I may well be about to embark on a blog frenzy! I have quite a few issues to address! However I may get bored, or want to go fishing in WoW or shoot things in Eve-Online! Where was I? Oh yes direct delivery, the new, and rather worrisome delivery method for the Second Life Marketplace.
Basically how it works now is that you load a boxed object into a magic box inworld, go to the markeptlace website and then link the item so it can be sold. Users then have to accept delivery of the item inworld, this part has always been potentially troublemsome and on the old XStreet people were warned that they shouldn’t be afk when purchasing.
The new system will do away with the latter problem, it’s likely to introduce new problems but they should be able to be ironed out if all works well. Basically it seems, we’re going to have an incoming and outgoing folder for the marketplace, if you have questions Brooke has started a thread on the official forums, here. However it’s well worth reading the direct delivery FAQ! Really, if you’re a merchant, read that.
Now direct delivery isn’t imminent, so there’s no need to get the pitchforks out just yet and Linden Lab are saying that beta will go on for one or two months during the summer, when everyone is outside getting burnt to a crisp because we’re long overdue a sizzling summer, 1976 is a long time ago now, I burnt my ears in Torquay!
Now my concern is regarding items being in this outgoing folder, I would prefer that merchants had to move items to this folder themselves and that this folder is then locked from having items deleted without an extra warning at the very least. However the plan seems to be to copy items there, unless they are no copy items, in which case they will be moved, which makes sense as otherwise someone would be able to sell a no copy item on the marketplace and keep it in inventory, at which point they could sell it again! However the concept of locked folders is not a new one, Axl Kurmin created Jira SVC-6289 about it in terms of people being able to lock any folder and I quite like the idea. I’m used to locked folders of a kind when I create organisational units in Active Directory, I always tick them so that they can’t accidentally be deleted. I would imagine there will be no way of deleting your folders by mistake with the marketplace folder as it’s a system folder, but being able to lock the items inside the folder would be handy.
Direct delivery has potential, it also has concerns, the system sounds easier, if customers won’t have to accept delivery, they won’t be able to accidentally refuse delivery. There are other concerns with the system, such as markeplace merchants not requiring land, which is a social concern as well as income for Linden Lab. However from the FAQ, I’m not as concerned as I once was about this idea, we’ll see what happens when it goes to open beta.