Tolerance Curve???

To me it depends on when it happens and how long it lasts.

What I mean by that is that, for example, if I am in world and having a nice chat with someone, or meeting someone new or something like that, and SL crashes for hours on end, yes that is very irritating for me because it is disrupting me when I am in the middle of something. It's kind of like going to a movie and halfway through the projector breaks, and they tell you that they can't fix it today and send you home having only seen half of the movie. It's not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, but it is very irritating nonetheless to be interrupted like that -- most folks, I think, do not like that kind of interruption, whether in SL or RL. This happened yesterday evening and was quite annoying to say the least.

It bothers me much less if, for example, I simply cannot get in -- as is happening today. Yes, it's still annoying, but I am not in the middle of something in SL, and I just easily go off and do something else. It's the disruption to what I am doing in SL that I find the most irritating.

And, to be honest, I find it much more annoying when these outages occur over a weekend, when I tend to have more free time, than during the week, when I would not notice an outage that took up an entire working day. That's just pragmatism for me, and I realize that people in other time zones are impacted, but to be honest for me the weekend disruptions are more annoying than weekday ones.

I'd have to agree with you, Milla. More or less, I expect the crashes, restarts, glitches, and random acts of accidental nudity..heh. Though, I'm mildly annoyed when i'm in the middle of an "important" conversation and everything goes down. That and buying something expensive and having SL swallow it forever once i lay it down..hahah. To much work to have it recoverd, so perhaps somewhere there's a large amount of treasure somewhere with my name on it...LOL

Downtimes, even as bad as this one, don't bother me at all these days. The passtime value of SL had run its course for me some time ago, and being logged in is usually undesirable. What does annoy me though is the daily non-delivery of goods. Once in a while is ok, but it's been almost every day for a couple of weeks now, and that is *really* annoying. I don't mind losing sales through downtimes - they are not that important - but not delivering the goods and still taking the money is so very annoying.

Phil, when I saw the title of this thread I first thought it was about you.....

LOL. When I just saw the title of the "Where's Phil?" thread, I look twice lol

Exactly. My tolerance for the "failed transactions" situation, for instance, does NOT increase as time goes on.

coco

it was much worse in the past with downtime and bugs..alot worse actually..sl is running soo much smoother than say last summer when there were constant glitches and bugs and shutdowns..or was that the summer before. lol
wow i have been in too long.
this down time may be good for me

For me SL is all about business, and the current outage has caused me allot of lost revenue. However, you have to roll with the punches and just like RL be prepared for the unexpected events that hinder or halt our progress in our chosen activity. I've been in SL long enough to know that the platform is highly unstable. I still choose to invest hundreds of hours per month in SL and accept the fact that the platform is still pretty much in it's beta stage. LL know what the ongoing problems are and react quickly to technical issues like their current ISP problems and I am confident that they are doing their best do keep SL stable. Compared to the end of 2006 SL is in really good shape at the moment and I am happy overall with the state of things. Poeple need to chill out, accept SL for what it is...i.e. a work in progress and if they cant handle that then they should stop playing as life is too short.

Well as far as being down and unusable for this long period of time is a shock to me. Sure the Wednesday thing wasn't too bad and at the very beginning we had outages of 6+ hours or so here and there when they were getting things back up. So Im quite used to it.. Im just not used to it having be down for THIS long. (half a day or more just about). Im hoping this will end the long troubling problems the world has been having.

Ding! Very Keynes for the win!

I think that what is going on right now is that there are a lot of us who are honing skills in SL, and enjoying our friends, exploring, etc. We have the sense that there isn't an alternative just yet, so we're all here together for the time being.

Where it will get interesting is when a viable alternative emerges. There will be pioneers that go off an explore, and who come back to tantalize us SL'ers about what they have found. Will there be a splintering? a mass migration? Will some simply divide their time between SL and the new thing? who knows..

That's true probably, and we all do get a little hysterical at times with the criticism. I just don't think LL wants to admit that SL is still in Beta, especially to potential investors. They are selling it as a ready to go program as I see it. It's kind of a bait and switch from a consumer standpoint.

Not really, Bren.....trust me when I say they are working hard now and trying to open up asap....

