This was ment as a reply to a thread made when the grid came down, but since its back up now I thought I would post it in its own thread, to see what sorts of thoughts it brings.
Really, any MMO has to have downtime for fixes, patches and updates.. From the old days of Ultima Online, onward through EQ and WoW. Its just the nature of persistant online worlds.. Some might say that LL takes thiers down for too long, but ya know what.. Look at the nature of thier world, of SL. Its more dynamic, more user-involved and allows players more freedom than anything Ive yet to see.
This simple fact alone means that your going to have 5000+ people at any given time doing things in the world, often times those things might be something that LL never concidered a person would try to do, or could be done through some code loophole. Because of this, and because of how SL is, people are going to be finding more bugs, exploits, and glitches than in any other MMO program existing today, and to maintain the world as it is right now, its going to take longer to fix them.
Add into that the fact that SL, being entirely user-created holds in and of itsself almost all of its data on thier server side, and LL ends up having to be very, very carefull in thier updates. Otherwise things will end up getting broken, moved, disappearing and lord knows whatever else because people demanded a hasty patch.
The only reason that makes me argue against the downtime would be from the perspective of people like Anshe Chung and others who's SL business life actually suppliments a portion of thier RL income. For those people, SL downtime is lost money.. and thats something they have some right to complain about, though some understanding of the above points would still have to be concidered.
For the others, the casual players and anyone less than 1mil Linden in thier account right now, I really think a little paitence is in order. LL has given you SL for free.. Ive been playing almost a year and never put a red cent into it, and loved every second. If it has to come down for a few hours now and then to make sure some griefer or some exploitive sort doesnt ruin the whole thing.. so be it.