Too too too slow

thanks for this perspective. I'm pretty new here, and I've noticed that the extreme newbies like me and the old hands are, for the most part, not the ones who are most upset. It's the middle tier, who joined a coupla months ago that are really angry.

The old hands have seen this before, and the extreme newbies haven't seen anthing before, including a stable system. So those people who signed up in the middle tier, who have experienced a stable system but haven't had to experience a traumatic update are the most (understandably) upset.

The old hands do not complain, because they know it to be useless??

Which can mean: they think these things will get fixed in time regardless of complaint and are just sitting tight or they are utterly disillusioned with SL and have been for some time. The latter seeming highly unlikely because they are, of course, still here.

Hmm well with being a Lifetime Member sice 2003 and paying the 2 sim tier I am hardly fresh off the boat with the bananas!

And yes this is NOT the first time I see regrettable lack in response or feedbac to the paying customer from LL and so yes as someones says I have seen this all before, I said that in the start of this thread. I think that's precisely WHY I am so anoyed. I am annoyed that so MANY times a new version update happens a mess happens. Every time a mess happens, it seems that (presumably) everyone ot LL should or will be working overtime to fix it, cos surely they don't want hundreds of dismayed players. That's what you would think.

BUT every time, we get few messages, no thread LL responses, not much keeping up to date, no visible sign of any urgency. They have liaisons and advisers galore and Lindens who seem to pick only the cherries of posts they want to reply to.. It seems almost anything that you post here in Technical no matter HOW bad the service gets will never get LL response. Many I see have gone to Hotline to LInden straght away instead of proper use of that forum and posted their immediate technical anger or problem. Some of them get a Linden answer but usually from some unimportant Linden who's just been told to cut and paste the same ' sorry we hope to have it working ok soon, thank for ur post' type stuff and who has no power to get anything done anyways.

I play MANY MMORPG persistent visrtual games. They all patch regularly. Neocron and Project Entropia update often. There are bugs sure, mini patches sure, odd effects sure.. but the game stop working?.. NO! I have NEVER known a situation in ANY other online world wher it just won't work after updates, and you just cannot do ANYTHING, you cannot do the BASIC purpose of the world in seeing it, moving around and performing actions.
YET this seems to happen in SL often, after many updates. This is the ONLY game/world where I am investing near $400 a month to use the world. This is the ONLY game where problems happen on a VAST scale and we hear NOTHING from the developer.

IF EVERY linden resource is being used to make second life WORK again, I want to HEAR about that. I want to HEAR a message, get an email from support, see some evidence in the forums here. Where is the man who OWNS and RUNS LL during this.. where is the post from Philip Linden telling us this WILL BE FIXED, understanding that the very people who keep the operation funded cannot in fact many of them even USE the service at all? Is he too busy trying on another silly costume for the next PR exercise? It will be no use adding many many new people thru shiny website announcement of how great 1,7 is which is complete misrepresenting, when the BASIC world don't WORK! Why do they keep producing these disastrous Version Updates after months of useless preview and have no contingency for when they don't work.

THAT's why I (as an 'old hand' ) am ANNOYED yes, I am. and I don't want to just sit there and say nothing even though i DO KNOW from experience that it will only get done after a long time, the Lindens will seem to carry on as if nothing is wrong, I won't get an LL message and eventually it will all be forgotten until the farce of the next update. AND I will still carry on paying for a process that always seems badly thought out because like so many others I am hooked on the concept, and want the world to succeed.


Customer contact and Technical stablity are the two fundamental criticisms I have as an experienced Virtual citizen about the LL world and organisation

Smart PR meetings, flashy promotions, matter NOTHING if you cannot keep the world running and keep the players informed. More money and resources should go into these two things and not into gimmicks and trying to add patches aimed at commercialism knowing that things are not tested properly.SL is a great idea but we are all doomed to be perpetual beta testers because LL think and proceed beyond their ability to back it up

I may not be in the least important to LL as a person, and I am not one of their LL favoured clique players, nor with two sims do I even count as a big player but the day that I or people like me decide to GIVE up paying their $125, or $195, or $390s because of these two problems, then that wil be a really bad sign for this product. That day may take a long time because of our love of the idea and our enjoyment of the world when it works, but it may still come. I wonder what will happen if yet again I write to the 'Concierge' service I receieve such glowing emails about from LL. The last time I wrote to them in such despair about this they ignored me and never wrote back, probably same again.

WHEN WILL IT BE FIXED?

This definitely is the slowest SL I've ever experienced.
It's hilarious to read Jesse Linden talk about the drop from 15 to 12.5 fps, and that they'll soon be able to recover 0.5 fps bla bla bla

HEY JESSE, WHEN WILL YOU RECOVER THE 13.5 FPS THAT I'M MISSING ?

