Bunnies in bondage

No, this is nothing to do with that suggestion I made for a tinies-Gorean crossover... that was just a piece of idle conversation... I absolutely haven't even thought about tiny slave gear or any such stuff... oh no.  (Besides, I'm sure it's been done already.)

No, this is a more serious topic, the problem-plagued rollout of Direct Delivery for Marketplace items.  I referred to this a while back, airily commented that "of course there are teething problems", and went on to talk about the effects on land usage.

However, those teething problems have, as it were, come back to bite me on the butt, because they are still in evidence and show every sign of being an intractable difficulty.

Basically, a number of products - how many?  I really couldn't say, but more than enough to notice - in the process of swapping over from people's Magic Boxes to their Merchant Outboxes, have become confused.  Names and images and descriptions are getting scrambled, leading to quite understandable confusion about what you might be buying and who you might be paying for it.  Merchants are, equally understandably, up in arms about the whole business, and I for  one don't blame them.

The reallocation is quite random, and it affects enough stuff that I, for example, noticed an "Ozimals bunny" in a search with an image and a description for some pretty exotic bondage equipment instead.  (Was I searching for Ozimals bunnies, or for bondage gear?... I think I will just have to stay mum about that one.)  Now, this means lost sales and/or angry customers for merchants, and a great deal of effort expended in sorting things out.  The shift to Direct Delivery is already putting stress on merchants, some of whom have many, many items to convert.... and this mix-up is adding to the load.

And it is still going on, I notice as I trawl through Marketplace looking for shoes, as is my wont.  And there is a deadline looming, now, in the form of the date when LL switch the magic boxes off for good and all.  You have to think that they must get this issue addressed before that date (June 1st, last I heard, but I could be out of date myself on that one.)

One can't expect changes like this one to roll out with no problems at all, of course... sometimes we forget to what extent SL is operating in unknown territory (there are virtual worlds out there with more membership, but there are none with the combination of distributed assets, user-generated content, and numbers that SL can boast.)    But we can judge LL, I think, by how effectively it rises to these challenges... and how it treats its users in the process.

We have a situation here, and LL is going to need to work with the merchants to resolve it - whether by postponing the deadline to make the changeover slower and easier, or by working hard to address the problems arising and set solutions in place.  And it really, really needs to do one or other of them, I think, or it is going to have a whole host of legitimately annoyed users to deal with.  Basically, LL has an opportunity, here, to not shoot itself in the foot.  I do hope it has the wit to take it.