Flea Yatsenko

Best selling is going to be a mess for a while even if they fixed the code. Because the code doesn't have proper sales data to give good results. The larger the store, the worse it's going to be and the longer it's going to take to fix. And best selling works by number of transactions, not L$ earned or anything. Mine are a little funky right now too because some of the old cheap stuff was selling better. But the last week or so my newer stuff has been selling a lot more. But it'll take time for the sales data SLMP uses to calculate best selling to be updated and reflect the changes they made. Right now, only really immediate effects we're going to see are the results not showing horribly outdated products. After customers keep buying the newer stuff, it'll start to show in best selling results. But it's going to take time, and LL to not break anything before the sales data improves.

Seems to work a lot better now than it used to if you're using long keyword searches. Results were really bad before, like showing sculpties, gacha, and stuff. If they did really fix it, it's going to take at least two weeks before sales information updates and the data SLMP is using to sort and search (like sales data) catches up. The problem was very likely that SLMP was pushing older and outdated products in search, so more people were buying them, thus boosting their sales rankings over newer and higher quality builds. People are going to buy low quality stuff if it's all they can find. As the good stuff becomes easier to find, it's going to slowly work its way up. But you have to imagine, sales and all sorts of other factors LL uses to rank products in search has like a year of having low quality search results pushing low quality products. Meaning even if they fix search, it's going to be a while until customers correct it and give SLMP good data to sort, search, and filter with. Basically, the bad search results affects that data SLMP uses to sort and search which then causes more bad search results. It's an endless feedback loop that just makes search worse and worse. But if they did really fix it (which I think they've improved it), it's going to take some time and sales good products for their fixes to show up. No matter what LL does there's going to be some irrelevant results because of merchants abusing keywords. Best thing you can do is vote with your L$ for relevant results because AFAIK LL weighs search results based on sales, to some degree. I've been watching a few search terms for the last few months just to see the quality of what's returned. And it has gotten better, slowly. Searching for "blue shirt" used to return a lot of old style clothing items (you know, the ones that now work with BOM) and no mesh. Now it's mesh results. Some are not blue, some are not shirts, but you are at least getting things that are blue and things that are shirts and the first page of results is actually pretty decent looking stuff that's somewhat modern, showing 96 results per page. So by what I've been watching, search is a lot better than it has been. It was atrocious before. I gave up trying to buy things because it was futile. I felt it strongly in my sales. But things seems to be trending well. Search will not be fixed overnight, but as long as it's trending in the right direction it's a very good sign.

From what I've gathered reading the forums 1. The new marketplace search focuses on items like Gacha. Which I think is pretty terrible because LL is basically throwing content creators out while focusing on people who usually don't even create content. But I did see a post claiming the new algorithm was making LL more money. So from what I gather they are neglecting content creators for gacha because it makes them more money 2. Only the top selling 50k items on SLMP get a priority ranking. I think with the algorithm changes, the top 50k top selling items on SLMP has changed drastically and a lot of original content creators no longer find themselves in the top 50k and it's obliterating their sales (mine included). Because if you're not in the top 50k you're basically treated like every outdated and poor quality product on the SLMP. And if you sell anything remotely niche that's not mainstream, it's even easier to fall out of the top 50k. And I think SLMP uses total transactions to rank sales. So if you sell a gacha for L$250 10 times you will rank the higher than selling one product at L$2500, since it's 10 transactions instead of 1. I think their next step is to upgrade the SLMP servers so they can index more top selling products. But to be honest I think gacha is strangling content creators and niche product builders (i.e. everything that's not home, home decor, and avatar stuff). They need to legit just make a gacha marketplace and a traditional marketplace and keep them separate. The "do not show limited quantity items" checkbox works as a nice filter, but SLMP is still ranking your products against gachas selling for L$100 and if you're not moving enough quantity those gachas are going to bury you in search. Granted most of this is an educated guess. But I do think that's what's happening and it's why my sales were so filled with high volume, low cost items when traditionally my more expensive high end products are what made me money.