Have a look at these stats, that's how _my_ SL looks today, on a bleeding edge machine with the latest graphics, cpu's, drivers, you name it.

UNPLAYABLE, is the word.

My experience too!
Hardly surprising though when, as far as I have been able to discover, the two individuals concerned are also the SL support team (all of it? or part? Who knows?), which is renowned for failing to respond, other than with an automated eMail...

Concierge appears to be nothing more than another LL marketing hype - WHEN are LL going to realise that talking the talk and failing miserably to walk the walk is going to damage SL badly and make a laughing stock of LL throughout both the MMORPG community and the industry?

Worse than that: since my rez date I have engaged the CEO of the relevant firm in various dialogs about in-game mechanics, customer service, and software development praxis. The conversations have been cordial and productive up until the point it is agreed that actual change is warranted and then it spirals into nonsense.

I wish I could say that I'm an armchair wannabe and so I'm just being placated, but I'm not. I wish I could say that I'm acting out of self-interest, but as I have a lifetime account and don't sell anything in SL, my interest is in the improvement of the game for all. I wish I could say I'm a crank, but as my interlocutor has told me he has cited my concepts at conferences, either he's been fooling me or believes that I have given him new perspective on a few things. I'm strongly tempted to post the recent dialog we had where he had concluded that what I was telling him about corporate practices was possibly true and asked me how they should be altered, and then declined the proffered advice, but some part of me feels that is kicking a person when down. Out of abject frustration, I recently wrote the board in hopes of having others help he who seemed unwilling to help himself; they are aware of the situation, but miracles have not (properly) been promised.

One does what one can.

"Action expresses priorities." - Mahatma Ghandi

Hmmm, well after the first week in fact the old hands did stop complaining.

Only a couple of 'Rah Team! Rah!' types continued, and at this point even Torley has become rather less strident...

One great blessing is that, in the face of the scale and duration of the problem the 'arr, back when I were a newbie, in V0.0001, then we 'ad REAL issues wi' new releases - so you jus' sit aroun' for a week or so young lady and it'll all come right, you'll see. Arrr *dribble, nod off into senile coma*' brigade have quietened down.

One hopes that certain individuals uncritical pro-LL stance, regardless of the circumstances, will in future be moderated. But somehow I rather doubt it.

That's fascinating... Hmm, did you ever meet Steve Jobs before he grew up?
Remarkably similar to the un-named CEO in question, a comparison that has occurred to me several times before, judging simply by observed behaviour and company culture.

Nothing new under the sun, huh?

I await history replaying itself with some interest.

When did Steve Jobs grow up? Which era of Apple is this?

I've been a software developer for 32+ years and I will concur that you are absolutely correct, Dyne.

Still, it behooves us as customers to continue to apply gentle pressure to LL to keep them

a) informed of the current shit state of things and

b) motivated to restore our wonderful game to the glory that it once was.

Because as bad as things are now, SL at it's best is pretty damned good. Frankly, this is the cause of most of my pain: a good RL friend of mine for many years surprised me and up and joined of her own accord just the other day. And while so far she's hanging in there, I wish to God she were seeing SL at it's best, not it's worst. My only solace is my faith that things will get better. But for now I can't even get a good freakin' snapshot of us together fully rezzed at the same time

Jess

I'd say Stevie grew up about the time he realised that:

You can't run a large company the way you run an enterprise consisting of a couple guys in a suburban garage making stuff up as they go along.

You can't keep promising customers features and failing to deliver.

You can't charge customers through the nose for supposedly 'state of the art' products which don't meet people's expectations.

Customers want basic features that work reliably, not eye candy that doesn't.

And when he finally realised that you do sometimes have to listen to what your customers, engineers and board members are telling you.

Of course by then he'd been ousted, founded another computer company (which failed), dropped computers and gone into another field altogether...

Excellent!


LL can do better!

I logged in for the first extended period today since v1.7 and saw the same time dilation moving hovering at 0.5, creeping up to 0.9, plunging down to zero in a backwater sim in the sim600 series with little content and one agent. I also saw the stats go to 0 at points - this is literally infinitely worse performance than I've ever seen.

Teleporting to another sim or just crossing the sim boundary corrected the problem, going "home" yielded the same atrocious performance; it would therefore be really hard to pin it on anything other than a very buggy simulator. We hailed a Liaison who came to "check", appeared in the sim, said nothing, reported nothing, replied nothing.

I had gone in game to prepare for an event that I cannot hold.

Oh well.

From the support wiki:
"Images Time - The amount of time spent updating and transmitting image data to the agents."
Looks like something is seriously fucked up with LL's texture code. It's not just taking a while to rez, it's taking a lot of CPU time.
Like, 4 times the totality of a normal sim's load.
"> 22 ms - the simulator is experiencing severe load, either due to physics or a large number of agents, such that even by slowing down script execution it is impossible to compensate. The simulator frame rate has been reduced as a result."

