Flea Yatsenko

I made a few listings today and they looked fine. Probably depends on what kind of image you're uploading, if it's more like a photo or more like vector artwork.

QA means they are testing them before they roll them out.

SL just needs a mobile client that you can actually play and do in world stuff with. People brought up Roblox, they have almost 12 MILLION REVIEWS on the Play Store and over 2 million reviews for the app on the App Store. If SL just had a tiny fraction of that user base, it would be several times larger than it is today. Given how Western marketshare between iOS and Android is about 50/50, yet there's such a difference in the amount of reviews, I'd wager that a lot of Roblox players aren't in the West, something SL is completely missing out on. SL needs to shift from being something you play on a somewhat modern, decent laptop or desktop and be something you have on your phone you can pull out on the bus, train, car, etc when you're bored. What it really needs is to make a tech leap where sims can be compiled and optimized to run on lower spec hardware, like how things were with Sansar. A lot of SL's performance problems come from the desire to have everywhere in SL be a place you can build. Look at earlier in the thread (sorry, I read the whole thing and forgot who posted it). The sim and region is all set up and all the technology is there for everything to be edited. And it's locked down so much that a facial animation HUD can't be used. Why make all these performance sacrifices for a place where you can't even run scripts? The reality is most places people aren't building. They are being social or playing with stuff. To put this into perspective, imagine you have to tell a random person to get into SL and help them get set up in world. Now imagine you tell someone to try Roblox. Getting started on Roblox is 1000x easier and less daunting, I guarantee it. There's so much content in SL, it's a gold mine. You can find literally anything you want that's not a complete copyright violation. It is the gold of SL and it's what causes all those other virtual worlds to come and go (even Sansar). There absolutely has to be a way to split editing and viewing up in SL. Make current sim state where people can build together be an "edit mode" so people can be social and build together in world. Then have the sim be compiled to an optimized format that can run better on lower end and mobile hardware, but building is disabled. But it'd be a huge project and it sure would be troublesome and not fun to do the coding for. But imagine an SL where you rez into your parcel or sim or whatever and you download a compressed and optimized package containing the mesh and textures and everything is loaded and running great quickly. I love building in SL. I never would have gotten into making mesh in Blender if it weren't for SL. And I'm not advocating making it impossible to build or some elite thing. I'm saying that SL is treated like an editor for a virtual world, and it's alienating people who don't want to build all the time by making the client overly complex, hurting performance, and limiting the potential audience by massively limiting the types of devices that can run SL. LL is fighting changing demographics of hardware and it's not working. Android has successfully eaten away and traditional computers, and I don't think the correlation between the decline of Windows computers and the slow decline of SL is a coincidence. Focusing so much on marketing to the audience of people with decent computers is limiting your possible outreach for users. EDIT: Just think if SL was more focused on social. You are out and about and you just pull out your phone to see who is online to talk to. That'd be awesome. Sitting around on your phone, talking to people, playing with your AV appearance, and maybe doing some light exploring. Right now when you get on SL you basically have to pick a dedicated time to do it, sit in front of your computer, etc.

I'm going to say something controversial, but I imagine the vast majority of users never even bother with content creation at all. The current viewer should be rebranded an editor and made for power users. The actual viewer should have all the editing and advanced features removed. Make it 100% focused on customizing your avatar, being social, and getting the most performance out of the viewer as possible. I always imagined an avatar editor more like in the SIMS. The current one feels more like a chore. It should be a full screen mode, with your avatar in a 360 degree preview you can freely move around and see changes in real time. It should be made as simple and not intimidating as possible. I think all these menus, folders, etc are very confusing to new users and stop them from coming back. SL's biggest problem right now is getting new users and keeping them. Making the new user experience a lot more enjoyable would be a huge boon for SL. And making the viewer simpler, easier to use, and less scary to new users would be huge. All the viewer really needs is 1. An easy way to customize your avatar 2. An easy and convenient way to buy things and buy L$ 3. Quick and easy communication with other members The editor should go all out hardcore with advanced options, menus, features, etc. Just add features, even if they're confusing or difficult to use, if they help people create content and get things done in SL. The current viewer tries to please content creators and content consumers and it's just oo overwhelming for new users.

