I’ve been playing the latest World Of Warcraft expansion, Mists Of Pandaria, recently. The starting zone introduces you to the wise Master Shang, who offers wisdom and tells you that something is wrong with the world, he is seeking aid on how to fix things. Does this sound familiar? The solution in the end is rather drastic, very risky and takes a lot of healing.
Which brings us to The Marketplace. I’m not going to go into all the current woes, Inara Pey’s blog post and a forum thread or two, will do that for you. Suffice to say there are many unhappy bunnies, merchants and customers.
Someimes you need to stop digging. The Marketplace is suffering all sorts of woes, I’m sure people at Linden Lab and on The Marketplace team are tearing their hair out and beavering away trying to come up with a fix, but it may be time to think again and look at another big overhaul.
I’m sure there will be groans at such a prospect, but sometimes you need to rip it up and start again.
The thing with The Marketplace is that it could be positioned to deliver services to other virtual worlds, future ones from Linden Lab, maybe even to other grids, but certainly not in its current shape and form. The bugs keep on coming, the fixes are like plasters when bandages are required, frustrations are boiling over.
I think it’s time for a deep breath and a step back from Linden Lab here, is this platform ever going to be able to deliver the stability merchants and customers require? The Marketplace is a large central plank of Second Life now, love it or loathe it, it’s here and here to stay. The Marketplace needs to be robust, it’s a growth area, it has potential to grow larger, but right now it feels overburdened, which means there’s not really room for much growth!
I think we’re getting close to the stage where the reality is, the current platform can’t deliver. There’s nothing wrong with admitting that, test environments very rarely reveal the full breadth of variables and bugs in a system, right now the commerce team seem to be spending too much time fighting fires and that will always hamper progress.
Gentlemen, they can rebuild it. They have the technology. They have the capability to build the world’s first bionic marketplace. SL Marketplace will be that marketplace. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster…..
I think it’s time to go to the pub!