Kampu Oyen

>I agree Lasher, it's legitimate to add it.. It's legitimate on capitalist principle if customers are willing to pay it, although we've agreed not to do it by agreeing to do things the Linden way. By having both types of shops, you sort of limit yourself in terms of your ability to charge a lower price in-world if customers aren't willing to pay as much, unless, of course, you´re also willing to sacrifice some profit on the MP in order to match the lower in-world price. This is a major reason why I've never been very interested in opening in-world stores. Other people tweaking or repackaging my stuff and reselling it can charge as much or as little as they like, and they've never given me any good reason to have to think about that problem at all. I thank LL for at least not requiring that MP merchants also maintain a commercial presence in-world (yet). Just managing the cost structures would probably be creatively paralyzing.

>Something you are forgetting is that inworld you must pay tier regardless of whether or not you make a single sale. In the Marketplace you do not pay anything unless you DO make a sale. For this pro price inflation argument to be valid LL would have to be charging us per listing rather than per sale. I still don't see why uniform parity is necessarily desireable anyway, as a matter of policy. Some customers may be willing to pay more for the in-world shopping experience for some items, while others may be willing to pay more in order to avoid it for some items. What's so wrong with letting customers decide what something is worth to them according to total context? If you don't agree, you don't have to provide the item at that price. The whole idea that value is essentially a function of cost or effort, rather than subjective utility to the consumer is marxist. If LL really wants to manage their economy from that angle, it's little surprise that they've also otherwise failed to make it more profitable. Maybe LL should just socialize the whole in-world experience and get it subsidized by registering as a nonprofit, then lobbying the US Congress for a tax on competing grids.

>This is abuse as well according to Linden Lab's policy isn't it? Maybe not. According the way the policy is written, dropping the prices in-world should then obligate Marketplace merchants to also drop their prices in order to avoid having an inflated price. In other words, in-world merchants are essentially granted the right to set Marketplace prices. I think the whole concept is crap, though, regardless of who it favors. Customers should be able to determine the value of an item by deciding what they are willing to pay for it, regardless of the production, marketing or distribution costs, and regardless of any commissions. It's called "market capitalism". I should think LL would have heard of it by now, somehow. But no?

>'inflating prices on the SL Marketplace, in comparison to in-world or other e-commerce sites' is Anti Competive and abusive behaviour. There's no real logic behind it. When LL uses the term "anti-competitive" they actually tend to mean "demand-driven"; that is: "competitive". By contrast, price-fixing would seem to be just fine. In fact, by LL's standard, price fixing would seem to be the very model of "competition".

In principle, it might be a good idea in that it can slow down merchants running bait-and-switch after getting good reviews and rankings. OTOH, as has been said here, it's not really fair for LL to bork somone's listing and then derank them just for getting fixed.

