Recover no-copy merchandise during rollback

If you place a bunch of expensive purchased no-copy merchandise on your land, it can get lost in a sim rollback.

If you try to get it back through official channels, the official Linden response is a verbose letter that amounts to "tough luck, sorry, it's in the TOS".

I would propose that, in order to remedy this problem, a secondary log be kept of objects that are added to or removed from the land. During a sim rollback the main database should be reconciled with this secondary log.

If this would be considered too much overhead, perhaps keep track of the perceived value of objects according to how much L$ was paid for them, and have special tracking when the perceived value is over a certain threshold.

Bottom line here is in game economy and the whole driving force of wanting to play and set up a business is based on this. Some of us invest hundreds of real US dollars thinking that the equipment we buy has a tangible invested value. What good is it to fork out a couple hundred dollars then have your investment vanish from existence? I for example just paid 130 real US dollars and one of these rollbacks happened. I lost half of my stuff just as I was unpacking it. Needless to say I was very upset to find out that game policy has no way to protect its investors. Fortunately, the creator of the expensive equipment I bought was kind enough to replace my items. If I had not been so fortunate I was ready to give away the assests of my remaining inventory and cancel my account. This issue has been a real eye opener for how worthless my invested money in Second Life really is. I have already purchased several hundreds of US$ worth of L$ prior to this. I can now guarantee I will be making no further L$ purchases after experiencing this issue. Below is the a copy of the "sucks to be you" email I received from Kona Linden (bug guru) with regards to my concern.

Hi there,

Good to hear that vendor replaced your items. During rollbacks due to
griefing or general system crashing, any items placed out during the
rollback period are unfortunately lost. Hopefully, you're allowed to
have copies of your purchased equipment, especially for the price that
you paid...if they are no copy, I'd seriously request that the made
copyable/no transfer to avoid risk of loss in the future...especially
with the degree of grid attacks unsavory individuals have been launching
inworld (and we're working on new safeguards, but there limits to
open-ended environments like ours as far is avoiding such
situations...but we're working on it).

As many old time builders in SL have learned, it's always prudent to
always be sure to make copies of anything you deem of high value FIRST.
Per our TOS, data is data and data can get corrupt at anytime...and we
don't guarantee against data loss. That is the risk all residents agree
to when building in our open-ended environment and residents need to
know that inherent trade-offs to having such an environment. Should you
have further questions or would like further tips on how to build more
wisely, feel free to IM me in-world anytime =)

Regards,
kona

Category: Misc

I just spent $130US to buy $40,000 equipment. I was
placing the equipment and then when i was about done positioning
everything the game froze. I then logged out and then logged back
in to find that the machines were just laid out at they were when I
starting placing them.

Observed results: It appears the game had rolled back about half of an
hour. Some of the machines are placed like they were as I was just
unpacking them like it did about half an hour before this issue
occured. The main issue is several of the machines have not reappeared
neither on my land or in my inventory. I messaged live help and
Data Linden suggested clearing the cache. I logged out and did
that. After logging back in and waiting for everything in my
inventory to load back up the items were still missing. Please
check, thanks.

That seems like a very professional response from the staff. And the content creator compensated you too. I dont see where the complaint side is...

Please do not read this as a complaint. This is a feature suggestion.

I was shocked to discover that there is no safety net protecting our monetary investment when a sim crashes.

Especially since it is a solvable technical problem. Computer crashes do not imply asset loss where asset transfers are involved.

To me it is no different than if I deposit money at my bank and then they send me a "professional" letter saying that due to a computer crash, the deposit did not make it into my account, although the money was withdrawn from the paying institution.

Of course this doesn't happen with banks because of standard transaction processing practices, and I am simply proposing a similar transaction scheme to solve this extremely serious technical flaw.

All residents need to be made more aware of this financial risk, especially big investors, until a fix is in place.

And those of us who are able to perceive the seriousness of this issue should apply pressure to fix it.

You also need to understand that a bank isnt in the same predicament as SL is. Making a deposit in a bank isnt an action that requires safety checked code execution. Meaning your money itself cant make decisions to delete other accounts. Its ONLY data.

In secondlife assets like scripted objects ARE permissable items with ability to break things if used incorrectly. Currently at certain times a 'safe point' snapshot is taken by the sims with a copy of the current world state. Changes after that such as transactions or rezzing out no-copy items might be THE CAUSE of the crash if one happens prior to the next 'safety snapshot'.

