Limit free users...

I probably gonna get stabbed for this, but i write it anyway.

Couldn't log in today when i wanted too.
The message stated that there were too many users online and i, a paying customer, had to wait "my turn".
I know there are lots of free users online which causes server overloads.
Everyone has to start and explore, so did i.
But now i see that many free users are creating duplicates of themselves and placing them all over the grid on camping sites. it's an easy way of making money, off course.
But the paying customers have to wait at the door, awaiting their turn to get in.......
(I posted this in some thread about the rolling restart, but my post was removed without any explanation. Ignorance is aparently a quality required to have when working at Linden Lab...)

So why not place a time limit on free users? Perhaps six months?
This time, they can have the chance to see for themselves if they like it or not.
I know there are lots of people who don't have a creditcard. Perhaps paypall would provide a solution. After all, the paying users now pay for the free users too. Server maintenance costs money.....If you can't pay, go and stay away....
You can testdrive a car, but you cannot keep on using it for free....

If LL keeps on letting free users in on an unlimited time, they will multiply and keep on overflowing the servers, causing more and more problems for paying customers who finally will give up too and move towards other grids....(oh yes, they exists!)

Just a though.....

Ok, let the bashing begin....

I'm not going to bash you Yann but this horse has been whipped to a bloody pile already. LL is not going to limit free accounts........they actually want more free accounts. It seems they want numbers. Numbers to show corporations in the hopes that those corps will buy up sims or islands for their RL businesses........some business model some of the LL people feel will pay off. I don't think it will but I don't have a say so.........so I'm done arguing about it.

I've found a promising looking grid that I've actually spent more time in than SL in the last month or so. We'll see if LL wins or loses over time. Not wishing them bad luck but I think they are in a very rude awakening in the coming months and years.

And.............I'm still a paying customer!!!

LOL

If i think which grid you are referring too, they are working very hard to get it connected to SL....

In the end, there could be only one (to quote highlander...)

I know SL doesn't give a hoot about the paying customer. Well, not until they see their income increasing drasticly.
And you're right. It's the number of visitors that counts, just to brag about.

SL can be such a wonderful world if only it would be operated in the right way...
In the mean time, i compare SL with Microsoft....

One can only hope, right?

Yann,

How ignorant and presumptuous of you. So, you are saying since I'm a free user, I'm creating multiple accounts, logging each one in and camping? Freaking LOL!!!!!!!

The only reason to be a paid member is to A. get immediate tech support or B. to buy/own land. Ok, there's the lame weekly stipend but really, what is $300L in SL these days?

But let me tell you something. I am a free user and I rent a homestead sim. I pay $8750L each week for my sim. It is pricer than some I've seen but I am happy. I am an avid spender in SL. My inventory is bursting with clothes, hair, skins, objects that I obsessively buy from SL or Xstreet.

So, what are you trying to say? I really do believe you need to rethink your generalized assumptions of "free users."

or limit the free accounts to non prime time, or a limited time for each 24 hour period...

would cut down drastically on the bot usage I would hope, but probably not


(or limit the time or whatnot to accounts that have had no lindex or us dollar transactions via LL, as that is the only one they can monitor, and the transactions would have to be consistent not just a one time trigger transaction)

there are a lot of ways they could handle this, but they don't because as mentioned, they want the numbers and they do not care how they get them

I almost never have problems getting in because the grid is full. Maybe it's because LL recognizes I'm so awesome.

Users with free accounts still spend money. Why would LL want to ban them or kick them off the grid?

Limiting concurrent logins from a single machine would probably be a more effective solution to your problem.

My partner and I have been together in SL for almost a year. These threads always make me boil in that she is a free account. Our time together is already sporadic given our different time zones, or just general SL hairballs.

There was no need for both her and I to become paid accounts as we looked for land for our home. Also, she would have had to pay VAT.

Whether or not someone is a paid account has nothing to do with who should have access. When the grid goes down bad enough to restrict log-ins, it's not a grid worth being on. The worst was when my partner and I were trapped in 1 sim on the mainland that somehow appeared to be cut off from everywhere. The only reason we stayed on, or fought to come back when we crashed (soooo many times I lost count) was so that we could spend even a little time together. There would be no point in continuing to pay for SL if my partner was restricted from logging in.

The point should be fixing the things that make the database freak out.

Again - define "paid account."

I am premiujm, but my alt is "free." More real life funds go into buying my alt L$ than I spend for my premium membership. I buy L$ too on top of that. LL would be shooting themselves in the foot by limiting free accounts.

Also I don't use them both at the same time. Don't really have a use for that.

You want to eliminate extraneous avs on line? Then avoid all businesses that use bots to artificially elevate traffic numbers. Seeing nice symmetrically arranged green dots on the map always overhead or hidden away is a telltale sign. Shop the lower traffic numbers first.

They actually tried this a time or two, and it proved to be highly unworkable and led to more stability issues. As a result, they stopped doing it.

(/me feels old, 'cuz she remembers when the grid would crash and burn at 12,000 concurrent users, and everyone would say that the grid was not scalable enough to hold that many)

LL is to blame, that their system is NOT scalable enough, to grow along the concurrent userbase...
The concurrent logins are increasing, so, scale to it. (simple really)
No, instead of making a scalable system from the start, for future sakes, they ignored it, and build a non scalable system, than now, no longer works when more and more people login concurrently.

Bot, should be no problem on a scalable system.. heck you won't even notice it..

