Goodbye

Well I started this game around August of last year and now am leaving for good.

I built a SL company from the ground up using no real life money to supply my needs for a business and worked my way up to purchasing a private estate off only SL income.

I've created over 50 profitable items that have sold for reasonably for over 6 months and have met the needs of avatars and their desires considerably. Over the last few months I've noticed an overall negative additude from residents and I believe it to be the fact that people never IM you to thank you for their hardwork but rather for their own stupidity or ignorance.

No matter how easy you make an item or how much work you make an item user friendly you will always receive questions from confused residents and to be honest have met more mentally numb people because of this than I think i ever would have irl, which has in turn taught me compassion for the average person than ever before.

I see SL as taking a huge downhill slide in the future either do to the fact that pretty much everything possible will be created or the market will flood itself into a recession. Nothing is guaranteed when your dealing with digital creation and supply there will always be risks and some come out more lucky than others.

I would like to thank everyone who has been there for me and their support during my crazy SL, I will not forget all of the fun times and ideas I have experienced while in SL but I feel as though my peak has been reached and will never be achieved again no matter the situation.


I wish a good luck to everyone here and have a great second life.

Adios and goodbye

I am always saddened to see anyone leave, I have been playing since December 2005 and I still meet new people every day, I still learn new skills each day. There is ALWAYS one more thing to invent or create, and one more person to meet.

For me the shine has not worn off, my only goal here is to enjoy myself and I only hope I have helped a few of the new less savvy players.

I never meet you personally, and I only know you from the months you have posted in the forums, but never the less, sad to see you go.

Both SL and RL have their ups and down, recessions and booms, and peaks and valleys.

My goals and ambition in RL and SL are constantly evolving and changing, and if I feel I have peaked, I raise the bar and try something new. You still have the gift of youth, and soon – way to soon – you’ll have the wisdom of age.

So, sell that land, cash out those lindens, stow your inventory and drop to basic, but PLEASE don’t delete that account, you never know………..

I wish you the best of luck, good health and prosperity, where ever you go and in whatever you do

Should you ever decide to return to see what version 56.22 has to offer and to see what’s changed, pop in and say hello………………..

I don't know if an endeavor that has taught you to be more compassionate is something you should leave. That's pretty big thing to learn.

But good luck to you. If you do change your mind, you can choose a shorter first name next time, now that you know how lousy we mostly are at typing.

I'm sorry to see you are going too - I have never bought anything so I've never not said anything but that's purely down to lack of requirement as I think you've got some amazing stuff.

Rather than leaving and losing all the income from your items ... why don't you just employ a customer service team to fend off idiots?

I feel your pain, I really do, from RL. There I not only get idiot customers, I have resentful staff who don't see my advice as being intended to make their job easier and more pleasant so much as 'moaning'.

(An edit here - seriously, go work in Customer Support rl for a week and come back here DELIGHTED at how much more intelligent your erstwhile nitwits suddenly seem!)

It's not the fault of SL per se, but just like any other thing the early people have a vested interest and emotional tie that people who come to a thing already in existance don't have - and that's an awareness that this isn't a 'right' and that they should be seeing people behind a screen not something they have a 'right' to.

Whatever you decide to do, the best of luck to you. It sounds to me like you need a little fun in SL for a change and again I feel your pain there from SL ...

Hair and shoes up your bum as usual

Sounds like burnout to me Any seasoned gamer can spot it lol Delete your account is a bad idea even if you think youll never come back and especially if you like that name. Trust me on it. I left Second Life for an entire year because Lindens told me personally in private ims they would help me with a griefing problem. Then they turned around and suspended my account, as a clothing designer, for 3 days for cursing after im orbited for the 1000 time by the same person. I didnt see the justice so i gave up my promising design career and just walked away. But i did come back a year later! when i didnt care anymore . ..I still refuse to design or give any more of my talent over to a world i believe is fundamental flawed. But i use sl for my own enjoyment. Use it like the B**** it used me for in the past. On alts. Having a peaceful Second Life. And best part, i dont hafta talk to people that have no manners anymore. There are all kinds of ways to be in sl and have a good time. Maybe youll come back someday and find out for yourself.

Can I have your stuff?

Oh hold on, this isn't the WoW forums!

Customers and people in general do say positive things, quite often I have had IMs saying nice things about things I have made, in RL I dont thank every company I buy items from either, I figured my thankyou comes in the fact I buy things from them and do so again if the things work well and the company has good service, also in the fact I will recommend the place to people I know.

Its a fact of life(both in SL and RL) that however simple you make an item, there will be people who have problems with it, all you can do is make things as simple as possible, and accept that the above is the case, it cannot be changed.

I expect like most people who sell things in sl, I get quite a few IMs a day saying "where is your shop" or "can I have an LM to your shop", now my shop is in picks, in classifed and up until recently I had directions on the front page of my profile as to how to press classified and press teleport, but those IMs still come.
When these come I dont get upset with the person, I hand them the landmark, it would take considerably longer to rant at them and it would serve no useful purpose, there are things that just come with the territory and these are the people who will then probably buy things from me so it would be wrong of my to think of it as a nuisance.

