Linden Lab are a bunch of &*@#!!

I petition that the general forum be renamed "Sprial Into Insanity."

Wondeful post, Icon. It put a smile on my face, which I needed right about now. After some of the argument traps I've fallen into lately, it's nice to be reminded that that those with heads on their shoulders have voices too. Thanks.




Did you read the numerous warnings to turn shadows off? If you were crashing every 5 seconds, it sounds like you had them turned on. There's an incompatability somewhere with shadows in 1.6. I had the same problem until Adam Linden was able to rapid-fire type "turn off shadows", and the problem was solved. I remember thinking "D'oh! I read that on the forums; why didn't I listen?"

Hey Stormy, try re-installing SecondLife. I uninstalled / rebooted / re-installed and that helped.

shadows off? Check.

firewall off? Check.

AVG off? Check.

Bought new h/d and installed entirely new O/S and only have SL and the drivers necessary to run it on it? Check.

Still crashing? It's a hardware fault. Yes, it's the same hardware fault on both your pc's.

No honestly. The Lindens insist.



What Stormy said. All the people not needing the support and not crashing every 2 minutes are bound to say LL are great, because they don't need them. But not everyone's experiences are like that. Some of us have had no end of shit for months, and no real help, save for Lee telling us parrot fashion its our firewalls, avg software and any other excuse he can think of, and then support finally fobbing me off by telling me it's hardware related, which is a complete crock of shit and they know it. It just makes them look dumb when they come up with BS like that.

Flame away if you want to chastise me for not having a good SL experience. These forums are boring as fuck lately anyway.

Did you get a new power supply, Kris? That's a well known problem as well..

thats what Kelly told me I should do!

SL is harsh on a PC. My last one I'm convinced was simply cooked to death because computers are not meant to have CPU use at 100% all of the time. I think LL should up the requirements to a 3 ghz chip and 1 gig of SDRAM.

Iam having the same Jonquille,

I have to hit the debug world force sunset so much my
Rooster as died from nervus breakdown

am I living in the shadows, are Gamma Lindens out to get me, why are my pants always wet now ?

I see Dark people **

I'll start off with an apology:

Right now we're seriously backlogged in CS. While it's our goal to respond to your inquiries within 24 hours during the work week, honestly, we're more running along the 72-96 hour range at the moment.

Now, with that said, a couple of thoughts:

1. Contacting Customer Service directly is done in two ways:

a: emailing [email]support@secondlife.com[/email]

b: calling us at 800-860-6990 between 8am and 6pm PT M-F (except for today when we're shutting the phones down around noon to start the move process so we can hopefully be up and running first thing Monday morning at the new office.)

2. If you have submitted a Bug report or crash report, please understand that Customer Service doesn't get these. Bug reports goto the QA team who investigate and try and reproduce these bugs in house. Sometimes they may need to contact you about this issue, but, more often than not they can either reproduce the issue in-house, are already aware of the issue or the report was so incomplete that they are forced to discard it without contacting you. It's actually a reasonble rare instance that QA will contact you about a bug report.

Also, please understand that, if you do contact Customer Service on the phone or by email, about what appears to be a legitimate bug, we will pass it onto the QA team. It's not that we are ignoring or pushing you away, but rather that the QA team is more suited for helping resolve that issue.

With regard to crash reports. The crash reporter, while it is something Technical Suport will use to troubleshoot an issue after the fact, actually goes to the engineering team who uses it to identify patterns of crashes and isolate the why's and wherefore's of the crashes. By doing so, they can understand what's going on and hopefully resolve the issue.

Finally, Stormy, looking at your crash reports, I'm inclined to suggest you need to goto your PC manufacturer's website and see if they have a BIOS update. You're running a PCI Express graphics card and some manufacturer's (Dell being a big one) released machines with PCIe cards without having PCIe properly implemented. As a result, a machine with a PCIe card will crash a lot without the BIOS update. (To give a specific, since it happened to me at home, Dell Dimension 8400's running the AO0 through A02 BIOS' should really update them. If you're unsure about which BIOS version you have, you can always goto support.dell.com and enter in your Service Tag which will give you a rundown of what you had initially installed in your machine, as well as any pertinant updates.)

