Proof that LL are not idiots?

OK, most of us love SL. Sure, there are things we'd like to see fixed, and everyone wants fewer crashes and less lag. No doubt there are also plenty of cases with real grievances where people have problems that aren't being addressed by LL.

But I see a lot of posts that accuse them of being incompetent, and frankly, it just ain't so. Here's a little graph that pretty much proves it. This is a chart of LL resident in-world hours, per mont, since Sept 2003, plotted on a logarithmic scale, which is the appropriate way to graph things that show exponential growth. (Notice that the numbers on the left go up by a *factor of 10*, meaning 10 times as many hours, and not just by a fixed amount like that idiotic chart people show about the deficit which hides the real significance!)

http://learjeff.net/SL/forum/slgrowth.jpg

Notice how the line is pretty flat, showing exceptionally consistent growth. Sure, a few little bumps here and there, but for any market or business growth chart it's remarkably smooth.

If you crunch the numbers, you find that the number of hours all residents are spending in SL is growing pretty steadily at a rate of around 400% per year. That means, every 12 months, SL is getting 5 times as much use overall. That's really incredible growth to sustain over nearly 4 years. If it keeps up for 9 more years, then every person in the world will be spending 2000 hours per year (the equivalent of a full time job). Of course, that won't happen, but it puts in perspective how fast this growth is.

Just keep this in mind when we want to rant about how LL isn't paying attention, or that they're incompetent, or that they just don't care. This is, and pretty much *should be*, their primary focus: pleasing as many people as much as possible to keep them ingame and getting more people ingame and spending lots of time ingame. It's the measurement that really counts. Of course, another measurement that counts is of course, whether they make a profit doing it, but that's mere business and not a measurement of how happy the residents are with SL.

By and large, the measurement of total hours ingame *is* a good measurement of how happy *most* people are with SL. If they weren't happy, they'd watch TV or something!

This is a formidable accomplishment and despite the flaws and snafus, LL deserves recognition for it.

have u been living under a rock with all the db issue`s for the past couple of weeks with the crown of it all with yesterday prims dissapear from the land randomly?

incompitence and idiocy has nothing to do with eachother, we are the idiots that we go on as normal and take every loss for granted

a line or graphic say nothing about the ppl behind the scenes, they should fire the entire db team and find some compitent ppl who know what they`re doing

Ahhh. so making things take 15 minutes to rezz is a business tactic? brilliant.

No you are right. No one is putting one of Squeeze's guns to my head to make me log on.
Overall my experience is positive, I'm getting my money's worth. I just wish they would stop with the stupid blog announcements.

I would like to assert that even the very best software developers in the world aren't perfect, and that they write software with bugs in it just like the rest of us. It's not possible to have software of this kind of complexity be completely free of issues.

Having said that, I am pretty damned annoyed about the recent db and data server issues, and I hope they get resolved soon too. I just don't think that it means that the "entire db team" should be fired.

.

Keeping 100 residents happy is quite obviously more efficient than keeping 1 resident happy. But how does that change when those 100 never have and never will spend a single RL pennie on your platform and the 1 resident faithfully pays their tier every month?

Despite all of the grand numbers, there is only a comparatively small base who actually puts in any money directly, and a slightly larger group who does so indirectly and they're the ones who keep the light bulbs over at LL's office burning.

As long as SL keeps on growing, there are enough new people to make up for any old disgruntled residents who leave, but growth isn't eternal and LL may find that once the growth curve flattens out that they burned their bridges with their existing customers who they rely on to fund the whole house of cards.

oh don`t get me wrong, like it was 2-3 months ago with just slow rezzing at times and a occasional hickup i could live with but counting back from the past 3 weeks when the prim deletion went from normal to slow as hell and ghosts and now with prims just randomly vanish from the land for no reason would say enough how bad the db monkeys are doing...
no wonder they added a free banana sculp prim in the library^^

this is getting way out of control, instead of clearing cache to solve bugs, i just restart the region as not much is client side anymore unlike 2-3 months ago where a cache clear would solve almost everything

I'm curious what percentage of the number of residents online at any given moment are campers. (Happy or not).

It does get annoying when everyday things that are working suddenly go wrong ..and continue for extended periods. When new features are bugged, it's understandable.

No, no, no.. don't give them any more ideas! We have enough issues getting them to communicate with us as it is!

I'm keeping in mind a lot of things when I complain. When I say Linden Labs, I mean the company, not the individual Lindens, unless I state otherwise. The company is not the most competent I've dealt with. Actually in the areas of overall customer service, I have to say it's the LEAST competent.

I admit that on an individual basis, I've had rather nice experiences with the Lindens I've met.

(For those who wonder how I can actually think like this: A company may be made of up individuals, but it is not the individuals that run it. The individual has no say in what the company does, except to quit. Chances are the company won't even notice them leaving.)

more then u`d think...
in the past 2 days i did a island hop around the world (open map and pick places where there were atleast a couple of ppl and tp in), safe to say that of all places i got (from beaches/sex clubs/gay islands/etc etc) most of the population were campers

there`s place near my island wich by the looks of it will become a popular place aswell soon, a graveyard(no, a real graveyard) of a couple dozen stands with L$1 every 8 minutes and the place was perhaps 3/4th full

the campers are every where and in huge numbers, went to that carnaval island to finally see what the fuzz was all about, guess what, campers, campers, campers and a ocean of campers heh

in search, start at the last entry with no traffic, support the lil guys who don`t want/afford campers, no point in going to high traffic area`s and avoid as the plague cause all u get there are campers

pathetic

Yes any system of this level of complexity is subject to bugs, we all understand that. Where the low level of LL's competancy is demonstrated is in things like them fixing a bug only to reintroduce the very same bug with the next update. Or when tehy announce a fix or change in an update only to come back later and say that "it slipped through the cracks" and was not included. The very best and even most of the far from best software developers have at least some form of version control to prevent an update from actually regressing the software. LL is in very serious need of someone who understands the software development precess to take control and move them forward to what they can be instead of the mess they are now.

