When are LL going to get their act together?

I flew to Zurich in Switzerland this weekend to attend a 25th Aniversary Celebration of a company that has begun a presence on SL.
The goal for my travels, was to display the potentials of SL platform to the financial community of Switzerland.
My client, who hosted the event, spent over 5,000USD on just having an equal event in SL, which was streamed live into the RL event, and the RL event streamed into SL at the same time.

In addition we setup a system with an account for male and one for female, so people at the event could try out SL for themselves. The goal was to give them an experience of the VR platform, and explore its potential for business.

You may shout bravo, applaude the whole venture, when in reality the whole SL platform is an absolute shambles. Despite have a 100mbps connection, SL lagged with just 40 ppls in the Sim, we had to relog the accounts 40+ times each in 3 hours, eachtime we were only able to give these business people from some of the most respected financial institutes in the world, a few minutes before having to intervene and relog them repeatedly, whilst the walked a few more paces whilst in a grey world, Ruthed and unable to interact or answer those that were able to say hello to them, before crashing themselves.

I cannot explain the embarrassment, as we put on a brave face, made excuses and kept trying over and over again. Some asked us if this was an experimental project that we were trying to sell them, others lost interest after a few minutes as we relogged the client yet again, and others ask what exactly is the point of the whole thing.

We triple checked the connection from many sources, including latency and ping times, every test showed it was at LL end, where ping times would soar to 10,000msec in spikes every 5-10 minutes, completely freezing the systems. Time dialtions were very unstable as our teams fought to host a fashion show and a party for those brave enough to attend. The RL stream remained flawless throughout, mainly because it has nothing to do with LL.

Just to let LL know, should they ever take time to read these posts we make here. Despite huge efforts and financial expenditure, in an attempt to do a simple thing, to include the many attributes and potentials of VR platforms to some of the Worlds largest and prestigous financial intitutes, you have suceeded in letting yourselves down yet again. 5 Years of treating this whole thing like some beta testing playground, you have failed.. and you keep on failing. I logged in the following day, same rubbish, and again today from a different connection in a different country, same rubbish.

Our next and future projects whereby we expose VR platforms to RL companies, will not be in SL, but on other grids, where their customers really matter. I am only glad it was the SL logo that continoulsly appeared on the giant wall projector screen and not our companies, as we continously tried to relog every few minutes.

The only thing which awe inspired them, and did generate any real interests, was that despite being frozen and unable to move, they could see the RL stream of the event they were at, showing with such professional clarity, as some would wave at the RL camera and rush to see themselves 15 seconds later on the VR screen. Thankfully that was under our complete control. Fortunately we had the forethought to put our clients logos and our own on the screens, on full display.

The networking that I was able to do, was based on getting these companies into the VR world, using our resources, BUT NOT with LL and SL. They had their chance and they blew it.

This is a pretty well known limit. I'd be embarrased, too.

I'm curious what testing you did beforehand, aside from checking that you had a shiny network..

It surprises me that anyone familiar with Second Life's performance would expect it to work properly, during a demonstration, or otherwise.

I also don't see why a business would want to use SL in it's current form as a communications tool. We can't even send and receive email in the viewer, and there's no forum style persistent text. and on and on and on. A Zoho account would be more useful.

I synpathise with your dissapointment, but fail to see how any regular user of SL would dare contemplate doing something so critical as this on a weekend at peak concurency. You would have been better setting up a standalone grid for this perhaps.
I'm yet to find, these "better VR platforms", perhaps you mean OpenLife, HiPi or Active Worlds?

The event was 'contemplated' after 6+ months of planning. The OP was stating that SL has been abismal in the past month or more. The weekend was just another example of the conditions LL expect us to perform in.

25 years anniversary, can't simply be moved to suit LL. Having spent some 4+ years in SL, the past month or more has to be the worst it has been in such a constant way, so sign of let up.

With regard to SL being a business platform.... you perhaps have no knowledge of the Collaborative tools (Whiteboard, Blackboard, Powerpoint simulations) available in SL, or the ability to chat via email direct to avatars logged in, and chat direct off a webpage. Then there is of course 256 bit secure media streaming that can feed from behind a firewall and maintain security, also linking ro RSS feeds, html page rendering that is interactive, secure voice and chat facilities etc etc, but perhaps that is why you have your opinion.

