Ten Points in Favor of Abandoning Second Life

69? Forty-two times in a row? Whoa

High 5's bro! More big stuff yet to come!

While I believe that you believe this I don't.

What I see is that Philip is a vision guy, bug fixing does not fit in a vision.

Cory is just in over his head. That a single disk drive failure can bring down something as large as SL is sufficient evidence that Cory is past his level of competency. It is time to replace him--but I doubt this will happen so we will just have to learn to live with an ever more buggy/laggy SL.

With the current trend of SL the only real hope is a for a new company to create SL2, one that understand scaling and customer satisfaction.

And I never said ARPANET, Internet, or TCP/IP. I said Web, and meant Web. If not for the toy web that got people excited about the Internet; if not for open protocols and languages like HTTP and HTML; and if not for "third party developers" like Mosaic/Netscape and Microsoft... The Internet would still be that thing hackers dialed-up to when they wanted to launch missiles.

The reason I said Web, and not Internet, is because the Internet existed long before the Web and it never got enough publicity to draw people to it. You didn't see hundreds of ISP's cropping up until the Web came into being. Even though AOL, Compuserve, The Well, and such existed long before the Web, they were novelties reserved for geeks with deep pockets. They were glorfied, centralized bulletin board systems...

Just like Second Life.

I don't mean to sound pissy, but no one seems to grasp what I've seen and read for the last year... Big technologies never succeed, smaller ones do. Why do PC's come with Windows and not OS/2 or OS/400? Because MS-DOS was small and distributed everywhere during the PC boom? Why do more developers use C than they do LISP? Because from the get-go, C was a small, distributed language that was on every UNIX machine; LISP was a specizalized, idealized über-language that got lost when dumpy ol' UNIX began popping up on every production-grade server.

Everyone keeps saying things like, you did, "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." Or they say things like, "MySQL is too small for Second Life, it needs something bigger." While these two statements look completely disparate, they both indicative of the mindset that Second Life needs to get bigger so it can get better.

I think just the opposite, Second Life needs to get smaller so it can better so it can get bigger. The web beat out things like MSN and AOL because it got smaller, it allowed people to setup their own, miniature BBS systems called homepages. Yahoo!IM beat out Yahoo!Chats because they allowed people to build small chatrooms, between two people, and then Yahoo! was smart enough to expand on that.

But then I've said this all before, and no one cares... So, I'm going to go play City of Heroes and write erotica for Usenet... Last I heard, they were still working.

Yup.... LL needs to drop me an email and I'll help them remake SL into SL2. Less Rainbows and more L$... News Reports about players quiting their RL jobs and earning a living playing video games. Philip needs to fire everybody and call India about Offshoring Opportunities. That'll help cut back on overhead.

SL2's new business model should be about selling "Greed". Everybody comes looking for Gold and your selling Axes, Shovels, Water, Hotels, etc.... Think outside of the box.

So when does your alternative to SL start alpha stage?

My conscience is making my dirty mind bite its tongue right now!

Such as...when I was outside of the club last night, trying unsuccessfully to enter Schwan's party, the sim FPS never hit 5; and for a few moments was actually at zero. That's sim FPS, not user. And this after taking three hours and an upgrade to log in. And that makes two years in a row I've been unable to attend the New Year's eve party I was invited to, due to lag.

So, when turning off pretty much all rendering still didn't allow my Av to move, i gave up and went to visit the Beta Tester monument in Plum. And being the only person in Plum, my FPS was 22. Way to load balance! Way to scale!!

Such as...when I went to put up my Christmas decorations last week, none of my lights could be removed from Inventory, because they were 'not found in the database.' Yes, servers do crash. Hence, the concept of offsite backup.

Such as...prim drift, land drift, broken vehicle scripts, lousy physics implementation, broken lighting, broken prim linking... And some of these problems go all the way back to Beta.

I will say though, that the bugs we had in Beta were pretty massive in scope and volume. And I was quite impressed with the astounding, literally overnight, improvement in 1.0 vs 0.9. It's unrealistic to think that 1500 Beta Testers and a handful of developers, in a world which was minuscule and utterly simplistic compared to the current version, could have caught and killed all bugs which would ever appear in all future releases.

But, yes, as i've always said, this is just not good enough. And it keeps getting worse. Which is why my involvement in SL has dropped from eight hours a day in 1.0 to eight hours a month in 1.5.

Oh everyone quit your fucking bitching. My Touring Balloon is a lead brick, my feature requests go unanswered, I've lost major builds to sever bugs with no help from the Lindens. I spend as much as many people in SL, and I'm not getting personal responses from LL. Does high-profile bitching make results happen.

