"Cutting them some slack"

First off: Wow, first person on my ignore list.

- the product is suitable for "public release" (i.e., do you think it's finished and stable).
Yes, many softwares are as unequally tested,documented, etc.
Take Far Cry for instance (just got it for Xmas) Totally unplayable on nVidia cards.
Bright blue-white fog overriding everything but the very closest textures in the 1.0 version.

Finished - relatively for this go round. Stable - no not terribly for every possible combination of hardware and drivers but see above (did they not test on nVidia cards at all? they = Ubi)

- if no, do you think it ever will be, based on what you have seen over the past two years?
A bit of a slanted question, I hope that it will never become 'stable' in this case meaning stagnant.
There will always be upgrades and paths available for further development.
Yes it will be ready for more masses but not until a few more (perhaps uncomfortable for those of us inside) dev cycles. Unless they change their strategy quite a bit, which I hope they dont.

- the advertisements meet the reality.
I haven't read the latest or at least none later than the Echo Omega home page one.
Lives up to that easily enough.
'Are you a god?' a character asks in a famous movie: in here, well, yes I am.
I can change my stature, weight, color, gender, race, etc. I can create things out of thin air (is that air you're breathing?) shape and twist them at my whim. I can raise the earth up from the waters or mash it back down again.
I can program my Objects and give them rudimentary 'life' If not a god then at least a mid-level diety.

- you're getting your money's worth.
I pay at least my cable bill every month on average. Haven't been selling anything recently but that's my own lazyness. So, uh... Yes.

- it's fair that a clause in the EULA stating that there is no guarantee of any kind that the product will actually work is a suitable model for excusing a broken product.
Read any EULA, somewhere it'll read something like 'may not be suitable for...' 'no guarantee for X, Y or Z' so the EULA is nothing new. It may have been used as a crutch a time or two too often but I'm patient and have never been horribly affected as some others have.

- LL is properly focusing resources on fixing what is broken.
I cant really say with any certainty. But here's what I've observed: there are things that have been 'broken' longer than even you and I have been around Tcoz. Some have merely been 'depreciated' (or deprecated if you wish to use the wiki's spelling) while others seem to be overlooked for the good of the many... or the good of the profit, whatever. $8 mil sounds like a lot of money to some, but in business of any sort it really isn't. Sure they could easily blow half a mil on new servers enough to get even the void sims up to hyperthreading cpus but installing them all en masse and then debugging the occasional bad NIC here, RAM parity error there would make things glitchier than ever for a while. Get 50 or 100 in, set up a better preview grid, heck put 'em in as the void sims for a while to burn in. Then start cycling 'em in for old sims. If anything their people resources need strengthening *first*. Poor Andrew is desperatly trying to count the tills after the crash and then gets pulled off to help build/test the .12 release. Obviously another person good at Python/MySQL or a couple of testers or something would have been a good thing to have.

- the users are given a fair assessment of the state of the game by LL.
LL is, if anything, to good at letting us know. I shudder to think how much time they must take to dig through the troll threads, bug reports and emails to respond and act on what's going on. If it's down I can be 99.9% sure that some dedicated folks in LA aren't spending quality time at home, aren't getting the sleep they ought to be, etc. They're monkeying the grid, veryifying the databases, or poring over crash logs. Whatever need be to get us back in.

- LL responds properly to the legion complaints of bugs and other breaks.
well, as I dont run an ATI chipset, am not a hacker or griefer or Mall/Casino operator by trade, and am willing to believe the occasional Shit(tm) happens kinds of excuses (because by and large Shit(tm) does indeed happen) I think they've been fairly good. There are a number of things which are 'bugs' which require a complete recreation of large parts of code to correct. Look at the Feature Feedback forum, 6 pages for Permissions and 18 for Reputation System. I think that's *totally* backwards. The reputation system is a throwback to when it was a smaller community, where you could have a fair idea of where those 100 plusses for building came from. And even then it just became a habit, someone plusses you, you plus them back. Permissions on the other hand is something that is both crucial and quite vexing. I would love to lock things down so completely that knowing that something is touchable, scripted, physical, temporary, etc isn't just a mouse-over away. Can you mouse-over in Doom 3 from two 'sims' away and see the name of the thing that's launching rockets at you? No. Can you tell which books to click on in Myst to open the secret panel behind the bookcase? Well, in some cases you can but that's decided by the games maker. UI changes and an API would make amazingly more complex games and interactive experiences possible. But by the same token being able to set each and every bit about an objects characteristics and capabilites makes for a very complex list of checkmarks to set or Script code to learn.
I also hate having to remember to set perms this way or that for every script, notecard etc. Gimme defaults, let the 'Allow this person to modify your stuff' make them able to see scripts too, gimme.. well nevermind it's a long list. I'm willing to wait.

