have seen thousands of ads, but not mine. Then I added my texture pack and sculpture under their respective Landing Page Categories as separate ads. In this, my first week on MP, I sold one texture pack for 225 L, but have spent over 1,600 L on advertising for the same week. One thing I noticed is that many ads repeat frequently. I’m wondering if that’s the way to go, and if so, how do you repeat an ad more than once? Are there other strategies I should be thinking about to gain exposure? Thanks! Haveit Neox I JUSTTTT talked about this in the other thread and how in my opinion SLM Listing Enhancements are utterly USELESS. Thank you for being my straightman on this topic. Welcome to the complete USELESSNESS OF THE SLM LISTING ENHANCEMENTS! IMHO - you learned a costly and valuable lesson that many SLM Merchants have learned... Save your money and dont waste your $L on listing enhancements. What you experienced and noticed on your first experience with Listing Enhancements - I have noticed every one of my 4 wasted money experiements with Enhancements. For the most part - I think those that use Listing Enhancement have just convinced themselves that they only have SLM sales at the levels they do because they keep paying for enhancements. I am sure other Merchants will tell you they are so important to them and it is a must have cost to SLM... Not for me.... I have saved $10s of thousands of $L by not wasting it on useless SLM Listing Enhancements.

Ziggy21 Slade wrote: Josh Susanto wrote: Divide your listing enhancement costs by about 30 and multiply by the number of days your sales have been down (keep counting, eh). That is the absolute minimum amount of money you should have earned in that time in order to warrant the cost of the listing enhancements for those days. Ok, L$2899 / 30 = 97 or about 40 cents per enhancement per day. Ya know I reckon I will be ok, thats about 6 minutes takings. I think there is one more factor to the formula that Josh didnt mention and its not a factor in the formula that is easy to quantify. So to me Josh should have said... "Its the absolutely minimum NET NEW Revenue that the listing enhancment should generate over that period". If you are not comparing the COST of the enhancment vs the REVENUE the enhancement takes credit for, then all you are saying is that you have enough revenue in general to cover the cost of the advertising. It does not tell you if its worth while having the enhancement all together. Quantifying how much NET NEW REVENUE the Enhancement can actually take 100% credit for is not easy and an extrapolated estimate at best. But... based on my 4 experiments in using time period enhancements over the past couple years, the Enhancement Costs never generated enough net new revenue to warrant the cost of the enhancement. In fact, the enhancements proved every time to be 100% ineffective to generate any new sales... ANY NEW SALES! Another reason I steer away from SLM Enhancements is that if you decide to spend money on say a 7 day listing enhancement and then LL has a 2 day major traffic dropping incident (like they did this week), LL does not reimburse you for running an enhancement that was rendered ineffective because of their mistake. They even state that they would take liability for wasted costs or lost revenue caused by LL's mistakes or failure of the service. TO BAD SO SAD! I have long since given up on listing enhancements. Maybe it works for some of you Merchants (i.e. you can prove that you generate more revenune from enhhancements then the costs of the enhancements) because of the market sector you are in, OR, you just convinced yourself that enhancements are a significant revenue increasing factor when it actually is not the enhancements, OR, you just want to advertise and as long as GENERAL REVENUE covers the cost - it makes you feel good that you are adverstising..... but for me... SLM Listing enhancements are an utter waste of hard earned revenue. Like a RL business, if you your advertising/marketing costs are not demonstrating to generate new revenue to cover its cost - its wasted money. Yeah this topic is OT to the OP... but I wanted to chime in..... I am still waiting to hear from Brooke as to what the root cause was for the login failures and SLM instability. LL obvisously know what the problem was - they say they fixed it. So what was it and how did they fix it? Was it a code backout of DD?

Josh Susanto wrote: If they don't want to announce to everyone things that might make them vulnerable to (more?) hackers, I'm actually OK with that. So you are assuming they got hacked ?? I dont think what happened was a hack. I think it was LL installing new code into the SLM to prepare it for something - like DD and this update screwed things up. If so, they likely backed out some code they installed. Might explain why it took so long to fix. Alternately - it was a network issue in their DC - the "sometimes it works next time it dont" could point to a undersized or misconfigured network device like a proxy or firewall. But until Brooke comes clean - we can only come up with theories.