I'm sorry, I've just had it with all the bitching. LL is working on things, and catering to all of the bitches. Well, if bitching is what it takes around here to get things moving along, so be it.

I agree with you he has been very patient.
I wont pay more than I am right now to play but to each their own. I also think it will take a year to get the teen grid working right before it can work without many bugs.
The Lindens from what I have seen have always tried to make things work right and I am sure it will be better soon.

Very well said Jauani. You summed up my view of SL prefectly. For me, I expect there to be bumps in the road. I still think of SL and its community as pioneers. We as a community, and LL as a developer, are making this all up as we go along... not out of ineptitude but out of necessity. If I had experienced the same string of awful luck that Schwan has I might be rethinking my willingness to be a pioneer, but I haven't... and I'm not. I firmly believe that no one wants SL to succeed, be stable, and provide a solid platform for building an amazing world, more than LL does. It's unfortunate and frustrating that things have been bumpy as of late but I still have a lot of faith in LL and their intentions and good faith. If there was a comparable MMO on the market my loyalty would be more fickle, but as it is, this is the world that suits me best... warts and all.

In no way do I want to diminish the problems being discussed here but I do want to clarify that the nastier multiple billing problem that Schwanson and Jauani experienced happened only to the four residents who won $US land auctions on a particular day --and we believe that we have fixed it. Linden recognizes the severe negative impact of billing mistakes but it’s important to clarify that this one was limited.

ll and sl are a new venture or adventure (which ever is your personal opinion lol)
I would like to offer up something I read recently that kind of puts things in perspective for me. I hope it does the same for others.

"I guess we still have some bugs to work out"
-Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, when his computer crashed during a demonstration of the new Windows 98.

Good luck in the new year ll.

SL is what happens when content is made by amateurs, not by professional video game developers with experience developing sweet graphics and action and playability while maintaining control of how everything acts and are able to work around for just about any bug.

It's incredible to see what these amateurs have made, and it's further incredible that Linden Lab is able to not just work around bugs, but fix them due to necessity.

SL is more like an operating system than it is a game, because it is a platform that supports other applications. Considering the enormous staff it takes to make other operating systems...

... cut LL some slack, yo.

Tee hee, Schwanson pulled a Catherine Cotton

Phew! I was hoping you'd come to that conclusion, Schwan.


At the same time, I'm glad to see the Lindens are reading this thread because several of the people I respect the most in SL---ones who bring a tremendous amount to the community--feel you have spoken for them as well. People that have a lot at stake, financially and in terms of personal time investments, are frustrated. People I never thought would leave are talking about leaving.

I'd hate for that to happen. We'd all lose if Schwanson, Crowcatcher, Pete, Eltee or other people with their talent, intellect and energy leave SL.

Ugh.

OMG Eggy no he didnt ...did he??

Schwan I knew it I knew it you you you....I will IM YOU IN WORLD>>HMMMPFFFt

Shadow

Schwanson is Catherine? omg

For quite a while I built some of the larger game systems in SL. The continuous, ongoing problems with scripting, porting, content management, lag, inventory, and so forth, got me caught up with constantly rebuilding the systems I was working on to keep up with the latest bug or unnannounced change du jour that i got fed up and said to hell with it, I'll wait until it actually works.

I have a game nearly finished that I think would be something quite remarkable in Second Life; a couple more weeks of work would do the trick. A few in the world have seen it and they just keep wanting to know when it will be finished and available. I keep checking back into SL to find out whether or not they have fixed the variety of problems that plagues SL (and my efforts), and time and again I am disappointed. Probably the two biggest problems are the lack of 100 percent reliability of llListen, and the painful slowness of link messages. The latter I've been working around by going black box component vs. central engine, but the former there isn't anything I can do about.

Having Andrew or Cory come into the forums and say "mea culpa" doesn't do it. In spite of the fact that I have been treated poorly by some LL staff and favorites in the past (which has lead to a lot of my general attitude about LL), I greatly admire their capability as technologists and LL's vision, but I can not say the same for the status of this product.

Funny how people say, "so what exactly do you want".

- I want the product to work, as advertised.
- I want the things that are supposed to be implemented, implemented.

That's it.

Then I hear of this Teen Grid. For crying out loud. Now we have TWO grids that don't really work, and the LL resources are stretched more thinly than ever. If you think fixes are slow now...well, I have a feeling you ain't seen nothing yet. No, instead we get the ability to make your avatar dance and do karate forms while your inventory disappears, you can't port from A to B, and your current structures are torn apart by land/prim bugs (fyi requests for assistance to fix what these patch bugs destroyed were met with ZERO response. ZERO. Not even an apology...but hey after a while even a saint must get sick of apologizing).

