Should LL give us a better Service Level Agreement?

I'm a new-ish SL user, but in my first month here I've experienced two lengthy unscheduled downtimes, and some service delays on the day of the last software upgrade. I'd **GUESS** it's been something like 10 hours unscheduled downtime.

Inspired by this thread, where SL's service is compared to that of a database provider I started thinking that SL as a provider of data should have a comprehensive Service Level Agreement (SLA), like other data providing companies do (the main ones that spring to mind are webhosts which are pretty similar in that they store your data, allow you to change it, and broadcast it to many other people who are using a commonish client).

This is what SL says at the moment, in terms of a SLA:



To put this in some context, I picked a web hosting ISP at random - GoDaddy, and found the corresponding piece from their end user agreement for web hosting. Here it is:



So firstly they GUARANTEE 99.9 uptime - which is nice. Even if they don't do it, it shows that they're on top of their infrastructure and have calculated that they should be able to provide 99.9% uptime. Currently I'd **GUESS** SL's unscheduled downtime has been something like 10 or 12 hours this month. That's an up time of as low as 98.3% which is quite bad for a provider of data services - most of whom will guarantee or at the least publically aim to provide 99.9%. (Anyone got accurate SL downtime figures?)

Secondly, they give their customers some recourse if they don't meet their guarantee - 5% refund on the month's fees - which can only be used against further service purchased, but that's still nice.

From SL we get neither of these things, and I think we should at the absolute least have an uptime target set by SL which they aim to uphold.

BB

Just to put things in perspective, eq had 8 hours of downtime per *week*, admittedly scheduled, for updates, but downtime nevertheless.

Why would Linden box themselves into a corner by committing themselves to things that make them liable to be sued in an expensive way, with no benefit to themselves?

The only way that Linden would add an SLA is if it enhanced their ability to market themselves, but lets face it it changes nothing marketing-wise, simply adds legal liability.

Really, what you're asking is simply for a reduction in unscheduled downtime, the SLA bit is just a way to change the way Lindens look at things. Really tho, what is the effect of 8 hours downtime on new player additions? Simply those new players who didnt join because the game was down at the time, and who didnt try again a little later. Are there players who have left SL because of this downtime? Probably a trivial percentage, maybe none.

Course I'm biased cos I dont play any more, so the only effect of downtime for me is to increase forum traffic but I think these are possibly valid points?

Azelda

You realize of course that any guaranteed SLA will no doubt be coupled with rate increases.

When you're breaking new ground every week, you're bound to run over something.

Granted, unscheduled downtimes are no good, but consider that you can get full, unfettered access to a growing virtual world (and its processors, and its database, and its bandwidth) for ten bucks. Period. Also consider that, due to a thriving currency resale economy, you can make that ten bucks back and more.

At this point in time, regardless of what the ToS says, and regardless of what the high thinkers of SL (Robin, Philip, Cory) are saying, SL is currently just an entertainment medium. To be more than that it needs at least 5 times more users, better software and hardware, and less reliance on gaming (rating systems, dwell, etc.)

LF

Why should it be?

An SLA, or at the least publically and non-contractually saying 'We will try to provide X% uptime' is a sign that your company is on top of it's infrastructure, knows the limits of it's hardware and has plans in place for failures, etc. etc.

<edit> At the moment much of that appears to be lacking.

Also, I'm 99.9% positive which people would choose if given the options:

1) Random downtime, poor hardware, bad upgrades/failuers management, $9.99/month
2) 99.7% uptime guarantee, better hardware, better upgrades/failures management $12.99/month

No, I don't think they should. It wouldn't make hardware any more reliable, so all it would really accomplish is demands for credit from some prissy bitches.

lesse...
24 hours ina day
31 days this month
744 total hours in the month

10 hours downtime according to you so thats less that 5% unscheduled downtime.
Now I suck at math but... 1% would be 7.44 hours right?
10 hours is... what? 1.5%?

Soooooooo... 98.5% uptime for 10 bucks a LIFETIME?
Okay cool... so they didnt meet the mythical 99.9%... how about they give you a 100% refund good towards your NEXT lifetime of SL?

In the context of my original post, 98.5% uptime for a data provider is terrible, and 99.9% with proper hardware and management is absolutely achievable, as per GoDaddy's and many other ISPs contracts.