As someone who does web dev as well as SL, it sounds like when you save the images to the servers, they are compressing them too much. Unless they are saving a higher resolution image somewhere, LL won't be able to improve the image quality until you provide them with a better image. I highly doubt they are saving higher resolution versions of the images you upload if they're not using them. They are trying to get the SLMP to load faster with all this caching they added, and they're being over-zealous with their image "optimization" to improve page loading time and reduce operating costs. It's a very good thing they are doing this, e-commerce sites need to be extremely fast: https://www.gigaspaces.com/blog/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-latency-cost-them-1-in-sales/ Most importantly, look what Google found. Half a second of delay drops search traffic by 20%. SLMP website can take a second or two to load the first page. Meanwhile Google's first page loads nearly instantly. Amazon is the same. Caching is one of those things that can massively speed up your website and people make it sound like it's extremely easy to do. The reality is that adding caching usually breaks things in ways you never expected or shows you bugs you didn't know you had in your software. I'm glad they are finally working on increasing the speed of SLMP. The execution could be a lot better, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. The initial page load should have the openID server check for login information with an ajax request instead of an HTTP redirect, for example. But they are moving in the right direction. It has potential to really improve sales and search traffic. And when the search results are so bad due to things like keyword abuse, better performing search and SLMP website will make a very big difference. I'm holding out on making a few new listings because I don't want to deal with going back and re-uploading the images again.

Sounds like it's just a caching issue then. Thanks.

So, is it safe to make new listings yet or not?

Keyword spam is hurting our sales, and it hurts LL income as it frustrates users who are looking for things and only see irrelevant results. As LL shifts more of their revenue to SLMP instead of tier, they need to provide users with tools to make sure the content they see on SLMP is relevant and encourages them to make a purchase. There's no real punishment for keyword spam, it's why it's so prominent. There's no serious penalty and you have a slight chance of selling something to someone who gets interested in something they weren't looking for. You'll frustrate and annoy the majority of people who view your item with the wrong key words, but that doesn't affect you if you're keyword spamming. They never would have saw your product in the first place without the keyword spam. IIRC there's some sort of penalty for having your item show up in search results and not having it clicked, but there needs to be more effort into voting with your wallet. Something like the more L$ you make in a transaction per search the more your ranking increases. There's also no penalty for spamming gacha everywhere. In fact it's free advertising, why pay for an ad on SLMP to show your products to someone who didn't search for them when you can just keyword spam? I don't do it, I'm realizing after writing this it makes it sounds like I'm for keyword spam. I'm not, it ruins the marketplace and hurts legit and honest creators. But from a business perspective where you're only out to make money, it makes a lot of sense to keyword spam. The benefits far outweigh the costs, especially if you're running some shady, fly by night business where you expect it to last a year or two tops before you make a new one. That needs to change, and it's quite clear there's entire SLMP stores dedicated to these practices.

SL is doing fine for what it is, a virtual world that requires a computer to run. Computers have been on a downward trend for quite some time. There's a generation out there with a lot of people who don't know how to use a QWERTY keyboard and only know how to "swype" or peck at a screen. SL is a safe, slowly declining product that LL has and they don't want to take huge risks to upset what they have. Part of that is not adapting SL to go after new markets. SL is hitched to the higher performance computer wagon and nothing has been done to get it off of that. I've posted here before, but the fact that you can't do activities in SL that revolve buying things and changing your avatar on Android or iOS is a ridiculously huge amount of money and new users that LL is passing up. SL would be laughably huge and successful if it was turned into a product where the current viewer was actually an editor for power users, and there was a dumbed down Android and iOS client that let you play dress up on your avatar and visit sims to go to dances or events and meet people. But that is the problem with a product like SL in today's internet. The internet 10 years ago was a very different place. Today it's more about posting links on reddit for upvotes, pictures on instagram, facebook, etc for likes, or typing out a paltry 280 characters max on Twitter for likes and retweets. Second Life is fine, it's filled with people who like the way the internet was before it was dumbed down into a "submit the easiest to create content or someone else's content and receive dopamine" disaster that it is now. If the internet didn't go in the direction it did, SL would be huge right now. But LL didn't really adapt to the way the internet was changing. Does this mean it's going to die anytime soon? Absolutely not. But it's going to be in a steady decline as the market of people who have good computers and seek out things like virtual worlds declines. LL could fix it if they could develop something to bring SL to a new market, like mobile users. And all those users would need land and they couldn't handle doing that stuff on their devices. So it'd easily end up something like $5 a month gets you a tiny little skybox where you can decorate like in the sims and play dress up. I don't want to rant too much, I think LL has made some odd choices investing heavily in something that, while really great, could have been so much more while they pass up something with so much potential. Forgive me for this, but SL very likely has the most content of any single game in existence (maybe not Microsoft Flight Simulator because it's legitimately the entire Earth). That's a huge resource, imagine if EA had to pay people to make the clothing options available on marketplace so they could put them in the Sims. It's not feasible. SL's content is absolutely stunning in quality and quantity (really, go look at some game assets in a model viewer and gag, there's plenty of mesh people in SL that have more talent) and LL needs to do more to capitalize on it. They keep making products unrelated to SL, but SL is an absolute gold-mine of user content and there's absolutely zero way any other company could create what you can get on SL.

