Mind you, I hate to kick programmers when they're down, because at 10pm, if any of the SL staff is still programming, they HAVE to be tearing their hair out by now...
BUT... as a programmer myself I have to ask... why is it that a hard disk crash took down the system today? Considering SL is not a mom-n-pop website.. that the company has some $8 mil in assets and capital... has no one heard of system redundancy and mirror servers?
Why does it take me sometimes 10 minutes or more just to log on to SL? I don't buy "because it's just so busy".... tell that to Yahoo... with MILLIONS of users. How does Google manage to stay online 24/7? It has never taken me more than 4 seconds to load Google.
There's a guy with a little, tiny shop near where I live. Hole in the wall place. He sells servers. His selling point: guaranteed 100% uptime on your servers. Now if HE can do it....
Why is there LAG on SL... sometimes so bad we can't even walk. It would seem that the lag monster would be the #1 target of "things to fix". Either that, or the GHOST monster, which hits people about a dozen times a day. Anything which forces people to relog several times a day on a daily basis... I would consider a severe system problem that needs to be eliminated with all prejudice.
I know folks probably have all sorts of "reasons" these things happen. My businessman-answer to all those reasons: fix it. Every business has problems. After a certain reasonable time, those problems should vanish. They should not remain month after month. Fix it. Others have. SL is not the only 3d multi-player game on the market. It is one of the buggiest I've ever played. I have never played an online game that booted me half a dozen times a day, every day, for an entire month. I've never played one where the servers went down half a day once a week and performed worse after the fixes than before. And a system that was down for an entire day? How much SL commerce was lost today?
Again, I'm not trying to kick a system when it's down. I'm not trying to be a trouble maker. I am pointing out that SL is one of the most expensive online games going and that warrants better server policies, better access time, and elimination (at least as much as possible) of ghosting and lag. I know I'm not the first person to point this out nor will I be the last. But after an entire day of not being able to access SL because of a hard disc crash...
I'm sorry, there are ways to prevent that problem... especially with eight million dollars under your belt.