People are forgetting about the Unity Viewer. I fully expect it to run far better than the LL viewer. It won't have GLTF/PBR. I don't think making the current viewer more demanding is going to hurt low end users. In fact, a measly celeron is pretty dang close to an ARM mobile device that runs SL on the mobile viewer. I'd even bet a low end laptop or computer running the mobile viewer would be faster than the current SL viewer. I always advocated having two viewers, the current one being for power users and content creators and being more of an advanced viewer or editor and another being for the general population, lower end devices, etc. Unity view is going to solve a lot of problems SL has had, difficult interface, poor performance, etc. and it's going to do it without messing with the current viewer and making everyone angry. Like when they released viewer 2 with the interface change to be more appealing to new users which lead to a massive revolt. But they are trying to address a lot of the problems SL is facing. Maybe not all of them, there's a lot they still need to do. But the biggest problem I think SL has right now is they have too many content creator and sim/parcel owners and not even general users to fill these places up. It's why the grid is always so empty. The current SL ecosystem prioritizes power users and content creators. Which is a smaller portion of the internet population. SL needs to attract more "average" people. And I think they're addressing that. If they didn't care anymore they would just keep riding SL out until it stops making them money.

I think when LL was making Sansar, they viewed SL as the safe money maker they could leave alone and still have it pay the bills. So it did get kind of neglected. After Sansar basically failed (sorry), LL came back to SL and realized how valuable the content and the whole grid is and that it's worth it to keep improving it, even if it has over 20 years of code and people who wrote code and left behind it. It's really easy to look at SL and think that it's so outdated and things are such a mess after 20+ years of people working on it and technology changing and think starting from scratch could be better. But with all the problems SL has, those problems are nothing compared to the huge benefit it has from the user generated content. And as the internet becomes increasingly locked down and centralized, SL just gets more and more open and free compared to other platforms as time goes on. SL has been getting a lot of love from LL lately. I think they realized just how special and cool SL is, and how much potential it still has. In fact I think there's been a general tone shift on the forums and in general about SL being outdated and needing to be replaced. People seem more excited to talk about future things coming to SL and making improvements to it (other than the obvious "this is broken" posts). And look at what we're getting, PBR and a new rendering engine, new starter AVs, a mobile client. Hopefully we can get some improvements to grid/web stability and marketplace. Even though marketplace has been messed up and having a lot of issues for months I do generally feel pretty optimistic about the future of SL. I think right now we are feeling a bit of the pains of them neglecting SL for Sansar and they are working their way out of it.

They are fixing it. My products came back.

I got an answer to my ticket. They claim at least the missing listings aren't deleted and they are working on it. I was about to remake all the missing listings. They are still there do not remake them.

I am missing products from my Manage Listings page and my store. I have a copy of my store items from a month or so ago for slfind.com. When I copied them over, I had 330 public listings. Now I have 290 public listings and 320 in my listings editor. I was able to compare the listings, and found several items missing from both the public store front and the listings editor. In fact I am missing 40+ listings from my listings editor. Some of which are actually pretty popular products. I used regular expressions to filter the copy pasted results from the listing editor and just queried the database on slfind for listings and used an online list compare. I think just because you are listing and unlisting doesn't mean you are getting all your listings back.

I tried lowering all my prices for a few months and it did nothing. I raised them closer to how they were and the last few weeks have been an improvement from the previous months. I have a bad feeling LL makes more money selling gatchas than they do original content from merchants selling traditional items and that's their focus now on search. And given how much money those stupid gacha mobile games make it wouldn't surprise me at all. They came out and said they were making more money with the new search and all you see is gacha. Starting to think SLMP is just a gacha search engine at this point.

Templates and starting items should be in the library folder for new users (and everyone else). It instantly tells new users that content is user created and they are encouraged to create content. 99% of them who try will probably fail but it changes the new user experience from "I'm going to dress up my AV" to "Woah I can make stuff and make money! I have a long term goal of things to do in SL" I highly doubt it's going to cannibalize other sales. People spend money to look unique in SL and a mesh body, no matter how nice, if anyone has access to it, it's just not very unique. It's just a matter of time until it becomes the "noob body" and people are spending money on different bodies. So it only really needs to be good for new users to get them involved with SL. NUX has a chance to show new users it's easy, fun, and profitable to create content for SL. A big chance to show new users what makes SL so unique (user generated content) is being squandered here. I mean if you want to get good user retention, showing a new user you can make money in SL and giving them what they need to get started is a great way to give them a long term goal to stay in SL and to keep them logging in.

I would hope that upgrading from an 11 year old CPU would give you a huge performance boost.