haha, I had a nice, long post written up about how December was bad for me too. And how it had to do with SL reliability being a problem. And when I clicked submit it ate my post and started giving 504 errors. What a nice reminder of why I never really use these forums.

If SL was growing and doing well, they wouldn't have to increase fees. If SL was growing by 5% every few months, they'd make more money with 5% commission than they would at 10% with a flat or declining userbase. Remember that old story or whatever where someone asks if you'd rather have a penny that doubles every day or get a few dollars a day? It's very similar. SL still plays like a game before 2010. You need a good computer, it takes time to learn how to use it, etc. SL desperately needs a new, alternative viewer designed for exploring the world and making your avatar look good. People have no patience to learn a something like SL, they did years and years ago. LL needs to shift SL to be more attractive to content consumers and not content creators. There are enough creators, it's why most of the grid is empty. People come here to make things and then no one shows up because everyone else is making things and they want people to show up. Meanwhile you have people who don't have the time or patience to learn the SL viewer and get into things. You have a generation that barely knows how to use a physical QWERTY keyboard, and there's nothing LL has to cater to that market. I've floated this idea before, but LL needs to make the current viewer the advanced editor for SL, then make a simple, well performing viewer that does nothing but let you explore the world and buy stuff. They need a way to compile a sim into an optimized map that can be downloaded by that viewer, so it runs significantly better and we can get SL on iOS and Android. There's a lot of things LL should be doing to grow the user base. And they keep getting stuck in side projects and ignoring SL. Imagine how much the SL economy would grow if there was an Android app where the focus was on having a home and making your AV look cool, and you could buy L$ directly from the app. SLMP is interesting, because when we make more money selling stuff, so does LL. It's win win, which is why I think a lot of people are upset about the increase. LL took something that should be win win and turned it into win-lose with merchants losing twice as much money as they used to in each transaction. I feel sorry for you outside of the US. VAT and that income tax is absurd.

I never said it was a good idea. It's not. it's absolutely horrible. But it really highlights a problem that new users are intimidated by directly spending real life money on SL. The best solution is to just spend the money and get started, it's obvious to anyone who has been here in SL for any amount of time. Yet people don't. And that's money that people could pump into the SL economy. Instead they idle for pennies a day. It really highlights another problem. It costs around L$10,000 to make a good mesh avatar. You're easily looking at $20 to $40 for a good looking avatar. You can buy an actual game for that much money and have more fun. But there's not enough users for content creators to make money selling stuff cheaper. LL needs to stop treating SL as a PC game and treating it as a social platform. The ratio of content creators to consumers is usually between 1:100 and 10:100. I imagine it's far lower in SL, with mesh you need basic knowledge of Blender, 3ds max, etc and the barrier to entry is much higher than on a site like reddit. It's great SL makes it easy for people to get started building things in a game. But they always market to builders. And the grid is empty because people are building things and not enough people show up. Well at least I think that's one big reason.