Brooke Linden wrote: HI all, We have resolved these issues. We will continue to monitor Marketplace this evening. Please alert us if you see any additional issues. Thank you. Brooke Thanks for providing a status.... would it be too much to ask you or someone else at LL what the root cause of the RESOLVED problem was? Why was SLM borked for 2 days? In case you didnt realize, your Merchant customer base is made up of a huge deep base of pretty smart RL ppl that know as much about technology as your team does. We would find it very interesting to know what was the root cause that was resolved. In RL when I engage with my IT suppliers and they report a major incident - like what has happened here with SLM that has caused who knows how many $10s of 1,000's of dollars or more in lost sales - I expect and I get details as to what the root cause to the outage was. If its an outage within our corporate nework, our vendor tells us what it was (i.e. a damaged interface card on a PE Router in xxx CO that was replaced). LL needs to stop treating their Merchants like babies..... Please have someone provide a bit more details as to what the root cause of the problem was that impacted all of us for 2 days and what you did to fix it. Thanks

What Darrius is talking about is exactly the examples I was referring to in another thread about the culture of a STAGE 2 company ... The fun work of releasing the basics of a new website, ecommerce site, major function like DD, inworld function like MESH is what drives the LL strategists and developers. Ever since the basic SLM took over from XSTREET, no one at LL wants to finish the job of deploying the missing functions in SLM that xstreet had. That is boring to LL! Its important wanted features by the merchants (LL Customers) but LL Development an Commerce team doesnt want to do software maintenance and minor fixes like finishing the critical SLM reporting. Brooke and Team wants to tackle Direct Delivery. LL development doesnt want to fix lag on the sims - they want to work on the MESH. That is why JIRA is awash with countless rarely looked at or LL dismissed bugs in the existing inworld grid like VWR-4018 which has been a terribly annoying bug in the grid for years but as you can see for yourself - LL has now placed into the blackhole called "Product Backlog". AKA "bugs we will never fix because we are working on exciting new functions like Mesh" LL as a Corporate Case Study screams out as an immature Stage 2 company structure.

Sassy is hard to read as she does often favor LL but I suspect she was referring to LL's antics.

It has been said and pointed out by many of us LL Customers (that includes us Merchants) countless times how LL's software/services/policy development and deployment is constantly stuck in the immature "startup" company culture of shoot from the hip since a long as i have been in SL and observing LL's childish strategies. We all are in violent agreement - because so many of us are in the same I.T. industries that LL struggles to run - that LL's SDLC is still in the early stages of maturity. The problem I have is with all this is that in the 3 years of observing and engaging in this topic of interest for me - I have not seen really any serious progress since 2008. LL is in a stage in their Corporate Lifecycle that I refer to as STAGE 2 - CONTAGION. In 5 Stages of corporate maturity - this is the stage that so many young startup companies get stuck in and ultimately die in or get bought out in by more mature companies that want to pillage the idea but not the people and processes that failed the startup. This stage is where there is a lot of growth in revenue from a successful idea, product, service, etc. created in Stage one, BUT, the startup entrepenuerial spirit and culture of the company is no condusive to move the company forward to a lavel of business processes maturity and control disciplines. That is Stage 3 - CONTROL. Over the past couple years LL has made a lot of sr management overhauls and shifts in an attempt to rid itself from the Stage 1 culture that is holding it back. Sadly - so far - they have enough of the old guard in place in sr. management as well as informal yet powerful influencers in lower staff positions that does not allow LL to shake the old "shoot from the hip" immature business / IT processes that holds it in CONTAGION. The Control stage is an ugly stage for Stage 2 cultures and staff to swallow. Why? Because they dont like control. It limits their freedom. They see controls as bureaucratic and slows things down and impedes technical progress. They also get bored of controls like proper systems management and maintenance. They really dont like dealing with all the complaining customers who are not satisfied with the crumbling services that LL staff dont want to support - since they would rather be working on the next COOOL NEW IDEA! They long for the good old days of the Startup. As such, for LL, their startup culture is so strong that even after firing 1/3rd of their staff and management and replacing the CEO - the startup culture remains. So, until we see this shakeup or until LL dies or is bought out within Stage 2, we will not see any improved Customer Service, Customer Support, proper services/software maintenance, and low risk new software deployment. This is the culture that LL staff do not see the value of - even though most LL customers complain constantly to them daily of these weaknesses. Then LL Management and staff will defend their business practices by only working with Customers and partners that are open champions of LL's cause (brown nosers or those that are being rewarded one way or another for openly defending LL). LL will also isolate themselves from those (like me) that see all their problems and troubles and weaknesses because it only scares them. They are like Ostriches - keeping their head in the sand and closing their ears to ligit criticism. The only hope for LL is Rodvik but even though he is the CEO - he is not powerful enough to change a company's entire culture unless he seeks out and listens and embraces criticism AND then seeks out the champions of the old culture and replaces them with those that can think more business strategically and are strong Change Agents. These people are very hard to find as they have a lot of smarts and are very out of the box thinkers and are very stubborn. Some call these the AX MEN. There you go.... as the deafening silence from the LL Commerce Team continues - those are my theories as to why LL's immature practices will not stop. (PS due to time - i apologize for bad grammer and spelling - didnt have time to check it)

