Proof that LL are not idiots?

DISCLAIMER: the following comments are only my personal opinion as a private person, which should be taken with a grain of salt as well as the right of free speech in mind. It's not a personal attack on any individuals working at LL or any SL user.

From all I know, LL started out with "I read a science fiction novel, and now I have this cool idea (The Vision™) of a metaverse, kinda like the internet but in 3D". The idea sold well (i.e., found sponsors), so a team was hired and left to work on pretty much whatever they'd like to work at. Pick something from the list that seems to be fun, write some code that is halfway compatible with the code of your co-developers, then move on to the next fun task and don't bother altoo much with testing and debugging.

The creative chaos worked out, as chaos often does. Chaos always has astonishing results, although these results are rarely stable or reliable. A sort of MMO was created. One of the reasons that it worked: the content creation as well as product testing and bug-hunting was entirely left to the customers. Well, rather beta testers than customers in those days. At some point it became obvious that the venture capital wouldn't last forever, so the beta testers had to be turned into paying beta testers.

Land "sales" for real money, L$ to US$ exchange. A nice idea, but not really thought through. SL turned into a world not only "built and owned by residents", but also being a money sink for residents, even those who just wanted to play without owning any land. Wasn't exactly The Vision™ of Amazon selling CDs and other RL wares in virtual 3D shops and McD paying for virtual road signs, while slap-happy residents created lots of free content just for the fun of it. Instead, residents sold content that LL didn't bother to build to other residents. SL, still in a beta stage (never really left this stage, but MMOs never do) failed to be a reliable and secure business platform, and people had suddenly a lot of money tied into an MMO, with only a share of this money being paid to the provider. Not a good combination.

Another thing that conflicted with The Vision™: a MMO that allows its players to build and script almost everything imaginable can only turn into a world full of virtual sex, of even the most depraved and uncommon varieties. I don't mean that in a pejorative way; that's exactly why I'm here. As well as many if not most other residents. Whenever I heard or read of SL 2 years ago, it was mentioned as an adult game or a sex MMO. No one but us adult roleplayers and sex maniacs had much use for this world. There already was a 2D internet, which worked just fine for the serious businesses LL was hoping to attract. They didn't need laggy 3D shops full of customers flirting with each other or shooting and caging each other, with the need to hire shop personal as well as security.

Because of all this (SL not being much of a game, being unreliable as a business platform, having not enough users to justify RL product placement, having content that needed to be bought with real money and attracting mostly people looking for an "adult game", a virtual sex simulation), LL tried a new strategy to attract larger numbers of users, in order to draw public attention and wake the interest of respectable RL companies. The flood gates were opened (i.e., age verification by credit card removed) and millions of bored teenagers swarmed all over the grid. Of course they did. An adult game for free! Yay! 1$ whores! All you can eat!

A completely irresponsible strategy considering the adult nature and the content of SL, but it worked out. For LL at least. Finally SL had sufficient media attention and high enough user numbers (at least on the paper) to attract "the real businesses". Only problem, aside from legal concerns: the grid broke down. Apparently no one had bothered to ponder if the home-grown network and database solution could possibly handle the load. Turned out that it couldn't. The price for nice looking user numbers, caused by millions of kids and other people with a lot of spare time but without the means or the will to pay for their entertainment, was to give up the little stability and reliability expected and counted on by the few paying customers.

Lack of scalability, lag, packet loss, crashes, database issues. Customer service overworked, mostly through complaints by people who couldn't really be called customers because they didn't pay a dime to LL. The brilliant solution: let's simply get rid of the customer service and completely ignore our user base. But it still worked, somehow. People endure everything for sex.

By now, SL has reached a point where The Vision™ seems to be within reach again. If by competence or by luck, who knows. I don't doubt that some people at LL are really competent, otherwise it wouldn't work at all. But on the whole, it's... chaos. Creative chaos.
Lots of publicity (both positive and negative, who cares), which draws both more users and RL companies riding the publicity wave. The grid is still up and running, held together with tape and chewing gum. Every now and then it throws up or coughs blood after swallowing someone's inventory, but is always up and crawling again after a little rest, often a tad laggier and less stable than before.

Even if LL manages to turn SL into a more stable and reliable platform again, the trust of many residents is severely damaged. Not only due to bugs, instability, sudden price increases of 150%, a TOS that claims ownership of everything a resident bought and worked for (contrary to the advertised promises), a lack of customer service and an utter lack of concern for paying customers. Also due to the haphazard way LL dealt with the recent media events in order to avoid further bad press. People need stability, in more than one regard.

