SL International Business

They say that …

- It’s our fault for using a system which is broken
- Coder’s are excellent, it’s just we users who are stupid
- Lag exists because we use the system
- Inventory losses are caused by us users
- Search is lagged because we use
and so forth and so forth … This sarcasm is quite usual sight now btw :O

But that’s not what i’m writing here about, that’s just the top of the iceberg … There is way more depressing issues at play

Age verification
YES for age verification, NO for current plan.That’s what my GF says.

Requiring passport/driver’s license etc. is simply STUPID, people WILL NOT provide them. I know, as i shall not. I’ve already given them WHAT THEY NEED and i’m not giving them my IDENTITY.

There is countries where it is ILLEGAL to give such information. Why? those documents contain social-security number, and it is on those countries / states, illegal to give to companies for age and/or identity verification purposes. Passports and Driver’s license contain these if country uses social-security numbers at all.

They top it of with new “Mature parcel flag” thing. You cannot access areas with such flag without age verification. This is Really bad for businesses. Most people WON’T do the verification

There is still large portion of people who do not have a scanner or digital camera good enough to do this. Also, i suspect many is going to be sending them goatse / porn pictures for “verification” as a joke and griefing for doing such a move.

Legally, it neither is LL’s problem if someone lies their age to them. If they do, and it goes to inspection, LL’s only problem is to provide connection logs to find out who it were.

This won’t help, as easily as a kid goes and take’s theirs parent’s credit card to go premium or buy L$, just as easily, they can get their driver’s license or passport. Minority, of them will do it, but it’s still quite a bunch of kids who will do it.

We have teen grid already, why all of sudden main grid should be ‘teenager’ safe?

In other words, this is mainly just going to hurt almost everyone involved. Thank You!

Pushing new land so fast that no one can absorb them, even together
Another fatal mistake by LL!

Yes, lower land prices can be a good thing also! I’m not saying other, BUT their method is a little bit screwed up too, and unrealistic.

Real Estate has a natural tendence to raise in value, appreciate if you may. So they will raise again, UNLESS LL just keeps pushing new sims constantly.

But there is another problem: Tier costs, 65536sqm tier costs 195USD per month. That means for 1024sqm piece of land you pay about 810L$ per month in tiers. Currently 1024sqm costs about 9,000L$. That means in less than a year you have paid more in tiers than the land did cost. In RL, such a thing wouldn’t happen, RL moves slower yes, but more likely, your piece of land would gather value in near urban areas faster than you pay in tiers.

Ok, not really that bad for regular joe but for us Realtors it is BAD. Your profit margin might be for 1024sqm parcel 500L$, that means you have to sell it 2½ weeks or so, in order for tier costs not to eat you alive. That means, it’s STUPID to invest into undeveloped new areas, or low quality land. Developing takes a lot of time, which, is directly relative to cost in money to serious business owners.

Market is BADLY saturated, which means realtors are unable to get their land moving, which means in return: Losses. More velocity is needed, A LOT more velocity for low margin people. Oh wait! That’s not ALL!

There is SO MUCH good quality land also available, that even high quality land DOES NOT move. Some realtors report that their sales has been very low for a long time now, SL relative long time: couple months.

Know who buys from auctions? Yes, we Realtors do buy from auctions. NOT the regular joe who can barely afford 1024sqm or so. We realtors spend the thousands and thousands of USD to buy from auctions.

Who is the winner then? LL is, and they are the huge winners. Each auction sales brings them instantly money, which should be far more than cost of the hardware PLUS a new full sim tier monthly, 195USD per month. Basicly, they have license to print money now, if they do not get sold for good price, the really big realtors are loosing alot. Yes, even CP Costello has been doing low margin sales lately.

Communication

There probably is no (service) company worse in communication than LL. You basicly almost never get answered, properly. Also, even I have gotten angry live support. I got called stupid etc. Tho, this one was some volunteer. I’ve had a great experience also with Spike Linden, he was great, he infact came in to take a look at it himself.

Lots of tickets end up in canned answers of “closed ticket”, without actually solving it. This canned answer is a bunch of links to knowledgebase etc. No human answer.

