Kampu Oyen

> You're not better informed, but in fact have halved the sources of information and the retained half is the unreliable half. So the "solution" is that people no longer have to worry about so many failures because they'll be totally unaware of more of them?

>You're trying to diagnose a general trend from isolated data. Absolutely correct. My sales are WAY up. But you don't see me trying to pretend that means everyone else must be doing something wrong.

>I had a theory that LSL scripts were getting lagged and getting hung up on delays. I had the same theory. Except in my theory, this was being done intentionally so that DD would be seen as necessary. That's why the problem became a problem in earnest just in time for DD to be announced. >DD was designed to get around this issue. That is the official explanation, sure. What I've seen it do, instead, is what I expected it to do all along, basically from the time it was first announced.

>After Deja's post a month or so ago about concentrating on inworld sales, I've begun doing this as well and had forgotten how much fun it is to actually BE in my shop and interact with customers. Meeting some great people and having more fun on the merchant side than I've had in a long time. So yes, I am planning on doing the same. So you see - DD is working perfectly, just as intended.

>Easily explained as "a bunch of merchants spammed all their listings with a keyword" ... and were permitted (if not encouraged) to do so if they also owned land with an in-world shop on it, linked in the spam listing.

>Really? Yes. Really. Please feel free, though, to conduct your own analysis for comparison. The promotion, for all its spamminess, has been pared down to fewer than 2700 items. Considering what we know about what was removed by LL and what remains as not removed by LL, the only visible criterion that would explain why a merchant providing more than 1% of the promoted listings does not have them removed is that such a merchant is either an owner or partial owner of a sim on which that owner also has an in-world shop shown linked on the promoted listing. The only exception out of the 12 investigated is a guy who didn't link his store because he's still not done building it. Removed items include rainbows. Unremoved items include even some pretty weird, futuristic stuff. This supports my earlier claim that LL defines "madstyle" not in terms of the desription provided, but simply in terms of who is allowed to use the keyword; priority given to people who might not renew their sim ownerships if they don't start to show more income. In the spirit of classic tokenism, shopless merchants are naturally allowed to list one item, and may be able to get away with more than that in some cases. Just don't think that the fact that they match the promotional description will offer them any special protection from being delisted - and, when the promotion continues to show them even after removing the keyword - delisted a second time and permanently removed from the marketplace. Of course, if you don't feel this is fair, all you have to do is buy a sim and set up an in-world shop linked on your promoted listings. Go ahead. List all you want of whatever you want. After all, the money for that sim has to come from somewhere, am I right?

>Hopefully the magic boxes will be shut off before the new region idling system comes online. Because that will surely decimate magic box performance in empty regions. ...aaand now we also know why the new region idling system is "necessary".

>When/if LL fixes the backbone and back end, we can talk about magic boxes vs DD. I think that's fair and reasonable. >If everyone in this forum banded together and made reasonable demands from LL (like something as simple as a status update) instead of doom and gloom and rage, it would help everyone out and this would probably get fixed a lot quicker. I guess you weren't around this forum all that much between when DD was announced and when it was finally deployed. What I see in here are some of the most pleasant, most patient and most forgiving people imaginable (does not include me) and I see them reaching for the stick because, finally, they're just all out of carrots. Being not angry didn't work any better for them than being angry is working for them now, so it's partly a question of of just trying any approach they haven't yet tried. There was at least one person telling them from the start that being nice would not work because all the classic diagnostic signals were already being present for a malefactor operating inside LL. I can't really fault people for not wanting to believe this, though, even now. It's natural just not to want to believe such a thing if it is at all possible not to believe it.

>I am now convinced that Flea Yatsenko is an undercover LL agent here to spread propaganda. Wow. My plausible alts are just coming out of the woodwork these days.

>Based on what she says, Dakota in Customer Support is as in the dark as we are, perhaps Brooke knows nothing yet too. I'm also convinced that Dakota is mostly in the dark. As for Brooke either knowing or not knowing something, if providing anything that resembles a solution will also mean admitting there's something she does or does not know, that's just not going to happen. >I predict they quietly shut it down in near future. I previously projected a total Marketplace shut-down date of 5 July 2012 and I'm so far seeing only reasons to stick to that as a projection.

>Next some merchants & shoppers alike (for different reasons) begin to apply pressure on Lindens to shut MP down. Then Lindens graciously 'comply' with these demands. After all its what residents want. Finally SL returns to be as it was long before --- an inworld-only shopping experience. ... Now I'm really confused. Whose alt am I supposed to be?

>Did the $ float away to the ether? That is practically the only way LL makes any money off of the SLM. Money that is lost or destroyed never has to be paid out again. Otherwise, maybe it does.

>The biggest problem with magic boxes is that there is no reliable way to have in world objects communicate with websites and vice versa. I do accept that as a shortcoming. I also see a number of possible work-arounds that might not have turned out to be less reliable than what DD has been. Again, I should point out that the website and the boxes seem to communicate just fine as long as the boxes think they are rezzed on Linden land. It's not the boxes that are broken; it's what they're connected to that's broken, and not even that if what they're connected to is a Linden sim. > It's rather clear that they are either understaffed and can't deal with our concerns or they don't care. Maybe they wouldn't need so many staff to fix things if they just didn't hire people to break things in the first place.

