All Out by 2009?

Quite. I've hardly logged in since Nov/Dec, when everything worked fine on my setup, but having returned since 1.19, I've discovered I'm pretty much out of the game.

Although the memory leaks, and constantly increasing requirements don't help, I can't help thinking lack of adequate testing and quality control also compounds these issues. I say that because SL shouldn't be a problem on my system at all (Intel P4 HT/3.8GHz (800MHz FSB); 2 Gig DDR2/Dual Channel RAM; XFX Geforce 7950GT/512MB (570MHz) graphics) but for some reason I can no longer get more than 4fps on the Windows client when I've been in the game a few minutes.

I've gone so far as reinstalling Windows XP _and_ trialling Vista Ultimate (hated it), but no difference as far as the SL client is concerned. Installing Fedora 8 and running the Linux SL client on the other hand proved that my specs are still capable of running SL adequately (it's averaging 40fps in this screenshot: http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/snap.aspx?p=260090.jpg&w=800, so the Windows situation becomes more of a mystery because the exact same hardware is being used; in fact the GPU & client are configured with higher quality settings and a higher draw distance in Linux, so it really doesn't make sense).

Unfortunately I am too reliant on Windows applications for work to become a Linux user again (Gentoo was my system of choice from 2001-2005 but situations change), so it's unreasonable for LL to expect me to use Linux just to run their freakin' application.

Granted, this is just one tale of woe, and thankfully I'm not so addicted to SL that I feel the need to rectally prolapse all over the blog because of it; but I see this tale repeated time and again, and it really makes me wonder how many users Linden Lab haemorrage because of it.

My two annual premium accounts will not be getting renewed in August, not only because I'm no longer in a position to use SL, but because tech support has proven absolutely hopeless at a time when I needed it most. Once again, I ask myself, why the hell am I paying for this?

yeah, tl;dr.

unless you're bored.

Activated. But my homepage has a "contact" field as well...

I actually might even log back in a few times now they dumped the forced update. If I only can find an older client for download somewhere...

Wrong. Completely wrong, again. There may be good business reasons against open sourcing, or against any specific schedule for open sourcing, but security just is not one of those reasons. Again, to refresh our memories here: copybot existed long before the client was open sourced, and so did the most egregious grid-threatening exploits.

This is all off-topic, but I will grant that I'm a little nervous about grid-interconnect: the idea that servers not behind LL's firewall can become part of the main grid. But I'd be more nervous about that if they did it without first open sourcing the server code for community inspection. Just having server-to-server packets visible on the open network means those protocols had better be secure, and their implementations not subject to buffer overrun exploits, for example.

I think it would be great if LL could offer some sort of light-weight compatible-with-pretty-much-anything client that doesn't have all the fancy graphics, but gives a basic in-world presence, and then has a high-end client for those with systems that can handle it.

I just wonder how much more work (and therefore cost) it would be for them to develop and support to wholly different clients....

I agree Lindal. Maybe it is included above but I would also add artists to what you said. Its a great place to share ideas and create. I think SL will be a vacation designation as people need a break from all those tedious corporate 3D worlds.

Unless those corporations can be implemented properly huh Dnali?

Desmond, I don't feel picked on at all, but I also don't think you answered anything for me personally.

You compare SL to a basic computer. I'm saying it could turn out to be more like the Betamax player. Supierior... maybe. Anyone still use it? Anyone?

Mission statement:""It's our mission to connect us all to an online world that advances the human condition."


But ummm.... wouldn't you need to know how to provide good customer service before you tried to advance the human condition? Wouldn't you need to have the sensitivity to know how to communicate with your customers effectively (the recent "We're having a party you can't come to blog post springs to mind)? When 25% of all sessions result in crashing the client, how well are they connecting us?

Wouldn't it be slightly more difficult to get those few phone calls to the big boys begging for more millions answered if your investors were too busy backing other endevours that showed as much promise as yours did 3 years ago?

You call SL "The Main Grid" but does it have to stay the main grid? If Osgrid and Openlife grid and Deepgrid all eventaully connect together, why bother going thru the hassle connecting to SL grid? Economy? Can't I just steal a ton of content from SL and drag it with me for free to any of these grids? Why pay in an opensource world?

