Flea Yatsenko

Nintendo is crazy about DMCA an stuff. Never use their stuff in SL and you'll save yourself a lot of headaches. Sony is very strict too. Luckily "Vita" means "life" in italian so they are kind of limited, but my experience outside of SL, Sony DMCA will hit you quickly.

A lot of my recent transactions are for products made between 2011 and 2015. In fact it's by far the majority.

Why is anyone gonna build PBR when most of their stuff that's selling is already horribly outdated and search doesn't push newer stuff?

There is a problem with it showing outdated products. It really struggles with simple keyword searches and shows lots of sculpts and prim builds even though there's much more modern stuff out there. It also feels like it does better with more mainstream products, like clothing, than niche products. Then again that's still not great, take a look at at the Linden example of searching for "blue shirt" and see. It really needs more keywords to do well, like if you search for clothing and add the name of the mesh body you're looking for. But I think what's happening is search has gotten very bad in some situations with people searching for short keywords or a few keywords and it's obliterating sales for people who don't have multiple keywords to find their product (i.e. (body type) shirt). It's like it just searches by keywords now and if ignores everything else including product age, ratings, etc. For example if you're selling products that people would find by searching for "cave", you're buried in outdated stuff.

I don't know how long this has been going on for everyone, but for a few months I've been way below average year over year. It's just finally reached a point where things are way too bad. I've been pretty depressed over it. I have a bunch of new stuff to upload and I'm not even bothering spending the time or upload fees.

SL doesn't have to compete with AAA games, there are gamers who only play indie games or at best AA Japanese games. I haven't touched a triple A game in years. And I don't plan on doing it anytime soon. I play a lot of games, that quite frankly, look terrible, and I have a lot of fun. I can't even remember the last time I played a pretty AAA game, I think it was when my 7970 was new. Even if you're the type of gamer who doesn't care about graphics, SL's latency issues mean it's relegated to only playing turn based games like Greedy Greedy instead of anything remotely real time. They can start adding lag filters to their viewer to mitigate it like I mentioned earlier in another of my posts. And it's so easy to start making money in SL as compared to trying to launch a game on Steam that has low odds of ever being purchased. The framework of creating games in SL with microtransations (i.e. buy this gun in the shooting game for more power or a cool skin or whatever) is all there. But the game play part of SL feels terrible because of the lag/latency. Sure graphics or whatever are a problem, but SL will always be held back because it takes so long for your avatar to respond to movement or for you to interact with the world. SL needs a mode that makes the net code operate like a legitimate online shooting game. It should be part of an experience in which movement method it uses. Experience should also be able to change movement parameters, like speed, etc and it shouldn't have to rely on scripts. It needs to happen on screen as fast as possible. And give scripts more keybinds. I think SL could be amazing for making small games like VRChat has. I played a game that was a cross between an FPS and Among Us in VRChat and it was a ton of fun and it wasn't horribly laggy. But the latency/lag in SL would make it worse. LL has better resources to make game levels and stuff than VRChat, people could make way better games. But they need the tools to do it. There are a lot of laid off game devs who are trying to free lance and SL could be a great place for them to do so.

When you press the key to move your avatar, the movement is sent to the server/simulator, the simulator processes what your AV would do, then it sends how your AV moved to the viewer where it updates. This is going to be an absolute nightmare when the mobile client is released, because mobile data latency can be horrendous compared to landline. It's a structural problem with SL, but they could mitigate it by doing things like having the viewer making a guess, I.E. "Flea pressed walk forward so I'm going to start him walking forward and when I hear back from the sim I'll update if it's wrong". The latency between telling your AV to do something or interacting with the world is a show stopper for a lot of people. I don't know if you play Switch, but SL's netcode is set up like Smash Bros Ultimate where everything is synced and all clients have to agree with each other what's happening on screen. Meanwhile, Splatoon 3 makes guesses. Both provide different types of lag, SL/Smash lag is more like, "I pressed a button and it took 300ms for me to see what happened", and Splatoon lag is more like "I didn't see what happened on the screen, I just died suddenly."

Checking out some of my keywords, some of these results are really questionable. Like #1 rank going to a very outdated full perm object with a single 1 star review saying physics are messed up. Cheap FP outdated products aren't really that popular, are they?

