Why SL cannot succeed - a personal opinion.

actually scientists in Seattle have created contact lenses they intend to use as a monitor inside virtual worlds.

i noticed very serious customer service problems about 3 years ago. Linden Lab undermines their own authority when they allow corruption in their ranks and AR system. They reward it. Now everyone is finally on the same page and seeing things how they really are. Beta testers rarely ever see stability. But we are beta testers who have paid for the privilege. Unfortunately, its just too late. Linden Lab is hellbent on sticking their finger in the wound. Regulating role play of its citizens, turning their backs on their own residents who plead for assistance with griefers. When the mass exodus happens, and it will, mark my words, i don't want to hear any sniveling. There wont be any sympathy.

Do you get a free ipod implant in your back molar with purchase?

i have no idea how it works but i also heard something about fabrics that heal themselves. Seattle is a strange place to live these days.

Ok then resently all the problems occuring is ok to deal with right? We pay for a service that seems to have nothing but problems? What is wrong with this statement? The paying users are payig for what objects lost in data base, teleports that results in loging out of the game. People going around stealing other creators copy written objects and scripts. Ok i say its not crap then, then what would you call it? LLABS doesnt hear its Customers they reary do. after 3 1/2 years i seens more "well maybe" then do(s). After Copybot, that happened they reprogramed it ( well some say they didnt) to stop it. But really LLABS doesnt give a ******** about anything. OI is nothing but a waste or resources that needs to be redone. I say let the commercial island newbie landing points be the OI of SL. OI is outdated and at times full of griefters.

It's like the story about the Easterner who arrives in an old Wild West town and visits the local gambling hall. He watches the action for a while, then goes up to one of the locals busily gambling at the roulette wheel and says, "This wheel is obviously rigged. Why do you keep playing?" And the local says, "Yeah, we know. but it's the only game in town."

Very true..............

The tens of thousands of residents logging in-world every day minus the few people who come on to the forums to complain would imply to me that most feel it ok to deal with, otherwise they wouldn't log in.

If you feel that there are only problems, then why do you continue to pay?

If people are doing what you are saying they are, then what is wrong is that they are foolish to keep doing something like that.

OK, then please feel free to move to something that is less outdated.

I'm sorry if this comes over as harsh, and I didn't mean to pick on you, because these types of post are all-to-common. I don't think many understand quite how complex it is to do what LL are doing with SL - they are leading the way with something revolutionary. They are having "growing pains" and are doing their best to get things stable, according to everything I have read about their priorities now.

Windlight - most people say that it performs as well, if not better in terms of refresh rate than the old client.
Havoc 4 - will improved server lag and stability
Mono - will improve script performance.

Now, I'm not technically-minded, but these are major projects that seem to be trying to address what residents have been shouting for a while "No fancy new features - get things stable". Seems like these projects are trying to do just that.

Add to that the changes they are making to try to reduce inventory loss (remember a lot of people having items appearing back in their inventory that time? That didn't just happen - someone at LL did a LOT of work to try to make that happen).

Problems don't go away overnight on something this big, and I know many are frustrated, but to claim that LL aren't listening is, in my opinion, utterly absurd.

If SL really was as bad as I seem to read on the fora, then people wouldn't be bothering to waste their time with it, no?

If you think you can do this better than LL, please go ahead, and people will come in droves. If you can't, then please stop telling them what they need to be doing in order to run their business. I think the american term is "armchair quarterbacking".

nice writting and snipping but you lost the meaning...............never mind........
Nice but really rah rahing it up doesnt make anything better. Wow you most know something about sl we all that are having problems don`t know.........Please share us the rah rah...................... BTW.Who cares

I think that this thread can be summed up quite simply...

Different people have different ideas of how SL should be. For many people here, and probably most of the population, what SL is now is how it should be - stabilised of course - so for them, SL is successful already. Other people, such as me, envisage a huge online future for a system like SL, to the extent of making the web history, and SL as it is now, is just the beginning. So, for them, LL hasn't yet succeeded and, imo, will never succeed if they continue as now.