Abuse reports -> at best takes many weeks to “solve”, after that you do not know the action taken or anything else.

Bugs, Lacking NECESSARY features & Security issues

Bugs are a BIG part of our daily SecondLife.
Here are the worst according to me:

• Land not transferring
• No group transactions history / accounting, only bottomline
• Group dividends do come a little bit now and then sometimes, not regularly
• There might be group dividends in limbo for weeks, or even upto months.
• When you buy parcel: Seller can rapidly change the price to higher on > and it just gets accepted. You might endup paying 40k L$ for 512sqm instead of ~4500L$. This is because only parcel id is sent to LL servers.
• Teleport not working … It’s funny how it seems to happen always when there is something important to do
• Notecards not saving AND disabling saving of the notecard when failed: you have to copy & paste the text to get it saved. Not everyone does think of that way of saving their texts.
• Texturing problems: 90degrees ain’t 90degrees, all textures not changing.
• Building problems: Won’t allow changing size of linked object, or objects “undoing” changes all of sudden etc.
• Rendering & Alignment issues: There is no such thing as seamless in most cases in SL, objects even having the exactly same diameters might vary in size, or same height coordinate may vary based on other 2 coordinates. Cylinders inside cylinders not rendering correctly. Alpha rendering order messed up, some menus simply doesn’t work.
• Inventory loss :: I haven’t personally suffered from that, but i know off people who have.
• Sim crashes -> Loose your work. Region rolls itself back some minutes, i think about 5-10minutes.
• Caching problems -> It’s insanely slow when it grows a bit, and reloading textures etc. RAM is there to be USED, so is vidcard’s ram also.
• Performance problems -> Don’t even let me beging with them! Missing multi-threading (and actually some people are AGAINST multithreading), which is necessary for multi-processor AND multi-core CPUs. Memory leaks. Poor rendering performance. Ironically, it seems that even a ancient vidcard can somewhat keep up. Performance of a system just isn’t being UTILIZED.

This is JUST the top of the iceberg.
Summa Summarum

There is HUGE issues right now, which needs to be solved. But instead of SOLVING current issues, they just bring in new stuff, to give us MORE ISSUES. Ok, i understand the explosive growth, but to us end users, it seems like old bugs never get solved, just new ones introduced.

SL is best we’ve got, only thing we’ve got, so i Really hope these issues gets solved, bending to media stops, and some sane politics are taken into effect at LL. When i found out about SL, it was like dreams come true, now i feel like wanting to start backing up my business and leave forever. I know many has done so already.

LL should take a look at their own metrics -> those earning atleast 2k USD a month has decreased for the first time in a VEEERY LONG TIME. This is alarming, i think that all these actions LL is taking AND NOT taking is hurting the businesses in world, Really bad.

I really hope things get better soon, communication starts to work, businesses aren’t being tried to be killed, bugs fixed etc. This is afterall ALL we got at the moment. In the meantime, we just have to adapt, and hope for the best.

They are running SL like it’s piece of desktop software and with Nazi attitude, LL please wake up!
They should be running SL like a game or bank. That brings us a few assumptions:

• Every single user does what ever they can to abuse
• Users do everything unexpected and beyond
• Users WILL reverse engineer
• Users WILL circumvent ANYTHING
• Users LEAVE very easily
• Users BRINGS your food on the table

And about real estate currently -> Perhaps there should be governing of the land value, a kind of fixed appreciation level, which in effect also affects the auctioned sims amount. I think about 9-10L$/sqm is a fair and just price, and monthly appreciation of 0.2-1.5%. Other route would be to HEAVILY drop the tiers, or EXPAND sim size. So that everyone gets more land to use for the same cost -> people will start buying more, and will start building bigger things. We might even see more private roads etc.

These all are hard questions and problems, economically, and should be deeply thought thru. Bugs simply need to be squashed.

Personally, i’m amazed how such a stupid design has gone thru on parcel buyings: just passing the ID? Oh gimmey a break, that is BEGGING to be abused.