So when a crash occurs instead of booting the most current data (thus loading the object that caused the crash and creating an infinate crash loop) the server instead backs up to the last safety checkpoint.

Yes it is possible that between snapshots the system record each and every single action performed on in-world contents.. so that it would be possible to restore items UP TO the point of the crash. The problem with that lies in the sheer number of tiny changes that happen to ensure the world state could be accurately recreated.. it would have to go thru and process every movement again, every rotation, every texture change and keep loading all these actions one at a time and with each micro restore setting a checkpoint about the last safe micro item. Cause as soon as the server repeats that crash inducing action we have another BOOM.

So it would be possible to do micro updates. But the TIME of reloading those changes would be dramatically increased over just flatly loading the last snapshot. It would be a magnitude closer to a dozen or more minutes rather than the 1 or 2 curently required to bring a sim online. And even then its possible that the true crash inducing primary cause happened in some combination of actions that just happened to destabalize the system as that final action was performed. So NONE of the actions after the last safety snapshot can be really trusted.

At least from the standpoint of doing higher resolution rollbacks the proposal would be a bad thing to impliment (my opinion). There is a 2nd implimentation method that can get the same end results you desire but has its own drawbacks in a multi server network like SL.

One thing you should know is that your inventory is NOT saved in the sim your avatar is in. It is located in a more dedicated server. That is why the sim can rollback, but your avatar does not. The fail safe we could get implimented would be that for an AVATAR all inventory actions in the last XXX minutes get micro transactions saved to be able to undo inventory alterations.

The timeframe could be set to whatever the frequency of the sim snapshots is currently. This would enable that if an avatar is detected as being in a sim that just crashed, that avatars inventory can also get rolled back either to the point they entered the sim or as far back as the sim snapshot itself as appropriate. This would mean ONLY inventory transactions that happened in the crashed sim would get undone.

The drawback to THIS method is that it would be possible to transfer no-copy items to someone NOT in the sim that crashes, then to intentionall crash the sim so that your avatar gets rolled back to a point the no-copy item still exists for you. This can be overcome if some type of 'dirty' flag was applied to transactions that effected people outside the same sim as the avatar and dirty actions would not get 'fixed'. In the end it would still lead to instances where some people could take advantage of crashing a sim in order to profit. And that would be bad too.

My final point is that dealing with micro transactions for full featured restore points and the safety nets required in those systems is a MASSIVE ammount of work. Especially in a world where digital content is in at least some ways owned by the creators. And the lessor of 2 evils is that a crash destroys content rather than creates it. If crashing could create content that would breed a new category of greifers.

I'm sorry for the post being longwinded but I've actually attempted implimenting similar systems myself in other online games and I know first hand the issues to deal with on the programmer side. It would be GREAT to have all those changes made that would allow for this proposal but its more work than id wish on the developement team and its a really BORING type of programming. We dont want burned out coders making our beloved game.

I would just like to add that, having read these concerns, my original feature suggestion stands as written and these concerns do not apply.

The concerns would be valid if I were suggesting that a sim rollback put everything back exactly the way it was before the crash.

I am not suggesting that.

My request is much simpler. Please re-read my original post.

I love SL and I think as more people get bitten by this flaw it will be the downfall of the online economy, in much the same way that online commerce expansion would have been stifled if not for the fifty dollar limit to our liability if someone steals our credit card number.

Some other ideas to address the same underlying issue of no-copy merchandise being lost in a sim rollback:

1. Some kind of an escrow system that can be explicitly invoked when placing no-copy merchandise, that would keep a copy in an internal table until the sim is safely backed up.

2. Some ability to get a digitally signed receipt from the sim when placing expensive no-copy merchandise, along with some ability to get a digitally signed confirmation of when the sim crashed and when it was last backed up. These might help break through the trust barrier in recovering merchandise from the original creator.

I am intentionally not addressing every little detail of these suggestions because that is best left to the software developers.

I would like to ask Linden Labs to adopt a "where there's a will there's a way" attitude in addressing this lost merchandise issue, even if the solution is something different than what I am suggesting.

I would also like to suggest that the logic where we allow people to lose their investment in order to make sure they never accidentally get a free copy of something, is not right. Ideally neither would happen, but the system should be biased in favor of protecting assets. For a sim crash to result in an extra copy of an object, is a small burden on the creator of that object, when compared to the burden on the owner of ending up with no copies.