Then you remind us all that we (meaning premium, tier-fee paying residents) are the ones really supporting this whole thing. But is anybody who is paying for this platform really happy about that? And how many people from 2004 are still paying premium? From 2005? If you can't keep your resident supporters, how are you going to keep your corporate supporters? And why am I paying tier HERE when in Central Grid its significantly cheaper to 'own land'?

People don't value cheap. I offer you Walmart and the humble VW Bug in argument.

I respect you a great deal Des, and applaude the way you have used this platform to its fullest potential. But I think the people, like yourself, with so much invested in this platform are going to be the ones left out in the cold the most.

Change is coming. Adapt or die.

I strongly suspect that if the current official client was better optimized, and the code of better quality, it would be far more friendly to older systems.

It beggars belief that a 3.4GHz P4 with 2 Gig of RAM and a GeForce 7950GT (512MB) RAM would get 4fps with the official client because I'd bet on that spec being better than the average user's. That the same gets 40fps on the Linux client suggests this is more to do with sloppy, inadequately tested code than hardware limitations, and the quality would surely get worse if they started working on more clients (besides Windlight, et al.).

This is what is most intriguing about SL.


The experiment is proceeding as one would expect.


Maybe expecting LL to have figured out, at this point, exactly how to change the nature of human society is a bit unrealistic.


Just like some people in rl.


In real life every time something happens that bothers people who are able to influence law makers the lawmakers do their best to come up with new law to address the situation. It is a piece meal haphazard way to try to perfect human society but it's the best system we've developed so far.
SL isn't real life and is a microcosm. So it's an opportunity to observe and think about ways to affect change in human society without rushing to set controls on the details of what individuals are able and obliged to do.

Yes and I should have been clearer in my sentence there. It's not just that they Open source the client and say they plan to Open Source all of it, they allowed some non-employees to play with the code, instead of guarding it like Fort Knox.

So yes I think that was a bad "business decision," especially since it is well known that some coders have an ideology, that anything not in the public domain and free is akin to being an instrument of evil dictators and capitalist pigs.

My point is that we don't live in a real world that is so Utopian and pure, that code can be released and people can be expected to be on an honor system.




But is "community inspection" really feasible? I'd be much less nervous knowing that LL was totally dedicated to preventing exploits with their own army of well-paid employees.

Actually, I don't think SL will be the BetaMax here, unless some new platform catapults itself into over 12 million signups or 15 or 20 or 30 million, whatever it will be when it comes along. Signups aren't a good measure, but... whatever the measure is, right now a competitor has roughly zero.

VHS pwned because of popular use - that's an argument for SL, not against it.

As for mythic perfect competitors that would BetaMax Second Life - who? When it comes to brass tacks there's croquet, vastpark, a number of others.

But there's also ActiveWorlds - that sleepy almost-Second-Life that has been around since 1995 or so. Second Life had already BetaMaxed ActiveWorlds, There.com and a host of almost-rans back in 2004, and then did a triple-homer victory dance in 2006.

Do I think there will never be a serious competitor? Of course not. But I've yet to see even one that I'd buy 100 shares of their stock based upon its soon-to-wow-everyone perfection.

* * * * *

Customer service et al - Even if we know what they are up to, doesn't mean they are doing it right. Would a purely financially driven competitor do better?

If you look at industries, from fast food to airlines to online games, one thing stands out. They *all* suck at customer service, don't they? You can be a customer service hero just by being less worse than the next guy - still abysmal, but 5% less abysmal! Yey.

Being the next big thing doesn't help either - if anything, it makes you impersonal and incapable as you grow in size. Remember Star Wars Galaxies, for instance? Oh, and wait... wasn't SWG from Sony? Sony, the company that the consultants were touting as the one going to pwn SL!?

If anyone thinks Sony is going to turn around after Star Wars Galaxies to become some kind of SL-like customer service perfection god, I've got a heavily damaged SWG landspeeder to sell ya.

Customer service will still be a problem for *everyone* in 2009, and still in 2019 and probably the year 2109 too.

* * * * *

As to why you can't just steal a ton of content from SL and drag it for free to some opensourced pirate grid - DMCA and criminal prosecution is why.

Who wants to be on the same grid that pirates Stroker's Xcite stuff? Think the ISP and the grid provider won't hear from Stroker's lawyer? Think a homegrown grid provider will actually be able to curb that kinda stuff when people log back in and re-upload it? Will such an operator be able to stay online once the content creator community retaliates with legal action? We are gonna see some grids shut off by their ISP's if their managers don't take DMCA's seriously.

