Warning: MP enhancement bug rebills hourly, no fix yet

[Tibouchina Freschi]

Just a warning that Marketplace promos may be far more costly than you expect. I ordered a few enhancements yesterday on my dining tables (Thanksgiving, you know) and have since been charged the promo fees hourly, over and over, with no end in sight. The erroneous charges total about L$25,000 so far. LL closed my support ticket, concluding that this is "a bug.". Live chat is polite but says they can do nothing; this is Marketplace, not a regular billing issue. Caveat emptor....

[Pamela Galli]

It is a longstanding bug. It is literally criminal not to warn buyers. Disgraceful, unethical.

[Tibouchina Freschi]

Thanks, Pamela. I was aware of the bug that kept renewing and charging for an enhancement at the end of its term - this has happened to me plenty, and it is why I rarely do enhancements. (In fact most of the time I can't figure out if there really is any enhancement to my listings; there seems to be no way to verify other than checking view and sale reports to see if numbers have bumped.). But in this case, the charges repeat every darned hour, so there are 24 charges for the same thing in a day. This sucked funds from my account so fast that I finally just cashed out what I had left and now have an empty account. I expect they will soon declare me delinquent! Yes, it is truly criminal.

[Pamela Galli]

The renewing multiple times a day is also a bug that has been reported many times. I got charged 32000 L in one day, bur someone else not long ago reported something like being charged 60 times for one listing.

 

Can you believe they do not just pull the ability to sign up? If one of my products malfunctioned like that, I would pull it off the market Til it was fixed.

[OzwellWayfarer]

I avoid enhancements these days for exactly that reason. I was bitten once, thankfully only slightly but still, never again.

 

I cant say I have ever had any real benefit from them anyway. Maybe one or two extra sales but for the price and to deal with all this, its really not worth it IMHO.

 

But I wanted to add my voice to the people here saying this is criminal because it really is. The Lab are well aware of this bug and have been for a long time. I hope all these people I hear this happening to get a refund. Sorry to hear about your bad (much worse than mine) experiences.

[Tibouchina Freschi]

Thank you both for your replies. And here I thought LL actually had some intention of fixing this bug, that it was an aberration rather than an ongoing pattern of deception by which LL skim funds from its customers. In RL this practice might not be a crime, but it would appear to be a clear violation of the Federal Trade Commission laws against false advertising, not to mention good old consumer deception at the state level. Wait, this is RL! Of course the individual amounts skimmed are probably not material enough to support legal action, which is probably why LL have not bothered to fix this. Taken in the aggregate, however, and considering the folks who don't bother to try to recover their funds (as I have not until now), one might reasonably wonder.

[Alicia Sautereau]

Why do people even keep bothering...?

That thing has been broken since they got it, all it does is filling their own pockets to the borderline of stealing.
Marketplace is the biggest scam in SL that makes Ginko look like a saint!

[Parrish Ashbourne]

I've never had this happen to me, but I all so don't keep L$ in my account for them to take, I use an alt as a bank for this.  Use the distribution option on the marketplace to automate the transfers.

[Motoko Oanomochi]

Hello,

I know it is an old topic, but I don't know if anyboby made recently a new study of how LL play with MP ?

I did it and I found plenty of very interesting things.

In first, there are no bug on MP, no one can sincerely believe that there are bugs uncorrected for more than 24 months. It is clear that from the beginning, the system has been designed to directly influence the success or failure of stores.

Now, time to list the evidences :

Easy test :

simply identify some products, see the size of the land, seniority, number of objects, the number of review. etc...
Then you have to target a narrower than the outfit, of course, it's easier, but it also works for clothing.

Then, take some time to scroll through items on the homepage. Do not try to memorize everything, just those in the category you are targeting. **Only uploaded images may be used in postings**://secondlife.i.lithium.com/i/smilies/16x16_smiley-happy.gif" border="0" alt=":smileyhappy:" title="Smiley Happy" /> bingo
Evidence appears clearly emerges a carefully sequenced hierarchy
Overall after testing the system, we can define three 4 levels.
 - Top level, the product often appears at any time and regardless of the selected language and PG / Mature / Adult.
 - Medium level, the product appears once or twice per hour, no more.
 - Low level, the product never appears, but the report makes you think that your product appears, it is wrong, I insist it is wrong, the product does NOT appear.
 - Ostracized, the product never appears, of course, but you also do not have report of enhancement ! The LL support replied that this is a bug, but the product is present in the homepage. In fact this is a lie, the product never appears, you do not have a report and if you click any button, the system will load L $ and you can always expect to be refund.

The question is who pays for what and how, to choose the category: top level, medium level, low level or worst: ostracized

I will be happy to know who I need to pay and how to go up in the MP true category,  ?

Best Regards, Motoko