In future, we will be using a bespoke opensim platform that is tailored to our clients, which will give them a good and persistant experience. LL keep failing and are now in keen and more powerful arenas with companies and organisations that are providing a more customer orientated platform.

As our companies make movies, host and stream them into SL, we have a good deal of knowledge regarding loadings on the client, this includes reading the many stats available within the Client itself (Ctrl+Shift+9 is one example), from those we can ascertain what the LL network is doing, along with Sim performances and client loadings. Combine this with connection stats we have and system performances, we have seen a decline in many elements pointing to the LL end of things.

There are periods of relative stability followed by long periods of instability, as they suffer cascade failures in their network and connection systems. It is hard to determine any trend, and or consistancies as this seems to be system wide. Fix one thing, another begins to fail under the strain, leads to another etc, they are firefighting all the time, like a drowning person clinging to life.

We had a mixture of systems at the event, all suffering exactly the same, so it is not system and or platform (OS) relative, nor was it connection issues as we were constantly monitoring that. Pings and Time Dilations were hitting new heights, connections being dropped from the Sims, freezing the client meaning the only way to relog was to force the client to end abruptly. Other avatars on other sims also monitoring the situations from different countries, also reporting similar issues. With these sort of costs involved, we left little to chance for anything within our control. In the end, it is the poor performance and attitude of LL as a business, that have failed over and over. After 5 years, you would have thought they would have proper systems in place to cope with most of the issues that have plagued this platform, moreso in the recent past.
Installing new software without proper testing, debugging on the fly, patching, rolling back and then do it again, is not a correct way to perform. Any other company platform would have gone under by now.

LL do not have the luxury of being the only player on the feild now. Other companies will superseed them and make them look like a bunch of hobbists. They will only have themselves to blame. You can't believe the recent event staged by LL and IBM, tping to other grids was a publicity stunt? It goes to prove that IBM have had enough of their lack of professionalism and want to host their own grids, simply making a link from SL to maintain some sort of continuity.... for now. They may raise anchor and let SL drift in cyberspace, especially as the big corps start offering a professional service hosting and creating grids.

AWM, no idea you were involved in this. Your feedback about virtual worlds as event venues interests me.

It seems to me that, in throwing an event like this, you should be able to coordinate with an LL enterprise liason, realtime, during the event. Did either you or the customer (whose 25th anniversary this was) have membership in LL's "Enterprise Level Support" program? Would that make sense for you?

I had the impression from the OP that there was one sim involved, which went south when 40 avatars were logged into it. That wouldn't be at all unusual. But I gather from your post that visitors were spread over more than one sim? Were you using the 4-sim juncture method to spread the load of a large gathering over 4 sims of resources?

You mention a custom Opensim meeting platform ... have you looked into things like Qwaq (www.qwaq.com), which is specifically designed for meetings? Or Project Wonderland, that the education folks are putting together?
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Hi Nika
What we wanted to show at the event was SL and its potential, rather than some staged set of conditions. The SL event was held in the SL Nest building. To have 40 ppls on a sim, should not cause cascade failures. I believe it wasn't avatar quantity related, the sims are laggy with just yourself in them. It is purely the QOS from LL, or the lack of it.

Our spearhead is to develop our own set of grids, hosted on either 3rd party, or our own servers, so we can control the experience of our clients. Unlike SL which has been 'in development' for over 5 years and never really attained stability. Other grids are now leveling the playing field and attaining what has been severely missing in SL. This is what WBA Goalpost was posting about (WBA Goalpost is our group accountant , she gets frustrated when NC's won't open, dropping receipts fails, IM and group chats fail, inventory wont open, she can't login etc etc. Moreso, she tells me, when she appears ruthed lol).