Kris: Your crash reports don't have a specific "Smoking gun" that I can tell, however, the two things I'd suggest would be to goto

c:\Documents and Settings\(yourusername)\Local Settings\Temp and delete the contents of the Temp folder.

c:\Documents and Settings\(yourusername)\Application Data\Second Life\Cache and delete the contents of the cache folder.

If you still have problems with the computer locking up/powering down after this, I'm inclined to look at hardware issues focusing on the power supply, as you said Kelly mentioned, as well as making sure your graphics card and memory chips are properly seated in their slots on the motherboard (a slightly unseated card can seem to work fine, then will randomly produce crashes. Since you seem to be experiencing crashes specifically related to one item I'm less inclined to believe this is the case, but do nee dthe throw it out there.)

Colin

Thanks for the post, Cory --

Maybe we can get one of the QA people to outline what a good bug report reads like?

I'd also like to reiterate a point I think was lost on some people in this thread --

Simply because YOU have problems doesn't make LL or any of its employees incompentent or incapable. It simply means you have some freaky problem -- while the general majority doesn't have them.

There's a scale and I'm sorry if you're a rare extreme, but it doesn't mean anyone should feel as miserable as you about it and rake LL for it.

I mean... no one wants to go to work and have someone bust in on them and tell them how incompetent they are. "You're stupid to have done this," "Stop doing it this way and do it this way," "Your decisions are rediculous," blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.



I build all the time in Gibson. I'm developing a competitive version the classic boardgame Trouble, I'm (slowly but surely) making a line of clothes, I'm producing a sit-com series in SL, and I'm talking with other machinema-inclined residents about starting up SL's very own little hollywood kind of thing.

True I have yet to experience almost any of the bugs some people feel are the end of the world; but I've been here for a year and a half now and really -- I've seen a lot of bugs. I even went through a period where a hard disk was failing on me and kept crashing out of SL every 10mins. I'm still here and I didn't raise a big stink about it on the forums and I most certainly didn't blame LL for my ills.

SL is something I refuse to take for granted. If there is a bug or someone at LL hq makes a mistake -- I'm not going to freak out about it. Probably because I wouldn't want that coming back around on me -- if I make a mistake I certainly hope people aren't going to burn me at the stake for it and accuse me of incredible things.

I Don’t Want Much
lyrics by Mose Allison
I don't want much in this world
It's the simple things I treasure
'Till I die I would get by on fame, riches and sensual pleasure

I don't ask much in this life
No special consideration
Just treat me like His Majesty
Of a friendly OPEC nation

Some people
Just don't know when to stop
Some people
Just won't quit until they reach the top

But I'm so easy going
I'd make my way through life
On love and understanding
From a rich and beautiful wife

Some people
Just never seem to get enough
Some people
Want salvation, paradise and all that stuff

But I'm so easy going
Don't even keep the score
All I want is plenty, but I will take more
If you ask me
I will take more
Say please
And i will
Take more

Regarding shadows.............

I did searches on the forums for "crashing," for "cortina" (where my store is) and anything else I could think of. I went through the hotline and the tech forums and you know what I saw? I saw a heaping pile of threads about crashing, but nothing resembling my situation, and nothing about shadows until a week into the problems.

I guess I should've known to search for "shadows." Hmm. But then if I knew that I coulda fixed the problem myself.


Colin, my bios wasn't my problem. Shadows were my problem, and had CS responded to me within the week between the patch and my finally finding a thread on shadows, I wouldn't be nearly as PO'ed about anything. I, like many others, hate being ignored.... especially by a company that's automatically debiting from my checking account monthly. My crashing has decreased greatly, and if the ones I'm still having are bios related, then that's odd since I didn't have this problem until 6.0. There are so many system components that SL seems to clash with (according to the responses LL gives people about their issues), it seems LL needs to make their min requirements list a hella lot longer... perhaps even distribute SL specific computers made perfectly to match your finicky game... until the next patch atleast...