While your complaints are 100% valid, you are forgetting how much they affect customers. They are spending real life money to buy something, and they don't have confidence that the marketplace will timeout when they go to check out. Maybe if you have a successful store it's easy to write off L$250 or even L$2500 as a small sum. But some people work in SL dancing and doing whatever to scrape up L$250 to buy something. If they go to buy it and the marketplace is having problems, they aren't going to risk spending that L$ they worked for if SLMP can eat it in a time out. Imagine if you went to buy something on Amazon and the page kept timing out. You would be really nervous when you press that check out button. Will your order go through? Will this turn into a giant mess? Do I contact SL or the seller if the sale doesn't go through? Is the seller even active in SL? It's horrifying. Every time I buy something on SLMP I cross my fingers when I press that checkout button. I've never had anything go wrong when checking out, but I've had enough problems to cause a major lack of confidence. And this has always been LL's problem, making things reliable and stable. People have less attention and devotion to something now than ever. When SL was young there was no real competition to them. If it went down, people would wait. Now there are tons of virtual worlds and tons of things to spend your time doing on the internet. And when people are trying to put on new clothing they bought, building with their new builder's kit, and it doesn't work right, they just give up and leave. There's some really good stats in the other thread about the increases about the user base, and a lot of users very rarely sign on. I think it's a combination of not having anything to do (cheap land will fill SL will more stuff to do) and them not having confidence in SL's reliability and stability. Imagine how you would feel if you were brand new in SL. You drop $20 on L$ to buy stuff to make your AV look good and to learn how to build. You log in, and you instantly start having problems with getting things attached, rezzing, etc. You are brand new, you don't think this is a bad day, you think the whole thing is broken and you give up. And you're angry because you wasted $20 on a game that "doesn't work." I have experience with running websites. If you have a new user and one thing doesn't work right or confuses them, they are GONE. They will probably never ever come back. I don't want to get too far off topic but what SL needs is to split between the main viewer and a light version. Make the current version of SL and viewers the editors, then compile them to something more efficient and create a simple, easy to use viewer that can't edit anything, downloads optimized/compiled maps of the current sim, and can run on lower end hardware (like phones). People are vain, most people in VRChat spend their time in front of a mirror looking at themselves. It wouldn't take much, SL has more content to make avatars look good than any other platform.

I don't think it was your change. My sales have been absolutely horrible lately. I easily made half of what I made in November last year. Lots of maintenance this time of year. If SLMP and the grid is running well, November and December are usually one of the best times of the year for me. And if they are in bad shape, they can be some of the worst (year over year). I have a theory that more people than normal try and use SL this time of year. Winter is starting, they might be busy with holiday stuff but they probably want to escape into another world. And they try to go to SL more than normal and overload everything. The announcement was very bad timing. They say they will raise commission and then they have lots of problems with the grid and SLMP. If they did something to SLMP and my profits were up I would gladly let them have their 10% commission. I would be glad they took it because it would be clear they were using the money to improve things and make both the Lab and us merchants more money. But honestly I am going through a stage of some of my worst sales every (and oddly enough the old stuff is the stuff that's selling) while they raise commission. And before it nose dived I was getting a very large amount of positive feedback about the quality of my new products. And then profits drop and I start selling really old stuff that's been outdated. Almost like people can't find the new stuff. SL is a really cool place, and LL built something really cool that allowed a huge amount of people to add even more cool stuff to what they made. And I think their userbase is disappearing and the economy is slowing because people lose faith in SL being reliable. Who will go buy a ton of builder's kits to build on their land if they aren't confident SL will perform and let them build, or if they can even buy everything and not have issues. Reading some of these other posts, people can launch products that have potential to make passive income for the next 5+ years. Doing it is a no brainer, yet they are hesitant because they don't want to end up wasting time because they aren't confident the SLMP will be reliable enough to save a listing. I sell a lot of stuff for builders. If they want to enjoy my products and have fun they need to have a place to use them that is reliable and easy to build with. I want people to have fun with my stuff. I want them to build really cool stuff and make something awesome they can really enjoy. And knowing they are fighting SL to try and make what they want is a real bummer. I know it's costing me sales. So is the high cost of land. I'm trying to get a build in world now, textures keep resetting, prim params keep resetting. Now I have to spend time testing because I'm not confident that what I see in my viewer is what others will see. Could easily end up where it looks textured on my computer and when someone gets it textures are missing. I really love SL. I am grateful for what the lab has done. But they have serious issues they need to resolve. I would even say SL would be growing today if they had kept it more reliable and gave people confidence. I can only imagine the issues SL instability has caused. "Hey come check out this cool place SL, oh we can't log in today it's down maybe tomorrow", "I can't wait to build this really awesome place! Oh I can't log in or buy things"

Is it really though? I just got this error browsing search results. And marketplace.secondlife.com is currently not loading for me, throwing an internal server error after it tries to load for about 30 seconds. I'm just trying to shed light on a situation, you're free to ignore what's going on but when SLMP is down it doesn't matter if LL is taking 5% or 10%, 5% or 10% of zero is still zero. And none of us are making any money either.

