A little perturbed at fellow SL home builders

Perhaps its wrong of me to do so in the forums, but with more occurrances daily I find the need to post here a source to vent my frustration. I am a co-owner and co-builder of Home Sweet Homes in Second Life. I am so unbelievably frustrated and dissapointed with a few other builders in Second Life for their business practices.

One day, while I was working on homes at our location, I received an advertisement that was sent to me by another builder. Not a general resident of SL, but by the builder of a particular business. Yes, it frustrated me, but I let it go. I figured I don't need to go around to other people's home centers and send out spam advertisement to their customers, but if someone else needs the business that bad...so be it.

Then just today, one of our clients was harassed by another home builder for a custom building that she herself designed and came up with the concept for. Stating how industrial it looked. It's a shop for goodness sake. She does business out of that structure and designed it herself to her liking. He basically insulted her taste in buildings trying to take it out on the builder not to mention offered her a building for free to take ours down.

I am completely disgusted at these so called business practices. Never have I attempted to persuade a customer from another business to come to ours. Never have I gone to another builders parcel and asked a customer to come look at our homes. Never have I disgraced someone by the choice of home they have. Each person in game is free to shop where they choose. I am proud of our homes, I do not need to go "steal" other peoples customers. They come willingly to us. And for all of you out there that choose to partake in these practices, all customers need is to see the quality of what they get to decide what is right for them. I feel sorry for you that have to try to insult others and to come on our lot to steal business.

There seem to be a lot of jackass home builders in SL. Every once in a while they crawl out of the woodwork and either scam, harass, or steal.

I have a short list started of people who are doing shady things in the building industry, via my own personal viewings of such people. Thankfully it's a short list thus far, but I don't get out much.

So it goes with so many people when told... Hey get into business making things and sell stuff if you want to win SL. Many have little to no experience in at least one or more parts of the making money chain.

Be it understanding SL well enough to research a market for a product or service, creating/collaborating or out right paying for the product or service to be made, writing ad copy used in marketing, efficient selling practices that return a (decent) profit, customer support, keeping the ego under control, etc. Add to that being nice. Sure is a lot to ask. Many residents seem to skip steps, usually it's the last few. Especially when no BBB, wide (sp)read consumer reports listing or any kind of damage to profit exists. Who cares when wide communication across the grid seems to only reach a minority of the residents. It's like the wild west or the Internet back in the early nineties.

I think Yiffy has nailed several important reasons why this occurs. The first is the sink or swim nature of SL. It is being marketed as $$$$$$$econd Life, come here to make money money money money money. Many people don't have the ability in RL to establish a successful small business - even those that do often fail. Yet, in SL, we are all expected to be business owners if we don't want to buy L$. So you will see people with no business experience trying whatever they can do to make some income - including poaching customers, spamming, and whatever other bottomfeeding techniques one can come up with to eek a few L$ out of people.

When you combine this with the fact that there is very little recourse for bad behavior - we cannot name names (a stupid, stupid policy), so there is no ability to directly put out the word to people that something is occuring. On top of that, other than these forums, there is no global communication system. I wish that SL had grid wide chat channels, a la World of Warcraft and most MMOs. Granted, those might have the same limitations that these forums do, but I still think it would be a nice resource to have.

People often wish for a BBB-like structure, but nothing ever seems to really emerge. I would love to see some kind of ebay like system where people can be rated once you have done business with them, and that the vendor has the ability to respond to the rating. That would help to discourage some of the bad behavior, as there would be consequence to it - however, it also opens up a whole different problem. I think it is worth the risk, however - we are far too limited in our ability to make informed decisions as customers because of the gag order that exists regarding bad behavior.

yes iv seen this kind of stuff hapen too ppl going around sayng my stuffs bether comme shop

if some oen can come up whit a good monitering way of warning ppl of shady acts im shure a lot of ppl would want to be part of it

And if we do want to buy L$ and create stuff for ourselves and friends instead of trying to run a business we get dissed.

The whole 'make $$$$ in SL' summed up:

Most items I've sold are around abouts the 1.00 - 1.50 USD mark.

