Knowledge Base

Posts posted by B00tsy Compton

It's been my experience that the LL support system works somewhat like a hospital ER.  They prioritize support cases as they come in, putting "urgent" ones at the top of the list and setting ones that can wait farther down.  As Adam says, then, their response time depends on how long the queue is and whether your case is more demanding than the next one on the list.  After normal work hours and on weekends there are fewer people answering support cases, too, so they tend to focus almost entirely on things that can't wait. 

I have rarely had a case stay open more than a couple of days, but then I have rarely submitted a case until I was sure that I couldn't handle the problem myself.  However, having served this Answers forum as a regular for over a decade, I know that some people -- (not you, but some people) -- will come here with annoyances that are little more than the technical version of a hangnail.  If many people are submitting those sorts of issues to the LL support system, they will slow down the queue and make it harder to deal with everyone else. 

As Adam suggested, it's often quicker to just pick up the phone and call the Billing Office if you have a question about your account.  They won't deal with other types of issues, but I have found them very helpful when I have had questions about my account balance or billing status.  The billing team is available from 6am to 3pm PST, Monday through Friday. 
Call toll-free in the US/Canada: 800-294-1067 or 703-286-6277. 

I Understand that, with most companies support works that way.  My case of not being able to login to the marketplace and managing my store could be considered as 'urgent'.  Luckily I don't have sales going on that I have to manually disable, but this issue is been going on now for 2 weeks so I am calling it 'urgent'. 

The times I had to use support in the past I also had a response time of max 48 hours, thats why I am a bit confused and worried about the time that has passed now.  Or would it be that since I don't have/use premium anymore my ticket is stuffed on the bottom of the pile?  I don't know! 

And Calling support all the way from Europe is not something I really want to do.  Besides, my account issue is not related to billing so I don't want to bother the wrong support department with that. 

Well, any support subject should have a decent response time.  Not expecting support to fix issues within a blink of an eye, but I do expect a response and confirmation that the issue is noted and being worked on.  If waiting a week for a response is the new standard on SL then things has changed since the last time I had to use support. 

You have those now and then.  Stay nice and proffesional, log the IM's, base any argument on facts (and not emotions), let the customer review the products(s) and see if it has any merrit.  If not, report it (and leave a comment) and let te marketplace team handle it.  If that does not take care of the issue then you still have the IM logs that will help your case when you open a support ticket to solve the issue. 

Isn't it really relative to the product?  Making a tatoo is completely different then creating a HUD with many features or other scripted product, specially when you also provide free regular updates and new features.  Tatoo take 1 hour, HUD could take 1000+ hours if you count updates and on going work on the product. 

One thing I can tell for sure is that the average customer often has no idea how much time and effort creators in SL put in their products!  There are many great mesh builders for example that sells quality buildings for 1 or 2 US Dollars while they 'may' have spend hundreds of hours in Blender (or similar app) with dozens of test upload versions, much time on texturing and adding nice lighting and adding scripted features to their build (etc). 

I just want to say that I am beyond disappointed in how issues are being taken care of by LL and the SLM team. 

For over 6 months I can not look at the SLM account/orders page because then I get this:

So sorry to keep you waiting.  We'll be right back! 

We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly."  Yeah I am waiting for it for 6 months now! 

Listing enhancements are stuck in a uneditable limbo also for months and on top of that active enhancements are being canceled on it's own without any confirmation or action by me the accountholder/merchant.  The SLM website is almost 2 years online and still it borked and unreliable.  Give me one good reason why I should still trust LL with my money on that website?  And this is on top of a lot of other existing SLM issues such as fake and manipulated reviews and ratings and other bad merchant behaviour like selling other peoples creations without approval... as anyone can sell and call themself a merchant.  A few days ago I saw a merchant that copy/pasted an entire listing of mine and I can not even communicate with the SLM team about it, besides unrelevant flagging options without a commentbox to clarify the flagging action.  So I then have to file a DMCA for a listing description, a DMCA team that ignores letters from oversees and only accept fax-DMCA's.  And then still good chance they wont do a thing about it.,  besides that I am done filing DMCA's, dealing with them pisses me more of then the actual IP theft. 