I don't mean do away with "Stupid Blog Announcements". I mean the "Stupid" blog announcements.

Well it is a nice graph but you also need to compare it to population growth to get a proper look at the happyness of sl. If the hours online grow by 400% in the last year but the population of users grows by 800% then there would be a downturn in the general happiness of residents. Looking at the graph sl make from january 2006 to march 2007 showed a a 7.5 times incress in user hours. http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy-graphs.php

In the same time the number of users grew by 27 times. this shows a rather massive degrees in the number of hours per user on average
http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy-graphs.php

I don't think that's an unusual take on it . The few Lindens we get to interact with are at the bottom of the whole chain (exception would be Kelly Linden's office hours I guess) and they can't do or change anything.

The Lindens who do spend any amount of time on the actual main grid are generally personally sympathetic to most grievances or problems but they're not in a position to do anything about it, it's the higher up ones who are out of touch with 'reality'.

Throw into that equation that hardware failure can occur at any time to any one of us I think they do a pretty swell job.Kudos LL.

But to 'them' they are all stupid! But I agree... they really need to attach a shock-collar to two of 'ems keyboards, that are set to zark them whenever they go to post without someone at least giving the post a reality check. The others at least make sense and do use punctuation, as well as some grammar

*nods to Kitty* You summed it up better. When I'm angry, I am angry at the 'company' not the individual. The individuals that are lowest often get the most respect from me, because of the chewings they take for the 'company.' (Customer support gets it the worst! 5 years of proof!) And I lose my 'repect and awe' the higher up the company food chain we go. Now, there are exceptions, such as those managers who actually are paying attention to what's going on and can fully step in to help out when needed. (Man, these beasties be rare.)

But the company... needs a lot of work, in this case. I could offer tips, but I think the lower level Lindens could offer better ones!

Well, they didn't. Not at all. Script upload is still failing 9 out of 10 times. Boy am I disappointed

just did a lil test

rezzed my old 1170 prim mansion, unlinked it and started deleting pieces slowly

gave it some time aswell as the server might be abit stressed out(not appearing so, instant rez), this is what i`m left with:

203!!! ghost prims


sim restarted and all gone again as they should have been, what were u saying about the db team not being incompitent idiots???

and lost my HD big black sofa corner aswell...

What makes you think this is a DB problem anyway?

Even smart and "competent" (not compitent) people come up against incredibly difficult problems.

They're not incompetent... though they may be fools for having attempted the impossible.

There is a difference.

what ever it is, i`ve just had to request a rollback as items can`t be taken into inventory anymore and they are lost, wich also means that till then i can`t do jack shit again

way to go LL

Now Brenda, if they stopped the stupid blog announcements, what would we have to talk about on the forums?

Your chart demonstrates only one thing -- when you add more users, they will end up using more time. What your chart does not show is that the hours used *per resident* has been dropping. That's regardless of what definition of resident you use.

Let's take a 1-year baseline (May 2006 to May 2007).

If you take LL's "unique residents" number, you get a drop from 18.36 hours per user per month down to 4.75 hours per user per month.

Don't like that? Using LL's "all accounts ever registered" number, you get a drop from 14.55 hours per user per month down to 3.03 hours per user per month.

If we look at the 30-day unique login number (which is arguably the most relevant for this comparison as we'll be measuring "time spent in-world by people who actually logged in over the time period in question", we find a drop from 28.61 hours per user per month down to 18.93 hours per user per month.

So although the absolute time spent in SL has been increasing, each individual is spending much less time in world than before. I interpret that as people *not* loving what has been happening to SL these days.....

No, it also shows that the numbers have been increasing steadily and exponentially. That is very significant. In fact, it was the whole point of the graph.


Interesting, and good point. Yet the number of total hours keeps increasing, and dramatically. I say this means they're doing something right. Not everything, but something very important.

The folks who assert that LL are incompetent have no clue about the technical issues involved. The folks who asser that LL goof up, well, they're right. I've worked with some of the top software companies in the world and believe me, they all goof up. Few of them attempt as challenging an application as LL does. The guy I met who was responsible for a complete overhaul of the software system used by the IRS, well, ok, that was a bigger job. Not as novel an application, however.

LL is doing new stuff. They're learning as they go. There will be no shortage of screwups. The people who rant and rave about incompetence are usually those who've never been responsible for anything technically challenging, or they'd have a little more empathy and understanding.

u should work for LL`s PR department learjeff, ur as ignorant as they come

the db has been going on sfor atleast 3 months and getting worse by the day

I may not have a clue about the technical issues, but I do have an idea about customer service issues.

It is totally incompetent for the person answering the phone at LL to tell callers that they don't work in customer service.

Anyone who answers a phone at a business that has customers, works in customer service. LL is remiss in their training of employees if they are not teaching them this very basic principle.