Spectactular failure stories - got any?

Hugs Carl

The class itself ran for about four weeks, was well attended and got some very good feedback.. The idea was a good one (despite what others may think Carl) and I dont count it a failure, more of a disappointment, not in you, or in NCI but in the attitudes of some folks to sex.

so... High five... Carl

hugs, Imogen

My early days in SL, I believed in the Mainland and decided to buy several connected sims and provide a sense of what SL could be if it wasn't full of ad farms and crowded builds. Someone saw the sims and wanted to rent a place to live on part of one..hadn't thought of that but it sounded neat..

I ended up with several renters who I could never charge anything but a real deal on rent in return for what I hoped would be the development of a creative community. Unfortunately I completely excluded the possibility of the pain of various relationships gone terribly terribly wrong and I ended up exchanging the mucky landscape of ugly mainland for the mucky landscape of human emotions for which I was totally unprepared.

It was a wonderful and overwhelming time but I eventually realized that paying 1000USD a month in tier to tune into a world I could see on TV for free (including my own relationship drama that came barreling up from the depths to completely shatter me for awhile...all good now thank heavens) and the sims got sold off in a cataclysmic attempt to find emotional balance. Not a good time...the threads of friendship got very very frayed or broke completely.

When I miss those days and the sense of emotional connectedness and involvement, I refocus on my own creativity which fell by the wayside due to the seduction of emotional ups and downs.

And I gained a huge respect for the painful changes that being in SL can make in us if we are too casual in how we approach it.

I am pretty good at failing at stuff.
The best failure creative wise was prim shirts and pants.
The prim shirt and pants went sideways.

I haven't done enough in SL to have any really spectacular failures.

Let's not get started on RL. It's too painful.

On the other hand, those failures have taught me some pretty important lessons, and I firmly believe that if you aren't regularly failing, you aren't trying hard enough. Some of the successes I am most proud of have been in the face of many people telling me I'm doomed to failure, and they have been the result of me not making the mistakes that resulted in earlier failures. I don't really see failure as a bad thing unless it's the result of laziness or not learning lessons from earlier failures.

Ooooh, I was setting auto return for one of our public sims at the West of Ireland and made a little boo boo and returned 900 prims, many of which belonged to the folks renting shops on the island. I sent a heartfelt apology out to the group. Most folks were nice about it and gave me some gentle and deserved teasing, but a mentally unstable woman who used to be associated with our sims took the opportunity to send me nasty, gloating IM's about my incompetence.

That was a fun day.

The "Art of Roleplaying" class was not the "Sex in SL" class. The roleplaying class wasn't about sex, and your 4' tall loli would have been welcome. Of course with LL's current bizarre rules, we could not even think of a "Sex in SL" class because a child AV might be on same parcel and get ARed.

I read somewhere that there was a planned communist uprising in Italy in 1974. Thousands of people marched on Rome and got lost in the back alleys, were dissipated and went home after wandering aimlessly for a day. The government didn't find out about it until 3 years later.

Does that count?

How about doing a "Sex in RL" class? Surely, they can't penalise you for that.

Biggest failure, hmmm
My first effort was at making clothes. While friends and even friends of friends liked what I made, a shop never took off at all. Sold pretty much nothing at all.
The next business I tried was making textures, but after they appeared in another shop with that person's name as creator, that was the end of that business.
Next I tried having an antique furniture business, and while I did manage to sell quite a bit, the costs of renting and maintaining were not enough to make it worthwhile.
Then I tried selling crypts and coffins. But fell foul of one of the bigger names in the vampire scene at the time, so sold almost zero.

But overwhelmingly, my biggest failure is just SL itself. Still can't seem to get how to make a success of that



Great thread Desmond!


cheers
Mid

This probably won't make much sense to any of you young 'uns, but...

Way back in the days of telehubs.... I was flying over some newly-released sims (freshly sliced and diced into 1024m plots by the sim purchaser), when I saw a Linden lurking in a plot of linden-reserved land. To my amazement, right before my eyes, said Linden built a brand new telehub! The surrounding land was nothing special, and had been priced pretty low by the unwitting sim purchaser... but telehub land? That was PRIME real-estate in those days. I snapped it all up. OK, I had to stretch myself financially to do so, .... but I convinced myself that this was going to be my big break!

The next day, the lindens announced the introduction of direct point-to-point teleportation.

Oops!

Sorry but ROFL!!!

i too have textured a whole house and windows in silver birch...luckily it was copy...

The best time was when i started using temp rezzers and so enthusiastic about the prim saving qualities...imagine my confusion when my prims started disappearing and my parcel was then full...
It took a while to discover i was rezzing a hot tub which in turn rezzed its own water each time it hit the ground (non temp)...140 water discs later.....all packed on top of each other so neatly hidden and required individual delete....fun times....

Business wise was the Dating Agency but after days of work and graphics discovered people were incapable of taking and loading their own av picture and notecard into an ad board just too much like hard work...