- you are getting the features you were told you'd be getting.
see above. Features and bug fixes aren't really any different.
Ok, rendering bugs are, networking bugs are, getting havok 2 would be nice, full XML-RPC would be nice.
Silly things like the fading, expanding, contracting, blocking my vision, haze behind chat text are a bit, well, embarrasing... (especially when it was so massively buggy at first) so I'd certainly vote for real *features* and bug fixes rather than 'polish' like rounded progress bars. But as for getting what I was promised, it's all that and a bag of chips.

So to sum up:

Mostly
Yes
Yes
Oh yeah
Yes
Yes
Yes
Mostly
Yes

As for the 'if you answered no' bits:

posted above
Nothing
N/A
Pay? for what?

As for the last:

Yes there are lots of things out there that make you have to live by the 'let the buyer beware' rules. Luckily the free market economy model allows fads to die and well run
companys to flourish.
I very much hope LL flourishes.

L8r,
UU

So far so good.

From this, and some other boards, I have been finding the following pattern...which is exactly what I expected to find (these questions being posted not so much as the actual data gathering mechanism, but an attempt to flush out the polarized arguments, the boards already provide the actual data I need)...

"Yes, and No".

"Yes (and yes with some no)" generally moves along the lines of "I love the vision and the direction". Supporting this vision, and getting most of what you thought you'd get, makes it worthwhile.

"No (and no with some yes)" appears to be people concerned more with specific issues effecting their time in the game. Not getting some of what they expected, or encountering bugs that were not evident in a limited use trial, is unacceptable.

What is at issue here is the ability of the consumer to make an informed decision about a purchase, i.e. some form of consumer advocacy or reporting..."buyer beware" is not an absolute. Example; you test drive a car, in the summer, in Arizona. All is well, you buy the car. Winter comes, you drive it to Colorado, and find out that the car goes completley out of control in the snow, and that if the heat is on for longer than an hour, the car fills with smoke. Naturally, during your trial and initial ownership, you would have no way to know this.

Assuming it's a Kia, or whatever is new, do you say, "well, it's a new car company and, after all, I am getting most of what I paid for". No. You will go to the dealer and say "what the hell". He will say, "buyer beware". People will tell you, "you should have done your research". And, to a point, they are right.

What research is available for online products? What information and testing are companies obligated to provide? These are not lab experiments, these are business out to make money from you. Fascination and personal feelings of loyalty aside, are they in no way accountable, at all, for the product over time, or under a variety of reasonable conditions? It is impossible to know how broken SL can be until you start to push it a little, and you will not be able to do this in the trial. You will have invested time, effort and money, to crash into bugs, have your efforts stalemated, and then be told, "buyer beware". In SL this is particularly relevant, since it can end a money making proposition.

Microsoft, for example, can tell you that their product is secure. Do you believe it? Hell no. You want more evidence. So all this blue book red book whatever government benchmarking takes place, and MS passes. Now you have EVIDENCE. You can compare your requirements with these benchmarks.

Similarly, you go through a 30 day trial of a software game (something like this is a real issue in EQ2). All seems well, your can log in every day, kill rats on the lawn, get your 30 copper for noob quests. 2 months later of hard playing, you have invested time and money, you hit level 30, and suddenly, your inventory items stop working (the stats no longer apply to your character). There is NO WAY of course to determine this in the trial. So you say, "what the hell the game is advertised to level 50, but after level 30, it is broken in many ways. I want my money back." Sorry pal. Buyer beware. We know what we said. But you read the EULA.

