Paying for downtime

I play other games, have for years, and when we have serious downtime issues in those other games we are compensated for our lost time, time that we have paid to play. I was just wondering why we are not treated the same here in second life. When we are down nearly all day Wednesday we loose a full days worth of revenue and fun. Add to that the times we have to be pulled down the following day after a patch periodically and it really begins to add up.

I pay for renting my land monthly, for its use, and what the use of that land provides me. I also help pay for my land tier with my item sales, otherwise I wouldnt own as much land and linden wouldnt get as much money from me a month. When the world goes down and stays down for longer and longer durations each week, for the fixes to fix the patch that was supposed to fix something else... well, I get cranky. I know other people do too.

So, I was just wondering if there was some sort of bonus the Lindens could afford us paying citizens, for our inconviences. I am not saying give us x amount of linden dollars, or whatever, I am saying come up with something to offer your clients when they loose an entire day or have sporadic play for several days because of fix after fix after fix. Other games offer things like bonus experience, $ off of your account fees for the month, or free playtime for x number of days.

Just a thought, to help de-cranky some of us who truely enjoy playing, are possibly addicted, and are hating the downtime.

I'd agree... It's another one of my reasons to refuse to get a Premium account myself. Being in Europe, having these updates starting on wednesday 16:00GMT+1 ending around 20:30/21:00GMT+1 not taking into account the ever existing login problems (lasting for few hours after) or the dowtime again (to fix the fixes that should have fixed the patch) in a row; it's getting annoying. With June being the most ridicilous month (update almost every week, and other instabilities throughout the month) I can and will not pay for a game that takes away alot of my playtime.

Last week I posted a Feature Suggestion but it got deleted. Both yesterday and last week I knew of at least 2 people close to me not being able to login hours AFTER SL came up (finally able to log in at 22:50, whereas I was able to login at 20:45) and then just to receive it will be going down because of problems (23:15)... Plainly ridicilous.

So, sticking with the Basic account, I just suck it up... Nothing else to do is there.

they will refund only for unsheduled downtime of more than 48 hours if i remember

Per month??? Then last month shoudl give some Linden$ back.. Was more then 48 hours of downtime

It's not really lost time if you know full well that you can essentially write off every Wednesday as an SL free day. And if you haven't worked that out by now...

It's not for certain parts of the world....

*whistles*

No, 48 hours consecutive downtime. (actually I thought it was 24, but I can't be bothered to go looking).

LL do not guarantee any service levels or uptime. And it's probably just as well with their track record.

add on top of the downtime, everything i made yesterday when the server was up, got wiped out...

Ok posting one more time, because it wasn't just items I made yesterday during the few minutes the game was up. My shops all around the world are missing things that have been there forever too. This is seriously rediculous. Downtime was bad enough, now I have to go around and replace everything that poofed away in the fixes for the patch that shouldnt have been implemented if it was never tested properly in the first place!!

*end griping, have major work to do now*

of course everyone hates downtime and it would be nice to be compencated for it(within reason) i mean it's like i have been saying in other posts when you do something on such pa large scale theire are so meny things that can go wrong that you can't posibly be ready for all of them and to compensate people for every little hic-up of the code or servers would be ridiculouse...i can agree that yes if SL was not available for like 2 days straight then compansate some but like i said we have to expect some downtime or hardtimes after patches as new code is intergrated with old code(ie hud attahcements and other scripts) and as the server adjust to the new data that is being processed.....look at it this way...if theire is a power outage cause by a hurican or something(hurican used to portray code going funky) does the power company pay u back for the time you hade no power i think not....the whole isurance system is also an example...do u get paid back if u have no accident nope u dont(not sure those are the best examples but i think u will get what i am geting at)

this patch was tested it hase been on the test server for sometime now but as a stated befor not enought people log into the test server (so they obviously don't care) to make it count....theire is a diif between testing something with only 100 or so users then going live and having 3000 people using the new featurs at the samme time

How much would you estimate you lost?

You're paying, but you're not paying THAT much. 'Six Nines of Reliability' or whatever costs a bit more than $6/month.

If you were online n the 10 minutes before the grid went down they told you to "pick up everything you rezzed inworld today, we are reverting the grid to 8am, inventories will be uneffected."