No offense but if you're doing SEO, app store optimization, etc, you're always chasing secret changes they make, redoing listings, etc. This stuff is difficult and a lot of work. You are going to have to make changes to your listings if you want to be competitive. You will have to do a/b testing. Search before really sucked, it can be a lot better now. But it's going to take work from merchants and buyers to get things where they belong. Ranking in something like Google search is endless changes and optimization and all sorts of work. In fact if you have a blog you're probably spending more time with SEO than actually making content. I never expect slmp to get like that, but I think a lot of people were actually selling stuff because relevance was messed up and it's all they could find. I know I've always sold stuff and wondered why people are buying it because it's so outdated. And honestly I think it's because it's all they can find.

Even if LL managed to somehow completely fix marketplace overnight it would still take days or weeks for the proper changes to show up. I.E. if they are weighing results with sales in the slightest, and the last several months have been boosting sales of lower quality or older items because they've been given preferential treatment in search results. It takes time for users to correct it by buying the right stuff. Mainly the power users who can search for something, skip past all the prim/sculpty/etc stuff and find the good stuff, then buy it. There really needs to be an opt in thing for each store, where the merchant does an action that shows they are still active, and then users can filter active stores or not. I.E. a merchant just clicks a button on their dashboard to say they're active, then when people search they can filter by stores that have clicked the button, have not, or ignore that filter. I think no matter how hard LL tries they will never get SLMP marketplace search and sort working that well, because they listings they have to index are not very high quality a lot of the time and there's so much legacy stuff. There are a lot of stores older than a lot of very popular websites that exist right now. Even just excluding stores that haven't created a new listing in the last year and removing them from default search unless someone goes out of their way to enable it. LL needs more filters to sift through all the listings. And FYI no matter what LL does to the search there are guaranteed to be winners and losers. My BFF also has an SLMP store and with the constant changes to search, we've always been at odds, when my sales are good and his aren't, and then they change the algos and my sales are bad and his are good. My sales are still well below normal for year over year (this April compared to April 2022), but they've finally started trending in the right direction. I hope this is a sign things are slowly starting to improve because if they kept trending they way they were I wouldn't really have much reason to create any content for SL anymore. Anyways, whatever LL has been doing, even if they fixed it completely (which they won't without adding some sort of extra filters to limit what they have to search and sort), it could take weeks for it to show up properly in your sales. I don't want to sound like a suck up, LL's shenanigans have cost me a lot of money. But it's going to take time for whatever they've done to show up as a positive for us. I have been checking lighthouse and other website performance tools on marketplace and the site is getting pretty quick, honestly. They are putting in some good effort.

Mobile client isn't for building. The benefits of it will be more users to fill up empty sims and places. Mobile users will be strictly content consumers, which SL desperately needs. The fact there are so many empty sims and parcels means there's too many content creators for the amount of content consumers there are. Which is an extremely rare situation for a social platform as usually there's not enough creators. And I wouldn't just limit creators to just people who make mesh, it includes people who create their own social spaces, whatever you want to call them. Mobile SL isn't meant to replace desktop, you won't be building on it. But it has the possibility to bring in a lot of users whose only objective is to explore, be social, work on their AV, etc. If successful, SL mobile could easily increase the population and breathe life into a lot of places in SL that are fantastic and really deserve the traffic but are rarely populated as much as they deserve. Desktop will be for building and power users, mobile will be for people to explore the world and be social. And honestly SL really needs more users who just want to explore, be social, and do things in SL. Mobile client isn't going to replace anything. Even if they make the Unity viewer work on Windows, OSX, and Linux they'd still keep the legacy viewer around because it has all the features to build. But honestly I'd be happy to see a simplified Unity viewer and for the official viewer to be treated like the power user editor for the world, and for LL to be able to add advanced features for building and creating worlds while not having to worry if it'll confuse new users.

Marketplace has been doing this kind of thing for a very long time. It's only recently gotten so bad that people finally started to notice. It has some serious problems and they need to be fixed. I've always had patterns where I sell very poorly, sell old stuff, then sell new stuff. It's never performed the way it should for an ecommerce site and it's always left a lot of sales off the table. I hope this upgrades are a part of what it needs.