I think all of us at one time have asked a thing that we later realised was obvious or was maybe in the manual, after that happens you feel stupid, in such cases I am very grateful that the person I asked was understanding and had not made me feel like an idiot, the guy maybe gets asked the same thing day in and day out, and the fact he kept his cool and didnt get upset with me shows great professionalism.

There are times when you want to scream, or you feel like you are getting a dimmer view of people in general, I always thought if I ever became too jaded and started to get upset with peoples questions I should stop doing what Im doing, this is what you have decided if I read your post correctly.

I think its a great credit to you that you have made that decision, there are some who would keep selling for the money and ignore the questions or bite peoples heads off for IMing them, its a shame to leave but you are doing what you think is best given the situation.

you're as equally as "mind-numbed" leaving for these reasons imo. Idiots are wherever you go

BYE!

Goodbye.

That's right, SL is all about making stuff without bothering to support it. Money should just flow into your pockets after you make something, then your job is over!

WRONG. Customer support is key. Hell, I support other people's items as well as my own when asked. As someone more experienced and the creator of your products, you have a duty to your customers to see that they are helped. How many times have you had a head-slapping moment where you find out the answer was so simple that you wish you hadn't even asked the question? If you haven't, well, you're perfect and have no busniess hanging out with us mundanes anyway.

I have never flamed anyone in my life (until now), but I recognize my duty to the people who chose my items over any one elses'. They gave their money to me because they liked my style, and that's a compliment. Yes, it takes up a bunch of time, but in return my customers are happy, more knowlegeable, and feel good about themselves and my goods. It's our duty as content creators!

OK, I'm gonna get off my soapbox and drink some caffeine to wake up and then I'll probably regret getting all grouchy. Good luck to the OP in all his future endeavors.

With a twirl of her skirt, Jez waves bye and blows you a kissy.

*moves*

Well I am also a very large business owner and yes customer support can have its moments that try your patience, but if you are running a popular business you have to expect this as customers who pay you money certainly have the reasonable expectations that you can answer their questions.

I have a fairly similar startup story as yours… I made a failed attempt at a club and then decided those who made items for clubs were the ones making money. (Not that making money is everything, but it was my goal at the time.) So being a real life programmer I made a few things and set up a very small store on the mainland. At first business was slow but after a few months it was picking up nicely. This store made more than enough for me to buy an island at which time I made a much bigger store and many more items to sell. Sales continued to climb and yes I pay taxes. I was doing something I loved and making a lot of money having invested no money of my own. The past two months though marked my first decline (though modest) in sales. I do worry about the state of the SL economy, as LL continues to do things that anger their customer base… and that is bad for all of our businesses. As I noted in a recent post, this also may be do to a stagnant or even declining population, which is a first for SL and no doubt related to the earlier mentioned anger. But to your point of seeing more angry people… I can’t say I have had the same experience. About 99% of customers are polite and thankful and often DO indeed IM me just to say thanks for such and such.

If you are leaving because of the time it takes to do customer support I can offer some suggestions. The first is to write very good manuals. Even an item that you view as easy to use people will have questions about. (Perhaps you do this already I have no idea, but I find it helps.) Another thing I did to limit my customer support issues was to carefully determine what sorts of products I sell. I sell mostly complex and expensive items ranging from 500 to 6000 L$. I do this for two reasons. One is that it is my niche market with fewer competitors, which I can enter easily with so much real life programming experience. The second reason is that you are just as likely to have to offer customer support on a $50 item as a $5000 item. Logically, if you decide to go into a cheaper item market you can expect your time in customer support to profit ratio to climb.

I use one other strategy to reduce the need for customer support. I try to make my items have various “levels” of use. This requires an example to explain. I sell a very complex dance floor with tens of thousands of lines of code and nearly endless functionality. My manual explains that for less tech-mined people the only command they need to know is the preset command, which can load 120 different floor presets. That is all most people will do with it. However, a gadget guru is welcome to use the floor’s built in scripting language to program the floor for their own custom dynamic and interactive displays. I refer to this in the manual as a “level 3” user. People will usually find their own comfort zone and take the product as far as they want to go with it. I don’t know if this sort of strategy would work well for your products, but I can tell you it has served me (and I hope my customers) very well.

To conclude I have done statistical studies that show about 10% of customers IM for item related support. This is a number that is actually less than those that simply say thanks for the hard work. The only problem is that on a busy day that is still enough to flood my IMs (as we only get 25 in game) if I don’t check them at least every 12 hours. About the only time I have ever had a customer get angry was when I failed to respond because I didn’t get their IM. SL should raise the limit to 50 at least or have it as an option of some sort because business owners really need more than 25 stored IMs. I know you can have it sent to email but just imagine having to open 50 emails or more a day. It is much easier to do in game.

Well that’s my two Lindens on the matter.