[VIRTUAL/INSANITY] SL

Good morning,

just a quick note about respect during hunts.

Everyone who knows the store since a while and have seen me working knows how much respect is important to me as a designer but also as a human being.
It starts by little things like keeping a smooth customer service, having a fair pricing policy, offering a good description of the items so that you know what you are purchasing and also, as long as I decide to be active in the hunts world, giving out quality gifts.

While some stores as old as mine would only participate to a few hunts a year, I keep active every month in at least one hunt so that there is always something free to get at my store. The advantages of participating to hunts are multiple :

• You make some people happy by giving out an item they'll love and yet, you can't please everyone but, sticking to your style, you try to bring something special to them, for free or for a very cheap price.
• You also attract new people to your store, because each time, some hunters will be the same ones but there will always be new people to discover what you make and, after all, what we are looking for is to share what we create with a maximum of people.
• If you chose to take the needed time and energy to create a quality item, you'll be rewarded because people will notice that your store has great products and will eventually come back.
• You also spread your landmark around and that means again that people will eventually visit your store again and maybe find something they like in your whole collection.

Satisfaction is first in the fact to GIVE out something you created especially for the hunt, that you most likely won't resell and then, of course, if that can bring you to see your products loved by hunters, that's the cherry.

Of course, as I spend so much time at saying it since I started working on my project, [VIRTUAL/INSANITY], creating an original and quality item is something that takes time, energy and money too, sometimes.
So, if on my side, I spend all of this to bring something free for customers, I expect that they at least respect my work in return.

Let's make things clear : respect doesn't mean to love something you don't love. I have well conscience that most of the hunters will drop a good part of the items they are given away while hunting when they'll be unpacking it. And really, what would a guy make with snowflake earrings and a goth girl of a pink bra ?
You can't please everyone and taste is a personal matter.

What I mean by respect is just, as a hunter, having conscience that a designer is not a greedy scrounger just looking for traffic and linden. There probably will always be some to be that way, and most often they'll also be unable to produce original designs, so they'll be easily recognizable, but the truth is that most of us give a huge part of their real life time just to bring something great on the grid and believe me, that time, if it was given to a real job, would be way more productive in terms of money to me.

Respect is therefore to me, a way to understand what a designer is.
But it is also a way to act.

When you're rezzing an item for 0L, you can't control who will be able to pick it up or not, except with your ban list.
You can't make sure that people gave some time and energy searching, just like you gave time and energy building.

The aim, in a hunt, though, is to search for the items, just like we did it in our garden for Easter when we were kids.
The aim is to meet new people, to discover new places, to look around the store's items, and to be happy at finding the item.

So much hunters complain about the time it takes to find a hunt item and yet, I can understand because before I stopped having time to do so, I was doing it and it was hugely frustrating of looking for a gift for 2 hours and never finding it.
On the other hand, we have to also admit that it became harder and harder to get people to look for the gift and so, we have to hide it at spots where it is harder to find.

There are technically 10 ways to cheat during a hunt, so that you don't have to look for the gift yourself.
There are however more rude and disrespectful way to cheat than others.

My policy was always to say : you can't forbid someone to cheat but yet you can make it more complicated to do so by setting decoys, by changing the name of the object, by banning those who shout the location of the item in your store, ... But yet you can't be sure they will look. So if they do it silently, without ruining the fun of the ones who REALLY hunt, it's yet better.

However, during the past nearly-three-years, I've been noticing some absolutely disrespectful behaviors :

• Shouting the object location or asking out loud where the item is,
• IMing other hunters or shoppers to ask where the gift is,
• Making direct Slurls lists to the hunt objects and dropping it on a blog or on a notecard,
• Using this,
• Insulting a designer on the hunt group chat,
• Insulting what a designer created,
• Reacting violently when asked to stop.

The SLURLs list problem is not stopping since more than a year. You'll notice someone landing on your sim, then walking directly to the hunt object then poofing away. This is OBVIOUS when that happens that a SLURLs list is being spread around. No choice then that to move the hunt item around and to try to find out who created the list to ban them asap.

This is just PURE rudeness to use that kind of list.
If a hunt was meant that way, we would just rez our gifts at one central location and we would call it a freebie spot.

However, I still believe that a hunt can be funnier than that, that it can be a good way to meet people, to discover new places, to have fun and to get free stuff, all at once.
So why ruining it all ? Just to get free stuff ? And so, designers are the greedy ones ?

To finish, I'd like to share here some nice comments that we get when we ask to someone to stop using a SLURLs list, or else, he will get banned and reported to the hunt organizer. Hide your eyes if you're sensitive :
"but if you're gonna be some kinda bitchy turd then FINE ban my ass!!!"
"so you sign up for a hunt to draw traffic then bitch at the p[eople for coming into your store????"
"you stuff is all crap anyways and you are a psychotic bitch so please do me a favor aand ban me ok?"
"and your momma raised a skank ho"

Nice ! That makes you want to give freebies <3.
But I'm not going to punish 1000 good hunters for 1 or 2 sick ones, so feel reassured, I'll keep on handling stuff like these... I wish I wouldn't have to.

Please report to me any SLURLs list showing the direct links to a hunt item, report me any IM someone sends you at my store asking for a hunt object location, any lack of respect.

Thanks for helping us keeping hunts nice...