I'm a little late to the thread, but I've been giving this a lot of thought. I went through my sales data and looked at how much maintenance we have, specially the unscheduled kind, and those months and weeks my entire store performs far worse than when SL is running smoothly. If SL ran smoothly more often, more people would be buying things, and everyone, including LL and merchants, would be making more money. There are several outlier months in my history where I've made less than half of what I normally would year over year. Look at all this billing maintenance last month: https://secondlife-status.statuspage.io/ My fiscal month starts on the 9th. This month my sales have been well below normal year over year. This isn't the first time I've noticed this coincidence and looking back through history, if you have a large store that has some good evergreen products that continue to sell steadily and constantly, you will see it too. Which is why I am disappointed in the rate change. If SL could get things to be more stable, and get the billing system issues massively reduced, we would all be making more money, even if LL kept the commission fee at 5%. Much more income at the same rate is better than less or the same income at a higher rate. And looking at my personal sales data, SL grid problems cause massive fluctuations to the point that there's no way LL could ever reasonably expect to depend on SLMP income in SLMP's and the grid's current state. When they are getting money from land owners, they will get the same income every month whether SL is up 100% of the time or there's problems 90% of the time. But as they shift to depending more on merchants and L$ transactions, they stand to lose a lot of money when SL is down. And SL's stability leaves so much to be desired. I view what happens in a bad SL month and how it affects me, and think how that would affect a company. Depending on SLMP income when SLMP and the billing systems aren't stable and always need maintenance will absolutely mess up LL's quarterly reports. SL being down is costing us all a lot of income. Merchants and LL. Billing system maintenance always results in bad sales for me, I usually sell at least a few things a day (not trying to brag). But LL's web infrastructure is not good. It took me a good 30 seconds for the server to log me into the forums, and when I was I wasn't redirected to this thread. I had to go back through history. And SL's economy depends on this stuff. I am not one to be rude but looking at how Sansar makes progress and comparing it to the web side of LL I think the web stuff would be much better in Boston. Web stuff has been getting better, but it always seems to go through a cycle of getting better, then getting absolutely broken for a while. Just my two cents but LL is causing me a lot of lost income with all this maintenance, billing issues, and now raising their commission. They are free to compare themselves and their commission to Google Play or Apple App Store, but if they want to do that I will compare the uptimes and reliability of Google and Apple's billing systems and marketplaces to LL's and that is not a very good comparison for LL. I would be happy with 15% commission if it meant we would get a stable grid, marketplace loaded with the speed of a serious e-commerce site. Go test marketplace.secondlife.com in a web front end performance tool like gtmetrix. Just to visit the marketplace page you get redirected from marketplace.secondlife.com id.secondlife.com marketplace.secondlife.com?openid_identifier marketplace.secondlife.com I think I mentioned this a long time ago and things are getting better. Fully loaded was only 2.6 seconds, and there's some massively low hanging fruit like no optimization on storefront images, JS and CSS aren't minimized server side, etc. I was actually pleasantly surprised by this, I remember it was not very good at all a while ago. I don't mean to be rude to anyone or anything. But I've been dealing with the coincidence of lots of maintenance and billing maintenance meaning a bad month of sales for years. And I feel like no one has ever made a big deal out of losing income from that. I have another friend who has noticed the same thing after I pointed it out to him. At first he thought I was just being crazy, but now he will ask me if there was a lot of billing maintenance because his sales are slow. And there almost always is. I just want to see this stuff fixed. Taking more commission is just a band aide on a larger problem. And I am legit concerned that a shift to depending more on the economy, when I see issues with stability negatively affecting the economy, from a system that provides the same income per customer every month, will cause a lot of problems for SL. And I really like this place and what LL has done. I want it to do well. If LL wants to compare themselves to Google, Apple, etc they need to start treating the reliability and stability of the grid and related websites like they do. Look at how people are freaking out about Discord being down and having problems. Now look how much SL has problems. Marketplace would pull in so much more revenue if SL was stable like other services.