The internet shifted from people having fun and doing cool stuff online, exploring technology, to becoming excessively egotistical and individualistic. The internet now is an ego boost. Post pictures, get positive attention. Post stuff on forums/reddit/etc, get likes. The wholesome internet of people just doing things for fun is mostly gone. SL was a bunch of people using some "prim"itive tools to let their imaginations run wild. Yes, a lot of it didn't look good, but it was like creating your own lego creations. Now it's more like just buying stuff and throwing it together. I.E. you used to build your own picnic table out of prims, now you just go buy one. You can see how the old internet was "never post any real life information on the internet" and it was like another life. The new internet is "post as much of your real life as possible to get internet points and attention." Big example of the "new internet" is how YouTube switched from "don't use your real information on the internet, keep your real name safe" to "Google+ update is here! Your real life name will be on your channel unless you jump through hoops and cancel it!" Definitely not rose tinted glasses, the internet has changed. Second Life has changed far less than the rest of the internet, and I think between Metaverse being ran by Facebook and people getting tired of social media, a "Second Life" on the internet away from your first might appeal to a lot of people soon. I hope SL doesn't lose that, it's one of the few places on the internet where you can be someone else still.

I can't imagine it not being successful unless LL really drops the ball somewhere. Mobile users are so valuable when it comes to this stuff because people pull out their phones when they're bored doing something else, i.e. waiting in a line, waiting for food, on a long car ride, etc. They don't actively seek out and say "I'm going to hop on my phone and play games and browse the internet for an hour", they usually do it when they're doing something else. Desktop/laptop users are more like, "alright, I'm going to sit in front of my computer and drop everything to play a game/go on SL/etc." Big difference in how often people want to get on. VR/metaverse is an even larger commitment to get into. If you have a wired unit, you have to clear your play area, set up the software on your PC, then strap the whole thing on your head. It's a huge pain. Oculus tried to make it more convenient but every time want to play you end up moving most of the room around unless you just want to sit and play. I have a Quest, some of the games are really cool, VR Chat can be fun. But VR is a 100% commitment. I can log into SL to be social and work on unrelated programming projects, blender, etc. VR is 100% commitment to playing VR. Which is what I think is a major reason why metaverse failed. I'm logged in to SL now, if I was in VR I couldn't also be on this forum reading and writing. I'd be 100% in SL and unable to multitask. People like to show off, as long as the AV editor is great and people can make a half way decent AV without spending $50 (possible with NUX) they will stay, and if they stay and enjoy themselves they'll eventually want to stand out more by not having the "noob avatar" (no matter how good it is, just because it's so easy to get people will probably view it that way). I'd even argue the AV creator is one of, if not the most important part of making mobile SL a success. That and making the AVs look good and functional, which is what they are focusing on right now, which is a really good sign they're doing what needs to be done to make mobile SL successful.

They don't even need to add any new tools to make huge improvements. They need to update interfaces to allow dragging and dropping to move, resize, etc instead of moving sliders and stuff. They need to make it happen for av editing too. Building tools and AV creator need to be more like this It's still just moving sliders and values around but moving your mouse around and grabbing the body parts to move them is a lot more fun than digging through sliders. Same should apply to building. Should be a lot more fun to move drag and scale and draw than it would be deal with the floater. I feel like there's a lot they could do with the building and av interfaces in general to make it all a way better experience.

They were better for a little bit, the main SL website is throwing a 500 error right now. SLMP has been doing this pattern for years. I'm kind of in a unique position because I have such a wide product range and have been around for so long. Basically, the pattern is 1. Sell old cheap stuff 2. Sell newer stuff 3. Billing/SLMP maintenance 4. Sales crash 5. go back to 1. I think with the database upgrades they have planned, they've found a major problem that needs to be fixed. Given what I've noticed over the years, I think it's likely to address what I've been seeing. Almost feels like sales go very well, the system can't handle it, so there's maintenance, then it resets to selling old stuff. Each cycle has been getting progressively worse with sales for me, and I think it's reached the point it's obvious to a lot of people. And coupled with the poorly timed fee increases I think it got a lot of people's attention. Glad to see them making an effort though.

