The virtual world entrepreneur husband and wife team who work under the name Anshe Chung have found themselves at the center of a major controversy, reports 3pointD. According to a written statement, they mistook a bug in IMVU's system for a feature and began to lower prices on 1500 of their items.
Things got quite a bit more complicated from there. The IMVU system allows people to create derivative products, and many were creating products based on these items whose prices were lowering. The derived products, however, weren't automatically lowering in price accordingly. As a result, competitors would create copy-cat derivative products at a fraction of the cost while the original derivative products were still locked at the higher prices.
Restoring the original prices has proven more complicated than one might think:
We don't have a list with the original prices and have to browse the developer reports to find prices of previous sales. Lowering prices of 1500 products already took us 20 hours, with the slow page loads that we currently suffer from China. Finding out the original prices one by one and raising prices again will take a multiple of that. We have 2 people doing that full time now, who will need several more days to get this done.
This is a good example of how nuanced commerce in virtual worlds can be. If pros like Anshe Chung can be caught out this badly on the details, it might pay for the rest of us to re-read everything before making a move.
[CORRECTION: Shortly after this article appeared Anshe Chung contacted Metaversed - "Just to clear up confusion: Anshe Chung is just only my avatar / pseudonym, not shared with my husband. However, Guni co-founded the company Anshe Chung Studios, Ltd., China with me. Guni's own avatar is Guni Greenstein."]
Anshe Chung hasn't gotten as far as she has in the virtual world by not understanding what she's doing. She knew exactly what she did. She has never shown she cares anything about the community at IMVU, only about the bottom line. She set out to screw over the other developers, and is still trying to by not resetting her prices correctly. Her "apology" was cold, mechanical, and totally unbelievable.
"This is a good example of how nuanced commerce in virtual worlds can be. If pros like Anshe Chung can be caught out this badly on the details"
BULL!!! It says right there, when you create a product, "Check to allow derivation from this product. Once someone derives from this product you will not be able to set it back to underivable and the price will be locked." In Plain Letters. Not so hard to understand is it? Anshe Chung blatantly took advantage of a bug.
ACS is a multi-million dollar company. 16 staff work on IMVU alone. 30 total for various 3d chat programs. 17 eyes and they didn't see the "Check to allow derivation from this product. Once someone derives from this product you will not be able to set it back to underivable and the price will be locked." on 1500 products? They either all need lasik surgery or just a bunch of complete and utter buffoons. She and they knew it and still did it.
Many ToS violations, spin doctoring and insincerity has made the developers of imvu highly upset. Remember, she was banned from second life for a period of time. :D
Sorry, I don't believe ACS on anything they spout off. She does this stuff when staff goes home. So, from Friday night to Monday morning this is going on.
This is NOT the first controversy she has caused at IMVU. Her pro status has been suspended and the enitre community is tired fo tactics like this. She knws exactly what she is doing. She is trying to crash the economy at IMVU so she can implement the global multiverse economy that she wants to be queen of. The users at iMVU have spoken. They don't want her there anymore. They do JUST FINE WITHOUT HER and her underhanded business tactics.She exploi\ted the bug AFTER it was brought up in the forums about the price not locking. The pages CLEARLY STATE that you cannot change theprice once it has been set. SHE HAS SAID HERSELF that she didn't think you could RAISE the price, but that you could certainly LOWER it.
________________________________________________________________
"http://www.imvu.com/catalog/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpbb2&file=viewtopic.php&p=2377091&highlight=#2377091It is against rules to raise the price after some product has been derived. This is very necessary to prevent abuse.
There is nothing wrong with lowering the price, as long as it remains lowered. IMVU has done this, people do it all the time. Imagine, I would have lowered all other products, but leave the derived products at old price and the people who derived them stuck at higher price level?
I think what IMVU should do is two thing:
1. Make it impossible to raise price after product has been derived from
2. Make it possible to lower price and make it so that the system automatically lowers prices of all derived products
Please don't let the haters confuse you. Everybody who derived from my catalog benefit big time from this!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SO FAR, NO ONE HAS BENEFITED AT ALL, THEY HAVE ALL TAKE A MASSIVE LOSS!
Here are some gems from her team
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"http://www.imvu.com/catalog/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpbb2&file=viewtopic.php&p=2385897&highlight=#2385897
J4SM1N3 wrote:
malohroquii wrote:
Anshe, If you pay for all my submission fees, I'll resubmit my products at the lower price. Exclamation
agreed...
but still.. the TOS says you can't submit the same object more than once.. so this whole thing will probably not work.
(ANSHE REPLY)We will hide the old version, so there will only be one copy in the catalog."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For someone who taught english, how does she NOT UNDERSTAND THAT YOU CANNOT UPLOAD THE SAME MESH AGAIN? CLearly stated, yet done anyway.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROLF She knew what she did, if she is that smart to being pro that fast, she knew that doing that could be a big mistake, that was stupid, she wasted her Anshe name, that was so popular. i know many people out there will continue to get to her cuz not many people read the forum or read news, but the ones that know are all very sad about the fact the anshe did that i must say, she did a lot of mistake, why make another when people give her another chance? that sound so stupid!
So how come this story has only just been discovered?
And you're all posting anonymously... hmmm... makes me wonder if you're all the same person...
I, for one, have no clue what you mean. I don't know how you got the idea that we are all one person. Have you even CHECKED OUT the forum links i have posted? let me make it easier for you to SEE them!
http://tinyurl.com/2neyoa
http://tinyurl.com/36cmhe
Great, thanks.
Welcome to Metaversed. You'll note that this a friendly place. Thanks for keeping it that way.
I know this thread is older, but I just have to add a comment to it. The idea over on Second Life right now in controversy, is that Anshe wants to "help" the Second Life economy by lowering prices down to ridiculous levels with her "staff" making the items and selling them for next to nothing. It is said that she thinks it worked well over on IMVU and will be good for the SL economy.
Needless to say the controversy has stirred quite the heated protests over there.
http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=22452...
I have been reading the Second Life forum on this topic tonight, and one link lead me here. I am a Second Life resident, designer/creator and business woman/owner of nearly 3 years.
Since I have only just found this thread, I had no idea Anshe was an IMVUer as well as a Second Lifer. Seems like she wants a monopoly on everything virtual, not just land. Tsk tsk. And I used to think she was a clever girl. Seems so sweet in RL, butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. Greedy and conniving is more appropriate I think. I once looked up to Anshe, as I am sure did many others, a smart business woman with a growing company, she oozed success. I now feel ashamed to even rent ACS land, as I'm contributing to the hold she has over SL. Can't say I'll be doing that much longer.
Let's just hope the good people of SL are smarter than she thinks they are, and look for unique quality before they resort to purchasing cheap mass production knock-offs from ACS.
I'm sorry, but I am looking at this from a consumers point of view, and the only problem I see is that no one else has that low of prices. As consumers and customers, we are always on the look out for the best bargain, the cheapest version of a cute shirt, for instance. What Anshe is doing is letting the poor IMVUers posess something other than IMVUs stupid noob outfits. I see everyone hating on her, but what are you guys going to do about it? maybe everyone else should lower their prices as well and make it more competitive again, hmm?