I argue that the spirit of that contract is being taken out of context. Not only is the bug still not fixed, but SoE has been aware of it the whole time, and never informed anybody. The only repository of this info is the boards, which since 80 percent or more is nothing but trolling and pointless bitching, you ignore.

This is indeed the model that is taking hold in the world of online products. There is no advocacy for the consumer of any kind at all, no recourse if the product ends up being flawed when you really start to use it. "Vote with your feet" is the common answer, but that involves leaving a pile of cash where your feet formerly were.

Should something be done about this? Should companies be made more accountable for the state of their product, and is it accpetable that a clause in a EULA sets them free of this obligation? I don't think any company would throw it in your face and say tough as a standard ploy, but ultimately, they CAN and WILL if it comes down to it.

Put another way, instead of saying is it fair...should the legality of this be reexamined to work more in the interest of the consumer? I would argue that at this point the law in no way serves the consumer of online products, it simply provides companies a tremendous amount of leeway in what they should be delivering.

A simple small example. I firmly believe that SL is not suitable for real time game development. Period. Ghosting, tunnelling, and flaws in llListen, prevent it from working reliably...it's the main reason I never charged for the Vorago, never finished off Terrain (a shame I think people would love it) and now let it rot. I put a lot (lot!) of time into these efforts, just to have them die when it came to the crunch.

Yet read this.


Game Developers
Do you have a great game idea? Want to build your portfolio or try out a new game on a captive audience? Or would you like to get your feet wet and see if you can create a game that’s both challenging and entertaining? Second Life is the place to be.

* Build in a persistent 3D digital world
* Entrepreneurial economy with third-party currency exchange for real US$
* Robust scripting language and physics engine powered by Havok™
* In-world 3D modeling tools
* Compatible with numerous middleware and file formats including Poser, Photoshop, GIMP, .wav, .bvh, .tga, and .mp3.
* Diverse range of resident made games from puzzle and sports to FPSs and RPGs.


Does SL live up to this, or is it somewhat misleading? Would you ever figure out the reality in the trial period? And, once you do discover the reality, should you be expected to just scrap the projects, put on a G string, and go dance in some garish empty cube with a non-functioning bar and questionably fair gambling devices, or at the worst, cancel your account and chalk it up to a bad experience?

I don't mean to sound harsh, but I don't get this whole thread (and applies to a pretty good portion of service related threads I read on this forum). Questions were posed, but then as the thread continued it appears that those questions were in fact rhetorical in nature.

In conclusion what we've found out is that people should read the associated EULAs and TOS agreements and if they don't like what they read they should head elsewhere.

Sweeping consumer protections are not required here, and calling for them is a bit silly considering the nature of the products.

I understand people have put a lot of time and money into SL, but at the end of the day (regardless of wether you can sell L$ for real dollars or not) we're talking about a hobby grade service here.

As an example; pouring thousands into your model train set doesn't entitle you to demand money back once you get bored with it, or if it starts to suck, especially if you bought it knowing there were no refunds.

*shrug*.

And for my $9.95 USD, a one time fee I paid, I couldn't ask for a better deal. Even if I was paying $15 a month for some elevated privs I'd still be pretty happy with the service rendered so far, and it's been spotty getting on since I joined. I'll feel the same in a year I'm sure.

From a financial standpoint, if what you're paying to participate in this online game isn't pocket change to you, then what are you doing?? Invest in your pleasure and entertainment maybe, but if you think this is going to offer you some other type of return on your investment get the F out now before it's too late.

Roll back to a basic account and enjoy the landscape like I do.

Creating a 'game' that will be created by the players, as they inhabit it is a tricky tricky task, and so far, LL has done as well (and in some cases) better than I could imagine.

Obviously, SL isn't finished, and never will be - that's one of the things I mention to promote SL in SL Basics classes - as a feature of SL. MMORPGs in general have had the catch 22 issue of making it to the point of development where they need people in the world to test it, but since they are still testing, obviously the game isn't finished. MMORPGs tend to have extended BETA periods. LL could have kept SL in BETA longer, but I'm really glad they didn't. SLs issue with the above catch 22 are intensified by the fact that no one really knows how SL is gonna evolve, and to get an accurate vision of that evolution, it needs to be populated with 'real' people - not play testers being forced to play for certain periods, or even public BETA testers, whose zeal and loyalty to the game might bias their judgments.