Sex Bed Shoes....
The clicking heels Dorothy moment just didnt capture the imagination of those keen to keep on the bling in intimate sessions. A lot of work, prim intensive stock and only sold a couple of pairs. Decided things that required too much explanation just aren't worth the space..

re above...sorry but i dont agree that land bot problems qualify as failures ...thats a success for 'normal' players who used to try hard to find land deals or auction wins without being gazumped by robots... )

Complete Avatar Business - Failed.
At the time there was NO complete AVs and "shape only" stores that used other designers skins, hair and clothing to pretty up their shapes I felt was misleading to noobs and they charged upto 800L
I felt it was a sure success and would make the money back I invested within the first 6 months..heres the kick in the crotch..

Spent $5,000 (yep RL) on having skins made for the business and bought the rights to sell another skin designers male and female skins with my full AVs as well as 2 hair designers hair and a selection of clothing.

We made male and female complete avatars with shape skin hair and clothes eyes and prim lashes too for L$800. Got a fair bit of interest for a new store.

This was literally 3 weeks before the dreaded launch of "full perm" stores and when ppl started ripping skins and selling them as full perms.

We eventually put them all in servers and offered the vendors free on SLX for ppl to display on a 30% commission. The most we ever made was 12K a month.
Now I dont think we even make 5K a month and there must be hundereds of our vendors in SL.

The AVs are really good quality, we only bought the best designers stuff. But with so many high quality skins now available from full perm stores and skin kits being sold for L$40,000 the " complete AV" industry was born !! lol

Timing is everything and you can never predict whats around the corner.

Oh wow...I would be pissed! lol

Mine were minor in retrospect. The first was that I set up two complete sims, 16 k to 32 k before I knew to align rezzers and buildings along 0/90/180/270. Putting pictures on the walls was my main SL hobby - each one took a while when the wall was sitting at, oh, say, 123 degrees. Or 17 degrees. Or 217. Anything but 0 or 90 or 180 or 270...

And I once reverted a relatively high island back to water. Had half of it back above the sim water before I found out the edit tool could be set to something other than 'small'. Seems incredibly trivial now, but I have to say, having an island one second and nothing but water the next was a bit traumatizing.

But EVERYONE who tried to put up a slightly large house on their first 512 plot has experienced failure. And frustration. In my case, a lot of help from avatars that didn't need to do so... Stuff most of us now could do in a minute and be shopping for furniture in the next.

BTW, does anyone else use Linden ferns primarily to measure land specs? My first breakthrough in using SL...

Huh?

Sounds like you would make a great consultant for start ups.

Awww shucks, they sound lovely and would make a great addition in my flower box!

RL business bridging

Came in to SL determined to discover the kink community (that took.. ten minutes) and then bridge to the RL fetish world, spreading SL installs throughout London's fetish emporia...

Double crash and burn. People who want RL kinky gear, are gasping for it and will seek it out without using SL to find it. Conversely, people who are really invested in Sl fetish have RL issues which keep them from splashing out on a catsuit or a set of pony boots or whatever - whether it's advanced age or kids or physical image problems or partners or... something. Rl fetish couturiers are out of that group of people who look upon the whole computer thing as a weirdly eccentric diversion: they have dribbling little geeks who handle their email for them, most likely on the end of a leash. Sl is anathematic to them.

There's a movie out at the moment called "how to lose friends and alienate people". Oooyah.

10 minutes? I guess the industry really hadn't taken off yet back then...

Sorry to hear that it wasn't a success, Carl. Remember that article I wrote for Lucrezia's newbie kit? I turned that into a class that I teach at GQ Start. It's completely PG, and it's one of the most popular classes at the school.

Well there I was, able to create buildings, 4096 m2 of mainland, and I saw great possibilities in those boxes one could buy for a little bit of money

So I filled a building with BIABS, one with freebies, and a small shop selling the buildings I made. The set, which I called marble mall, still sells now and then on SLX, but of course I hardly ever sold a BIAB. And glad I did not, knowing what I know now.

If you need to know whether a building will fit and you know the measure of the building, the easiest thing (AFAIK) is to put something in the middle of where you are going to build, go up in the air a bit and edit/check distances from center by clicking on the direction arrows. The fern is a good one because it is visible from way up and from most angles. Small distances, you can stand in the middle and use prim hair you are wearing, but its hard to control angles.

There may be tools to do the same thing, but I don't build enough to warrant buying them, and the fern is quicker than laying 10m by 10m prims to check, although that would, I guess, with the right texture be the more accurate way to do it.

I had just moved onto this beautiful beach sim, made a few friends and was very happy.

One day I was bored, there was no one the island and I started to go through my inventory.

I found something called "club lighting business in a box" and first I wondered where it came from and then I wondered how it worked.

So I dragged it out of my inventory and dropped it on the ground, expecting a box to unpack.

Nope

Entire store, building and inventory, over 1,000 prims, rezzed in the middle of the sim.
And not one piece of it was linked. I spent hours that day taking each piece back into my inventory. I was new enough that I didn't know about the drag and select nor that I could hold sift and select multiple items at once.

Lesson learned.

FaTeke

I think for me as a scripter the biggest idiotic thing i did was someone came up to me when i was quite new and offered to sell a product they had dreampt up if I did the scripting.

I did the scripting gave them the full perm script and never received a penny....

It suddenly occured to me that I should just build my own stuff and sell it. Why pay someone to do what I can do myself!!

"If you build it i'll sell it and give you 50% of the profit" Yeah right, if I build it I'll sell it and keep 100% of the profit woot!