Interesting. So, if someone at LL actually wanted a project to fail, this checklist would have been available the whole time?

>none of them show up unless they also have the same keyword included in the features section. THIS PART is important. Thanks for telling us.

You still haven't explained in what way the boxes "fail". If the SLM isn't communicating properly with a box because the region is borked, that's a region problem, not a box problem, and the SLM should be able to instead communicate with a duplicate box on an unborked sim. That is, any such problem that can't be solved by putting boxes on multiple sims is a Marketplace problem, and we might as well expect it to also affect DD (which- hey, wow - it apparently does). So if you don't like the performance you're getting out of your box, you at least have some kind of alternative by moving it to a different sim. But if you're having what appears to be the same problem with DD, what's your alternative? How is having fewer alternatives an improvement? If DD worked as well as it was supposed to, it would outperform boxes attached to avatars while on Linden land. It doesn't. That's why I say it's not an improvement, even if it does replace the problem of borked sims with a bunch of newer and more interesting problems. I think we can agree, though, that the box/DD question is sort of a moot point as long as the Marketplace, itself, is dysfunctional when connected to either thing. Meanwhile, I'm not suggesting people shouldn't be allowed to use DD if they really want to. All I'm suggesting is that the urgency in eliminating the boxes as a continuing alternative to DD is probably related to the fact that DD neither is, not was intended to be an improvement; that it was intended to be what is now, and what it even more will be when the boxes get shut off; a mandatory service downgrade calculated to persuade you to start taking your business in-world where you will have to pay for land.

>There's no definition available in any Merchant resources. Yes. It's odd to me that they don't provide definitions for terms they create, while, at the same time, they don't apply obvious terms for things that are easy to define such as "stolen by Linden Labs".

>Maybe too many people are focusing on their MP stores, and not inworld shops? Maybe its time to move?, buy all those dead parcels and start to focus on inworld business? I'm not a merchant... just saying**Only uploaded images may be used in postings**://secondlife.i.lithium.com/i/smilies/16x16_smiley-happy.gif" border="0" alt=":smileyhappy:" title="Smiley Happy" /> If MP stays as it is, people will have no choice then to give it up.... I'm pretty sure that has been the plan all along. Just shutting down Xstreet and telling people to go back to doing business in-world could have been an even bigger disaster than providing a comparable alternative and then gradually crippling its utility. I'm not playin' that game, though. If the grid is too big, the grid is too big. Messing with merchants' minds every day for a couple of years is not a proper solution.

>if you can't solve it. They still haven't tried creating an inventory folder inside which a magic box will behave as if rezzed on Linden Land. So it's a bit soon to say they can't solve it. Maybe it would be more accurate to say they don't even want to try?

>Did I miss something? Maybe you missed where Brooke devoted about a month and a half in August/September to doing essentially nothing but trying to convince merchants that all the Marketplace problems were actually Magic Box problems. Even back then, though, she wouldn't explain where the lost money was going or why that would have anything to do with box function anyway.

>Magic Boxes have been silently failing and delivering products It's not the boxes failing, but other things connected to them. If the item delivers, then the box has not failed; it's just doing what the Marketplace tells it to do, much as it used to do what Xstreet used to tell it to do. If the money does not get collected, that's not the box's fault since the box doesn't collect money anyway; the Marketplace collects the money for what it tells the box to deliver, much as Xstreet used to collect the money for what it used to tell the box to deliver. Except that Marketplace isn't Xstreet, and it won't collect money correctly even if you get rid of the box, because the box is not the problem.

The last piece of data is that one of the merchants has had a tough time making sales since LL pushed his adult business to a different part of the map. If he was turning a profit before and is now in danger of not paying for the land, I can see how a little help on the Marketplace might be seen as a way to try to render him more complacent. I'm gonna' ask some more people now...

I'm still waiting on one piece of data. But it so far looks like the promotion was probably offered as a concession to people who LL was worried would stop paying for land if LL didn't do something help them generate more income. This is not to say that the process would necessarily have been spelled out to people in this way; they may have just taken what was offered as a promotion without much thought to why it was offered, or whether it would be administered in a way that would end up favoring some merchants unfairly.

Well there are some limits to how deeply I can dig for something by the end of the day. So, in the short term, I'm focusing a group of 12 merchants who account for 585 of the items, which is over 22% of the promotion.

As you can see from perusing the Mad Men promotion, the items of high relevance which remain undelisted at this point do not have in common that they especially evoke the 1960's. But they do at least appear to have some other interesting stuff in common from a statistical standpoint. I'm not done crunching all the numbers, but I can already tell you what they're going to say about the top 100 most "relevant" items which no one has succeeded in getting LL to delist. Out of the 53 merchants who offer these 100 items, 45 show in-world shops; in-world shops that are are lands owned by a surprisingly small number of people. Next looking at the number of items offered by each of these 53 merchants which turn up on a "madstyle" keyword search, it sort of looks like something approaching or possibly exceeding half of the items in the promotion are situated so as to provide revenue likely to be used to pay rent to a very small number of land owners. Or I could be wrong. If I happen to be right, though, will anyone even care? Should I even bother to post what I finally find?