Free items "No Transfer"? This is ridiculous!

OK, this is about the last straw for me...

So I have been collecting some free items from the various places like Free Dove. My wife decided that she might be interested in SL, so we created an alt for her. When I went to transfer the clothes that I had found, none of them would transfer because *everything* was marked "No Transfer".

What is the point of this? Just trying to waste my time? Why should I need to take her avatar to all of these places again, sort through all of the junk, just to get the same free items that I already have?

These kinds of issues are just sucking the fun out of SL for me (and my wife)

Many free items are copyable and modifiable, so that you can mess around with them and change them to your liking. One reason that those items are 'no transfer' is that if you can modify, copy AND transfer the item, you can sell it as your own creation and make money off an item which was supposed to be free in the first place.

I've run into people who package up a bunch of transferable freebies into an attractive box, and then attempt to sell the box for L$50....it's VERY tacky! Same with free poseballs... I've seen people who say "well I changed the colors, so I modified it, so I have the right to sell them." It takes away from the hard work of the creator, who intended the item to be free.

I'm sorry for your unhappy time, but there really is a reason behind it. Have fun!

Oryx

Isn't it the sellers choice to choose between transfer and no transfer? I don't see why the need to get all upset. After all, they are given out for free anyways and they really don't need to do it for free.

If I offered free items at the Dove, it would be to showcase my work and then entice people to shop at my regular store. If the freebies were transferable, one could take hundreds of them and then turn around and sell them to unsuspecting folks. Not good for my business.

The freebies there are not the same as you'll find in Yadni's and other warehouses. These freebies are really samples.

It also means the creator can drive people to his shop to pick up the freebies after friends have told them where they have got them from... therefore increasing the creators traffic and also possibley enticing people to buy some of their paid for items.

I mean... come on... its free... so just tell your wife where they are and she can go get them.

Perhaps, if she's new to SL, the experience of going out shopping for her own freebies will help her get to grips with SL.

The point of it is, so the creator can give things away for free, without worrying about freebie resellers.

SL seems like it may not be for you, Kyler. You seem to have a lot of posts about things that suck the fun out of it for you.

My freebies are definitely non-transferrable as I don't want them to be sold by any freebie resellers. If you like my freebie treehouse or prefabs, you can always get as many copies as you want for your self or send your friends around to stock up for themselves. But you won't be able to pass them on.

many old-school freebies are intended as lures, or promos. I own a shop, let's call it Eclectic Randomness (that's the name of my shop.. so we're good so far)

let's say, around the holidays, I set out a few boxes in various places around the grid, labeled "not a bomb". clicking on the box would give you some freebies. A holographic keyboard, a chair, some things I've sold on and off, etc. Basically a gift pack, a "premium".

now every one of those items was labeled "Eclectic Randomness" and was no transfer. Why?

Because your friend sees you with the cool thing, and says "I want one of those!" so you look at the item, and note where it came from, and now your friend comes rushing into my store.

Now, ideally, I'd have my freebie box available in the store (but I've been remodelling recently, and it's not out at the moment). The idea being that you HAVE to come to my store to get the freebie, and then you'll see all my incredible products at amazing prices, and buy buy buy.

The theory behind a "Freebie mall" like Free Dove, is that you can place your "Freebie pack" in the hands of some noobs, who will go out and share the news, bringing them back to the dove, where they will probably spend an hour picking up as many freebies as they can. And in every box, a landmark to the store where they can get "more wonderful things like this".

While it may be desirable for "true freebies" to be transferable, commercial premium "teasers" are actually intended to bring you back to the source, and to bring friends. (lucky chairs being a good example here as well).

While I generally prefer Lucky Chair items to be no copy, transferable.. I can see why one would choose to go the other route.. to keep someone with 25 alts, from running your chair and having 26 copies of a transferable (resellable) item.

A significant fraction of what we call freebies were never intented to be free.

They were normal for sale items that due to pemissions bugs that Linden Labs didnt contain in time ended up leaving the control of the original creator.

In other words people got full perms versions and instead of keeping them for their own use or destroying them - distributed or sold them.

Thus not freebies - but thievedbies.

If someone makes their freebies no tranfer , good, no one should be profiting off of them anyhow.

The solution to this would be really easy...if an item is marked as "Free", then just make it so that you *can't* resell it!

I understand everything you are all saying. I understand that the way SL currently works is that I could modify an item and then resell it, so that's why it's marked as "No Transfer". My point is that this is not a good method for handling free items.