My old 59L tapestries have become a better seller in my SLM store than my premium traditional best selling sculpty landscape packs which make over 90% of my total revenue. Sadly I suspect - based only on Brooke's last posting and LL Development's strong history of how they release new experimental code into production that as of August 1st, the LL Commerce Team has started adding the needed software components of the mystery Direct Delivery into the main production SLM code. And these changes are possibly somehow impacting the SLM. Also the continued rash of SLM login and access problems that started yesterday and is still happening now could also be symptoms of LL quietly sliding in the DD components. BTW these problems which Brooke has not updated anyone on since her last posting on this issue was yesterday at 2pm - no news from her as to what the problem is and when they will fix this. This is a natural guess since when Brooke was challenged last week why she has stopped providing marketplace updates she was clear is telling all of us that her excuse was because the has been nothing to report since her team is totally focused on the DD development and deployment. SO.... since Brooke stated LL is only working on SLM DD activities, one can only predict that the source of our significant sales drops and failed logins is a result of their queit DD deployment into production. Its not the first time that the LL Development Team has put Beta code into production without warning anyone. As much as it would be a appropriate for the LL team to be open and honest as to what they are doing to SLM that is affecting the SLM service - I suspect we wont get any REAL INFO from Brooke, Dakota, or any LL spokesperson as to the source of the problem. It will just embarass them. We will likely get the typical "we have not made any changes that would affect the marketplace and we are still looking into the slm login instability - sorry for the inconvenience". So frustrating!

I am totally in synch with you on this. It was around the 1st of the month for me as well that my top selling items just stopped selling. I dont mean that they stopped dead to ZERO but daily sales of them significantly dropped to less than half - even had a few days where none of my main items sold - just my small older products. What has kept selling as much as always has been my FREEBIE DEMO PACK. They dont seem to be affected - but of course - WHO CARES as they make me no money. I am exactly like you Mickey in that I know something has changed in SLM when my steady-as-a-rock daily sellers (and my most profiable ones) collapse in sales for more than a few days. I am glad you noticed it too and other threads have also had many merchants stating that something has changed. What angers me is that just recently Brooke posted that she has not updated the Mechants because there has been no changes other then their DD efforts. So Brooke - based on your comments - I guess this major negative impact on SLM sales is from your team's quiet DD efforts??

Mickey Vandeverre wrote: Good Morning Lindens May we please have an update on the status of the Marketplace? Have yesterday's glitches been resolved across the board? Was there a rotation of product? as in, was there a new algorithm applied or a new sort style applied or whatever you call that process, so that a different assortment of items now show up on the first pages? perhaps a new weight assigned that we are not familiar with yet? For instance...on our top sellers that have sold every single day several times a day for days on end for like a year...would there be an explanation as to why those stopped selling overnight? Do your marketplace hits/sales records show a huge slump across the board, so that we have something to go by? Thank you. I completely agree - the LL Commerce Team needs to open up and speak up as to what changes have happened to the Marketplace in the past couple weeks. As Mickey said - I see the exact same thing happening... My top selling items which have a very very steady daily sales tracking of a few sales a day (on big $L price each) have pretty much stopped selling. For the past two weeks my top selling items are lucky if I sell 1 a day! This has not been a 1 or 2 day glitch - this has been going steady now for over a week - my weekly sales are less then 1/2 normal weekly sales. And my weekly sales are normally VERY VERY steady (fluctuating less than 10% between weeks). So I am right with Mickey on this request. Brooke, your team needs to speak up and come out of hiding and explain what has been going on. Your team has made changes and they have impacted SLM traffic/sales for many Merchants severely. What did your team do?