There are two potential markets our there, one which I believe has been overlooked, but which we have been involved in for the past 10 years. Most assume companies want to become connected to the ilkes of SL. For a lot of companies that may work, to gain traffic. This is okay for certain products, but detrimental for companies not wishing to share their companies ethos with other genures on the same 'website'.
To expand, consider what it would be like to have a 'single webpage' serving the internet, where every website is listed. There will always be a percentage of companies, groups, organisations, individuals that would prefer to be a part of focused groups all sharing common attributes. Therefore not sharing their association/links with, what maybe considered 'undesireable'. The single webapge senerio I suggested above, maybe akin to what SL is.
Taking that further, consider a group of grids that are business genure specific and that share a common ethos, say Eco-Friendly. You could do that in SL using private islands, but the SL name and levels of customer service, still sticks.

We have created a business plan that will remove anything that is not focused on the desired genure, combined with many functions we have collated/developed, to bring users, employees, clients and associates into a focused environment, from initial contact off a client website, being able to make text and voice contact directly with a greeter, that will guide them through the orientation on a one to one basis, right up to the point of 'delivering' them to our clients doorstep.

SL no longer figures in our plans. They have had their chance over the past 5 years to mature and get the basic function of acheiving stability. To be frank, eachday is a different experience, trying to wresstle with numerous functions failing. If SL was akin to say MS Office, you would have dumped the product long ago and it would have failed. Now there is serious competition available, SL's days are numbered for a lot of business genures and applications.

Our business plan will be exposed at a convention we are involved in, at Geneva later this year, whereby we will show business the realities of what can be acheived with the platform/environment, but not under controlled conditions in SL, but under real conditions which we will provide.

I agree that, being Euro-centric, you won't get the QoS you need from SL. Even with much less demanding non-SL collab applications (low frames/second application sharing, with concurrent VoIP), I observed extraordinarily bad behavior between Germany and the east coast of the U.S., operating over VPNs on the public internet. Personally, I've never seen the horrendous quality in SL you encountered at your event, unless the sim was badly put together and simply crashed. But then, I live on the West Coast, U.S.. Many posts here in the forums have made it clear that LL has not done the requisite network engineering to get decent performance in Europe. Sounds like the guy from AOL they hired may be turning to MPLS ... should help, but really, they need European server farms and truly dedicated, non-virtual, intercontinental trunking to make it work.
Ah, I see, you wouldn't want to use Qwaq, you want to BE Qwaq! I agree that the primary aim of businesses in SL is not to sell to SL residents, but to use the platform for collaboration and meetings. In fact, the executives at SL appear to have now understood this. My idea for this was to put together "office park" grids, still linked to SL. [This is also IBM's idea, so perhaps I'm not as creative as I would like to believe!]

For office parks, I saw SL being used like a good "convention town". It would provide two things that will be a lot of work for you to duplicate on your own servers. First, easy access to inexpensive rich content and builders, both of which I could use to create custom venues. Knowing you, that is not so much a necessity for you as it would be for me

Second, SL would provide entertainment (via semi-guided tours to SL's main grid) for conference attendees or workers. So SL is like holding a RL conference in London; a conference on an isolated grid is like holding a conference in Siberia. However, to stretch the metaphor, it would be hell to hold a conference in London during a transit strike in a blizzard ... and that is what you were doing last weekend.

Best luck in your startup!

WBA, ignore the couple of unsympathetic posts here. Some folks really don't understand any aspect of doing business in Second Life, nor the responsibility of Linden Lab to its customers (especially at the prices they charge).

During the last month and unexpected updates, the performance of Second Life has degraded beyond belief. Current performance is worse than most I've experienced in my almost 4 years on this board. There is no way you could have predicted such at the outset.

I *will* agree with the posts that basing any earnest business around Second Life is a REALLY BAD IDEA. The platform is unstable, the company unreliable, there is no ULA or contractual agreement between LL and region "owners" (what a laugh that term is). Industry analysts agree Second Life is NOT a good platform for business investment.

Still, having your region crash, relogging 40 avatars repeatedly, the ever-present-and-increasing problem of failed texture resolution... these things are all on Linden Lab. When the problems show ping spikes on the part of Linden Lab, this all comes down to what we've been saying for a long time-- too many people at Linden Lab have been playing eye-candy games instead of shoring up the foundation.