Also, Colin, since turning shadows off, most the times I've crashed have been when whatever sim I'm in crashes (for some reason atleast several times a day)... and those come between the "You have been logged out.... click continue to read existing chat and IM's or quit to exit the game and try relogging" screens. Are those caused by my bios too? I'm sitting right next to Starax who has the same problems, and his machine is entirely different... no PCIe for him.... ?

One more thing Icon..

Looking back, over the time I've played SL, between tier fees and land purchases, I'd estimate I've spent thousands of RL dollars on this game. That makes it not just a game anymore, but an investment. It isn't just "a" bug.... it's "a" broken game and a ghostly CS. It's paying for frustration. This isn't some little 10 buck a month mmorpg where it's like it or leave it. People sink money into SL and it's not too much to ask for it to work right (for the most part) or to get responses from CS. How long has it been since 6.0 was released? I still have yet to hear a response to my emails to cs and hotline threads. Colins reply to this thread is the first direct communication I've gotten on the issue, and only because I've shown my ass in public.

No offense, but you didn't put thousands into SL expecting it to work perfectly, did you?

There's gonna be problems and "investments" are always risks.

Personally, I hope it does "pay off" for you in the end.

All I'm saying is that the community as a whole could stand to be far less condescending and spare the acidic vitriol.

Because I had complained so much about 1.5's lack of sufficient bug testing time, I owned up and did a bunch in 1.6. While doing so I learned what Dan, Vektor, and Kona like in a bug report.

If you notice, the Bug Report now auto-fills some headings. (You're welcome, my suggestion. ) They are:

Steps to Reproduce:
(Observed) Results:
Expected Results:

And as before, the summary.

These are the things I've been told they like to see.

Steps To Reproduce: Have a clear, simple method of reproduction of the bug.
Results: State what you see happen
Expected Results: state what should happen

Additionally, I recommend:
- Testing different settings that may affect results. (If a graphics bug, test with/without local lighting, etc) State whether or not different settings affect results. (For instance, I found a bug that effected the mis-scaling of local-snap-to-grid, but not global-snap-to-grid)
- Make the summary clear and concise. (NOT "there's a bug with money", but instead, "giving money offline fails to report transaction"
- DONT bug check every friggin thing you find. Before you do a bug report:
(a) If it's a scripted item, check with the creator of the script / try resetting the script
(b) If you lose an item, ask Live Help, don't report it as a bug
(c) Don't post a bug unless you can do a repro - unless it's simply too critical to ignore
(d) You have to be much more specific than "this thing isn't working"

I was able to catch a few bugs in 1.6 preview, and because I learned what the QA team liked in a bug report, these were corrected / added to the bug queue.

Glad you got the problem worked out, Stormy. As far as whether you should have known to search for shadows, obviously there's no way you could have known that specifically at the time. I do seem to remember quite a few threads in a row about it when the problem was first discovered though, which was how I happened to read about it.

I agree with you that if an issue is known, like the shadow thing, then CS should be made aware of it, and should be trained to offer it as a suggestion. I see no reason why if Adam Linden, a liason, was able to diagnose and solve my shadow problem immediately then CS couldn't have done the same for you. This sounds like an iternal LL communications issue to me.

In any event, as Icon and others have said, berating the Lindens over it isn't going to solve anything. Having spent as long in the corporate world as I have, I can atest that while each and every customer is valued by every company, in most cases those customers who portray themselves as badgering, insulting, or sarcastic usually don't end up eliciting the best treatment for themselves in return. Those who politely and articulately express their disappointment usually get bent over backwards for. That's just human nature, and no amount of debate about whether or not it's fair or right is going to change it. In any situation you have to treat people as you would want to be treated, whether or not you are the "paying customer". Attack, and you make people defensive and reactive instead of responsive. On the other hand, forcefully but politely express your dissatisfaction, and you'll get a much better and faster response. It's called catching your flies with honey. Or to put it another way, think Roadhouse, when in a confrontation "Be nice." Trust me, it works.

Enjoy!

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My. God.

*head asplode*

I was crashing changing texture while inventory was streaming.

I bet this has something to do with streaming inventory.

So what are you saying?