I hang in there, and continue to pay, and continue to hope that this product will finally, finally meet the advertised statements. But I am really starting to feel like I'm just pissing away money to continue observing this with some kind of macabre fascination.

I recently had a conversations over a holiday dinner with a lawyer friend of mine, who has never played a MMORG of any kind. These conversations centered around the fact that companies like SoE, LL, Funcom, etc., advertised high end services with great promises of cutting edge this and that capability, yada yada. The delivered products fall DRASTICALLY short of the marketing, are broken in a variety of ways, don't have features they promised. But the EULA sets them free because it states that the product doesn't actually ahve to work.

Think about that. So basically, a company can tell you anything they want, make all kinds of promises, but they are null and void because of a paragraph in a EULA. The attitude of players is generally forgiving. WHY? WHY is the obligation of delivering a high quality working online product that lives up to the advertised statements different than in anything else?

The conversation turned to consumer advocacy. What benchmarks are in place to ensure that customers are getting what is promised? Who is watching this? And what refunds are you entitled to if the product takes a left turn into near unusability, as SL, and EQ2, and many others, have?

None. You are entitled to nothing. NOT even a CR letter. The common response "vote with your feet" is the answer. So essentially, these companies are uniquely free to fail to deliver, and keep your money. LL is a tad less guilty than the "big boys" since they don't sell you the initial software, but overall it's the same problem.

It was interesting enough that we are considering writing an article on it. What they say, what you get, how they get away with it, why does this model persists, why are their customers so frequently willing to "cut them some slack", even to the point of blind defense.

Fact is, to a degree, we all been had, yet we all are willing to just complain on forums and otherwise ignore it. LL, or SoE, or any of the rest of them, will never offically respond, as it would open a can of worms they are not prepared to round up. The only such attempts I have seen are from the creators of Horizons, who explicitly state how they are using their resources to fix problems, what their schedules are, and so on. But...even though the delivered a completely broken toy after what, seven years of development, you still couldn't get your money back.

Do I believe LL has the capability to make this thing work? In the past I would have said, "absolutely". Now, I have to wonder...do they? I've been registered for two years and the fact is, from the end user's perspective, the game seems as troubled now as ever. Can I be called a pessimist for my doubts that they will actually ever get this thing out of perpetual beta?

I mean c'mon people. "Bumps in the road". "Cut them some slack". The product has been "finished" for almost two years. If your car didn't work, or your web provider didn't display your web pages consistently, for almost TWO years, would you be saying, "oh that's ok give 'em a break and keep paying". I sincerely doubt it.

I felt the need to highlight this statement, its worth a re-read.


fen-

Bows humbly to Tcoz, well said old friend and creator of my infamous gloves..

Shadow

I have known you since before Beta when you were a noobie chasing all the skirts you could find. I remember when you had land beside cua and Drift; I remember well how you would drive them and me crazy at times with your "land baron" attitude.

I also remember the love you found with the SL software, how you marveled at the creations, laughed at the obnoxious and mature material; and I also remember that you had time for each and every n00b that came along, you would give them money, a freebie, and simply laugh along with them.

It all changed when high amounts of money for the precious and lag-free land started. It wasn't funny any longer when the asset server would be down, when the latest update created 10 times more bugs than the fixes that were supposed to be implemented.

It started being more serious when individual ownership of creations were placed squarely on the end-users via the DCMA because "SL is only a hosting company for those creations," but when asked for monetary refunds with the previous downtime by sim owners, sim owners were told... "We're not a hosting company."

The problems seem to be escalating instead of the promised "nose to the grindstone" fixes from Phillip's towne hall a few months ago.

When something you love becomes frustrating, when something you enjoy makes you angry, when you start to feel the pain of the scripters, the creators, the land-owners because of all the serious problems and their loss of control; when you simply tire of negativity associated with your SL experience -- you simply back away for awhile. You leave the land, the forums, and your friends until you can sit back and realize that this is a "game" that is being developed, it's still beta-based software; and only those with truly thick skins can remain during this time.

Take some time off for awhile, sit back, relax, tier down (or let someone hold your sim for you) -- try something different -- and don't let all the negativity sour in your mouth whenever you say "SL."

You love SL. We all know that. Don't walk away -- just breathe something positive for a change. Remove the negativity from your SL life for awhile. Then come back when SL is ready for you -- and you are ready for SL once again.

While I also believe that breaks are good, but what if you took a break last Monday and came back last Friday?


fen-

It's the "Zen" in me -- if it's still negative, if the feelings are of negativity -- stay away until the calmness, fun and positive experiences return.

SL will still be there -- you would have just side-stepped pulling out every last inch of your hair.