Mandy C

Yep, when they opened up free registration in Q4 2006 it bought the platform to it's knees as they just werent ready. They have made the same mistake of selling SL as a corporate tool before the product is ready. It's one thing using all of us 'little people' as guinee pigs but if they continually fail to deliver to their corporate customers then they will lose any remaining credibility. Linden Labs tendency to jump the gun does worry me as they are not showing very good business sense.

/me nods. Oh I don't think they aren't trying. They aren't purposely mucking things up, they arent the Government, after all. However, I do think there is a disconnect between the technical and business sides of the house, hopefully one that will be corrected in the restructuring. Technical problems are usually easier to solve. But bad business plans can sink a corporate ship rather quickly.

when i find myself getting all upset for the first few minutes of a blackout from sl i just think back to why i joined and the options i had back then..really it has gotten to be so much more than i intended..
i just wanted a place i could chat and hang out and be able to see other people in a virtual world and make a lot of new friends..i never knew all the things we could do in here as i was going in..
so the rest is a plus..if it goes down then it goes down..i don't think i could blame sl if i decided to take a risk on investing in a business in here knowing it was really not stable when i came in..
for the longest time before i ever heard of sl people wished they could find a game they could make a living from so they could work from their homes..
this is the first place i have seen that you could do it and it really amazed me how many people actually do make a living from here..
but it is also a very big risk in doing so because the world is hardware and software based..
you have to play grasshopper and ant all the time and be the ant getting things ready for winter..
we can't blame sl for us being grasshoppers and not accounting for cold times i don't think..
we are going to lose money and gain money in a lot of ways in sl..thats business

I've been here since December 2006.

Even if it's very tempting to continue to chastise LL for the perpetual repeats of the misery we're seeing, I'd just as soon shrug my shoulders and find something else to do while they patch it together with gum and duct tape once again.

To be fair, most of the time SL is working quite OK and it's possible to have an enjoyable time there, but there are the continued repeats of the well known problems: TP problems, login failures, asset server unreliability, transaction problems, friends online problems etc.
You all know them.

It's pretty clear that the original design and architecture of SL has been streched to the limit to accomodate the huge increase in registered avatars, inventory objects, sims and concurrent users online.
It's barely holding up - most of the time - but as we know, occationally it breaks down.

It will probably continue to be so for the rest of SL's lifetime¹ unless LL should decide at some point in time to do a major overhaul of the architectual design and a re-write of major parts of the code base.
Specifically, things like the unreliability of the asset server and the transaction system really don't need to happen. It IS indeed possible [using properly designed and properly written software] to run a heavy load on a huge database without losing the integrity of the database. Sure, if the load is heavy enough for the way the system is dimensioned, response times may suffer. But the integrety of transactions and the database will be kept.

But to wrap it all up, I will try not to continue to bitch about the problems we see and just shrug my shoulders and see what the future brings.


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¹) Of course I have no idea what the lifetime of SL will be, but unless LL at some point in time will transform SL to be able to interconnect with an upcoming standardized open 3D internet [whenever such a standard will emerge], SL will end up being to the 3D internet what CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy is to the normal internet.

SL being down doesn't hardly faze me anymore.

Heck it crashing doesn't even faze me, I just like to make sure that its not "my computer".

SO as soon as I see other people cant log on, or that crashed, then its fine.

Found myself a lot more intolerant.

I have 2 jobs in SL and because of that and because I DO have RL work/relationship/friends etc I now keep myself to quite a strict timetable on when I am on and what I do in SL. I LOVE it, it's my way to relax and spoil myself. So when I can't get on on those times I feel I'm not only letting people down who expect me not only to be there but to actually be able to MOVE!!!

Great question...

Even tho I have a little business now and commitments in world, my tolerance level is much higher than it was in the first giddy addicted months of my sl life.

Remember the days when voice was coming in? The glitches and crashes we had!! heh

I think the longer I'm in this kind of bleeding edge 3D avatar existence, the more I realise that after the downtime/glitch/issue - I will still be here and hey! the issue might be resolved! And I adapt and even (shock) spend some time in rl. I love SL and I love being part of this type of emerging technology even in a tiny way, I love having friends all over the world (even dare I say leerrvv) who I wouldn't have met without this platform, I love learning new skills which have allowed me to be creative in so many ways.

Maybe it's not only about tolerance but also about understanding & patience as well. : )

What you mean people really use voice? And without crashing??????????? NOWAY HAD should be HAVE