SL already has the content moderation ability to limit the iOS app from the app store to only accessing M or G sims. I expect the Android and iOS versions from the app store to only be able to access M or G sims with a direct download to an unlocked APK and iOS app on the SL website to access Adult sims. Marketplace can also already filter adult stuff too. I kind of hope that's how it turns out, because if the mobile version is successful, it'll motivate people to make G and M sims and get away from SL being so sex oriented, which it's kind of developed a reputation for.

They need to separate store name into a different tag, like how google does site:reddit.com (query) , and allow boolean so you can do NOT store:"blah blah blah" to exclude the store or store:"blah blah blah". There are too many store names that have nothing to do with what they sell. And from a search optimization standpoint you want your brand to be something unique that pops out. But if you're using any standard english words people would search for in your store name, adding store name to a generic query can really ruin results. I.E. if someone has a store with "car" in the name and they sell things that aren't cars, those irrelevant products show up because the store has "car" in the name. I think they are getting basic search queries under control, the results seem a lot better lately. Obviously it depends on case and if you're using relevant keywords and optimizing for search. But once that is under control I think the next step to make SLMP search really good would be to add a bunch of filters you can use in an advanced query. Something like the store boolean, and other tags that do things like show products that have been released in the last X days. Excluding a store is a very important part of search, especially when sorting starts having hick ups and starts pushing 10 year old stuff where the creator is long gone. But it needs to be its own tool and not included in a generic query. I'm pretty sure they could add a few more really helpful features, especially after the problems we've seen from the last issue with sorting. Mainly the ability to exclude stores, or search multiple stores at once, and the ability to limit results by age. They should really consider adding more listing options when writing a listing too, including the techs used to make the product. i.e. prim/sculpty/mesh, texture/baked/materials/pbr, etc. and let people filter. We need more filters and for a generic search to be as relevant as possible. This would be helpful for anyone selling multiple color variants. Having multiple listings show up in a search that no one clicks on also hurts that products' ranking.

What's not working? I see a lot of signature shirts. Problem may be because you're looking for signature body shirts and signature is just a common name outside of the brand. This is more of a branding issue. The results are quite good for "legacy signature shirt". And I am one who usually complains about search quality.

They already do want it. Look at Roblox, VRChat, IMVU, etc. People want to be social. Metaverse failed because people like virtual worlds as an escape from their real lives. A virtual world tied to Facebook completely defeats the point of a virtual world. Facebook knew it and it's why they went so far as to change their name to Meta. But it still wasn't enough. And meta verse is truly dystopian, everywhere you go there's all these messages telling you how to behave or you're going to get banned, all on a service tied to your real life name. It's no wonder metaverse failed and it was doomed from the start. Look how many people want to share RL information in SL. Now imagine if LL decided one day that all accounts will be linked to your real names. Metaverse failing had nothing to do with people not wanting a virtual world. There are tons of very successful virtual worlds on a huge range of platforms more than a desktop or laptop PC. I would even argue that given SL's technology and content, those other places intentionally entered markets SL wasn't in, VR, mobile, etc and filled in the void. I think if LL jumped on that earlier they would be the VRChat and the mobile IMVU. I don't know why you have such a bone to pick with mobile. In the last 10 years the entire internet has changed, websites target mobile or provide an app when they used to target desktops and laptops. The internet has changed a lot in the last 5 years with COVID and WFH, let alone in the last 10 years. You can call me names all you want and be rude but the fact of the matter is computing and the internet has drastically changed since SL was created and it's only going to keep shifting in that direction. You don't have to dig very far to find articles talking about college students who grew up on phones and don't even understand how directories and folders work. Like it or not there is a generation that mostly only knows mobile devices and touch screens. They will never come to SL in it's current state. If SL stays with just a PC/Mac version it's only going to continue to slowly decline in users as people age out and stop using SL faster than it can attract new users. I've been doing web/internet stuff for a long time and lived through the shift from desktop to mobile. I'm not excited about the internet and devices getting dumber and dumber and turning more and more into a content consumption platform instead of a content creation platform. I miss forums instead of reddit. I miss a lot of the old internet. But you need to realize it's never ever coming back and it's just going to get more restricted, simpler, and less tailored to people like us. SL has 60 million accounts registered by who knows how many people over 20 years, with their largest growth behind them. You just have to search Play Store and you'll see a ridiculous amount of virtual worlds and avatar makers with tons of downloads. Avakin has 100M+ downloads. There's a ton of them with millions of hundreds of thousands of downloads. There is absolutely demand. How many successful virtual worlds do you have to look at to see? Of course they all don't work out, but all it takes to prove that a mobile virtual world is wanted is a few success stories, and they are definitely there. Things don't have to be removed to make the viewer more enjoyable and easier to use. Changing your avatar with a bunch of sliders is really outdated. One of the coolest character creators I've seen in a game let you drag and scale the actual parts of the face, like if you wanted to change eye distance you'd click the eye then just move it. You could get the corner up and down and the eye distance with one natural motion instead of two different sliders. End result, no customization and features were lost but the user only has to perform one action to get their result instead of two sliders.

