Enable Requests for Bellisseria Commercial Stores by Ticket Only
tracked
Prokofy Neva
Currently, there is enormous dissatisfaction among the merchant population with the inability to find readily available commercial stores in Ridgewood Enclave, where large tracts of them were dropped in the last year. When the Moles release entire sims' worth of the stores, inevitably at an inconvenient time zone for significant portions of the population, there is a mad scramble for them. Thus, few can obtain them in a fair and orderly manner, sometimes camping the store spawn for hours or even all day in the fever to get a scarce store.
Numerous examples abound where a single person has grabbed more than one or two stores and uses alts and enlisted friends to sequester multiple stores under one brand without even an effort to make them different.
Worse, when a store is abandoned, a throng of people can develop waiting in anguish for the 1.5 hours or more to elapse before the AVAILABLE sign appears. While the kiosks that now give lists of available stores are an improvement on the original insane scrum, in fact the available stores do NOT appear on kiosk lists WHEN abandoned but are only listed AFTER the AVAILABLE sign appears. Only by constantly paying attention to Bellisseria Merchants, a resident-run group which has taken over store registration, as well as other Bellisseria groups, can prospective store owners hear of an abandonment coming.
The Premium Plus account of $15.99 a month, a substantial expenditure for many, has the feature of requesting certain exact Bellisseria
homes
by location, instead of accepting a random option from the web site. So there is no reason not to add requests of stores
for Premium Plus. This could be done in addition to the "kiosk" available list and the "sudden large drops" by Moles.But ideally, ALL STORES SHOULD BE REQUESTED BY TICKET to reduce the amount of hoarding and sequestering of multiple stores under the same brand/group and more importantly, the stress of the survival of the fittest in the mob rush to get a store. The Lindens can either automate this random fulfillment of ticket requests if it seems like a burdensome chore, or advisedly, eyeball them to see if multiple requests by one person are occuring. A "first come, first serve" solution that would randomly deliver an available store to each person who filed a ticket would be more fair and more predictable for both residents and Lindens/Moles.
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Oatmeal Linden
updated the status to
tracked
Hello Prokofy! Thank you for your feedback about the Ridgewood Enclave Commercial District. We are marking this as tracked for further review.
The purpose of LH Commercial is to provide an opportunity for Premium Plus Residents of Second Life to quickly own a business and belong to a community of businesses. The covenant information has important information about using your store parcel. You may find the covenant in the About Land panel under the Covenant tab. If you believe that a store may be violating this covenant, please file a detailed abuse report for the issue.
You may find the covenant in our wiki, as well as inworld in the About Land panel:
Snowlord Resident
While I certainly agree there should be better restrictions on owners using alts to expand storefronts/brands to multiple shops I feel the selection process is fine as is. It can indeed be tricky to obtain a shop no matter how it is setup, if it were a ticket system it could get abused by readying users/alts to write up tickets, abandon, then submit said tickets right after. Too it would put more work on an already time consuming ticket list to process. lastly as far as 3rd party sites showing what is available etc, that has been dwindled a ton since LL added the kiosks which is good. I personally didn't care for the sites that had users going in to locations to create "lists" of available shops/abandoned homes which really just adds avatar traffic that has nothing to do with store specific traffic.
Prokofy Neva
Snowlord Resident Ticketing enables the Lindens to review the demand on these scarce stores and stem the tide of multiple alts taking stores. It's not possible to put a different RL name and different form of RL payment on every alt, and so the Lindens could simply have a policy to limit requests to one RL person/one form of RL payment. Often a suggestion like this is only edgecased to death as if you focus on how it could be overcome (people have multiple credit/debit cards where there name may even be slightly different) instead of focusing on the fact that filing a ticket is a kind of friction that does open the request up to scrutiny, formal and informal, and of course will lesson the likelihood of taking multiple shops.
There isn't that work here involved. Some 1365 stores have been taken to date -- you can see the figures on the Bellisseria Online page. https://feedback.secondlife.com/ldpw/p/enable-requests-for-bellisseria-commercial-stores-by-ticket-only
It's not tens of thousands; it's 1365. So until a whole new drop of dozens of stores on mulitiple sims is made, there might be a few hundred people at most -- and not even -- trying to get stores. How do I know? I am in two Bellisseria groups, Bellisseria Merchants and Bellisseria Citizens where people discuss store availability and also those wishing to abandon a store put a notice in for others to try to get it. I also fly around the area and see who is actually there hoping to find a store -- tiny handfuls of people. A few have posted they were looking on the forums -- and got one. The time consumption here is on the part of desperate store-seekers trying to keep up with groups, in-person visits, forums, etc. - and will drop their $15.99 Premium Plus account. It is not on the part of Lindens who receive way more requests for abandoned land per day than they would stores. It's eminently doable and doesn't require even the same work of abandoned land, which they often have to move to auction or sell directly after clearing -- the store turnover is an easier job.