It's easy to fix if it's automated. Just a few quick ideas off the top of my head 1. Make new accounts wait a specific amount of time before opening up a new store (least effective) 2. Require credit card to open up a store 3. Force a captcha for doing several things on the marketplace, and then let premium users skip it. The the very least, they're manually creating alt accounts (or they've found an exploit somewhere that lets them bypass the captcha). But once that's done, I think the rest can be automated. Something really needs to be done, these people drive down the prices of a lot of virtual goods, which discourages mesh creators. Personally, I think if you want to use Second Life to earn money in real life, there should be no line between the real life aspects of Second Life and real life. If you want to go on Second Life and live it as a purely alternative life, you're more than welcome to. But if you're going to be using it to make real life money, you shouldn't be hiding behind all this alt stuff. It's obvious the system of waiting for something to get reported and then going through all the DMCA hoops to get it taken down is not worth it. I imagine a lot of hours get wasted by LL employees dealing with this sort of stuff.

LL has to make tough choices here. If they want to bring in more previous content from SL, they'll probably have to make sacrifices on Sansar. And if they want to go all out and ignore backward compatiblity completely, they will have no content for Sansar until people move, and it falls into the very common chicken and egg problem with social things on the internet. I think they will do what they can to bring new content in. But, just off the top of my head, even if LL doesn't make some steps, it doesn't mean it's not possible. If Sansar allows custom skeltons to be uploaded, there will be skeltons that match exactly SL rigging and will allow backwards compatibility, but it will probably be a thing developed by a third party. I imagine too that some sort of tools which help a ton for porting LSL to the new language will be wildly popular as well. These are things LL won't have to do at all but other people will do for them, and they will make money off of it. Which is why I am personally excited for Sansars new business model of relying on merchants and content creators more. LL can hopefully just bring us the tools we need to make things and then let us make things as we end up in a win win win situation where customer gets quality product, merchant gets paid, and LL profits from sansar. My thoughts are that if LL won't directly provide support, which I think they will allow some sort of importing for content creators to Sansar, third parties will fill in the void, and the people who do it first will make a lot of money (probably). I'm not too worried about it either. If LL can get Sansar to become popular with the mobile and casual users it's going to be extremely lucrative for content creators and I highly doubt content creators wouldn't be flocking to Sansar (as long as LL can bring in those users).

The reasoning behind moving marketplace inventory to SL inventory servers is to get rid of the redundency of having to store items in both the SL inventory server and the SLMP inventory server. It also reduced an entire hop with a transation which reduces the amount of possible areas things can go wrong. With Direct Delivery, it goes a bit like this: Merchant uploads item to SL to sell Merchant places it in merchant outbox, which transfers inventory to the SLMP servers (you now have a copy in SLMP server and SL server User goes to buy your product SLMP website looks up item on SLMP inventory server and then communicates with SL inventory and delivers the product The new way with VMM is a little more efficient Merchant uploads item to SL to sell Merchant places in special folder inside of their inventory, item to sell stays on SL inventory servers User goes to buy your product SLMP tells SL inventory servers directly to give the user There's a lot less to go wrong with the new system. In a way it's the best of magic boxes and direct delivery, where you can sell limited quantity items as well as there's no additional hop between another server like with Magic Boxes, but it has the perks of DD like not having to depend on an LSL script on a simulator. However, the real reason I dropped by this thread, was I was hoping we could see the migration to VMM used to clean up the marketplace from older listings from merchants that have abandoned SL. There could simply be an email that says you have to opt in to move to VMM and if you don't, your listings will be unlisted and not automatically migrated after a certain timeframe, say a few months. Basically, just use this as a chance to see which users are still active and which are gone, and to reduce the amount of items clogging up search for users and clogging up servers for LL. If someone misses it, they could manually migrate and list again laster manually.