Desktop and laptop computers are a dying market. This is from 2013, by the way, it's only gotten far worse for PCs, laptops, and desktops. Since this was made we've already had a generation that's over 18 that never was old enough to even use a desktop computer. Just for reference the Android version of IMVU has over 10 million downloads. SL could easily be superior to IMVU on Android. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine) Unity is a game engine so it does all the graphics and low level stuff for LL. They just have to make the game engine work with the SL service. The viewer is written entirely by LL with their own engine. I.E. if LL wants a Linux version of the viewer they have to write the code and make it work with Linux. Unity takes care of all of that, there's literally a dialog when you go to compile your game that lets you choose what you want to compile for, and it includes Playstation, Switch, Android, iOS, Xbox, webGL, a ton of stuff. LL wants to switch from OpenGL to Vulkan, so they'll have to edit the code for the viewer to make it work. With Unity, they just select what API they want from a drop down and the engine does it all. It's very exciting, Unity doesn't just mean mobile, they could easily deliver things like a DX12 Windows client, Linux Vulkan, etc. Basically, Unity will do a lot of stuff LL has to do manually. I wouldn't be surprised if LL had more plans for the Unity viewer than just Android and IOS, but the Unity viewer is extremely promising yet still pretty short on features and it's not ready to replace anything yet. Anyways it's pretty cool and I think if the Unity version ever got to the point that a lot of people would have two viewers installed and have a higher performing DirectX version on their Windows machines.

What Starry is trying to say is that there was a quirk with the older renderer that allowed light to pass through when changing alpha masking and setting it to 0 and it doesn't work anymore. Basically, Starry is just requesting a feature for PBR that allows light to pass through objects and not cast shadows.

This is fantastic. And I hate to get too far ahead of myself but great job going with a standard game engine. Unity can also work on Windows, Linux, WebGL, PS4/5, Xbox one and X|S, Oculus, Android TV, tvOS, Switch, etc. This could be huge for reaching new markets and it could easily be the biggest thing to happen SL since mesh.

The App Store guidelines aren't a big deal. LL can just limit the iOS App Store version and the Google Play Store version to PG sims. And then just host their own APK and whatever app package iOS uses on the SL website. There's a lot of really simple solutions to the App Store and Google Play rules that it isn't going to stop it from happening. And LL can just distribute their phone apps by themselves for power users and not have to care about anyone's app stre guidelines. The original mobile viewer was not much, it was more or less a text viewer where you could only log into specific regions. There were huge limitations on it, to the point people probably wouldn't have used it and it was easily surpassed by Lumiya and even Speedlight. People thought they were going to get a mobile viewer that let them do things you could on the regular viewer, but it was so restricted it would have been a waste of time.I remember when it was announced people were pretty excited and when they learned what it actually was they were very disappointed.

They probably aren't using the limit for elasticsearch which cuts off results that are below a certain matching score. Basically, ES searches all documents based on queries and gives each item in the results that matched a score. If you are good with ES, you figure out what scores start to be completely useless and tell ES to ignore them when it gives out results. I don't think LL's implementation of ES is doing that, so anything that matches even the slightest little bit ends up displayed. Can be kind of a difficult situation for newer users of ES as the score depends on each query, so it's not as simple as "ignore score < .5" You have to do some math and figuring things out since the score is always different. At least they are taking this seriously, I think they've been swarmed enough to realize they have made a pretty big mistake. I just hope this is a big enough hit in their revenue for them to realize how important it is to make sure MP search works very well and everything is reliable.