Ten Points in Favor of Abandoning Second Life

just to add my name to this post. i got only 4 month of SL, i know is nothing but i already got all this problems.

I don't understand. People shop and communicate in-person and online in RL. Why not in SL?

I may be missing your point, but why would people browse slexchange if not to buy items *for* SL? And why would players buy SL items if they don't plan to log in?

So sorry to hear about all these horrible issues you have been having Schwan! You have some very valid complaints and concerns and you presented them in a very straight forward way. While I would not blame you for wanting to leave, I of course have to add my hope that you find some way to stay. You are a big part of SL and losing you *would* hurt the community. I know you have to do what is right for you though, and it is selfish in a way to make you feel guilty if you need to leave. My hope and best wishes are with you no matter what! *HUGS*

Clearly there are many, many problems interfering with your SL experience. We're trying to knock them off, one at a time.

A couple things Schwanson mentioned that I want to put to rest --

First the teen grid won't be opened until we're completely confident that it will have no impact on the main service -- in development, hardware resources, and staff.

The education program is limited to 3 classes per semester, of 25 students each. The professors are required to sign an ethics agreement (more on that separately) with respect to any research plans they have, and also to clear their plan with the ethics committee at their university. Most of these classes are only in SL for a few weeks; occasionally one stays for a full semester. I don't think the education program will negatively impact SL, but if you have more questions, please let me know.

Schwanson, I hope you don't decide to leave. You've made a significant, on-going contribution and we would miss you very much. We are very committed to making SL the experience that you desire. It is clearly what we want as well.

Schwanson leave? No. I won't allow it. Period.

My humble opinion is that Linden Labs is being run by marketing folks instead of technical folks and there lies the problem.

In 20 years of working IT, I have seen it over and over again. Sales and Marketing departments offer vaporware and make promises to customers without consulting IT folks on the feasability and practicality of what they are offering.

Marketing and Sales get the awards and publicity for their "vision" while the technical staff gets hammered by both the customers and management for not being able to produce something they never stated they could produce.

I could tell you of many professional experiences where the marketing folks basically pushed developers into putting out complex products with tons of unnecessary bells and whistles at the price of stability, instead of a simpler but solid product.

Then, after the initial product was out, pushed for yet more flashy stuff as opposed to working out the existing problems. Sounds familiar? Well, this actually happened at a well known financial institution when launching their on-line banking product. Five years later, they have yet to learn their lesson. Of course, many of their customers went bye-bye.

SL is a great product with much potential, but the rush to make it "the future of Internet" is going to destroy it. Without a solid and stable foundation to build on, this house of cards may come tumbling down.

- T -

I always feared this sort of glitch. I knew eventualy, there would be a data problem and inventory would be lost. I do allot of database work, that includes some SQL, and I know know that this sort of thing was inevetable.

What I did was create a "Safety Deposit Box". I have two object in world, out of the way, that contain every item in my inventory that I find of importance. The chance of losing both those items and my inventory is very unlikely.

I would love to see the data warehouse of LindenLabs and know exactly what they have behind the scenes. In my opinion, the only product that I would have faith in to handle all this data is Essbase by Hyperion as the back bone. That is just my opinion though.



Are you serious? Marketing folks? SecondLife is barely marketed at all. WHat would make you think that marketing people run it?

One thing to consider is that while SL had it's beta period, it never had a proper 'stress test' for the system. Until recently there just wasn't enough of a population to do so. Now, with the large influx of people, the weaknesses and bugs in the system are becoming more apparent. Couple this with the fact that a lot of what LL is doing here just hasn't been done before with MMOGs, AND the system is only about 2 years old, LL has real done a pretty darn good job. I have seen much, much worse out there on the net. Lineage 2 comes to mind.

you may be too practical to realize that people generally shop for fun and buy loads of stuff that they never use. i shop on the web to purchase things i can't find locally, and locally for things i want to be able to see before i pay for them.

my point is simply that people, including ll, are using tools other than the second life interface to do things that are just as easily done inworld. i take that as an indication that people would rather revert to web use than bother with sl. i won't argue that they shouldn't do that. people will use the tools that meet their needs and form communities around them.

Wow. What I find interesting is, if I didn't know better I'd swear I was in "There". many of the examples and problems happening here, is what happened in "There" & that community almost went under.

All they need to do at LL is look at "There" & they might be surprised to see that they are making the same mistakes. Because this whole thread reminds me of a year ago in the "There" forums.

Actually, I have to apologize for the tone of my last post, it was late and I had a bad day.

I really would like to know what is being done with the 8 M though.

That question will not go away in my mind.

I'll buy your land for cheap Schwanson!

Well if Robin is true to her word then I wouldn't expect the teen grid to open until 2006

But there are a couple of points I want to make. I can't play SL at the moment anyway, too busy in RL, but some things are sticking out like a sore thumb over this latest major issue:

1. Work did not start on sorting this problem after Cory had posted that they knew there was a problem for many many hours. That's not a good sign. Sure it's the holiday season but I would expect any company that's future is based on the provision of a service for which it has to maintain the hardware to certainly action something quicker than the 12 or so hours from the announcement to taking the grid down. That doesn't show that they're particularly bothered about service up time at all in my opinion.

2. Philip Linden has to, without question, stop right now, this very moment, trying to say that SecondLife is scaleable. It is quite clearly not as the architecture has a design flaw that leads to a single point of failure that just happens to fail or be a problem with amazing regularity. Something is not correct here in this system when a single hard drive failure can bring it down in this way. The vast bulk of problems over the last 6 months have been caused simply because the system has not scaled well. So Philip, please be honest.

Schwanson, I'll be more than happy to replace any items of mine that you bought and lost. Hang in there!