Folks, even secondcitizen.com (a website) faced legal action and was taken down repeatedly by its ISP before it went down permanently due to concerns about legal action - don't think it won't happen. Even with the admin doing his level best to do things lawfully and right, which was the saddest part.

I also don't think the 'big boys' here would suddenly hop platforms and start funding a competitor to Second Life. "Gee sorry Phil, we were with you for fifteen years, our kids play together, but as they say in the biz... Ooh, Shiny! Don't take it so hard..." Heh. Not happening.

And why pay in an opensource world? Because bandwidth and customer service isn't free, that's why. A grid of motley home-servers isn't going to work. I think people get the cavalier sense that it's sort of like a BBS network or a webserver, but... it's not.

There are some pretty serious challenges here, and proper bandwidth costs serious cash. Peer to peer is possible but crushingly debilitating to world complexity (I'd love to lose this argument when household gigabit internet finally comes - I think that would finally be the breakthrough that makes it possible).

People do value cheap - WalMart and the VW are great examples for the real world, but not here. Here's the cheap VR world example: ActiveWorlds.

When it comes to capability, they are very, very close to Second Life performance for pennies on the dollar. Been around forever, too. So why aren't we all over there? Mostly for the same reasons we won't be on Open Life and Central Grid.

Sure there's a place for those, but try and talk a corporation into getting a Central Grid location. Heh. My RL business has paid more for a small weekly ad in an industry news rag than monthly tier cost for a region (3 x 4 inch ad: 700 USD/wk, tier: a mere 295/mo) - and my RL biz is microscopic in the grand scheme of things.

Watch businesses get entire grids just to screw around with them, just because they can, here in 2009:

http://secondlifegrid.net/

* * * * *

Yeah, people like myself would bear the brunt of it if things went badly here. No doubt about that - if I didn't believe what I was typing here, I probably wouldn't be doing what I do.

I've put my time and money where my mouth is - I hope people can see that. Caledon is now well over 100,000 USD of business annually (I get a minor fraction of that, most goes to tier).

Shall I adapt or die. I've been management in California tech companies, I've worked at a 10-person startup that sold for multiple millions (a rare '90's success story, well, save that I didn't get any proceeds! heh) and I've started up my own successful RL biz which will be 7 years old this June. So I leave it to you sir, to decide if I shall adapt or die.

* * * * *

Pie, I'll risk violating the 'gambling' restriction and place a $L 1 gentleman's bet with you.

"I bet that at the end of 2009, Second Life won't have a direct competitor with an equal online concurrency." - Desmond Shang, 13 Mar 2007.

To clarify: a direct competitor that isn't a fundamentally dragonslaying 'game world' like World of Warcraft, or a myspace with a lame, non-contiguous-worldy little 3d room trapped on the web page. I'll even let you "make the call" if the world is a valid or not, how's that.

Opensource worlds will count, and if concurrency isn't available some benchmark statistics to estimate concurrency may prove your point, I'll be a gentleman and look at it fairly. We can average things a bit, by month or by quarter or something; I'm not talking about precise concurrency at the stroke of midnight 1 Jan 2010 as that would be ridiculous.

Furthermore, I'll make an additional bet that at the end of 2010, there still won't be a direct competitor with Second Life's concurrency.

I'll double-or-nothing the first $L bet! If you are right, you have a great opportunity to snatch $L 2 from my open hand. (Heh, well if I'm wrong, $L 2 might not be worth the bits it's printed on, but believe me I'd have lost more than that by then anyway).

What say, friend?

Yes it's very unrealistic. They need to be there to help residents at a moments notice and have radical new, built in, technical protections, to catch offenders, bots, illegal activity etc. and a very clear cut set of rules that deter and stop, scammers and the devious from running amok.

On the other hand the ideal of making SL a positive tool to improve the human communication that could help the "Human Condition," is a great ideal, but SL itself, is not going to be a tool to help improve anything if it's allowed to be a Bordertown melting pot of scammers. Putting the cart in front of the horse doesn't work. Allowing cats and mice in the same room tends to lead to bloodshed

I think assuming this is a bit dangerous, because these things _could_ compete with SL, and in fact are likely to become more of a threat to SL as SL's model evolves.

Great arguments for sure.

I think the biggest SL-killer would be SL itself, unless they make major changes.

After enough people get burned and if people at large, look at it as scam-central then who will take it seriously except those looking for a free-for-all.