Nice job with the interface. Looks very touch friendly and very easy for someone who isn't a computer power user to navigate and find what they need. Extremely not overwhelming, which the mainline viewer is. The only thing that excited me more about SL than the mobile viewer was mesh. I still believe this has the chance to transform the SL userbase and see some huge growth. I also hope since it's Unity we can get some native Windows, OSX, and Linux builds out of this. I've wanted to see SL split into a simple "viewer" that only focuses on viewing the world and being welcoming to new users, and leaving the traditional client for power users and content creators. This really, legitimately looks great, thank you LL. SL has always had a problem with their viewer, if they make the mainline viewer more appealing for new users, the existing users revolt. I was there for the interface update everyone hated. But if they don't make it easier to use they're killing their new userbase. Unity viewer is awesome and I hope it buds into so much more than just a mobile viewer. Times have changed and computers are used by a much wider audience. Meaning everything needs to be simpler.

Why? You are excluding your customers who want the SL UV BOM and then adding a new feature that existing customers can't use. Best thing for the customers is to have an update that that adds support for EVO X. Best thing for you, it depends on how much you expect to make off of having an EVO X head. If you expect to make a lot it's worth it to just make it a free update since you've increased potential customers by including people who use SL UV and EVO X UV. Worst thing you can do is cancel the SL UV and replace it with EVO X while keeping it the same product. Then you have customers that say "I really love this head but they want me to buy new skins and change my whole AV for the new version" which really angers people. And if you make it a new product, you may lose a customer when they switch to EVO X UV. Then they have to buy a new head. Which means you probably lost a user instead of keeping one. And walking around looking good is basically free advertisement for AV stuff since anyone can source where it came from in world.

I never remove old stuff. I've had people complain that they couldn't find older stuff and they really wanted it. In my eyes it was totally out of date, early mesh work when I didn't really know what I was doing like I do now. But for them it was great. I would have left the old version alone, maybe added some more body type support depending on how well it was still selling, then made a new product with materials instead of baked on shine. It's kinda weird but sometimes people still like the older tech, even full bright baked stuff. I don't know why. But they do and it's not worth updating a new product to alienate customers.

I don't think that's what SL prefers, I think it's what users have to do because of input latency to move your avatar, lag when someone enters a sim/server, etc. Moving around SL simply isn't as fun and enjoyable as it is in other games. I'm sure you know the technical reasons why, but for those that don't they focused on making SL more accurate between clients (i.e. everyone sees the same thing on a screen) as opposed to most games who just update the best they can and guess (like with avatar/character positions). Surely you've seen characters jumping around in other games when it gets laggy, yet when SL is laggy you just can't move.

Sounds like they want to make tools for other people to make their own virtual worlds with instead of creating their own virtual world. Guess they found a way to make money off of virtual worlds, sell the tools to make them to people who'll either make proprietary niche virtual worlds (think training scenarios, etc) or people who want to make social virtual worlds that end up dead after people realize there's no content and you end up running into people who look the exact same as you.

Not to be rude, but you are telling a bunch of power users, who are so involved with SL that they sign up on forums to talk about SL, how to use the search engine's advanced features to find what they want. Do you think the average user would do all this? Do you think a new user would do any of that? Imagine trying to show a friend SL and how to find stuff. So they search and find stuff that looks like it's from a very outdated game. They think SL is a bunch of outdated stuff and looks old, then you tell them they just aren't using search right. Not going to go well, I guarantee it, unless your friend is very patient. But with hundreds of thousands of games out there who cares about being patient for one? The fact that the biggest power users in SL, forums users and content creators, can't get the search engine to work right makes me feel it's the search that's the problem. SLMP search right now is like if you went to amazon and searched for "legend of zelda" and it showed you the original NES legend of zelda instead of the switch one, because "legend of zelda" is more relevant than "legend of zelda breath of the wild." And instead of listening to complains about the the results being outdated, you just told people the search was working fine and they just had to search better. Or imagine you search for "Joe Biden" on Google and all it does is show you results from 30 years ago when he was a senator and all the modern stuff is buried in results. And the response is "just add some filters!" Are those results relevant? Yes. Are they useful? Absolutely not. And just so you know, this is why when they brought in Google search it failed on SLMP too. A store doesn't need relevant results, it needs relevant and USEFUL results. The text and listing has very little to do with if a product is good or not. Sorry for the rant, and thank you for folks who said kind words about my creations. I really do appreciate it, especially in these times. But yes, I'm beyond frustrated, demoralized. Why do I spend tens of hours making in depth builds when I can just slop together old stuff and have it make more L$? I'm actually quite demoralized, because the way SLMP search is right now it discourages higher quality content and prioritizes lower quality content (even in my own store, not jabbing on anyone), which incentivizes making lower quality content. And really, why am I gonna spend time making some complex build with PBR and normals properly baked and all this stuff when old full bright baked stuff is selling the best? It's sad really. SL is amazing, I legit love the platform, and PBR and the new rendering engine is going to be amazing. But if people can't find content for pbr because the main way to find content is suggesting you buy full bright baked, sculpty, and who knows what else then what's even the point of using any new tech? I'm so demoralized I'm not even excited about PBR. I was going to make a ton of new products and get them ready for PBR, then dump them all at once. But I started working a second job IRL because I don't see SLMP providing the returns on my time invested. And honestly I think they just want SL to be an avatar dress up platform at this point because that's obviously where all the money is now.