>With the removal of Magic Boxes, LL has removed any barriers to entry to becoming a merchant. That's not really the complete picture. DD has made merchant access to the MP more evenly available by providing an alternative to renting a box space. I approve of that in principle. But shutting off the boxes mean fewer technical options for merchants, and I disapprove of that in principle. Why is it so important to shut off the boxes if DD doesn't actually work any better? That they still have not given a reason would seem to suggest that the reason is a reason they can't give us. I think I've mentioned what I really think about that. >Thus, you get people who create lower quality things and sell them since they have nothing to lose. That's a trade-off I think has to be accomodated in order to provide an alternative to in-world shops that is demographically different enough in terms of who can make use of it. The marketplace does nothing to constrain value of products beyond simply trying to assure that they are legal to sell as sold. Some shoppers won't want to see all the kipple, sure. But if they want to shop a bit upscale, they can stick to the enhanced listings or shop in-world. As cynical as it sounds, the option to go slumming is a valuable feature for a lot of users; especially newer users (which SL needs). If that is to be eliminated, though, I'd hate to see it eliminated as anything other than an intensely well-calculated decision to protect LL from operating at a loss or creating potentially unmanageable legal problems. >Then, the marketplace gets clogged up, search results get awful because of keyword abuse, and no one can find what they're looking for simply because there's too many items. Then, the price of products drops, LL stops making as much money off of the marketplace as they used to, and performance of the marketplace degrades because too many people are trying to sell things. I think there is some of that happening. But I think it's also a problem we shouldn't confound with the other problems which may be a lot more important. That is: we can't really properly assess the user end of marketplace performance unless the administrator end is first essentially cleared up for some appreciable period of time. The system may be set up to encourage systemically counterproductive types of use, but to turn to that matter at all while there's a stack of JIRAs open which are not requests for new features but mere requests to get things to work passably in the first place, is applying a much higher standard of behavior from users than from those who should be setting examples for them. >That is what scares me the most. If you are competing against a ton of L$10 items and you're a new merchant with a quality product, you're going to get burried, and you're not going to want to sell something for pennies. If you make mesh and you're skilled, you could not bother with Second Life and just post mesh on places like TurboSquid. I'm not totally unsympathetic to that. But if the other choice is to start cutting off the lower rungs of the ladder, I'm pretty sure it can't be that much better. LL either needs to commit to supporting opportunity for the least experienced in spite of the endless stream of useless crap that will result, or LL needs to commit to a building and commerce culture that is much more unmistakably infused with a values system that includes elitism and exclusion. The middle path will leave people at all parts of the continuum disgruntled, so it's better to try to please at least some of them instead. In principle, I prefer the idea of leaving the doors to commerce flung wide open to the hordes of the the great unwashed, partly because it's consistent with the basic philosophy espoused to maintain a pool of long-term users who believe similarly, and who are already providing some amount of consistent repeat business. But again, if the numbers just aren't there to back it up, LL needs to try something different; and if so, probably something close to the opposite. >I do want marketplace to perform well, and I would love to see some sort of factor set in place that requires people to at least be able to have in world stores, even if they're just floating skyboxes or smaller parcels. I remain convinced that help for in-world merchants is on the way as soon as LL is done crippling the MP. It's not the help to in-world merchants to which I object. I just think LL should be sure that it's really necessary to also cripple the MP in order to make that other thing work. >Before XStreet, it was pretty impossible to find anything. A web based commerce solution is superior to just looking at an item name, TPing to the place, trying to find the item, seeing it, finding out it's not as good as you thought, and then moving on. It's superior for customers, so it should also be superior for most merchants. But it isn't superior for LL if it kills their land revenues. >What would be fantastic is if there was a marketplace that listed in world items for sale. The site would be the same, but instead of buying things on a website, you'd teleport to the place in world and buy it. As someone who is not interested in opening an in-world store, I would nonetheless support that. It's another useful option for customers, so I have to support it, at least in principle. >My problem is that there's too low of a risk (virtually none) with getting started on marketplace, and it's negative for the entire economy. Would it not make sense to thoroughly explore options for some more reasonable amount of risk at various points in the process? Solving one problem is often not worth the trouble if it creates 2 or more problems which are even slightly larger. I agree something could be done, but I think it's the type of decision that warrants a good deal of caution and a real kind of analysis rather than hitting a screw with a hammer just because it's sticking up. >Marketplace is a great merchant tool, but it shouldn't be the only one. Right now, it's a tool that works poorly and that's what my concern is. Yes. Even assuming LL really is trying to help in-world merchants by crippling the MP, it's not worth the trouble if, at some point, the MP borking has failed to produce any stimulus to demand for land. I really, really hope they have some kind of schedule for deciding that it hasn't worked. Otherwise, they won't move on to the next desperate experiment until they have no choice at all, and then it might be too late. >I don't know if in world stores need to remain relevant. I think some of them might. Even a lot of my products only sell as well as they do because people have seen them in-world. And some in-world merchants make good money by selling them. I'm just not into that, myself. >You are right, marketplace is going to seriously disrupt the way the grid works now, and it's going to disrupt it more and more the more popular it gets. I think it already has, or, rather, Xstreet already did. Before Xstreet, most of SL looked like a huge shopping mall. After Xstreet came, the malls started to empty out, and then a lot of them disappeared. I was happy about that. I wasn't happy about nothing coming to take their place. But a lof of in-world shops still fo just fine. What they have are products that sell better when marketed in-world, partly just because of the kinds of things they are. There was a lot of stuff in those malls that people should have been able to buy out-of-world, from among numerous pages of competing options. That stuff, I'm glad has moved to the MP. In fact, one reason we percieve the MP as beign so full of crap is that the crap that would have been in 96 shops in-world can now all be viewed on one web page. You can now see how much crap was really already kicking around to begin with. Granted, the MP has allowed for a lot more, too. If that's bad, I'm not sure it's bad enough to want to fix the problem by creating some other problem. >More than anything, the fact that LL is putting so much of their merchant's commerce into the marketplace when it performs so poorly is extremely worrying. LL isn't forcing merchants to choose the MP. The comparative cost is what people say (possibly rightly in many cases) forces them to go to the MP in order to compete with other merchants keeping costs low with the MP. I do think there's something to that, but I think the issue is not nearly as simple as some people want to make it, and at least part of this phenomenon is actually a good thing. Ultimately, if LL can stay afloat by doing it, I will always prefer more useful options for consumers. That would almost certainly mean both in-world and MP, and it would also mean continuing to offer magic box use as an alternative to DD.