If SL ends up with the same rep as "Nigerian Email" Scams, crooked Multi-level marketing, ponzi schemes, or has the rep of allowing illegal behaviors to occur, then the media will oblige the seeming, SL deathwish and help them die quickly.

Well a full scale, direct competitor isn't going to come out of nowhere.

So its pretty obvious there wont be one by the end of 2009.

That doesn't mean SL isn't in a situation where it isn't ripe for a competitor to come and steal huge amounts of its active user base.

In fact companies that have been musing the idea over might feel encouraged by this very report done by a such a "respected" company.

I think it's very unlikely that a competitor would steal a large amount of SL's existing user base. What a competitor is likely to try and do is to either: a) use a different hosting and business model to provide a different experience to SL; or b) predict the future evolution of SL's own model, and design a hosting and business model that revolves around that. In other words, it won't take SL's existing users, but it will cause SL's growth to slow down. And that could damage SL quite badly because a lot of the economy depends on continuous growth - most L$ purchases are still made by newly arriving users.

Most of the current competitors, it seems, are doing (b): they're providing disparate hosting, removing the integration of content creation, and focusing on social ease of use. In other words, they're extrapolating the trends SL is showing, of increased movement towards managed private island communities, professionalization of content creation, and a rise in socially-focused non-creative end-users as the final customers.

The "3D web" idea has a lot of potential, but it has yet to be proven, and it will depend on decentralisation which will drastically affect the business models involved.

I disagree.

A comparable, direct competitor, if it existed could steal a sizable portion LL's user base without even breaking a sweat.

LL has simply alienated too many of its customers for this not to be the case.

Of course if such a competitor went into development, LL would probably make an effort to reverse that situation.

That's a fair point. For the alienated customers that stay in SL (and if they aren't staying in SL, they are no longer part of "LL's user base" and are no longer there to be "stolen" the question is if they are staying because there is no better alternative, or continuing to stay in SL because they are getting unique benefits from SL. (eg, making money, or having an established social network) Now I _personally_ think that the latter is more likely, but the former is entirely possible it's true.

There are enough posters who have said as much on these forums over the years for me to have no doubt this is the situation in many cases.

Deal

Never let it be said I couldn't be a gentleman
(no snickering Colette)

I couldn't help it.

I was snickering before I even got to the parentheses part

I suspect that if someone did get a truly comparable service up and running, many of us would be amongst their first users, just to see if it was what it promised. If it was a stable world, with a similar ability to create content, and half-decent customer service, then as soon as people started posting here that it was worth looking at (and they would) more of us would try and LL could find many of its main supporters drifting away.

The biggest problem a competitor might have is that unless it was very good when it launched SL's regular users would probably tend to stick with what they know rather than face being someone else's beta testers, and those who dipped into SL and never came back would probably say "just another SL" and quit.

It's true, but.. I mean, it sort of confuses me because if they are staying in SL, they _must_ be forming some kind of attachment here. I mean, if they are socialising they must have friends, if they are creating content they have work they won't want to lose, if they are making money they'll want to carry on doing that... I just don't see how someone can at once be active in SL but also be "coasting" so freely that they could just change world because another one came along. But that might just be me.

I suspect it's very unlikely that a competitor would have the same content creation functions because the cost of those functions, in terms of system load, is very high and the current economic evolution may turn out to show that it is a dead end anyway.

When you're inventing a really new technology-based product like 3D Virtual Worlds, the barrier to success is not: is this the best world? (It is pretty much a given that, anywhere during an invention phase, the product will not be completely "right". The barrier is, is it good enough for people to buy? If so, then can I get enough people to sign up so that I can grow it quickly enough that newcomers to the field will find it hard to catch up? (and, I would argue, anyone with payment info on file has 'bought').

Ergo, Microsoft. And Cisco. Very early in their fields, captured market and stayed ahead. Despite not being the best product available.

And, I am with Des on this ... I think you can add SL to that list for the Virtual Community (not game) market segment. That is, what I call the "retail" VW space ... the one that relies on individual consumers to sign up and have fun.

But, in the corporate world, I agree with Gartner that the product is not "good enough to buy". The feature set isn't quite right, and it isn't reliable enough. So, if LL wants to have corporations buy their platform to deploy grids that interconnect with other corporations' grids, and perhaps even to SL ... I think that field is still wide open.
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