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IMVU Back Peddles… TWICE in one week!

I don’t know about you, but it’s not very often that you see a stable company makes an announcement to change a major policy and then turns around and takes it back, but IMVU has done just that this past week… TWICE!

First of all was the hugely unpopular ‘Credit Pend’ which was supposed to go live on Monday, but never happened.  On Tuesday there was a brief announcement in the forums that the Credit Pend program had not been started and was going to undergo further testing.

Secondly, IMVU previously stated that the change regarding exact duplicate products being removed from the catalog would take effect this past week and on Tuesday they announced in the forum that it was now if effect.  Then, on Friday they posted that they had reversed the change ‘due to some issues that were discovered’.

Exactly who is running the show at IMVU?  Does anyone test these things?  The Zero Change Derivable (ZCD) policy seemed like a good one.  It would eliminate duplicate derivations in the catalog so that people who came in and simply jacked up an item’s price without changing it would not get paid for those.  However, it seemed that many other legit items were also cut.  I know for a fact that one of better known hair meshers had at least half of their catalog missing during the time the ZCD elimination was in affect.  This is probably due to the fact they used an alt to make the derivable and zero changed them under their brand name.  Totally understandable, yet a victim to IMVU’s untested change.

The credit pend system that will be in affect seems mostly geared to slowing down people who try and hack the system, take the money and run.  Although explicit items are against IMVU’s policy, it’s possible to get them into the catalog and sell them quick before they are reported, then cash out the money quickly.  With a credit pend, the cash made from ‘illegal’ items will be held and will thus be returnable when items are banned.  Without a profit, there should be less incentive to get them into the catalog.  Nevertheless, a good portion of creators are claiming that they shouldn’t be ‘punished’ for the problems of a few bad apples.  I have to agree.

In both cases, though, I have to question what is going on.  How are these decisions being made in IMVU?  It’s almost like there is one person simple toying with the controls while everyone else watches the profit margins.