Prokofy Neva
The kiosks do not take a location SLURL
until
the AVAILABLE sign goes up. But often there are people already camping abandoned land because they've been tipped off by friends or one of the Belli groups. I frankly don't understand what you "don't like" in the fact that people are coming to the regions to click on the kiosks as the only way to get a store instead of...what...? shopping at my store or you store? But why can't they do that?! Or do you mean they go to some other location to get the news of availability. But again, why can't they do that? If anything, the ticket system is more fair, less random, less frustrating and the Linden time is minimal to ensure that they retain a Premium Plus customer. Premium Plus already has
the feature of being able to request an exact home
you want and skipping the random queue. All my proposal does is rationally extend this same feature to the stores provided in principle in the account so that people can really get them.Snowlord Resident
Prokofy Neva I stand by comment, and your link to the online page is the link for this feedback (which is fine as I'm familiar with the sites and not interested in them anyway) a small part of the issue is from those who post when a store does become available; while the gesture is thoughful it just stacks avatars up at the shops door competing for the chance to obtain it vs letting the process happen with users actively searching in person/at the kiosks. As it stands we all know the demand is super high without changing to a ticket system. Really the number of stores all together vs premium plus account holders who want one is the main issue.
remi Enersly
I agree. It's like Walmart on Black Friday. People have died to get those items! i add a request for a store with every ticket I submit. No matter what the ticket is for. And what about bars? no one is ever at the one i see. Maybe the owner should have to spend a certain amount of time in the store. Or maybe post hours of operation not for whether doors are locked (lol that's funny in SL, locked doors.) Not for locked doors but for the customers. Nearly all the stores I have visited are empty, every time I swing in. So what's the store for? If I get a store I will post hours of operations so that my customers can come talk with me. I will not be an absentee owner.
Prokofy Neva
remi EnerslyI get visitors to my store and even purchases and click throughs to conversions on rentals. It's only a trickle every week but it's worth it. It's been better than my random roadside store I had inworld. I and others can put the Bellisseria store as the location inworld where someone can come from my Marketplace to see the offerings in world. What's not to like? That's the best use case of it, in fact. Right now, one resident group has gotten the windfall of all the registrations coming to them automatically registered, and they haven't done much with this except to allow people to put up promotions now and then. But other groups will come along and do more with their own and friends' stores and it will move more eventually.
A simple thing many don't realize to do is to put the parcel in search -- which you can do in Commercial Bellisseria unlike the residential area where this function is disabled deliberately precisely to prevent commerce. So work on key words, put the land in search/places and get more attention.
Garnet Psaltery
I don't even think about these areas now since I could never get one. A ticketed system is a good idea but not at random; make it a fair queue. I didn't know it was possible to claim more than one store but that is entirely unfair and should be regarded as abuse of the system.
Prokofy Neva
Garnet PsalteryWell, "at random"
would be
a fair queue, by which I mean "use the same system you already have in place for allocating Linden homes which is 5 tries per day, at random" -- which would be more orderly than the randomness of forcing people to wait around for hours or even days for the kiosk to get a notice of abandoned land and then serve it out when clicked.The Lindens have proven incredibly resistant to changing their alleged "at random" allocation system (which is the same sort of flawed system they used to have for delivering the newbie stream to various welcome area resident-run sites). "Random" when you have such a finite set of items as in SL means that you can repeat a single choice several times and even in theory five times in a row -- and that should be eliminated and likely there is a Canny on THAT problem. That is already a very frustrating bug-not-feature of the existing Linden home distribution system.
A truly fair system in fact would involve a serial processing of each available home or in this case stores as they came up -- the "random" idea only leads to repeats and ultimately failure. The same system tht generates the list for the kiosks can be taken over by the ticketing system, since 90% of the time when the stores are NOT dropped in huge batches, waiting for the kiosk proves to be a fruitless and frustrating system. As I know myself, only by persistently hanging around for entire days at a time could anyone ever catch an abandoned store accidentally. The other way is also accidental -- to be online, and in the "right" Bellisseria group, to see the chat about somebody dropping their store.
Yes, people claim more than one store on alts, and enterprising owners or brand managers simply line up a whole bunch of alts and/or actual real-people friends and they wrangle the stores. I see some people then doling them out to friends after they've wrangled bunches in a big drop. This follows the "Game of Homes" pattern where at peak times you will find people even with 100 houses, or all the houses on several sims.
remi Enersly
Prokofy Neva In my experience most of the avatars visiting the commercial regions are the ones hoping for a store.
Prokofy Neva
remi EnerslyThat's fine. Let them. No matter where your store is -- on the back of the moon or the Mainland on an obscure sim, or a booth at some high-traffic event, you yourself have to promote it in your group, on your profile, in search, etc. The Lindens can't hold your hand through that.
Dana Enyo
I gave up.