Kampu Oyen

No.

>No, but some people would buy 4x as much land, and more people overall would buy land- people that currently can't afford it now. You might see that in the short term. But unless something about total system utility to the user pool changes, the value of the land is the value is the value is the value is the value is the value. If the market were allowed to adjust land prices to accomodate demand, basically all the same people would end up owning and controlling the same things, regardless of changes to exchange rates.

>No, not at all. I'd rather see the L$ go higher, esp with the dropping $US. If you're running a profitable business you want the L$ higher. I don't much care about the precise exchange rate, since it's a variable not all that closely linked to what else determines the RL value of in-world revenues over the long term. What I do care about is stability or instability of exchange rates. Comparative stability of exchange rate makes SL a good medium for people who want to make long-term investments and help SL grow and develop as a more and more useful thing for people who might want to use it. Comparative instability of exchange rate just makes SL a good medium for speculators, and I don't think speculator money is what SL needs in order to progress as an innovative experiential medium.

>Since S.L. doesnt have any significant competition yet, that might be looked upon as a bad sign for future profitability. SL has plenty of competition, even without the explosion of other grids over the last 3 years. If something doesn't work right and the people who make money on it act like they don't give a 5h1t, users move on to something else. Drugs. Gambling. Prostitutes. Whatever. Users mostly don't have a proportion of their entertainment budget specifically earmarked for virtual worlds. Money they suddenly don't feel like spending in SL could be used to buy more canned food or shotgun ammunition or God-knows-what-else.... and, yes, IMVU. There are 119,935 people online at IMVU as I write this. How many are in SL? >And you're are correct that Linden Labs controls how many Linden dollars are floating around at any given time, People say that. But I don't really see any way they can control the amount of money in-world. They don't seem to set any cap on how much total money users can load in over a 24-hour period, and the means by which such money gets removed from the system practically all seem to be opt-in from the user end. So, really, LL would seem to be at the mercy of the whims of users in terms of how much money users load in without spending all of it. And Linden dollars are essentially a measure of total money owed to users; debts which stand to be either collected or destroyed by users at-will, and without any direct control by the Lindens. >so in effect they can indeed control exchange rates that way just like any central bank can in the real world. They CAN control exchange rates. And this can INFLUENCE user behavior. But LL ultimately DOES NOT control user behavior. If users choose to increase or decrease the total in-world money supply in some way, LL can only make certain tweaks to encourage or discourage the behavior. Rarely, if ever, should they be able to rely on such tweaks to persuade users to collectively reduce the money supply when they would otherwise increase it, or vice-versa. >Just a small tightening of the money supply can in effect keep the exchange rate up 200% for instance. That's essentially backwards. LL can't use the money supply to control exchange rate. They can only use exchange rate to TRY to control the money supply.

>I doubt it is the commerce team who runs these campaigns, I think it comes from the general PR department And that's why it was posted by CommerceTeam Linden? If the PR people are free to use that account, I suppose that would explain it. But if the real commerce team wasn't even made aware of the posting until we had already responded (assuming they're bothered to look, even now), how can that possibly reflect a good management plan for the account? And if the real commerce team was aware the posting, how could they possibly have been either oblivious to the high potential to insult most of the people reading it, or unable to prevent it from being posted? Most of all, why wouldn't the PR team have their own Linden account for these kinds of postings, and, if they do, why did they not use it? Why does it look either like the commerce team just doesn't know or care what's going on, or like they are subordinate to the PR people? >But the weak point is...they are losing more people at the backdoor then that are gaining on the frontdoor. Yes. It's a formula that might really even work pretty well as long as you keep people coming in the front door. But if you eventually break enough things badly enough, word not only starts to get around (bad news travels even faster on the internet; that's actually precisely what it was invented), but people will start to see things not working correctly on Day One, even if they bother to come in the first place. If things don't work on Day One, they will practically never be a Day Two. And, at least in terms of people being able to buy stuff, LL has now achieved breakage of Day One for some continuing percentage of new users. So if they can't keep older users and they increasingly also can't keep new users... what will they have in the long term? A huge empty grid all to themselves? Who is going to pay for that? Let me guess... they've all stopped coding and started scratching Lotto tickets...

>what percentage of SLers read these forums Well, this is the Second Life Merchants Forum, so if something important happened that would be of importance to Second Life Merchants, one might think that this place would provide a Forum to discuss it. If merchants don't read here, that's not really much of an excuse for Lindens not to post things. Really, it's fairer to blame Lindens not posting things for the fact that more merchants don't read here. Of course, Lindens may not want to post anything if there's a chance they'll be held accountable for accuracy, as Brooke was before she suddenly started pretending not to post here. So if this forum simply fails as an opportunity for Lindens to post misinformation without any personal consequences, that hardly seems like a fair excuse for Rod never at least popping in. Or does it? @Toy >the flaw with Rodvik is that he seems to ONLY use non-LL official tools to interact with his customer base. It seems like a pretty weak measure, but it probably offers him at least some plausible deniability in terms of the communications being construed as official LL information. Again, after what Brooke did, I almost can't blame Rod for at least trying to be more careful in some way. Almost.