Such as:

1. Setting land tiers for billing. That's a simple, form-based procedure. If LL would create a proper Client-API, they could imbed every part of the website into their client -- pretty much like There did.

2. Partnering with fellow players. I find it rediculous that I had to go out to the web to partner with Kerovia. If SL is a "second life", there should have been an in-world proposal system.

3. Listing new events should be done in-world as well. There's no reason this has to be done from the web, save for a lack of API.

Second Life is a useless, non-extensible toy. Second Life employees (and advocates) revert to the web because it is useful, extensible, and something more than a mere toy. Ten years ago, the web could have been viewed as a toy by cynics; the difference between the web and Second Life is that the web didn't rely on one company, one grid, and one vision to drive it along.

400 bux a month are you guys serious? thats a fricken car payment!!!!!!

Yes Joseph - there are some serious capital investments in Second Life - and for many of us it's not just a game.




I see the Grid is down again...

It did more than twenty years ago, when the web was ARPANET, owned, operated, used, and envisioned by R&D sector of the U.S. defense industry. Sorry.

Which means that for all useful intents and purposes Second Life is still in beta, if it is in fact the third iteration of the web. And will be for a long time to come. The difference is that ARPANET had a clear purpose and was supported by an organization that had relatively unlimited resources and would not fold if the experiment didn't work.

Holy Woah!

After first checkin my bank account history, came back to say thanks for this huge heads-up. Totally scarey stuff. I'm not 'into' SL anywhere near as deeply as many & have recently scaled back even more.

BUT STILL, at what I pay right now, I have never paid near as much per month for any of the other online games I've played & have held premie/multiple accounts in almost all of them. SL is way too expensive and a buggier game than most betas I've participated in!

It was somewhat reassuring to find that the teen grid is not up yet.. for some reason, I thought it was. So, I'm slightly less unhappy. LOL

You are a far bigger 'man' than I, sheepguy... LL is very fortunate to have someone as bold, patient & tolerant as you have been! I hope they seriously realize this fact & compensate you accordingly!

WE recently bought half a sim and I must say I feel for you guys who own Islands and such because we are only now finding out just how little support there really is in Second Life

Example - yesterday the club on our land, along with several others in the game, we're bombed by a guy.Multiple abuse reports were filed & yet today I receive a phone call at home to log into game because the same guy(using a newly created char') has just done the exact same thing.

We report REALLY poor FPS and lag time and time again - nothing gets done.
We report vanishing objects time and time again - nothing gets done.
We report bombers/griefers time and time again - nothing gets done.

Talking to one Linden is much like talking to another, they all spin the same lines and while I have to say that almost all of them are polite & understanding very very few of them ever give any actual help.

It's getting old - FAST. We LOVED the concept of Second Life but I have to say that the actual excecution is really really pi$$ poor.There are SO many script kiddies running around this world that its NEVER going to run right unless LL begin to take a firm stance and actually DO something about some of the soul destroying CRAP many players dump around the place.

You people who have been here a year or so and have spent hours and hours on this have my sympathy as never before because YOU made Second Life - not LL - and sadly LL and doing zip to back you up.Robin Linden says in this post ''First the teen grid won't be opened until we're completely confident that it will have no impact on the main service -- in development, hardware resources, and staff'' but isnt he missing the point? WHY are they even THINKING about a teen grid when the so called adult one does not work?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ - thats why - and ANYONE who thinks that Second Life is about anything other than making money for LL should think again.

Schwanson, we've never met but I totally understand your frustrations and hope that this thread will enlighten a few Lindens ... probably not.

What frustrates me the most at this particular time, is their lack of communication. The log in problems still persist in spite of the fact that the server status says "Second Life is open."

In addtion, the last communication from a Linden as to the current status of the problems/fixes was 02:20 AM EST "SL downtime Friday morning ". No other updates have been posted. Couldn't they at least let us know that the system is in fact not working and an estimated time of completion for the fix.

And thank you for the heads up on the billing; I am going to check my billing carefully on the days that we are billed so I can be sure I don't go bankrupt lol.

I hope that the New Year brings changes and that you aren't forced to leave SL out of sheer frustration. This game probably started as a huge wonderful dream, turned into visions of huge profits, and is now becomming a huge headache to the Lindens (and it's customer base).

I for one am not a glutton for punishment, and can find better ways to spend my money if these problems persist or worsen.

Indeed we should all be credited for the downtime, but we all know that isn't going to happen. I'm sure the UA has something about them not being responsible for technical difficulties and the persuing downtime caused by same.

I don't usually participate in the forums because I am too busy dancing and changing clothes and selling my paintings PLUS participating in dramas.

However, I don't think that it is easy to run an MMOVR (I do not consider this a game). I felt the same about There.com, and Uru Live, well ... you think SECOND LIFE has problems?

This is only the beginning of this sort of reality, and I think we have to take that into consideration. It may not be BETA, but the ppl who designed and are running this VR are running into problems no one could have predicted.

I have been working with computers for the past 25 years, and I have seen a lot of things, including how environments change drastically when EVEN AS AN END USER I added a component in line with other components. Imagine trying to keep multiple servers happy and having ppl who routinely do not even EMPTY THEIR TRASH!!!!!

Just to say, it is pretty darn good in SL. If you did not love it, you would not be complaining so bitterly now.

while I wrote my little love letter about SL, it CAME UP!!!
YESSSS

/me throws brick at Enjah

yes it does; but they have actually paid us a L$ recompense for being logged in the day of a preview-related rollback assuming that we may have lost hours of work. they've also paid occassional little L$ bonuses to people who've participated in the previews.

so it's possible they might be credited in L$. we'll just have to cash them if we want real money.