Karsten Rutledge

Sebastian Shelbyville wrote: You say that from your own personal experience that you have witnessed negative reviews get flagged and taken down over and over again. It seems to me the only way you could have personally witnessed said negative reviews being removed over and over is if you are the one leaving the reviews to prove that all of them are getting taken down. If that is the case they were not legitimate reviews to begin with and they should have been flagged and taken down because they were fake reviews. Now that is something that happens a lot. People that have personal grievances or sometimes even competitors buy things just so they can leave negative reviews because they are trying to bring someone's ratings down. I personally think LL should give the right to set bans on who can buy your products on the marketplace and/or you should have the right to choose whether people can review your products or not. If you choose to not allow reviews, just put a little disclaimer on the product page saying this seller does not allow reviews then it is up to the customer whether or not they still want to buy the product or not. Simple solution. That's not the case at all, I don't think I've ever personally left any reviews. I comment on other people's reviews occasionally, but that's about it, especially when they're left on my own products. You actually can't leave a review on a product you haven't purchased, either. Trust me, I'm not throwing gobs of money at random junk on the Marketplace just to leave reviews on things. I buy things off of Marketplace like twice a year, usually for seasonal decorations. I've personally had a number of reviews that I've flagged on my own products that have been removed, and I've also seen reviews left by other people (not me) regularly removed from other people's listings (not mine). I've watched particular marketplace listings (again, not mine) and watched bad reviews crop up and then immediately disappear. Reviews that should have stayed on listings that shouldn't have. Obviously on my own products, I like to think I've only been flagging reviews that deserve to be removed anyway, but I've never been disagreed with even on reviews that I could've seen an arugment both ways (for leaving and for removing).

Pamela Galli wrote: Karsten Rutledge wrote: I'm curious as to why there is no oversight on the Marketplace review system. Linden Lab has effectively given sellers the ability to delete any reviews that they don't like (aka, bad reviews). It seems a seller clicking "Flag for review" on a review of their own items will get that review deleted 100% of the time, no matter what the content of the review is or how legitimate the complaint. Is this an automated system, insufficiently staffed, or do the Marketplace administrators simply have incredibly specific rules for what qualifies as a valid review (because apparently nothing ever does)? This has led to very problematic products keeping a 5-star rating on the Marketplace which leads to an overall dramatically poorer experience for customers. Why have the reviews at all if only good ones are kept? Completely incorrect. That's not a terribly convincing argument you've laid out. I've seen from my own personal experience that they will literally remove every flagged review. I've also watched other listings (not mine) get multiple negative reviews that all disappear after a day or two, leaving nothing but highly rated reviews. This isn't an isolated instance. If they are actually checking all of these flagged reviews, it seems they at least heavily favor the seller. I'd like to hear an explanation of how that process works.

I'm curious as to why there is no oversight on the Marketplace review system. Linden Lab has effectively given sellers the ability to delete any reviews that they don't like (aka, bad reviews). It seems a seller clicking "Flag for review" on a review of their own items will get that review deleted 100% of the time, no matter what the content of the review is or how legitimate the complaint. Is this an automated system, insufficiently staffed, or do the Marketplace administrators simply have incredibly specific rules for what qualifies as a valid review (because apparently nothing ever does)? This has led to very problematic products keeping a 5-star rating on the Marketplace which leads to an overall dramatically poorer experience for customers. Why have the reviews at all if only good ones are kept?

Aeon Voom wrote: HERO QUEST! Oh god! Sweet memories! Ha. I played that as a kid... so very long ago. Kind of a D&D for beginner's. I went looking for a copy on eBay earlier this year for nostalgia's sake...damn things are expensive when you can find them. $100 to $200 is not uncommon for a decent set. It was a great game though.