So sorry to hear about your experience. I would recommend not repeating it (which I'm sure you folks have decided already). But your post here serves a purpose that the nay-sayers above seem to not clue into-- that due to stability isses (as well as company policies) Second Life is not yet a viable business platform.

It made me smile when you said about making VR grids appear like being in Siberia, as opposed to London. I'm sure if you are holding a serious business meeting or classroom education, the last thing you want to have, is some 'undesireable' flying through your window, with a flexi appendage on, asking where they can get sex.

That is the level that SL is. It is akin to holding a meeting in the middle of the busiest city. Along with continous unplanned fire drills, bomb threats, marching bands and angry drivers beeping their horns for the duration. Those interferences are akin to server rollbacks, members of the team having to relog, loosing voice, items not rezzing, sim crashes, members unable to login etc etc.... A dangerous and time wasting feature is chat lag... My point being, there are situations whereby having the facility to TP to Siberia is a good thing. Then in your lunch break, click a TP and eat your lunch in Hyde Park

It is true you can always put Siberia on a private island, which can be shut off from the 'rest of the world', but the foundations will always be founded on SL soil. You wouldn't host the whole on the internet on one companies data center would you? The very nature of the internet exists upon its strength of having multiple access nodes, one goes down, another route picks up that traffic.

True, AWM.

And, once they get the kinks out of TPing between grids, you really will be able to go to Hyde Park (or Carnival of Doom!) for lunch! Your clientele will be the perfect types for that, probably just coming and going with the clothes/attachments on their backs.
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Hear, hear. This client is awful, the loss is grinding us all to a halt. I can't even set my draw past 60m without staggering in the lag. That really is too bad that your conference was so awful. I was involved with a large company last year at this time. They had simlar problems. The fact is that almost all Fortune 500 and corporate sims are now gone. And the few companies that are still inworld are really not doing much.

Just think, 2 years ago at this time we were all so excited about the virtual future. Companies were hopping on and Secondlife was the talk of the news. One bad step from the company, and a resigned president, and now it has gotten all pretty bad.

I mean the long term residents are still around, going on 3 years myself. And I will stick around, largely because I have so much invested. But I sure do miss the corporate sim development gigs I used to get, almost non stop for a while. Not a peep for the better part of a year on that front.

Some folks questioned (and rightly so, to be truthful) why someone would plan a business venture around SL. Well, this might be a reason... I logged in today and the Flash Screen message to all of Second Life users was:

"Hold virtual meetings, show product simulations, provide employee training and more with the Second Life Grid. See: SecondLifeGrid.net"

Hmmm.... so Linden Lab is touting that their platform is stable enough for businesses to hold "product simulations", "employee training"... and "more"? To be frank, I think they're setting themselves up for a couple of lawsuits with that one. There is such a thing as foreknowledged accountability, and there is no doubt that Linden Lab (and most of its users) are aware of severe system instability. Trying to present to businesses that SL is a viable business environment-- at least at this point-- imo is (deceptive? misleading? fraudulent?). There is no way that SL is a viable platform for RL businesses... as the OP certainly shows.

The majority of online users (ie bots) seem to find SL is a very stable platform to run a business on..................................

I have just received a link to some of the RL event pictures, it will only last 2-3 days before being taken down.

You can clearly see SL on the projectors screens, and showing the RL event being shown within SL.

http://gallery.me.com/bureaudebank#100400&view=grid&bgcolor=black&sel=23

Our business plan will now go beyond SL and LL. We will be creating our own Grids that will be RL business focused. I will be giving a seiminar in Geneva this year to market and expose our business plan and portfolio.

What we did in SL was an experiment, the feedback from those business's that attended has been so positive, we will now proceed. Our portfolio will extend, not just companies intranets, but also extend the immersive experience direct from their website, by combining many available technologies.

SL is not the chosen platform for this portfolio, it requires more focused approached and greater customer appreciation. Visitors will have bespoke hand holding right up to the point of 'delivery' to the client/company they are seeking. Encapsulated regions being strickly for International inter-company collaboration.