This horse has been beaten to death. I'm making something but I'm not spilling the beans yet, but I think people will be pretty happy. I am happy so far and it's a very rough draft.

If only that's how it worked but that's not a good enough keyword. Plenty of very outdated products that are made of mesh. It's terrible, I only sell low end, outdated products now and don't sell anything new. So I don't even bother uploading new products. I tried doing a huge sale to lower the cost of my more expensive, high end products and it made zero difference. No one is finding them in search. Just looking through search and going back pages and pages there's lots of quality stuff buried between 2 LI caves and sculpties even though you're searching for mesh. I worry the old, bad items are still selling enough to taint any sort of data they have about product sales. I.E. someone's outdated stuff shows up on page 1, people buy it because they don't know any better, then it gets ranked higher in search because it's selling more. It's obviously going to scare away new users, because anything they look for will be outdated, and by extension make SL look outdated. You can say "well what about boolean operators and changing sorting and all these other features" but newbies aren't going to know and aren't going to care. Do you think a new user to SL who is trying to search for stuff their first time knows to search for mesh and material instead of sculpties? They have no clue. I just accepted it, they aren't going to fix it. It's still early but I'm gonna fix it, I'll say more later. I was patient at least.

dupe post, sorry

I don't think there's any reason for them to release it before PBR is released. Why would they have people making spec+normal content for a new body only for it to be replaced by PBR? Makes more sense to release the body after PBR is released. New body with PBR is going to really make Nux stand out. They probably want a hard reset on avatars, i.e. using Nux means you'll get PBR clothing and stuff. No more baked shiny clothes and metal, etc. I imagine LL has a roadmap for new projects to completely bring SL's graphics up to date and it completely revolves around the new AV and PBR.

Yeah, the results for the keywords I'm targeting are still borked too. How disappointing. I've been working a second job to make up for lost revenue, hopefully Lindens think of me outside spreading mulch and doing landscape work because search is broken.

I wonder if that changed with the infrastructure upgrades. I know they were talking about moving beyond the top 50k. The top selling products report is almost useless, it is lifetime. So if you've had a product that's been around for 10 years and sold 100 times it gets ranked higher in that report than your new successful product that has sold 75 times in a week. The only thing that report is good for is referencing date the product was released and calculating how many sales per day a product has had.

I've got some scripts that require parsing the product ID from my store listings. I've noticed a pretty big discrepancy where the product IDs in a URL in a store do not match the ones in the listing manager. Example: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/FYI-Mesh-Sky-Island-Cave-Platforms/24837657 is the product link, but when you view it in the store my link is https://marketplace.secondlife.com/s/FYI-Mesh-Sky-Island-Cave-Platforms/24810571 which then redirects to https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/FYI-Mesh-Sky-Island-Cave-Platforms/24837657 So, my question is why? And is this intentional? It's completely broken some stuff I use. I mean, I fixed it with a workaround but it seems kind of wasteful to have a redirect for each individual item, doesn't it? Only happens when you are viewing listings on public facing areas, like search results. Doesn't seem to affect featured listings and stuff.

SL does have a problem. It's not nearly as bad as it's made out to be. But normally content creator to consumer ratio is 1:100. SL has far more creators than consumers, which is why there's so much built stuff that sits empty.