This is supposed to be a social game. I should be able to give someone a free gift if I want and there should be some way for them to pass it on without profiting from it. Seems like the merchants out there should *welcome* an easy way to pass around samples of their work. I shouldn't need to hunt down their store. Just the fact that I can easily see who the creator of the item is already makes it easy to me to find their store to buy their stuff. Forcing every new user to revisit a freebie store isn't helping the original merchants at all.

Yes, I'm pissed off. Yes, I'm probably done with SL. Yes, nobody will probably care or respond to this. I'm just *very* upset that SL could be such a huge success, but it has *so many* problems like this.

Yes, my wife could waste hours revisiting the places we have already been together, get the boxes full of junk and filter out the stuff she doesn't want, just to have the same outfit that we have already spent the time putting together ourselves. Why should she need to do this. It isn't fun. It's just a waste of her time. It shouldn't need to be this way. It's just another example of the many reasons SL isn't going to attract the mass audience that I wish it did.

Just add a flag to mark an item as Free. It's easy. A free item could never be sold. But I guess nobody wants to consider ways to improve SL. All I hear is reasons why it's the way it is.

Not that it matters. I'm done with this anyway. Good luck to everyone in the future. Maybe in a couple of years LL will fix all of the problems and get this right. Or, maybe some other company will come along and do it right. Nice experiment.

People have been wanting LL to add the ability to transfer but not allow sell for ages now. Ever since I've been here, anyway. But they don't/won't, who knows why.

coco

It's almost a Catch 22, they don't want to make any big changes and they don't want to do any small changes to the permissions system because they have a big change planned (I'm not sure if this will happen before or after Havok 6 integration).

You are quiting Second Life becuase you couldnt freely copy and then transfer a rag tag unorganized collection of stolen items, promotions, early efforts, free internet downloads, and simple objects?

Wow - what would have happened when you ran into a real issue.

Good luck to you in the future.

And that patience thing.

Because of the defaulting problem.

When they add the new "transfer but not sell" flag, what should the default on all the items already in the database be?

If the default is "no sale", all the items that were intended for resale suddenly become unresellable. Vendors across the world break.

If the default is "sale", all the freebies that were originaly not intended for resale are now explicitly marked with an indication that resale is OK.

networked vendors do not "sell" items.

the vendor logs a "PAY" action. which then gets shunted to the Owner's account. Then the vendor contacts the server, and informs the server that the payment has been logged, and the item that it is currently displaying. The server then "GIVES" the item from it's inventory, to the person who made the payment.

Because of this simple workaround, anything that is giveable, is sellable. Even if LL created a complex permissions system that disallowed a box containing a "not for resale" item from being set for sale.. what's to stop the use of a vendor as described above? or the old fashioned "give me $50 and I'll give you one" method of selling?

unfortunately there are a lot of people doing things they should not be doing including reselling freebies that people make to remain freebies so over time you start to remove some of the permissions

There are a bunch of other issues out there but I would say your encountering someone who has found that their freebies were being resold for lots of lindens so they removed the ability to do so.

*moves to feedback*

And what would stop someone from selling it?

Even if there was a box to tick to say the item cant be sold, you could still sell it just not in a box (you can always ask the buyer to give you the money directly which could be for anything).

So as you can see there is absolutely no way this can be implemented without the possibility of damage to the designer.

Anyway its free stuff, why complain about something that didn't cost you a cent.

Finally, someone who understands my point. This isn't about whining over free items. This is about a basic problem that I'm seeing over and over again in just the first 2 weeks of SL. I see so many problems, and then read in these forums about how these problems have been around a long time and have not been addressed.

I could post about dozens of problems like this. And many people here in the forums have already posted about some of them. But, when I ignore the large percentage of "fanboy" (or fangirl) posts defending anything LL does, what I see is that LL seems very afraid of listening to feedback and making any big changes.

If I were a vendor, I would want a way to widely distribute samples of my work (free items). This *is* easy. If you put a "no-sell" item in a prim, then the prim itself becomes "no-sell". This isn't rocket science. But the whole philosophy of LL seems to be "hands off". Perhaps too hands-off.

If their permission system isn't sophisticated enough to handle something this easy, then it's a bad architecture. But they are stuck because they have such a large world of user-created content built upon this bad architecture that they are powerless of fix anything. That's not good for the future of SL.

I'm sure the Lindens are all overworked and busy with plenty of other things (like selling expensive islands to big corporations). They don't seem to care about more basic issues that turn off new, casual customers. Bizzard understands how to attract casual customers, which is why they have millions of paying customers. Because LL doesn't seem to understand or care about these issues, they will never reach that level of success. And that's what is so sad...it is such a great concept.