For the cost of a gumball you end up putting up with a lot of crap. But I like SL being my self sufficient hobby - I like it paying for itself and seeing 'how far it goes'

As far as 'real business' goes - It would actually be more profitable and at times less painfull to stand on the Las Vegas strip with a sign around my neck reading:

'Kick my balls - $1.00'

I shoot em and ban em myself so they cant come back since its the only recourse I have,
I was 20 minutes into a builf once and just threw up walls and was playing with textures looking for inspiration and some JA came along and said thanks for ruining the sim and he didnt even live there. Asked him to show me his work if he was so good and he TP'ed me to what looked like a dumpster converted into a house. I said sorry all I see is the dumpster ported home and banned him. Always going to be JA's unfortunately- sigh

So, let me get this straight. Someone from another business:

1) went to your land
2) then started to send advertisements (notecards?) to your customers?

That's... well. Anyone who does that is probably harming themself; I don't know of anyone who appreciates a spam ad.


I started getting strange ads too recently (more like business propositions) sent to me on a notecard.

But I was in my new, hidden sim at the time so it couldn't have been anyone nearby. I think they just have a list somewhere, and spam away.

Please, please, please don't ever let this happen in SL.

This would bring out the same behavior we saw happening in the classified forums, but only a thousand times worse.

I know you have good intentions Cristiano, but I think we'd be much better off just doing without this thing about rating each other. It seems to bring out the worse in some people, groups, cliques etc.

I would much rather see a reputable entity, such as a BBB, emerge that will fairly mediate disputes to the satisfaction of all involved parties. The outcome of all disputes could then perhaps be listed for all to view indicating that though a misunderstanding did arise with the particular merchant, the merchant was contacted and complied/did not compy with a remedy. The public could then form their own opinion on the quality of service provided by said merchant.

agreed, I would vote against such a system too. No offense Cris but its just too susceptible to abuse!

Dude, you are so undervaluing your "services"; I'd probably pay twice that.

First I would like to say Thank You to Viv for posting about this problem.
I am the store owner that she mentioned being insulted by the other builder
who was trying to push his own builds on me.

(whos builds by the way i was not thrilled with, there for didnt hire him in the fist place)

Id like to also add that this other builder tryed to use jenna fairplays name, saying he was selling his homes though her. Being one of jennas head managers, I checked into this and found it not to be true, as I had figured all along,

Also I think it is very honorable and sweet of Viv not to post this other builders name,
however I am not as nice and sweet, I am not the type of person that will sit quietly and be insulted, and am more then happy to share a copy of the mentioned conversation,
(just im me) however i could only take so meny of his insults before muting him.

I also want to thank her and sundance for the wonderfull building,
I got exactly what I had asked for. I told them i wanted a downstairs
with lots of display space for my work, I do Photo work such Weddings for Caymen,
Profile pictures, and so on, I asked for the upstairs to be sectioned off, for a photo shoot area, and office area, away from the store. the building suits my needs perfectly. looks nice, and is low prim.

thank you all for your kind words and thoughts on the matter,

Silver Dangle

It is wonderful to see so many of you in the SL community pull together and support fellow residents. Even if it just in the forums. I greatly appreciate all of your advice and comments. I truly believe that it is when all of us come together and support one another, yet still have our own independent businesses and creative outlets, that we make the SL experience and community so successful and rewarding. Hats off to all of the honest and genuine members of SL. *hugs*

One conclusion I had after dealing with some unethical or, in some cases, pathetic business practices was that a number of the perpetrators weren't evil but rather young and thus clueless. They hadn't quite made that maturity transition from focusing on "what I want" to the bigger picture.

However, I don't consider age or inexperience an *excuse*, even if it is one explanation.

Then again, some people are just sleazy.

I find the very best creators/designers/builders to be an amazing bunch of people. You don't see the petty backstabbing, the overt competitiveness, and the unethical business practices among this set (although there probably are a few exceptions... there are always exceptions). But it's the next levels down where people get nasty with each other, as far as I can tell.

Yes, those do exist... but I've only met one

These people are going to have any combination of home business experience, retail experience, and just plain niceness (whether they wish to admit it or not).

Vivienne, any customer that's going to be persuaded away by customer poachers are NOT customers you want to have for yourself. You don't want to have even the smallest remote possibility of feeling any sort of customer service responsibility for that type of person.

Seriously. If they had a product worth buying, they wouldn't have to do that.