It's not just the texture code.

I visited a number of sims today to collect these stats, and I hopped home on a number of occasions. What was funny was that, at my home sim, without anybody else there, I had a lot of missing textures, which was coming in slowly, but my viewer frame rate was sorta decent (if you call 4-5 fps that), and I could more somewhat around during the texture loading.

But, if I visited a sim with some people in it, the frame rate dropped to the 1-3 fps.
The funny thing was that it didn't drop immediately, but over a period of about 10-30 seconds. While all the texture loaded. And when all textures were done, I was down to 2 fps instead of the 15 that flashed by as I entered the sim !! Exactly the opposite of what you'd expect.
Something is really really wrong in there.

Confirmed. Paradoxical though it might seem, when a few avatars entered a shop in the other corner of my otherwise empty sim, the dilation decreased and the sim FPS increased. Go figger.

ah HA!!!

So THIS is where all the regular people are! I was here trying to find the answer to the question I posted about how to put an icon on your posts, and I found this.

For the past few days, I have been trying to figure out if we are just going to have to get used to these non-textures, etc., and was told in general something about it all being part of some greater plan so that we could no longer hog resources, etc. etc.

Then I saw Snakekiss's post in Hotline and posted IT in the General Forum today, saying THAT was what I meant.

Whereupon I was told in no uncertain terms that I was too stupid to even be DISCUSSING any of this, mainly cause I didn't know what "client" meant. And that Snakekiss didn't know what she was talking about either. Then people were deciding to use portions of my less elegant sentences in their quotes to PROVE how stupid I was. After spending a couple of hours there dealing with personal attacks, I left. I went back briefly a bit later to find a couple of AGEIST remarks added to the mix. Apparently I'm too OLD to have an opinion or be able to discuss 1.7. And various other personal assaults.

Now I find out that here is where all the sensible people have come to talk about it. You know, the ones who worry about this business of not being able to see textures, etc.

Why didn't y'all tell me? lol

coco

(P.S. My apologies in advance if I bring them all with me. It's hard for me to say anything anywhere, sometimes.)

"I play MANY MMORPG persistent visrtual games. They all patch regularly. Neocron and Project Entropia update often. There are bugs sure, mini patches sure, odd effects sure.. but the game stop working?.. NO! I have NEVER known a situation in ANY other online world wher it just won't work after updates, and you just cannot do ANYTHING, you cannot do the BASIC purpose of the world in seeing it, moving around and performing actions."

And THIS is what I have been saying!

coco

I just wish they would take down the mac client from their website, since it can actually harm your computer. >.< Unacceptable!!!!

Here's another thing I've noticed - one night I turned off my firewall, Zone Alarm, which had been told to accept SL, and never had a problem with it, and that improved things a lot.

I have had it on in the past few days and it seems to be causing no particular problem, but I might turn it off again and see if that helps again. Seems like I should be able to have firewall on while I play SL, as I always used to.

Don't know if that's part of the puzzle or not.

coco

Coco, you will soon notice, that when you log onto the forums and see a lot of people (>10) online here, something BAD is going on in SL.
When SL is functioning on it's prime (not often but it's known to have happened a few times), there'll be virtually no-one here.
When the upgrade to 1.6 went totally astray and SL was down for days, I think there was more than 350 people online here at the same time.
Thas was a BAD BAD time.

If you look at the forum stats, you'll see that there was 1117 people online Oct 24'th.
By some funny coincidence that was the same day 1.7 was released. Go figure.

So, judging from that, 1.7 is about three times as bad as 1.6 was

However, I'd say it's worse than that.

1986 i believe and steve jobs is turning in to a complete jerk He is dreaming of live without Micro Soft windows LOL

Seems like this has been hell on earth for nearly everyone, not just me!

I'm getting the same texture sluggishness, the lag and feelin like my feet are stuck in the mud, but i'm also getting wacky flashing textures sometimes, and terrible lag spikes about every 10-20 seconds. Still looking into that matter, since it COULD be my internet, but all signs are pointing to SL so far:/ I know it sucks for creators but hang in there!!!

-gets on the bench with Torley-

I just started this game a few days ago. I get maybe a few FPS max. I turned my gfx settings down (turned off all frills, resolution to 800x600, very short draw distance, etc).

I have one of those intel chipsets, a 64MB geforce2 gfx card, 2.4GHZ p4 w/ hyperthreading, 1.5GB RAM, 3 megabits/second cable internet. I tried installing that update for my board it warned about. no difference. I Thought something had to be wrong, or this game was just very, very, very poorly designed....I went with the latter and have been playing assuming this is just how it is, it's just this bad ;D

you mean it's not supposed to be this way?