>Since the esteemed CEO of LL very rarely reads or responds to anything The people to whom we should try more directly appeal are LL's legal department. If they understood how really close the whole company is to being legally dismantled, they would surely try to impress this point upon The Rod. No?

Flaming is not what you say. Flaming is who you say it about.

>If the buyer would like the order processed, they must submit a Support Case and provide the Order Number and ask to have the order processed. I'm confused. What would be unclear about wanting the order processed in terms of the order actually being placed to begin with?

Nothing from Dakota? OK, let's make this easier... If Brooke DID NOT suggest the 100 item capacity, please signify by saying "Brooke DID NOT suggest the 100 item capacity". If Brooke DID NOT decide the 10 item limit, please signify by saying "Brooke DID NOT decide the 10 item limit".

>Until proven different I do go by the assumption that Rod wants SL to grow and succeed. Based on what he has said, or on what the Lindens have actually done in the last 8 months? Assuming his intentions are what he says they are, what good will that be while the people working for him are consistently sending the opposite message with their actions, and while, as far as we can tell, he does absolutely nothing about it? Other than seeming to try to drive merchants back in-world to increase land revenues, and fixing some smaller token number of the slew of new problems they chose to create, can you really name even one thing that the Lindens have done in the last 8 months that indicates any intention to let SL grow and succeed?

>changing the tier structure would bring more people back into the land market. Sticks are cheaper than carrots.

>And, why in the world are you trying to influence what sells? Aside from holidays, let the market take care of itself, it doesn't need intervention. Well I guess that somewhat helps to clear up what one or more secret Linden alts would have for sale in one or more shops. Not that Rod will even pretend to care that that may very well be the case.

>The only problem is that they misinterpreted tolerance as ignorance. They were probably the smartest kids in class. So they probably haven't learned yet that they and a few dozen similarly bright friends are still no match for the total intellectual weight of thousands of people around the world trying to make sense of their decisions. As a bit of a nerd, myself, I know that it is often possible to even very shamelessly talk down to normal people without them seeming to notice, and, probably, without them noticing, truly. But Second Life merchants are not necessarily a normal group, and there are a lot of us. If the LIndens really aren't smart enough to know that they're not smart enough to keep pulling off the shuck-and-jive, they may have to smarten up the hard way.

>I notice the Commerce Team are not crunching those bugs so hard that they don't have time for "madstyle". Regardless of the various possible explanations behind the content or timing of the "madstyle" effort, the above sentence pretty much sums up in a nutshell everything that has come out of Linden Labs in the last 8 months. Really, how does it not?

>A decision / statement like this would have to be approved by mgt. No, it would it would merely have to be allowed. Have you seen any other indicator at this point that the Commerce Team has not become effectively autonomous? Maybe Rod stopped the post 13 September deployments. Maybe. But how could they have been any worse than what happened in the post 14 February deployments? Assuming Rod had both appreciable awareness and appreciable control in September, he must only have had less of at least one of these things by 14 February... .. unless, of course, this whole fiasco is his own doing...

>at least Rod responds, Meaning what? That LL's own lawyers finally all signed a certified letter demanding that he respond? Wow. How very considerate is The Rod.

>Does everybody realize that we are now 23 days into all these problems? Yes. We are now 23 days closer to a "solution". But which "solution"?

>And yet he can't even manage to post this timely info on his company's official website? And yet he can't even replace one person who has done nothing but create more problems for over 6 months, even in San Francisco, even with something like a million qualified people unemployed nationwide. (And yet he can't even get a green bear off the main page which continues both to mock you and to infringe on the trademark for Oopsy Bear.)

>what will rodvik do to ensure this sort of condition never happens again? It is already happening again. 14 February was 13 September happening again, only now there's even more of it. Given this as a pattern, and given the proportionately lesser acknowledgement by LL, what you should expect is probably just even further escalation of problems.

It's supposed to be some kind of banner administered by Linden, not a relevance enhancement. And I believe it. In fact, I believe it will work perfectly while nothing else does.

>6 MONTHS?!!? Haha Might as well all get our signs and start protesting now Yes. Don't bother to wait 5 months. It's much more likely that the whole Marketplace will be shut down by then anyway.

> why don't they just boost up their Marketplace commission to 10% or something That's a no-win for them. If it doesn't work out (as you intend, that is), it will be easier for people to blame the Lindens for killing the Marketplace, because 10% commission can't be described as a "helpful new feature" the way that the other various deterrents to commerce have been. And if it does work out (as you intend), that's even worse for the Lindens, because then they'll have a really hard time explaining why the Marketplace ultimately had to be shut down.

>MB have always been 100% reliable. True. That's a major reason why so many other parts of the system had to be borked in order to persuade people that there was anything wrong with them in the first place.

>they should all really give up on this failed California business model of ----- hey man i bet i can whip up some glossy presentation to trick people into working for free or outbidding each other to see who can work hardest for the least money. Did you see what CTL just posted? Please stop feeding them ideas.