I've been selling for a long time. One thing I've noticed is when things aren't so healthy with the pipeline between a customer buying something and actually getting it, weird things start to happen. The last few days, I've noticed delayed emails for sale confirmations. I usually keep my phone glued to my side and I keep a good eye on things. Delayed emails (yes, I check spam folder and I actually check on multiple devices to make sure it's not one device acting up) are a common thing I've noticed when the website or inventory servers are having issues. I don't think you're alone in noticing something odd. To be honest, things have been a little abnormal for me and a few other merchants as well ever since last June. it does seem like the last few weeks things have been getting even worse somehow. The thing about SL when it gets like this, I've noticed, is that it doesn't affect everyone. Some people don't get affected at all and some get massively affected. I think it has a lot to do with how old a lot of the SL codebase is. Those sort of bugs that affect certain groups of people but not others are the absolute worst to deal with, mainly because there's something unique they're doing or unique to their set up that isn't universal between other users.

I got to play around with it for a few minutes. I like where it's headed but it seems like there's some room for improvement. I sort of feel like it'd be nice to have the option the in "MARKETPLACE LISTINGS" window to create a new folder. It seems you want to keep more than one copy of a build on hand, so I want to move a copy of the item to my marketplace listings. If I could make folders, I could paste other things into that folder. I'll probably make a JIRA soon. I'm still really impressed with the performance of sending items to the website. It might be a good idea to update the merchant log in page on the marketplace website after you log in to see your store. I don't have any analytics data (obviously) but I would assume that gets more traffic than the merchant forums. At least, if you're still looking for feedback. Will you have a public beta of an importer tool from the old system? Or is it all going to be done on your end?

I don't think this warrants its own Jira yet, but it's something I want to bring up. It doesn't seem like a folder hierarchy tree-view is a good way to manage things. From playing with VMM a bit, it appears as though you have one level of folder for all of your products, below that, you have specific products, and then below that level, you have specific versions. A tree-view folder hierarchy implies that the different levels don't matter. I.E. there is no need for a parent-child relationship between folders. And from my playing with it, it appears there is. Example is I created a large folder of objects and dragged it directly into the listings window. It ended up dropping in a few items, picking a random item and making that the name of a folder, and then putting objects in that folder. I tried two times and each time, the item for the folder for everything to go into was a random object in the list of objects. So I would have Marketplace Listings ---Folder I dragged into Marketplace Listings folder in Marketplace Listings window --- --- random folder name from available objects --- --- --- Objects I fixed it by setting things up as Product Name --- Product Version --- --- Objects and dragging that to the window. And it worked reliably. It feels like I am doing this wrong, but the interface doesn't make it overly explicit that that's how it should be done. You do it wrong and it looks like the thing doesn't work properly, because there's nothing to guide the user on what to do and there's no meaningful error messages to indicated you've done something wrong. The only visible clue I had was that the version folder thing had lines on the folder icon and the others didn't. It feels like the interface isn't clear enough on what you should be doing. It would be more convenient and more clear if you just had a textbox where you typed in the name of the listing, and then dragged folders full of items into an area after that listing has been selected, and then right click to activate that folder as current version of the listing. I guess another way to explain my issue with this interface design is that you're using the same widgets to perform several actions: create listing, activate item, and edit listing. And this widget is a tree-view where you're supposed to just know that the top layer is a folder that gets listing folders added to it while the listing folders gets the folders full of content to list. It's vague and confusing. I really don't think tree-view is the way to go about this. I tried to make a mock up in qt designer since it's quicker than gimp or photoshop, but it's difficult to get across properly. But as a positive, I am really happy besides the interface. Normally it can take a few minutes for an item to show up on marketplace website when I use merchant outbox, and VMM was instant, even with a large folder. Sometimes with merchant outbox, it can take 10 minutes or more for my object to show up in the unassociated group. I think that clearing up interface issues is the current problem. Performance of this new system was really surprising to me in a good way. I am looking forward to what happens after the shift. I will say, though, that the initial failure to create folders properly leaves me concerned about how the automatic importing will go. As it stands, I have my folders organized like Object 1.0.0 Object 1.0.1 And it sounds like it should be Object --- 1.0.0 --- 1.0.1 to be compatible with the way VMM is right now. If it's the first way, dragging the main folder on will cause problems (at least it did for me).