Welcome to LL support. It took them 5 hours to discover there was a problem with SLM and then they close the ticket and think its fixed and resolved when its not. sighhh - gotta love LL support and customer service. At least Brooke posted once to repeat what the grid already said and didnt provide one bit of extra info.

seems this Grid Server upgrade is not an "Average Joe" low risk to rezzed assets or service type of upgrade. The fact that LL is mentioning in their GRID STATUS upgrade to save all builds is very scary ! I am sooooo royally ticked off that LL is executing a serious potentially sim disrupting / damaging upgrade and they only made a grid-wide warning to all residents a few hours before they start. Do they not think that some of us have RL jobs and there is no way we can get to the grid in time to save our builds??? Come on LL!!! Atleast give us 24 hours GRID-STATUS warning for changes of this magnitude. Wow - what a half baked immature company.

What is really scary about the SL Main Grid Status announcement is that LL is warning all residents not only to stop all purchases but that all residents should SAVE ALL BUILDS! So thank you very much LL for giving residents a whopping couple hours to log into SL and save our builds when most of us residents have RL Jobs and have no FRIKKEN way to get to the grid in time to save our builds! Hey LL - if you are going to make a major change to the grid that you truly believe there is a risk of losing or corrupting rezzed builds on the sims, you might want to send out an ALL POINTS WARNING on the main grid status about 2 days earlier so that ALL RESIDENTS have a chance to get into SL and save any unsaved builds. Welcome to LL - Kings of Immature Processes!!

I have a very stable weekly Sale Volume for a long history - over a year. On a weekly basis my sales almost never deviates more than 10% - 15% (usually 5% or less). So when I see a week where my weekly sales volume drops 50%+ , something is wrong. Well for the past 1.5 weeks, this has been the case. It does occassionally happen for me. 3 weeks prior to Christmas and thru New years day my sales usually plumet. This is an understandable and explainable BAD period for my product line as Landscape Sim builders seem to take a rest or get distracted SL or RL. But when it happens outside it this slow period, then something is wrong. Specially when the drop is sudden. Something has happened in SLM / SL that is affecting my SLM/Inworld sales dramatically for the past week and a half. I hope this is not because of LL experimenting with DD deployments or some other secret SLM changes that are technically stopping my customers from getting to my store. BUT the fact that others are also noticing a dramatic noticable drop this past week tells me that the LL Commerce Team must be at play and impacting us.

Chelsea Malibu wrote: Not sure what you mean but the rankings for ratings in MP is for the length of the item and is there for as long as the item is. So, lets say I had a very popular skin from 3 years ago and today's skins are far better now. The new one having been new will have less people rating it and since they changed how things are rated (no longer pushing you into the rating systems) new items have a lower chance of getting rated. I show ratings still and they count in rankings for products that I have had up for years. It also allow for easy gaming where you can get all of your friends to create a rating for you or worse, your alts. There is nothing fair or useful about the rating system as it is however, they could work if they made some changed. First off, ratings need to die off after time, say 12 months. Second, the rater needs to be identified. It's BS that someone can put one star up and not be identified that they did this. This also allows us to contact unsatisfied customers and correct it. Since I offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee, I would rather give them their money back or fix it, but the current system does not allow it. Last, the ratings a user gives need to be tracked as well as well as who they have rated. If someone constantly gives ratings of 1 stars to all users but 4 stars to another merchant with competing products, we then know that someone is playing with the system. In the end, there is nothing helpful nor fair about the current system and I say this being some with almost all rated items in the 4 star range. In the end, I respect what you are doing as well as your knowledge/ability as a SL creator however, I don't think your motion is nearly enough. I totally agree and have mentioned many of these concerns and suggestions before - but they were ignored as per usual. I completely agree and fully support that IF the rating system continues (which we all cant predict it will) that at the very least - ratings below 3 should MANDATE that the rater's name be identified. If a customer has that deep a concern about my product AND if this same customer has even approached me to bring up this deep concern to the point that he/she would rate my product a 2 or a 1, then they should be prepared to stand by their serious concern. This gives me the opportunity to contact this user to get more detail. But moreso, by forcing rating identification for ratings below 3. It also stops dead the Gaming and HiJacking that many of us Merchants have experenced by these unscrupulous ppl (be they competitors, griefers, or ppl with an Ax to grind on a Merchant). I also agree that ratings that were set 2 years ago should be aged out. If the rating is 18 months old - it should be removed from the listing like a sliding window. But the best solution.... REMOVE THE RATING SYSTEM ALL TOGETHER.