In the context of "Data Provider" it would appear you would pay significantly more than 10 bucks for a lifetime of use.
But! I could be wrong, I have been before... so... show me the 10 bucks a lifetime data provider with a 99.9% uptime guarantee and I will conceed my side of the argument.

Well to make your argument more accurate we'd need to know all users actually pay.. I'd guess that there are LOTS of users who pay monthly, and a large proportion of those that own land over 512m, making the average price paid for SL probably over $10/month, much more than a basic hosting account with GoDaddy.

Also, those $10/lifetime users are _not_ entering into a data provider agreement like a monthly fee for hosting with GoDaddy or a monthly fee for land with SL because they're not storing much permanent content in SL (i.e. building stuff and owning land). In fact to take the parallel further - people who just 'view' GoDaddy's hosting content get it FREE for life!

(And also to make my argument more valid, we'd have to establish that SL _is_ a data provider like GoDaddy, and I can definitely see the position that SL is more of an entertainment provider.)

You realize that players paying the kind of money that is being paid to LL, often hundreds of dollars a month for a service, should expect some kind of baseline SLA, of which we have none (unless you count "the service can be unavailable for several days, or even the entire month, and you would still not get a refund". Linden Lab certainly stands behind the "we're a service provider" argument when it suits them (as in protecting them from liability for what their users do), so an SLA is not unreasonable. I recognize that outages happen (though they are becoming far too frequent again - the service has never been the same since the launch of 1.5, we are still suffering the effects of it), however, if they are going to charge the kind of land tier fees they charge, which are essentially hosting fees for using their resources, then an SLA is something their customers deserve to have.

As it stands right now, we can't even get any kind of quality of service agreement - there seems to be no minimum performance standards for a sim (you can own land in a sim and be lagged repeatedly with the land unusable, and nothing will be done). Stroker Serpentine's recent post about the poor service island owners have received is a perfect example of this. It is a problem that affects all players, whether you are paying $9.95 a month or $500.

I'm spending wwwwwwaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy more than 10 bucks a MONTH. Tier fees have to come into this equation too.

okay Cristiano has convinced me that if you pay even a penny in a monthly charge for SL then you have a right to be pissed.

H O W E V E R,

Are you pissed at Linden Lab for not having a better SLA?
Or are you pissed at yourself for agreeing to the one in place at the time you signed up?

I used to addictively play an MMORPG and pay like 13 bucks a month for it.
When there is downtime I get all addictively pissy about it.

Then, the addiction wained.
So with it went the pissy attitude about uptime.

Here.. its a little more complicated... well a LOT more complicated.
You are paying for time to access resources and assets you could use to potentially make real world money. THough, lets be honest... if you pay a bunch of monthly fees... you got an addiction

Me? I am paying for the time to access the stuff you guys make and build.
Hence, me... not so pissy.
I guess I just see the 10 bucks a lifetime thing as MORE than enough to be thankful for and dont really stop to see where others are paying a monthly charge for SL and yeah, they should be pissed. And yeah, for that kind of cake there should be a better SLA.

Addiction? Pah! BTW, please stop replying to this thread.. it's distracting me from clicking the Connect button over and over so I get into SL the second it's open again.

You only HAVE to spend $10 once EVER, however. Considering you can end up spending that much (or more) PER MONTH to play a typical MMOG, wherein your job will be whacking moles (rats, decaying skeletons, annoying lugradens, <insert random MMOG critter here> 24/7 so that by slaving away in that manner, you can finally get your hands on content months later (or weeks, iif you're a devoted powergamer) ... whereas content in SL is basically just a build or a purchase away ...?

And then also considering the fact that every MMOG ever made has had ugly downtime from time to time?

Uhm ... for me, at least, it seems okay. But that's just my two cents', and I AM a newbie, too. So whatever. =)

Build, PURCHASE... Must get more... LAND.

Psh. I'm homeless. At most, I crash at other people's places.

But I guess needs differ.

Perhaps refunds could be offered for extreme cases. For example, if SL were ever down for two days or more, could customers get a discount on their next tier payment?

But LL isn't a huge company. It'd take a lot of time to change all those invoices. It'd be a waste of effort for anything but really large blocks of downtime.