I saw a huge dip when that announcement was made. But I can't figure out if that slip was them hinting to us that SL is going to be limping along while they work on the new version and that's why things have been oddly slow or if the announcement scared people off of SL. I sell some consumer things and some builder's kits. The kits have been doing pretty well, but the consumer stuff is a little slow. I think when SL gets slow it's because the more casual non-builders leave and the more dedicated users are buying things to build. There was a big surge in August for me. So I don't know if the issue with things being a lot slower this time of the year than last year is a social problem or a technological one. I've been keeping records for a good two years and I noticed some months just end up looking like huge outliers for some reason. Oddly enough it seems like for all the times of good sales there is going to be times of really bad sales. And the last several months before June were really good to me. Personally I think something got massively foobarred with the current backend of marketplace and that's why they're redoing it. I hope something along the lines of June and those announcements, SLMP team decided to make an SLMP compatible with SL 1.0 and SL 2.0 and they just decided to trash the old system and limp it along until the new one can come out. That's just being optimistic though. But I'm trying to wrap my head around why they would be redoing the backend of SLMP when it's about have a new service show up. The only good conclusion I came up with was that they're going to make a new system compatible with both services (at least on the backend) and they're redoing all of this SLMP stuff for SL 2.0, but still giving the upgrades to SL 1.0. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to redo something in a product that's going to only be focused on for a year. I could be wrong though. If you ask me, I think LL just took a lot of people off of SLMP maintenance and put them on making the new system. I noticed lots of weird things since June, like refreshing transaction history and getting 500 errors from the web server. Just poking around transaction history page and stuff there's a lot of odd errors. And all it takes is one error page when trying to check out for people to run away and not risk it. When you're dealing with real money and there's a chance it's just going to get thrown away, you get real careful. If anyone else has any theories I'd like to hear them. I've been talking this over with others and trying to figure things out. But seeing a big drop off in June seems to be pretty commonplace from the people I've talked to about it.

I was under the impression that the way things are currently setup is like this Create object in SL -> send to merchant outbox -> assets get hosted on SLMP inventory server So you have two copies of what you have listed, one in SL and another in the SLMP server So when you buy something off SLMP, it has to go SLMP website -> SLMP inventory server -> SL inventory server I thought the point of this was to remove the SLMP inventory server completely to remove a step in transfering items to customers. So it would look like Create object in SL -> store in SL Inventory And ordering would be SLMP website -> SL inventory server From a technology standpoint, I would assume the website would track how many items are left and it wouldn't push the transaction from you to the customer if the quantity available is not enough to complete the transaction. Shifting from SLMP inventory server to SL inventory server is going to really help speed up deliveries and make them a lot more reliable. SLMP has basically gone from: Unstable LSL scripts that depend on simulator and LSL scripts to distribute inventory SLMP inventory server that distributes inventory And latest version will skip SLMP inventory server completely and just let SLMP inventory transactions skip directly from user to user without jumping through different servers. LL has not made a big deal about this, but I think it is the largest reason for them to abandon the current system. It's going to remove a significant point of failure between sending things from SLMP and getting them from SLMP to customers. The current system is very convoluted. Why do you need another server to handle transfering something that will stay on the same server anyways? This has potential to fix a lot of things merchants complain about but LL is too nervous to even address.

I hope for this as well. It means that content creators are solely responsible for the appearance of the avatar and there's no longer a need to rely on LL to release avatar updates. As it stands right now, any content creators who want to make avatars basically have to hide the default avatar and then throw something over what exists already. Once you get out of humanoid shapes, you're in trouble. Not to mention custom skeletons open up possibilities like animated body parts. That would be a game changer from XXX market to people who want neko cat ears. I would hope we would see something along the lines of a default avatar and skeleton provided. Then, animation vendors would make animations for the default skeleton. And then, people who make avatars would want to use the default skeleton as often as possible to have the most amount of animations provided for that avatar. And then it still leaves the possibility open of allowing custom animations and custom skeletons to be added. I don't see it getting horribly fragmented. I have no doubt someone will try and lock people down into proprietary avatars and animations, but that's going to be a very difficult battle to have to fight against all the animation vendors who are designed for a default avatar. At least, those are my thoughts on things. It seems like some of this is being taken too hard again. Custom skeletons doesn't mean that we won't have a default avatar that is primarily designed around. It means that we will have a default avatar with the option of using custom skeletons and animations. If there is no default avatar, skeleton, and animations, people will just log into SL 2.0 as clouds until they buy things... I'm just throwing out baseless conjecture at this point, but if Ebbe is reading hopefully he can either give us hints that something like this is coming or that my ideas could go toward SL 2.0 if they haven't been thought of already.