You LL are asking jackpot prices and fees for virtual land while I could buy a frikkin tripleA server myself for the same price as 1 month region fees, at the same time inworld commerce is pretty much ruined by LL and in return we have a commerce site that we can't trust or rely on + that the site is still inferior to the original SL-Exchange that also had a dedicated team that was always on top of every issue, a team that communicated with the users on a daily basis. 

And when I contact support after being very patient to complain about the issues I am being shoved off with a link to this forum and the other half of my ticket unanswered and unsolved. 

You LL are a joke.  Lets face it you have missed the boat and SL will eventually die a slow death.  There were plenty of oppertunities to make SL big, but the arrogant vision of the old CEO's and the shareholders took the paying residents for granted and they were pretty much ignored and just milked as much as possible.  You were so arrogant that you focussed on bringing in companies into SL while they did not want anything do with your virtual experiment instead of focussing on the endusers and the merchants/creators in SL, the ones that bring in the real money.  Thinking back at the huge pile of drama we had to endure with contenttheft and LL leaving the creators out in the cold for years, where we had to deal with a just as arrogant DMCA team that were unwilling to help creators in distress other then the strict legal conditions they had to obey to cover LL's own ass.  Over the years I have a huge list of disappointments regarding LL's business practice and their priorities and there comes a time when it is enough. 

I am personally done putting any more time and effort into SL and spending my money on your dated and overpriced virtual environment.  The experiment is over. 

At this moment I can not look at my order history on my account page at all, so I have no idea what is being billed currently. 

I do see 3 enhancements that are stuck in a limbo with "charging/ can not edit".  One of those enhancements has been stuck for 8 months now (not the 2 months you are referring to).  I am not planning to pay for an enhancement that I wanted to stop many months ago, but simply can't because your software is borked. 

I also want to add that I have reported this issue of not being albe to stop enhancements and not being charged for them either in a Jira over a year ago and it was told it was fixed, with a nice thank you for reporting the issue. ( https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/jira-notify/2011-May/277312.html) I now noticed thus that I again a have stuck enhancement that I thought I had disabled like 8 months ago.  I am definitely not paying 8 months enhancement costs for an enhancement that I stopped, but is still active due to software problems. 

3.  Freebie and almost freebie items not showing up under relevance.  In fact, anything 25L or below should have it's own area and not be in the general filter. 

I notice the excact opposite with default display of relevance and best selling order.  There are pages upon pages of freebies and semi freebies and then at page 20 the real products finally start to appear.  The exception is the very first page where you do still see a few products with a price tag.  Atm SLM category display is messed as bad the first beta months of SLM.﻿

FREEBIES are good for SL, and when used properly can help boost your own business -- just as they can be in real world marketing.  I'll work on a indepth post on this topic for my blog, but a few reasons are:

If freebies are good for SL and your business is debatable.  I do not think they belong on SLM as separate products, it contradicts the whole purpose of SLM.  Freebies most certainly do not deserve a sales rank and a relevance rank as they do now.  Freebies should at least have a separate search and not be included in the default search on SLM.  The best place for freebies is inworld as it incites new residents to explore new locations while searching for freebies. 

effectively reduced a 60 minute meeting to 30 minutes.  And so few actual questions were asked and answered - thanks to Brooke's Question Filtration System (Colossus) that it just ended up being Brooke typing out a blogged status update. 

Since I am unable to attend anyway (as are likely most merchants), I would totally agree that Brooke should just collect the survey responses of the top issues, develop a blog of the topics she is willing to post about, and then just let the larger audience of Merchants ask questions on the blog. 

Then she should take some time out of her schedule and answer some of the responses / questions. 

I do agree that larger group meetings are not all that effective and has no room for in depth discussions, I am positive though about the active communication we are having with Brooke.  After Pink there was a gap in communication and no Linden that took over the public role.  Glad to see that void filled. 

Adjustment of the tier prices and setup fees is definitely wanted/needed.  300 dollars a month (ex VAT) is not linear to prices of other products in RL.  For 500 Dollar you can buy a quad core PC with a 1GB Gcard.  So having 1 sim in SL (on a shared server) is equal to buying a brand new PC every 6 weeks.  Not even mentioning the 1000 dollar setup fee for a sim.