Flea Yatsenko

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.

It has nothing to do with any sort of conspiracy theory. It's just extremely poorly timed, no gaslighting please.

Try searching for something like "blue shirt". The expected behavior is to find something that is both BLUE and a SHIRT. The current behavior is to find anything that's blue and anything that's a shirt and then try and sort them in meaningful way. Now imagine when people start searching for "mesh shirt" or "rigged mesh blue shirt". Instead of finding you something that's rigged, blue, and a shirt; it'll find you everything that's rigged, everything that's blue, and everything that's a shirt. In short, no one can find anything because no one searches for anything with a single search term and because it's matching all items if they match just a single search term, there's so much irrelevant stuff listed the results look like garbage, because they are. Just imagine trying to filter search results by mesh, material, body type, color, etc and you see how no one can find anything. To top it off, the relevancy results were completely borked and were listing obviously old products (prim and sculpty) over mesh, let alone mesh and material. And then LL has things set up so if a user is inactive and they don't sell anything, their items are purged, yet they are giving old products a huge boost in search rankings so they end up being purchased so the old stuff doesn't get purged because it sold. They have really messed up being able to find anything in search. No one can find what they want, then no one buys anything. Then no one, LL or content creators, make any money. And people are extra mad about it because while they managed to break marketplace search and destroy almost everyone's income, they announced they'll take a larger cut of selling and buying L$, which will discourage people from buying L$ and make it more expensive to cash out. LL's initial response was "just use booleans and quotes", i.e. blue AND shirt AND rigged AND mesh but no other search engine works that way. Because the results are garbage. Just imagine searching Google for "weather today" and it shows you articles about weather, what's happening today, and fails to tell you what the weather is today.

LL just use /index/type/_search?scroll=X and /_search/scroll. Please it's not that difficult to implement. You can show all the pages you want if you use the scroll feature of elasticsearch.

Excuse my attitude, but that response from LL sounds more like they can't get elasticsearch to work properly and are telling the users to fix it themselves by changing their queries. I use elasticsearch, if it's not defaulting to boolean AND with each search token you are doing something extremely wrong. I'm starting to think they simply don't know how to fix it. They never really admit a problem either. I am going on hiatus from building until this is sorted out, sorry. Maybe if you earn my trust again and make an effort to fix search I will create content for you. Right now this is a waste of time and I'll just let my outdated products LL is promoting in search rankings provide me with some income. No reason to make new stuff if the old stuff is cannibalizing sales because of search ranking.

I'm selling old sculpty products and early mesh products more than anything. If this isn't fixed, I'm going to take it as a sign from LL that they want cheap, low quality, high quantity products and stop making complex and high end builds.

Some of this seems silly. LL is leaving a lot of money on the table just from having SLMP search be in a bad state. No one buys things if they can't find what they want and creators don't make as much because people aren't buying as much. Kind of sad, I was hoping the change they announced a while ago about shifting LL revenue from land to other means would boost content creators and LL at the same time. I wouldn't really care about the increase if I saw increased sales volume because they made some sort of huge improvements to SLMP to make buying and selling on it more enjoyable. But the last few weeks have been people complaining about SLMP having problems. And it has been having problems. I think this was very poorly timed at best as there's a lot of content creators who are feeling the pain from the poor relevancy of SLMP search and to tell them their fees have gone up at this time wasn't very well thought out. Really feels a little unfair, I'm not going to see any benefit from the land price changes yet I'm going to lose some income to make up for land prices being lower. I'm not one to usually complain, and an extra 2.5% isn't going to be the end. In fact I lose far more than 2.5% income from SLMP being broken, SLMP search sorting being completely messed up, and there being billing/maintenance problems. I'm ignorant of a lot of inner LL workings but I think they could make that money up much easier by letting SL not be broken so much

A big problem with search results showing outdated and old products is that it makes SL as a whole look out dated. Imagine you are a new user and you search for something and all you find are sculpties, prim hair, etc, a ton of out dated stuff. There's some really awesome builds and stuff creators have made and SL has added a lot of features to enable content creators to make cooler and cooler stuff. Not only does that make SL look out of date, it makes it look worse to new users. If you were a new user and people told you about SL, so you went to buy something that interested you, and only found stuff way out dated with old school building methods, how would you feel about SL in general? I know I wouldn't be excited. Not to mention LL takes a cut of sales, it hurts their revenue when they are promoting 10 year old sculpties for L$99 instead of up to date products that cost more. After keeping the grid stable and reliable, the most important thing for SL is making sure marketplace search works. That's how you start your avatar and it's a large part of how you start building with builder's kits and stuff. It might take a while for that to show up, odds are they are using a lot of caching so you're seeing the cached result instead of the latest result. Which is fine, it just means it takes a little bit to update at the cost of running faster and loading faster. It could be your browser too, you may have to force refresh the page, usually control+F5.