Thank You Phil thats does sum it up the right way.......
Problem is too many people that are posting havent been here long enough. They havent seen the growth and the problems that went along with it. They only see today without seeing how it all went together. Besides if SL is to grow even larger they most make the game more stable and less problematic when they add on or take out features. Many of my friends have left the game because they just can stand the problems and issues that LL had failed to address.

Then your inference would be very much mistaken. You only need to socialise with people inside SL to know how the general population feels about the problems.

Yes, it's a complex system if you look at the whole thing, but just like all complex programming, it is divided into small uncomplicated parts, so it isn't as complex as might be imagined.

Erm... Windlight isn't a fancy new feature? I beg to differ. Windlight looks good, but that's all. It isn't necessary, and should never have been put ahead of the necessary stabilisation.

Mono will improve script speed, that's true. But script speed ahead of the necessary stabilising? I don't think so. Scripts work ok now, and are responsible for very little of the lag.

Havoc4 is intended to stabilise things? Perhaps. I really don't know.

So at least 2 of your 3 examples are not being introduced for the purpose that you claimed.

They did? How do you know that? Personally, I don't believe it. I'm more inclined to think that someone came across all that inventory stuff and made a way to return it. But if they did as you said, then they did the wrong thing. They need to stop inventory going missing. Spending a lot of time chasing stuff that people had written off would have been such a waste of effort. So I don't think they did as you said they did.

The thing is that most people don't keep coming back - they leave. But some do, and it isn't because they are content with the lack of stability

Sorry, but that idea is so wrong. People don't need to be qualified plumbers to know when there's a water leak. People are experts at knowing such things. And people who are not experts in running things like customer services, are experts in knowing how good or bad such a service is, and how one compares with others.

Phil, I don't know if I would go so far as to thinking that SL or anything like it will replace the web - more like add to it. There are things that the web does perfectly and things it doesn't do so well. Where applications like SL really shine is in person-to-person communication - more than one cynic has described SL as a big 3-D chat room. I can't imagine wanting to use a virtual world/3-D internet to deliver breaking news headlines, threaded forum conversations, marketing research, stock quotes and the thousands of other ways that fast and targeted web searches can deliver information to my screen. It doesn't seem logical to me to want to be logged in as an avatar in the 3-D internet in order to check the weather for tomorrow.

Perhaps so, Isablan. However, weblike delivery and speed is already incorporated into SL - in the All search. Right now they are just webpages, but in the future they needn't be part of the web at all.

Mono isn't really needed because scripts aren't really responsible for lag? Windlight is just eye candy? They "just found" all that missing inventory???

Phil, you really need to not talk about technical stuff.

Entropia Universe, IMVU?

OK now I so want to build an international weather forcast thingy for the Volunteer Island ... ah well, it ain't happening!

(Answer for UK = dreadful. What's new? Our weather is always dreadful)

Why? I have a long technical background. If I'm mistaken in anything, please explain why.

Because Windlight is not only about eye candy, because in many places scripts _are_ the cause of lag, because you just "come across" 17 tons of missing inventory in a closet somewhere, because Havok4 is absolutely going to help stability.

Taking just one of these, maybe you could back up that assertion that LL just came across all that missing inventory. Feel free to use techical words.

Perhaps you would like to scroll back and see what I actually wrote. I said that I don't believe that someone/people at LL spent a lot of time looking for lost inventory, and returning it - and I don't. I also said that if they did such a thing, then they did the wrong thing. Scroll up and see

Windlight:
That's not explaining why I am mistaken. All you're saying is it's more than eye candy. If it more, then tell me what it is please, because I only see unnecessary eye candy.

Scripts:
I said that scripts are responsible for very little lag (scroll up and see). The way that scripts run means that they can't be responsible for very much of the lag that we find, although there are occasions when scripts can cause significant lag. Please scroll up see what I actually wrote.