The reason I've quit isn't because of some silly free items. It's because of the attitude of superiority that I've seen over and over again, and the lack of attention being given to attracting a more "mass" audience. As I've said here and in other posts, I'm mad because all of the "hype" and potential of SL got me really excited, but the actual details of the implementation let me down. I expected a lot more from something that has had many years to deal with simple issues like this (and the many other problems that it has).

"how would that stop you from selling an item to your wife?" How does that stop you from saying "hey.. give me $50 and I'll give you this lamp?" the simple, ugly fact is.. it doesn't stop it. And even if you had a permissions system that could stop "items in a prim from being sold".... that only accounts for like maybe 1/3 of all sales in SL. The mechanism that "gives" you a coke from a coke machine when you click on it, isn't sale.. it's transfer. And most, if not all, networked vendors use this method of distrubution.

There' are vendors you "BUY" and vendors you "PAY".. and the ones you "PAY" aren't selling anything directly to you. In fact, the item you get from a "PAY" vendor, is probably stored in another prim, in another SIM! When you buy something on SLExchange or SLBoutique... that's how your item gets to you.

So, if someone can work out a complex spider's web of conditions of what constitutes "a sale" in this circumstance.. I'm sure someone else will find a way to build a new exception.... and many more people will run into it "hey she gave me that money as a tip, and I thought I'd just give her this free flower to say thank you".

What happens when the Vendor is owned by Joe, and it tells Mike's server to deliver the item to you? Or when SLexchange handles the transaction... Joe's money to SLX to Mike, and Mike's magic box gives item X to Joe. Joe never even GIVES money to mike!

and then, let's say that "no sale" disabled the lsl function llGiveInventory as well... THEN how do you deal with all those cars that give the passengers HUD attachments? Suddenly now your lovingly crafted backyard BBQ can no longer give out hamburgers? And that wonderful Babbler hud we all love so much, can't use that "gift" button anymore. And forget ever having a freebie vendor 'selling' for $0.

I think the reason we don't have that checkbox, is because it's so badly entangled with transfer after 4 years of SL.. that untangling it now, would involve killing a HUGE amount of content, and would involve doubling or tripling the server calls in order to determine if permissions allowed the transfer or not. Adding MORE server load.

It's a pain in the butt non transfer, I avoid buying anything non transfer as much as possible, better to have non copy, because if I want a second set of boots for the luxury of putting them in outfit folders, I'll buy them, but seeing I'm smart enough to cghange without taking my boots off I doubt I will need to, copyable items this way just increase inventory sizes as you add all your huds, accessories, hair, car & weapons to every outfit.

If I see something I like for someone else and it's non transfer, I just forget it and look for something else I can give to them as a surprise rather that drag them to the mall in the middle of their party for their birthday present.

What is the use of being able to have 42 copies of my sedan in my inventory but not being able to give the vehicle to my alt to use or give / sell away when I upgrade to a different vehicle? I might pay $2k for your new Ford if I can sell my old Ford off for $500

"Yes, so & so makes a nice sports car, had one in my inventory but deleted it because it wasn't being used" So sorry newbie instead of giving you my only copy of a good car so you can advertise the product as intended, I'll give you a freebie sportscar to use instead.

If some one want multiple copies of a freebie they can click the box multiple times.

The advantage becomes apparent when 42 copies of your sedan get lost in the bovels of grid thanks to all issues with sim border crossing, security systems unseating people mid-ride and their car winding up gods know where, and the usual SL performance hiccups along the lines of "oops i failed to rezz your car but no, it won't be sent back to your inventory, it just went... somewhere. It was no copy/transfer? Too bad, so sad" ... something that can take quite less time to accomplish than one could suspect.

Having to pay for new instance of car each time the previous one gets lost due to SL glitches would *very* fast make it way more expensive venture than the ability to get that 2-3 USD worth of L$ back when you switch to a new one.

As the owner of THE FREE DOVE.... it is one of my rules that all items are NO TRANSFER..

The point is...


I don't want to see that the designers that promote their artistic creations for free see their items "SOLD" for an amount of linder dollars in yard sales ...

These creations are to promote their stores and not for sale.... period...


I am a designer and protect the designers that participate there...

c'mmon if is free, what does it takes to take another "alt" and get the stuff for it...

the OP blames the stupidity of the SL permissions system for forcing his wife to go to all those places again to collect the same freebies he did.

But the OP also states that his wife went with him the first time.

I blame the shortsightedness of his wife not picking the freebies up when she was there the first time.

Who goes to a place like Free Dove, and hangs out for an hour while their friend picks up freebies.. and doesn't do so themselves???

PS: Palomma .... THANK YOU FOR FREE DOVE!

Hey it's for posing in the driveway, cars don't work in SL remember?
I buy them because they look cool, not because I want to use them in SL