I don't mind the LOL, since I agree it's a bit funny. But I actually wasn't joking. As long as it remains true that we can temporarily eliminate supposed box malfunctions simply by attaching the box to the avatar while standing on Linden land, the "box problem" justification for DD will only continue to look more and more like the BS that it is.

It has been a month since they dropped DD on you people. And in that time, how much of an improvement have you seen over the service you were getting from the magic boxes between 1 January and 13 February? Maybe instead of just dropping the commissions for some period of time, they could also make them an opt-in, with the provision that anything collected will be used to hire someone better to replace whoever it is that, by now, they must know they need to replace.

I use multiple accounts for a variety of legitimate reasons, so you won't see a lot of product in Kampu Oyen's store. You can make more money on the MP by working hard at it and taking some risks, but the amount you make while you sleep is mostly just dependent on how many products you offer. Surely making even small amounts of money while you sleep does not suck, am I right? Flipping burgers pays more, sure. But you can't really do that and sleep at the same time. The patience you need is the patience to keep adding new product even when you don't feel totally inspired, and the patience to allow any copymod items you produce to circulate in-world to a point where they are drawing additional business to your store with some consistency. Really, if you just keep your costs down and add new product with some kind of regularity, it should be almost impossible not to develop a steadily escalating amount of monthly business.

>I can't either, Miss Pamela. It's ridiculous. But if you could get in, it would be a really efficient experience compared to before the last 2 months' updates. And isn't that what really matters?