/me thinks that if the LL Commerce Team found the time to put in a FB button onto all our listings, then this change of simply adding a couple lines of text into the already existing MP Reviews should be even more simple and done in 4.9 minutes. As one might have already said... "this is low hanging fruit". (lets see if LL executes on low hanging fruit not on LL's own private list of MP improvements - stopwatch was clicked on)

Sassy Romano wrote: Toy, it isn't FACEBOOK a question FaCeBoOk of honey or facebook vinegar. You (facebook) are LIKE THIS! using words fACEBook that just F-A-C-E-B-O-O-K just don't catch LL's FAAAAAACCEEEEEBOOOOOKK attention. Ok Sassy - I read your post 5 times. You totally lost me. Not sure what you might be wanting to say. lol thought I would tell you.

Dart, I will be perfectly honest with you. I would love nothing better then to have a good healthy mutually respected relationship with the LL teams. Sadly, since 2009, I have been burned by the LL Commerce Team time and time again. Where I lost all respect for LL Commerce Team was back in the fall of 2009 during the Freebies/Clutter Listing Tax fiasco. Prior to Collosus's shocking release of that Clutter Tax announcement, I actually felt there was some communications happening and that some of the discussions me and several merhcant were having about the topic was being listened to. I was open to actually giving Pink and Collosus anothe chance because I saw hints of good two-way intereaction. Then Collosus destroyed that in my eyes and the eyes of countless Merchants. LL Commerce Team destroyed what little respect and trust they were building on that annoucement. And how Pink and team handled the aftermath of up-rising anger from the community even further crystalized the fact that there was no having a healthy interaction relationship with LL. Unless you are one of the "LL Insiders" where you can get the private ear of the LL team (which still happens to this day), the only effective communications with LL is one where you have to basically expose and embarrass the LL Team for yet another screw up and/or for not listening (or only listening to the few "special" merchants). Why do I continue to use this strategy? Because sadly with LL - it works! There have been a rare few Lindens that I have respected and that I truly believe they can be honest and open and willing to listen to residents, merchants, RL experts outside their normal favored few. Sadly many of those that I did truly respect and that gave me the time have been fired. Strangely and as a ray of hope, the one person that I know does listen to me - even though he wont acknowledge it is Rodvik himself. So there you go Dart. We do agree on something.... LL has never, does not now, nor I suspect will never change their communication strategy with LL Outsiders. And you are completely right.... LL should reward Healthy communications. That would involve LL taking the first step of allowing "outsiders" into their inner circle of trusted merchants. I even tried to join Brooke's February idea of being one of the "focus group" members. Hmmmm... after asking countless times how one can join or be considered.... guess what response I got? NOTHING! Meanwhile some Merchants - some of the obvious ones - were invited without even asking to participate at multiple focus group meetings. Nuff said on that. As such, until I see a change with LL, the only way I will keep communicating with LL is via the proven effective means - with Vinegar. LL Likes me to communicate with them this way - otherwise they would have changed.

Working with LL on getting their attention to fix bugs or moving forward good ideas is best done by Honey instead of Vinegar? Hmmm I think the JIRA i just pointed out which flavor got LL to at least look at the JIRA.... All the formal sweet sugary follow the JIRA process got us ABSOLUTELY NO WHERE! The day I escalated it by getting Phoenix involved and pointing it out in the Jira and tweeting @secondlife and @rodvik... THE DAY I DID IT.... Oz Linden engaged in the Jira. the first time in over two years a Linden looked at the Jira and it happened when I was forced to use Vinegar. So Dart... exactly which flavor makes LL move? See I am not you with your special inside means to get LL to do things. I am just an average LL Customer. Sugar dont work for us regular customers.

If you dont believe me... Read through the chronology and comments of Jira: VWR-4018 Then get back to laughing