Sean Martin wrote: There was one game developed in second life that made it to the Nintendo DS. I believe it was called Slingo, or Zingo? One of those 'ingo' games. That was years ago though. I want to say around 2005. You're probably thinking of Tringo. I remember when that was all the rage in Second Life. It wasn't prototyped here so much as an outside company swooped in and offered big money to license it for other platforms. There's a Wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tringo

(Reposting this, for some reason the formatting was screwed up the first time I posted it, and it wouldn't let me fix it because it looked fine in the editor.) I guess I'm lucky, my games are just objects like anything else, so nobody balks at buying them. I do get complaints about pricing though, people have a very distorted view of what things should cost in Second Life in general. In general though, as long as it continues to be worth my time to then I'll continue to make new games and add features, fix bugs, etc. As soon as it stops being worth my time, I won't bother anymore, because it's a lot of time and work both on the development side and on the customer service side. People need to understand that. Running a business in Second Life can be a full time job, and if you aren't making adequate compensation for working a full time job then you quit. As far as subscription based games go, I don't think subscription services work very well for anything in Second Life, a fault of language I think. If llGetMoney only bothered to return something when you called it, it would be trivial to set up recurring subscription systems that took L$. As it is, I think I'd rather pay an entry fee to get into a game than try to remember to pay a regular subscription, but I'm not opposed to either setup.

I struggle with this myself. Occasionally someone sends me a translation of the basic playing instructions for my games in another language, then I run it through Google Translate just to make sure it sounds reasonably like it is all game related, then I include it with the game. It doesn't happen often though, and is really a suboptimal solution, especially since it's only tiny part of the instructions. I get asked for instructions in other languages a lot, but I don't really have a good solution. Google Translate lets you enter a URL to translate an entire web page, I often do this and then send the translated link to people, but as everyone knows...machine translation isn't great. I haven't seen any games that aren't in English, but I'm sure they must exist.

Whether you love them, hate them, or just don't care, these are industry standard features in gaming today across PCs, consoles and even the mobile market of tablets and phones. At the beginning of the year, I began a project to bring these features to my own games in Second Life. The result was the new service http://Gaming.SL/ or http://GamingSL.com/. My games in Second Life connect to this website to provide: Global achievements. Earn an achievement on one Greedy Greedy table, and you've earned it on all of them.Grid-wide leaderboards.Local and Global jackpots.Tournaments"DLC" (Down-Loadable Content) in the form of Addons, allowing your specific game table to download new information for itself from the website. Currently this is being used to add new themes to your game table, allowing radical, dynamic customization of your game table without having to buy a new table or go through the hassle of an update process. Future games could make other use of this Addon feature as seems worthwhile.Aside from 1 or 2 people who have voiced privacy concerns about storing information, the response I've gotten to these new features has been overwhelmingly positive. The service can be opted out of, and does not record any information that isn't publicly available to anyone with a Second Life account. This includes your unique avatar UUID, Display Name and User Name. Some questions to consider: Is this something you would like to see more of in Second Life among other game designers, or do you feel Second Life isn't the place to bring this kind of baggage from traditional gaming?What kind of features would you like to see in Second Life games that you haven't seen yet or wish more creators did? Specifically features that aren't related to the gameplay of a specific game, but that enhance the overall gaming experience for you.DLC can be a touchy subject for many. Is it a way to merely increase cost of ownership or do you love waking up to find there is suddenly more to a game you already loved?If you have support questions regarding a game that you purchased from me, please direct those to me in-world or at support@karstenrutledge.com rather than post them here. Let's keep this for discussion only.

Sorina Garrigus wrote: SLopoly: A Monopoly style game but is having a name change. Though in part I understand why but at the same time there are dozens upon dozens upon dozens of games in RL ending with opoly. I am starting a RL "boardgame cafe" so yes Mr senator I can infact testify I have seen dozens of ...opoly games . Whatever the name its definitely a SL classic game. Yes, this was unfortunate but I wasn't given a choice in the matter. SLopoly is now known as Simopolis at the request of Linden Lab. While I agree with you that Linden Lab has no legal grounding to force this change, it wasn't worth my time or theirs to fight about it. At the end of the day, Second Life is still a private company and they can dictate what goes on their platform.

Audra Siemens wrote: Greedy Greedy - a game similar to Yatzee that you can play alone or with others. Its very addicting and loads of fun. I've never thought of Greedy Greedy as being like Yahtzee, but I suppose it has some of that in its blood. Personally, my favorite game is Khet, which is probably my worst seller. I'm a sucker for strategy games, though, and this one has lasers.