>The marketplace is how Linden Labs gets their content for their "game". There was plenty of content happening in SL before Xstreet... content AND merchants paying for land. >Linden Lab changed their approach to Second Life and decided it needed to be a user generated world. That's a good decision if it means getting people to pay them to create content rather than paying people to create content. I not only approve of that, but I strongly support it philosophically as win-win. It's the whole reason I came to Second Life in the first place. >Giving creators a reason to create and spread their creations (I.E. real world income) provides the people who would use Second Life as a game and means of social interaction more things to do because they can buy the things. Yes and no. A lot of people come to SL just to experience a creative environment where they can participate in the evolution of content as it changes hands among users. In my case, the ability to also make money was important because it allowed me to produce more free content for fellow users. It has never been vital to me to make huge amount of money with the marketplace, and if it consistently worked only well enough to cover my creative costs, I would still use it. The part that ticks me off is that LL has turned play into work by constantly breaking the commerce tools and changing the rules, and ignoring the rules they themselves write or subscribe-to. Really, they've done the impossible; they've turned me from someone who would gladly pay to upload free content for other people into someone who doesn't even much feel, anymore, like getting paid to upload content. It's like they just don't want any more content or something. And I'm starting to understand how that really just might be possible.That explanation is a bit complicated, and I expect I'll get into it more when I have clarified in my own mind how best to order the explanatory elements. >An e-commerce website wasn't what LL originally planned, but it helps the grid and it helps non-content creators enjoy Second Life, gives them things to do, and gives them reasons to keep coming back. I'm hesistant to use terms like non-content creators, although this is not a criticism of your usage. The commerce website can help consumers find reasons to keep coming back, yes. But not if there's no grid to come back to, and it's at least very unclear at this point how the commerce website helps the grid. By making it possible for consumers to pick up tons of free or cheap stuff without it having to be displayed in-world, the commerce website makes it harder for merchants to get the same sales they would from in-world stores that they might get if the commerce site either didn't exist, or didn't work well enough to produce the Fast Freebies effect.And if merchants can't compete with the MP, they may not be able to pay tier. Some people with whom I have strongly disagreed in the past have come to this forum to complain specifically about how the marketplace freebies are destroying Second Life. In recent weeks, I have come to think that they may have a point worth considering in earnest, although I need to paraphrase and slightly elaborate in order to make this point intelligible in a way that might have made any sense to me the first time; something like: if the market depends on the grid, and yet kills the grid, maybe there's no point in trying to preserve anything more than the minimum functionality of the market needed for LL to be able to continue claiming they've replaces Xstreet rather than simply shutting it down. >As a challenge to you, try building a sim with your friends and creating everything yourself. Get rid of all the clothes you've bought, the trees, homes, caves, landscapes, off-sim rocks, cars, roads, danceballs, animations, hair, etc. When you take away all of that, there's not much of a game or a product that LL has. They depend on us to stay alive, there's no way someone in their right might would spend $400 a month to have a big empty grass field and a ruth avatar to chat with their friends. I'm not sure that's the appropriate test at this point. The appropriate test might be to block SL to new uploads and see if the total appeal increases or decreases over time. Not to seem to agree with ralph, but I think someone wouldn't necessarily have to be crazy to think that doing this could actually improve total appeal. Especially if, at some point, new content is allowed to a group of licensed content creators who are well-selected and well-directed. That's not philosophically or aesthetically what I'd prefer. Not even close. But from a business standpoint, it might actually work better than trying to micromanage crowdsourced content and content marketing. >The CEO needs to start valuing what we do for the grid and realize that the marketplace website is extremely important for keeping users engaged and actived in Second Life. The people in charge of the business decisions also need to realize that the more high quality, good products that are sold the more satisfied users Second Life will have and the longer people will stay in Second Life before abandoning it. That has been essentially my own thinking until recently, and I wish I could say that I haven't come to have doubts about it, but I have. The bottom line is that if valuing content creation by allowing the marketplace to work correctly doesn't also provide payment for the land on the grid, it's futile to do anything that is not strictly directed to driving people back to paying for land by whatever means necessary. Decisions that look too insane to be merely accidental could also be explained as a kind of deserate experimentation to find something - anything - that might work any better than what has already been tried. And what has been tried is allowing a functional market system not-in-world to suck commerce off the grid. >Some of us make a decent amount of real life money from Second Life, and that's great. But LL doesn't keep everything around just so we can make money. Before Rodvik starts giving us the tools to make SL more like a game with things like pathfinding, content creators need a reliable way to deliver their products to the people who want and need them. That's the best way to get Second Life to grow and improve user retention. Tons of people want to make games, and if Second Life could turn into a place where people could come here, make games with Second Life as a game engine, and then profit from it, it would be a fantastic product. And, again, I wish I could be certain that I agree. But it also occurs to me that any user retention efforts related to commerce are probably a lot less promising at this point than simply adding some low-maintenance gizmos that make the in-world experience more appealing to people who wouldn't bother to come to SL otherwise. Maybe Rodvik is right to focus more on making it easier to drive cars over zombies and shoot them with flamethrowers and such. But I'm going to have to start seeing a lot more of that before I'm fully convinced that that's what he's even doing. After 8 months of basically breaking every single component related to the commerce system (except, the boxes, which have to be shut off because they can't be broken, apparently), I need to see a lot more than a path finding function to think Rod has any way at all to patch up the hull of this ship and steer it away from the icebergs that have always been somehow invisible to the Lindens, no matter how emphatically I keep pointing them out. >The bottom line is that if someone created something that had the popularity of a game like Minecraft and it worked in Second Life, there is no way it could become as popular as minecraft because Second Life lacks a reliable and consistent way to provide a potential customer with products. That's easy to solve, actually. A solution is for LL to block further content creation by general users, and to offer contests to existing content creators to produce content which LL will be able to take in exchange for a pre-stated prize amount to which the designer agrees by entering the contest. Then LL controls the content is gets on the cheap with some assurance that it's at least better than something else possible, and controls all sales of same. The very thought of such a shift in business model makes me sick to the stomach as a long-time SL fan, but I must admit that it seems like it might be at least as viable as what else has been tried in recent years.