What does that sentece mean?
PICK UP YOUR STUFF OR IT WILL BE DELETED
I know some people who are complaining were inworld at the time.

If I managed SL there would be manditory "Get a real life day" where SL would be down for maintenance once a week.

It's probably healthy to take a break every once in a while, don't you think? Breath some REAL air, go outside. Remember what real sun light looks like? Don't forget your shades!

P.S. Please don't call SL a game. It's so insulting.

SL did not have 48 hours of aggregate downtime in the last month. They probably aren't even pushing 15. Just to put things in perspective, the last update was done in 3 hours, not the scheduled 5.

Oh I agree.. A little downtime would be nice...

So I'd suggest for LL to put in a *rotating schedule* for the updates: every update starting 2 hours later then it's predecessor...

That way, some updates will take place while Europeans can sleep and the US of A experience a weekly 6 hour or mor downtime during peek hours...

Do you even think, that you could, WITHIN THOSE 10 minutes, get all that stuff with the laggy system as it was, the Sensor glitches popping up and in general erratic experience of SL?

One answer: NO!

You didn't count the four hours later that day that the grid was down so they could FIX a bug?

To put things in perspective:
Update started at 16:00GMT+1 (according to my girl in-game)... Was able to login at 20:30 (i didn't try it before, so I have to take your word I would have been able to login at 19:00).

Yet my girl again was NOT able to login from the period 21:00 to almost 23:00!!! That's also considered downtime: one cannot login. That others can, fine, but if you can't, it's downtime for you.

On top of that, after she logged in, the message came the grid would come down in 15 minutes! And according to formal posts on the forum this took ANOTHER 3 hours.

So for my girl effectively taking a 3 + 2 + 3 = 8 hour downtime, of which 6 hours would be effectively be PRIMETIME hours.

Now, turn this table around and lets say you guys in the USA won't be able to login for 6 hours during prime time... I bet they'd scream even harder...

I knew it went down later for a fix. All I stated was that the *scheduled* update finished 2 hours early.

Even with the downtime the total is very very far from 48 hours, and that is my point.


@Marcuw

I'm not from the US, and grid was down for update right smack on MY primetime. Do you hear me complaining loudly?

People are screaming because they want SL up 24/7 ... get with it folks, if you want to enjoy your SL and lower your blood pressures, change your mindset. Let LL update, and let them fix things. Documenting a bug well helps, screaming does not. Being a bean counter with uptimes and downtimes also doesn't help.

They announce an update, I give them room to work, remember that their update time is ALWAYS on my primetime. I assume there will be problems. I don't charge back in and expect everything to be perfect. Never happens, not in ANY MMOG, and I've been in 6 other MMOGs already, enough to know that everywhere you go problems WILL most likely follow updates.

I can give up my prime time without complaint when they update. You can too. Trust me, it's better to just let go and let things work. I have a generally happy existence in SL and part of that comes from knowing when to let go. Go read a book, watch a movie, pop in a DVD, see some friends ... logout to first life.

I come to SL for a happy creative experience. I get that. What I take back from SL is not measured in hours or uptimes and downtimes. I'm getting my money's worth. If you feel otherwise, well, all I can say is, mindset mindset mindset.

Personally I have no issue with it, going with the flow. But it does annoy me that all those online games never take into account some rotating schedule and cause of the fact that most of them are hosting in USA it means allways downtime during Europe primetimes.

Having that cleared, for some SL it's not a game anymore. RL Money is made with this (game)?! Thus for a lot of Europeans it's a Bad Business Day when these kinds of thing happen!!! Just read about someone experiencing crashes almost every 5 minutes while she needs SL to build homes/sims for RL money...

Luckily for me, I don't use SL for income at all. It's for fun, relaxation and meeting with friends and dear ones. A bit of scripting here and there, trying things out, and I'm happy.

But I do understand and feel with those who loose business (L$ and thus also USD) because of this re-occuring issue time after time.

For sure, if there wasn't RL money to be made for some, this would be a complete non-issue (besides of the minor annoyance to be treated like a second class world citizen for not living in the USA as is the case with most other online games).

And that whole is the point I was trying to make.

And they didn't fix it.