And for Premium users: what's the real gain to be premium, if you complain about not being able to log in.. etc etc..
sounds, the opposite world to me
why don't you revert to basic then, saves you money too
And you can buy land without premium, as long as it's not directly from LL themselves (islands excluded, that you can buy directly from LL without premium).

support is mediocre to marginal, at best in many cases, why would you pay for it anyway?

the stipend, is just a joke really.. 300L? hmm that income hasn't scaled to the current economics either, if you think close enough.
it's old fashioned income height nowadays..

besides Yann... if you want to block all basic users for certain times, or in other ways.. just because you are willing to pay LL with fixed fees (premium membership), that isn't needed in the first place.. it is your choice as user..
don't you think, that SL will dry out pretty quickly. cos many (most users on SL are basic) will stop using it. that's the other effect that your proposal generates, if it would be executed.
only the premiums, and a handfull of basic users remain on the grid.
many stores close down, many sims stop running, not much fun anymore, for you then. But o well, who cares, YOU can login in (on a nearly empty grid)

all in all, to me the idea sounds a bit like this RL example.

- rich guy enters the grocery store..
- rich guy claims the right to pass the waiting line of customers waiting to checkout the groceries they picked up.
- rich guy is put on hold, by the store employee, to go back in line (at the back)
- rich guy files a law suit, just because he's rich and thinks the world should turn to his needs, whishes..

see the point?

I do this all the time and people should treat it like a mantra.

And I agree that "paying customer" has to be defined... I spend considerably more than USD$9.95 a month .. but I'm a "basic account" with no urge to buy land, renting is fine tyvm.

The whole problem is that people with premium accounts think they are "paying to play".

You are not, you are paying for the premium bouses + the ability to lease land from LL.

this.

"This thread is for discussion of the rolling restart to deploy 1.25.3 this week and next week. The blog post describing the rolling restart is at: http://status.secondlifegrid.net/2009/01/13/post437/."

SO you posted a post about free users in an official LL thread to discuss the rolling restart? And you think they should have wasted 10 minutes of their time explaining to you why your post was totally in the wrong place?

(you did say to bash you )

This. Limit how many times a single IP can log in at once.

Oh I should not well nvm on this topic. but estate managers need excluded from being locked out too then.

That would fix it plus make that number 1 because 1 SL addict per household is enough.. 2 or more would be a mess.

also .maybe disable the AFK timeout over ride settings on users running more than one instance of SL at one time.

I'm not sure that would work too well. Back when I was in ye olde Furcadia, bots would just send a message to themselves every 5 minutes to avoid the AFK timer kicking them off.
Any solution to bots and server crowding needs to be server-side, given the open-source nature of the viewer.

They tried limiting free accounts once. didn't work. They got so much flack about it they decided they better not do that again.

Limiting free accounts limits all users . Even those who run a business and have several sims but use alts, they pay good amount of tier to be locked out. Also not a good idea to limit the new user experience. Of course that doesnt need any help with the outages here and there. But you dont want to make it worse by locking them out when the grid concurency hits a certain level.

They just need to get their new network installed. Hopefully that will open the door for a more stable grid. Get rid of VPN and get on their own managed backbone. Look forward to that around the end of this month. We just might see new records for online concurency

I think I have been locked out 2 times in a year . Only reason is because I don't crash. I can leave my viewer on more than 24 hours and not worry about crashing .. When the grid hits 70,000 thats when all hell starts breaking lose.. Hehe thats when stability in your viewer counts.. You can be the last man standing.. If your viewer crashes a lot then you will find your self on the outside looking in a lot.. Like my managers PC totaly blows.. I think she gets locked out every time lol. Constantly getting messages from her. "Help I am locked out cant get in!" Constantly. I think she hits every lock out. Pretty funny.

The only times I think my lock outs were because of network issues.. when half the grid goes offf line . Or a routing issue between here and there.

Funny how these same issues get beat to death over and over and over again.. If its not about BOTS it's . LOCK THE DOORS! KICK EVERYONE OUT, BUT MEE!!


Lol

So far SL has proved to be scalable enough, but the scaling only happens after the problems of a certain concurrency are reached. LL seems not to plan ahead.

Giving premium members priority over paying members makes no sense, because as soon as the problems arise they just have to stop letting users in. Period. No premium and no free accounts, because the system is falling apart at that moment. After they solved the issue, they can let users in again.

Now if I see how many times it happened to me that I could not login due to high concurrency numbers, I do not really see the problem. Most of the time, within 15 minutes you can get in again (if the problems are not bigger then just the concurrency).

And before you ask: Yes I am premium. Most of the price I pay gets back in my pocket through stipends and free tier on a 512 where I have a small shop, my main store is on an Estate. The only thing my premium membership entitles me to, is better support, and so far I have been quite happy with that.

Now once I was very much in favor of a trial membership of 1 or 2 months, and then require premium, but at this moment I doubt that is useful. The more users the merrier, and as a business owner I rather see more then less users
Getting rid of traffic as a metric in search would do much more good, as that would kill most traffic bots. Furthermore limit the amount of alts per user. Together that would already help a lot, in my opinion. But then again, LL wants to show figures, ad that they can do now.

Finally: Let's not forget how much things improved the last year. Most problems are solved pretty quickly, and downtime is less then it was before. We do complain a lot, but to me it seems that much work is being done at the company.

That won't solve it at all..
considering shared internet connections in some home buildings, or company hq's. (e.g. appartment buildings, student homes, etc.. many use a shared internet connection, adsl, cable or even fiber)
if you block it on IP level, only 1!! of the tenants can be online at the same time. that's not good...

Unless that tenant happens to be you!

I wonder how many people are doing this on a consistant basis for no good reason? (just because they can)

I was thinking of using MAC addresses instead of IPs.

1 router mac adress for a load of users, same as ip