>about 32K per month USD. Couldn't they make a lot more than that on land if they could just get every marketplace merchant to open an in-world shop? I'm just asking about the numbers, here.

If it doesn't open at all, how can you really say there's a delay?

Although the magic boxes have sometimes been blamed for the malfunction of other things connected to them, the magic boxes, themselves, have never been broken and remain unbroken. Really, the fact that LL has ultimately found no way to break them seems like the only reason they could possibly have for insisting to shut them off.

I don't think the issue is whether or not they have an obligation to support income. I think the issue is that they keep saying one things and doing something different, and that this behavior creates costs to users which otherwise would not be created. Even in cases where the user money they destroy is merely a portion of the user money they allow to be earned, they are still destroying user money, so whether it is merchant income or money that users paid to load in is irrelevant.

>We have all been greatly amused by the 'secret words' that cause our listings to get kicked out of General Catagory ; even more amused that the list of words is secret and when we tried to make a list; out posts got kicked... More conspiracy talk? You people are paranoid.

>Will not get fixed the next few years because they don't know how. But I DO know how. Put everything back the way it was in January and leave it alone. There will still be errors, but if LL will focus on compensating for those instead of looking for more ways that won't work to make them totally go away, the service level would either be sufficiently acceptable to allow user confidence and market growth, or it would at least be no worse than it has been since 14 February. How long should they keep clinging to solutions that are worse than the problems they are said to be intended to solve? Really, a better use of resources than development and implementation of DD would just have been to fully investigate the targeted borking of regions advertised as box rentals, and take action against whoever was responsible for that. @Spica: >Right, I guess 'fine tuning' just costs more than L.L. is willing to invest. I think they might want to also consider the possibly higher cost of not fixing it.

>Ela Talaj wrote: >SL was originally envisioned, designed and implemented as a game and a means of social interaction not as an income opportunity. It is what it is when it is what it is. If it's not supposed to be an income opportunity, then maybe, in addition to not allowing it to work as an income opportunity, they should stop marketing it as one. Marketing aside, though, LL wilfully allows people to enter into commerce agreements which LL does not compellingly show any intention to honor by their actions. Regardless of what SL is "supposed to be", what LL is doing is just plain wrong.

>They are neither in that folder nor are they in my inventory any longer. Yes, but they would be delivered faster if they could be delivered at all. What do you have against LL running its business strictly in the subjunctive?

Please accept my apology for misattribution. It's the result of c/p before pressing the correct respond, and I'll make a point of not doing that from now on. With that in mind: @Medhue: >Let me assure every single person that fears the MP will be permanently shutdown, that It is never going to happen. It would not need to be be shut down as such. Legally, it's better for them if they just leave it nominally running but so crippled that practically everyone has to maintain in-world commercial presence in order to stay afloat. The reason I think they'll finally shut it down on 5 July, though, is that they're just not as smart as me; otherwise, I'd be less able to keep predicting their behavior.

> "content is king". Practically any industry loses more users to bad service than to limited content.

>LL needs a better system for fixing things What they need is any system at all for not breaking them in the first place. >Rodvik has lots of game experience, which is going to be awesome for Second Life. OK, sure. But is it going to be awesome before or after Second Life has had to go out of business because of the way he has been managing things?

>If they can't get that right, there's something seriously wrong with the the system. Which system?

You are correct. Those numbers are inside the existing bork range. I still need to know when they were listed, though. If they've been pushed into that range by reassigning the numbers (as discussed elsewhere), the same point would apply; if these used to be higher-numbered items, putting them out of order could just be a way of trying to cover up what I've described.

>I'm wondering if the Commerce Team, database, whoever or whatever is working on this issue is trying to push the borked 141xxxx series of items out of that range by assigning new item numbers. That would make some sense. But where would they be getting the extra 15xxxxx numbers to which to assign the old 14xxxxx items? If they were trying to push items one-by-one into the dead spots of 15xxxxx left by closed accounts just to avoid an even greater disruption of order new-to-old, that sounds like a pretty slow and pointless process. If it were up to me, I would just tell them I'd prefer to relist the items in the current available range rather than let them fuss with it any more. But if they have done any of that for us, I'd have to give them at least some credit. A lot of the time I wish they'd tell us more of what's really going on, just on the off chance that it might make me a little more sympathetic.