/54/8a/123193/1.html

(1) I understand fully why the schedules don't rotate. In my country a lot of people asked for a different MMOG update time too. But all the MMOG companies here have similar update times, which are either early morning, or early afternoon.

A lot of people don't seem to know what kind of resources are needed to perform such an update.

First, you need the people. Having them perform the update at ungodly hours (their time) is not a good idea. They're going to make more mistakes, they'll also be more irritable because they should be at home. There are many people whose body clocks simply will not allow good intellectual performance at bad times.

Second, you may need outside help. Should there be emergencies you need to be able to buy parts, a new server, or contact suppliers. That's why LL would start updates at 7am. At 7am no one knows what kind of problems will appear yet but everyone is fresh and raring to go. By about 9am, when other companies are also open they're ready to help LL with their problems should there be any.

(2) I should have indicated it but the rest of the post was not really addressed to you. Also, I do understand that SL has become a business for some but they must remember that the internet is up to now an unstable medium where even the best of sites still get downtime. Couple it with the fact that SL is loosely speaking, an MMOG, yet another very unstable medium, you can see why it's not practical to demand 24/7. It's a very unfair and unrealistic expectation.

SL and the internet have nowhere near the reliability of the telephone and electricity. Those two are much less complex items, and even those things go down sometimes (Queens, New York anyone?)

That's why I'm advocating rationalizing expectations. I have a little business in SL going, but I have conditioned myself to take into consideration all the possible downtimes of SL. It's a summation of things I've picked up over all these years on the internet.

*laughs* some of the people complaining might get the idea I'm defending LL. But really, I graduated electronics engineering, I do program, I had been a thesis mentor to so many groups, and I'd also been a beta tester for one, and an official playtester for three MMOGs already. You can bet I got to see a whole lot of ways technology fails. So I know what a realistic expectation looks like.

That's actually not the bug I was talking about.
/3/a6/122171/1.html

I do understand this fully. I also know, from experience and requirements that this is NOT an issue.

It's called SLA (Service Level Agreement) which can be setup between LL and the other companies. It can also be used when attracting new employees, saying that they might have to work nightshifts at some periods during their employment

So these arguments, tho valid, are (or rather should be) of no no concern, since they can be resolved contractually...

Everyone has his/her mouth full of 24/7/356; it's time to put it into practice. Especially on-line companies advertise with this.


Not going into technical details here, but websites, with their "open" protocol and interface are more open for attacks and abuse then a propiaty (spelling?) server having an obfuscated communication protocol and ports usage. Hence websites are more targetted and destined to go down and as such giving the idea of an "unstable medium".

SL otoh, is using a closed protocol for exchaning. Therefore such attacks are less common and should be easier to detect, deflect and stopped. It is not a reason for not having a server running 24/7/356.

The cause of the downtime is, and I admit this as it is normal and nothing to be ashames of, human error in development, testing and deploying of such server.

As such, the deployment can and *should* be planned weeks ahead of schedule. So even if one would schedule a deployment of a new version in the middle of the USA night (00:00am USA time), resource planning means that before hand people can be there in offices, preparing the deployment, involved companies can get people on standbye, it's commuinicated to the users and so on and forth.

It's not like it's some thunder saying: ah nice, lets do an upgrade today at 07:00am....


How funny you mention this... Where I live, parts of the country (same part even) found themselves having 2 big power outages in 2 concecutive days, whereas my internet connection and most of the programs I use have been available for over 24/7/30 (for the time I can be around that is)...


Rationalizing expectations never hurts anyone as long as these rationalizations are real. For delivering a service, where one can put down SLA and similar contracts, it's not. The expectations can be met if the proper paths are being walked.

I've been an alpha/beta tester for some myself. I'm graduate Computer Sciences engineer (the broad area: from building networks, programming applications, testing, deployment and so on), with a good number of years of experience behind the belt, I can say that I'm still completely taken by surprise of the setup a lot of companies use with on-line services.

Edited to add: and yes, I'm writing this, because of some exploit was found, causing the whole service to be put down at aroundish 11:30AM my time on Sunday... And for how long, nobody knows...

So bringing it down at unusual times for LL is not an issue; they could do upgrades too.