SL Marketplace – Page 6

October 17, 2012October 17, 2012

Tier, Not Land Barons, Will Undo Second Life

There are a few posts over at New World Notes during the last month or so regarding Land Barons, the damage (or not) of the SL Marketplace, tier prices, entertainment and roleplaying. I’m not a Land Baron, I do have an interest in roleplaying, entertainment, tier pricing and the damage or not of the SL Marketplace. There are links between these subjects.

Desmond Shang kicked things off back on September 27th with a post about whether land barons matter anymore or not. They do, love them or loathe them land barons do work that would otherwise fall upon Linden Lab to do. Linden Lab are not Blizzard Entertainment, they don’t have the resources to deal with lots of individual customers day in, day out, they have a product that is chaotic in nature, Land Barons fill a gap.

Masami Kuramoto then inspired a post from Hamlet Au regarding themed mainland, and Masami makes some reasonable points but misses the point that the chaotic nature of Second Life is also one of its biggest draws. Masami is quoted as saying:

“SL has the largest map of all games, but the content is messed up. Imagine entire continents of adjacent regions featuring the same theme. Sort of like the Linden Home areas, but without the prefab buildings. Imagine Nexus Prime, Suffugium, S.I.C., The Next Day, Insilico and Hangar Liquides side by side and The Wastelands somewhere nearby.”

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April 5, 2012April 12, 2012

It’s Still All About Tier

Ah Thursday, not just any Thursday, but the Thursday before the Easter Holiday weekend, where I can now put on my slippers, sit back, and not worry about my day job until Tuesday. This also means I’ll be blogging … unless Football Manager 2012 hooks me too much again. Hopefully I’ll talk about Kitely later but for now it’s the Second Life shoppers paradise that I’ll write about.

The rumour mill suggests that Linden Lab are looking for ways to get people shopping inworld again, not that people have stopped shopping inworld, but the rise of The Marketplace has caused concern for inworld ventures. I’ve spoken about this before, I am not a huge fan of The Marketplace but it’s here, it’s convenient, it works (usually, there have been glitches lately) but it undermines some key aspects of Second Life, such as store rentals and sales which help fund roleplaying sims, Arts sims, Club sims, social ventures, hangouts yadda yadda yadda. Personally I think the horse has bolted now, the time for some joined up thinking was months ago.

The Marketplace isn’t the only reason for concerns on the viability of social and arts ventures, Styles Of Edo have announced they are closing after five years of trading in Second Life. This is a Mens fashion store for those who aren’t familiar with the fashion scene. When I originally published this post, this paragraph suggested Styles Of Edo was closing due to not making enough sales to make tier, this is not the case and I apologise for any confusion, I have not spoken to anyone from Styles Of Edo and do not know why they have chosen to close, however there is a comment from Chrissy Ambrose in the comments of this post. Stores and Sims in Second Life close for a variety of reasons, new ones arise from the ashes and we carry on, times change, tastes change and culture changes.

Deja Letov posted in the official forums on their views on why getting shopping back inworld is a great idea, however again we’re back to inworld shopping not exactly being dead and my view that the horse has really bottled, we are too far into the bricks and mortar challenge here, the online shopping experience in an online world is now very appealing and yes there is something wrong with that picture because Second Life is a 3D virtual world and The Marketplace is a 2D Shopping site.

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April 1, 2012April 1, 2012

Direct Delivery Migration Dates Pushed Back

I think it’s fair to say that Direct Delivery hasn’t gone smoothly so far, ok I may be underplaying the issues there. Darrius Gothly has a blog post entitled: The Fiasco Called Marketplace which has an in depth look at the issues. I’m not going to take an in depth look at the issues, largely because I’m tired and grumpy, this isn’t an unusual situation!

Linden Lab aren’t hiding the issues, they have a post on the forum detailing Jira entries on issues. Linden Lab have also made changes to the migration schedule, the original schedule was:

April 2 through 13, 2012: Inworld Q&A sessions on using and migrating to Direct Delivery.
April 18, 2012: All listings priced L$10 and lower must use Direct Delivery.
May 16, 2012: Magic Boxes no longer allowed for any Marketplace listing.

This has now all changed, with the FAQ updated to state that merchants will not need to migrate before June 1st and that a new schedule will be posted closer to this date, this means the Q&A sessions as well as migration are now going to take place further in the future. This is a sensible move, I felt the migration dates were too short in the first place and that was without the problems that have surfaced.

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March 29, 2012March 29, 2012

Linden Lab Still Supporting Magic Boxes

Sometimes it’s easy to be critical of Linden Lab, sometimes they make it absurdly easy. The impression one gets at times is that Linden Lab remains a company where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. There are other times when you think “WTF are they thinking of“. This was my reaction when I saw a couple of posts on different forums regarding an automated reply people have received when submitting support tickets on Marketplace issues:

“Thank you for contacting Linden lab Support. I’m sorry, but as of March 21, 2012, Linden Lab no longer supports the Magic Box application.”

Now let’s get something straight here, this should never have happened. I’ve already said that I feel the migration deadline was a mistake, but deciding not to support a product that is still in use, hasn’t passed the migration date and will still have support concerns, is no way of about going things, even worse, this was never officially announced. Fortunately someone at Linden Lab seems to have spotted this mistake and it has been confirmed that magic boxes are still being supported.

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March 27, 2012March 27, 2012

Direct Delivery Teething Problems

Teething problems with Direct Delivery shouldn’t have been unexpected, I don’t mean this as a slur on the capabilities of Linden Lab, the more people start using a system, the more issues arise and whereas some of the issues may leave people scratching their heads as to how they ever got into release, this is not that unusual. I installed an upgrade to some software at work last week, it fixed an issue and everything seemed fine until I noticed, and then my team noticed, a horrendous flickering issue when we switched Windows to another app and then back again. They glared at me, I pondered how this should never have made it to release, but it was obviously an issue the beta testers hadn’t witnessed. These things happen. However I can rollback with that app, so not the end of the world.

Where Linden Lab have made a mistake, is with regards to setting deadlines for people to migrate their magic boxes to the Direct Delivery system, this has added more urgency to the migration for merchants than was necessary. The ideal situation for users is to do what I can do with the app I talked about above, rollback, that means sticking with magic boxes for a while longer than was envisaged. However the deadlines mean people don’t want to consider that option, they want to get the migration done.

According to the Markeptlace migration guide, which you can read here, all listings of L$10 and under need to be migrated by April 18th, all other listings need to be migrated by May 16th. This was a mistake, when you consider that during this period we’ll see holidays such as Easter and Passover as well as May Day here in the UK where people dance around the Maypole … well they did when I was a lad, this means people are in a rush to get it sorted.

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