I'm only going to answer the first question Tcoz. Yes, I think it is ready for public release. In fact, I think LL went live at Precisely the right time. SL needed to be released to 'real' players as soon as technically possible so that its true evolution and formation could begin.

I remember a guy in one of my college psyche classes that wrote questions like your Tcoz. His proposals tended to get rejected as his questions were always heavily biased toward a presumed conclusion. As I and other's read your questions, that bias is fairly obvious.

Then, in your last post, you said the following: "From this, and some other boards, I have been finding the following pattern...which is exactly what I expected to find "

which was exactly what I thought you were thinking when you wrote the questions. If you wanted negative responses to support your presumptions, you would have actually gotten more with much more neutral questions.

Sorry, if any of this sounded like an attack. It really wasn't intended as such. I'd be curious to see the results if your questions were neutralised and posted as a poll as Torley suggested. SL's all a matter of perspective. . . I imagine you'd get about 50/50 positive/negative responses, but I'm not Certain of that - hence the need for an experiment. If I were already certain, no need for an experiment. . .

I like this type of direct discussion about LL, and more than any other company I've interracted with, I think they have the integrity to withstand the criticism.

I don't think your analogy fits very well, Tcoz... at least in my opinion. If you bought a car you'd have a very long historical basis for comparing it to other cars and could easily judge it accordingly. But what if it was the very first car? Would your expectations be the same? What would you compare your experience with the car to as your benchmark? A bicycle? For the time being there really is nothing to compare SL to in terms of its technology and what it tries to deliver. Comparing it to other online games or to hosting services isn't really fair... at least not yet.

I'm willing to cut a lot more slack for the quality of MMOs than I am with a static product like a car, or a single player game for that matter. As the MMO market matures there will be less and less excuse for buggy products or service interruptions, but it's still an immature market that's dependant on technology that's still maturing, and that developers are pushing to the limits of capability. SL is the third MMO I've been involved with. AC1 had bugs in every release. AC2, 6 months after launch, still couldn't get their in game chat functioning properly. AO was still hugely buggy and unstable 6 months after launch when I bailed out. Compared to all of those products, SL has had relatively few problems and very little downtime up until these past several months. The aforementioned MMOs were fairly static in terms of features and content and I consider them far less ambitious than SL. SL is treading brand new ground so in my mind it stands to reason that it will be a rockier road to maturity. The fact that so far it hasn't really been any rockier is quite amazing. I don't think it's really fair to expect LL to know up front exactly what they're going to need to do and what problems they're going to be confronted with. When the first airplane was being developed it took quite a bit of spinning out of control and crashing into the ground before tail fins were devised to compensate. They couldn't really have known until they tried it. I feel the same is true of SL, and I'm not at all surprised that we're going into a spin and smacking the ground. Scaling is turning out to be a difficult issue and I'm betting we'll get our tail fin eventually. I'm willing to be patient in the meantime because it's the only product of its kind... and hopefully not the last. If and when this is an established niche with a long pedigree I'll start judging it by the same standards as I would a car or a toaster, but that's a long way off yet... and it won't happen at all if people aren't willing to keep their helmets on and go along for the ride.

Well, this has been interesting. And I'm going to stop it since people are starting to lean towards attacks.

What I am after is the unusual tendency of the MMORG gamer to pay, forgive, and forget, and that statement has been reiterated here, and elsewhere on the boards, many, many times. I find it odd, and so does anybody I discuss the matter with that does not play MMORGs but is entirely objective. I think it would make an interesting story for a number of reasons, and I'm not alone.

I again repeat, but again expect to have ignored, the fact that I am not anti LL or anti SL. If you think I am, you are projecting and ignoring a variety of things I say. What I am is anti two year old bugs.

You won't hear from me in this particular vein again. I've copied the thread, and will submit it as part of my initial info.

Thanks. Good luck out there.