Havoc4:
Again scroll up and see what I actually wrote


[time allowed for scrolling up to see what I actually wrote]


You see? I'm not at all bad at discussing technical things - and better than most

From a different perspective - I think if you're talking about technical stuff, you are missing the real reason why LL might fail. I fall into the camp that believes they have a very good chance at continuing to succeed, but if they fail it will be for poor business decisions, such as the decision to not listen to the needs of their customer base, the decision to concentrate on new features instead of providing for stability and support for existing features, poor marketing, poor customer service, etc. The technical expertise is not an issue. They have that, and they have the vision. They don't have any direction and they don't seem to have any long-range plan. At least not one that is concrete enough to be valuable. Those are all business decisions, not technical ones.

At any rate, I played off your comment there, and I don't necessarily disagree with you on a lot of points. My personal strength lies with business issues, not technical ones, so I'm pretty biased in my approach to these problems.

I'm not so sure they made a decision not to "listen" to customers.

They have made a decision not to *communicate* well with customers.

Thats a bit different. They might be "listening" to all kinds of people who aren't us forums types.


------------------------------

(ohh and for those who seemed to miss it)

Voice was subcontracted.

Windlight was an already existing product LL bought and incorporated.

Blaming those two for not working on stability seems a bit dumb to me. Blame stuff that LL did on their own, like sculpties or flexi-prims or something.

I was thinking more along the lines of the bandwidth usage - which is becoming more and more of an issue as movies and other content get ready for web delivery. Providers are already throttling high users in some places. FiOS is already being wired in my neighborhood, but the rest of the world isn't so lucky. A 3-D internet with images that haven't been optimized for speedy delivery and visuals such as WindLight becomes a monster bandwidth hog when you start talking about an across-the-board web application. Using a bandwidth heavy application to look for the best prices on a new wide-screen monitor seems (to me anyway) a waste of resources.

Hi Trout.
I think we're pretty much in agreement. But the part of my post that you quoted - about "technical" - wasn't anything to do with the thread topic. It was a reply to someone who suggested that I don't talk about technical things. It was a sidetrack - nothing to do with the topic.

I don't disagree at all as things are right now, but bandwidth speed continues to improve by leaps and bounds, as do other online technologies. I don't see the future that I envisage as being just around the corner, but the start of it could be - even now.

If LL is looking in the same general direction, as I think they may be, they would need to develope interfacing protocols, so that different grids can interconnect. Incidentally, I don't particularly see it all as copies of lumpy land that slopes down to the sea, like OpenLife has come up with - just interfacing protocols, so that grids of any design can be connected.

(First, something extremely tangential: Mono will improve stability not so much because of script lag, but because it patches a serious security flaw in the earlier "LSL2" architecture, [details elided for prudence], resulting in sim crashes. Luckily, not a lot of exploits have taken advantage of that. Yet.)

I kinda think the 3DWeb thing is being mis-cast here. As I understand the vision, it's really quite analogous to the Internet revolution, but it's not particularly intended to *incorporate* that revolution. That would be rather like Web2.0 obsessing over whether it can make frictionless the manufacture of buggywhips.

The smart RL money is here not because they're looking for a way to leverage the 3DWeb to meet current business objectives, but to figure out if they can leverage any of their current competencies to *survive* in a 3DWeb world.

It's easy to forget just how many RL companies simply ceased to exist in an Internet-enabled world, and how many others saw their capitalization rankings slip to obscurity as Google, et al. climbed to the top. In our post-industrial "Information Age," there are few RL companies that can afford to ignore what may be the next information revolution. It's really not up to LL and its patient investors to help those "old-Web" industries find their way, any more than CERN had to lead Yahoo! to the web.

Although, if LL did that, those investors wouldn't have to be quite so patient.

Ok..


Turns out you did say that they "came across" all that missing stuff. Yes, you also said that you thought chasing missing items was the wrong thing to do but I think that people who got back lost stuff might disagree.


And, sorta my point here, how much effort have you put into finding out of what you're saying is true?

From the windlight page on wiki.secondife.com..



You say they can't be responsible for lag unless they're causing significant lag?


I read it the first time - you said you didn't know if would help stability. I said that it absolutely is going to help stability. Just today, Darien reported that the frequent sim crashes she's been having have vanished with Havok4. There's lots of reports saying that it helps stability, if you look around.


I still think your full of it.