The TL;DR between Geforce and Quadro is that Quadro is designed to be stable and accurate, and Geforce is designed to be as fast as possible. I.E. if there's two ways to write code in the driver, the Quadro way is the most accurate and least likely to crash or have a display errata and Geforce way is to bump up those frame rates even if there's some sort of display problem or it might not be the safest or most stable way. No one cares if there's alpha ordering issues in a game, but if you're doing CAD work for CNC machining and there's even slight inaccuracies it can cause problems.

I second a new CPU, motherboard, and RAM before the GPU. The GPU and CPU are going to hold you back, and it might be pretty expensive to do graphics card and the rest of your system. I had an i7 920, the stock speeds are horrible. Most CPUs are doing 4ghz now and in laymans terms they do a lot more for each ghz they have. I.E. a quad core new CPU at 4ghz is a lot faster than twice as fast as your 2.67ghz i7 920. Your graphics card is so old it no longer receives any meaningful driver updates, only security updates. You aren't going to see any meaningful improvements until you upgrade the CPU and graphics card. If you do one at a time you're going to be very disappointed, but if you can't afford to do both at the same time you're going to have to accept that you're going to spend money on one or the other and not see much improvement.

Pose stands are there to solve a problem. I.E. you are moving around when trying to adjust things on your AV, etc. and your AV keeps moving so it's impossible to grab what you want. If you want to make things easier, you get rid of the problems for needing a pose stand in the first place. You can't get rid of all of them, but I'm pretty sure everyone here at some point in their Second Lives ended up trying to move an attachment and fighting the AV from moving around. I know I did when I was new. For example, a way to solve that problem would be to have an animation or pose play when you open up your build tools. If you're trying to get a screen shot, turn off all other animations and open up a list of poses or animations and let you choose them. Almost all other snapshot features in other games do this, like you pick poses and stuff when you're taking your snapshot. I feel like a lot of problems with SL's interface comes from trying to solve a problem by adding a new feature, instead of trying to remove a problem. A good interface teaches people how to use the interface without even realizing it. Like, they'd have a snapshot mode that was borderline tutorial, had some poses so people could learn to use poses and what they do, give them the ability to rez some props and move them around, etc. If you have a game that has a snapshot or photo mode check it out and see how it works and compare it to setting a scene for a snapshot with SL.

Nux and having a mesh body included is going to really help with retention. The most expensive part of getting a good looking AV going is the after market head and body. It's also the first part of making an avatar, which means a new user is asked to easily pay over $40 for a head and body for something they don't know if they'll like or want to stay around for. Every other free to play game lets people get involved for nothing and slowly introduces the paid options. SL is the opposite, basically "spend L$5,000 on this body and L$5,000 on this head and we can start to pick out clothes and stuff." The initial cost of looking decent in SL absolutely kills retention. I'm sure many of you have tried to get friends into SL, only for them to wonder why they have to spend so much money just to NOT look like a total noob. SL's monetization is backwards, it should start out with some cheap and free stuff to get people involved, then work them up to really cool, rare, expensive stuff. Instead you can easily spend over L$10,000 or more just on a body and head. Only to start buying L$250 clothing accessories. Much easier to get someone buying accessories for L$250 if that's their first in world purchase, as opposed to convincing someone to spend the money on a mesh body and head. And if they want a better mesh body and head, which they will at some point, it won't be so intimidating and scary to drop so much money on it. There are lots of other things they can do to improve retention. But the initial cost is absolutely terrifying for new users. Even if they find fun stuff to do or cool people, they're going to be the odd ball newb looking user and their experience is going to suffer for it. It's also why so many people want to make money in SL, because everything seems so expensive and they think it's better to try and make money. I know the library exists but it's all sort of outdated and looks out of place compared to new stuff on the marketplace. SL has more than enough concurrent users, they have more than Final Fantasy XIV according to steam charts. But I think they are too spread out.