Aside from that: who knows what The Vision™ may consist of. Perhaps a clean and shiny world without all the ugly adult entertainment, where kids can visit their grandmother between McD and C.Cola advertisements. An open-source world where all digital content can be copied without any restrictions, other than legal restrictions. Where the content creators who now make a living in SL or at least earn enough to pay for their virtual land are no longer needed, can pack up their things and leave. A world ruled by laws that treat cartoon figures as living beings, enforced by moralists who despise too much personal freedom, even in digital dreamworlds. A world where being protected from your own dreams and desires is more important than the protection of minorities or the right of free speech and free thought.

A reply in advance to the "leave if you don't like it" comments that may follow: it doesn't make much sense to say "If you aren't satisfied with your ISP, who happens to be a monopolist, then stay off the internet." I already rented a server and invested lots of time and money in creating an internet presence, now I can't back out anymore. My ISP needs to get their act together and deliver the promised service. Also, if nothing else, the community still makes SL a wortwhile experience.

I doubt that growth of any kind whether of population or anything else shows LL is competant.
The large majority of accounts are free. Many are by the same person who has two, three or more avs. It took LL a few yrs to get to one million players and just a few months to surpass that amount one, two or more times over and the free accounts with no need for any kind of verification of ID was the cause for all the new accounts.

Lately, it seems everything is broken, not working at all or the way it should be. Things like not being to tp -which is so important in sl- not fixed and fixed properly in over a year. The case with the textures, another major problem that has persisted for along time also not repaired. And now you can't buy Lindens which is needed for the progress of the population also not being addressed. The Lindens issue has been going on for over a week now.
Would a competant company let these major problems go on for such long periods of time without being given the priority they need and deserve? I don't think so!

Incompetancy rules in Second Life.

Learjeff, I want to say that your analysis is brilliant.

Clearly, you don't work for LL, and probably never will.

I think what we criticize is not competence so much as policy decisions. LL decides to release stuff before it is really ready, before it has been fully tested. LL decides that it is more important to keep giving us new features, than to make sure that the old features continue to work properly. LL decides that, with regard to customer service, good enough is good enough - rather than to strive for excellence.

Al Franken characterizes the difference between Republicans and Democrats in a way that is illustrative to this situation. He says "Republicans love their country like a 5 year old loves his mommy. Mommy can do no wrong. Democrats love their country like a mature adult loves his mother. Despite her flaws and weaknesses, you still love Mother, but want to see her at her best."

SL critics are like the Democrats. We love SL so much that we get really frustrated when they make mistakes.

Yep, the Democrats are the saviors of America. And Al Franken is just the man to lead them....

in your chart did you ever consider those hours could be ppl waiting for textures to load, yoyo prims, fighting ghosts and redoing countless hours of work?

just wondering...

LOL.................and don't you love how Democrates and Republicans can get involve in SL/LL disputes?

Y'all just entertain me to no end sometimes.

Growth in SL is spurred by the Pr machine. And people who chat in the forums also count as log-on hours. I never log-off of the website, so technically i am logged-on 24 hours 7 days a week, even when i am not home. So how does that affect your stats? Every company balloons their numbers (facebook, Myspace, WOW) it helps draw more users and corporate dollars, so why do two SL cheerleaders believe LL's numbers as if they were the gospel? 5 year olds rarely live in reality, they are very gullable, and they always buy what mommy's selling. (And none of SL's problems affect me, so this is a critical analysis from an unbias resident).

From an unimpeachable data source:

I have a pretty thorough understanding of technical issues (Ph.D. in computational astrophysics, a couple of years as a research scientist, and most recently working developing mathematical/computational models for a large financial institution) and experience developing things that have never been done before, and I can't imagine releasing code into production that is as buggy as what LL shovels out.

The fact of the matter is, although they are doing something that is somewhat novel (at least it was four years ago), it's really the ideas and methodology that are new and hard to come up with. Once a methodology has been decided on, there is no excuse for sloppy coding. I think the real problem is that the Tao of Linden (tm) promotes mediocrity, as nobody has any real motivation to produce robust code when "kinda works" is good enough to count as an accomplishment. Debugging and QA are hard work and Not Fun, and that's not what the Tao is all about.

Referencing an old and entertaining argument from a while back, could we postulate that Linden Labs is poulated less by Techies and more by the Liberal Arts crowd and are therefore more concerned with the social and aesthetic aspects and are promoting them , technical deficiencies be damned? Some have accused the providers of catering to the tech types, but could the reverse be true?

Alright, I'm weighing back in for no apparent reason, but because I'm extremely bored.

Yes, Second Life is nearly bleeding edge when it comes to 'how complex can we make it?' We all expect a certain level of bugs in the code, but when we combine an continuous cycle of bugs that really become 'show-stoppers' and 'major annoyances' with the lack of a decent customer support, we get annoyed.

And we are right to be annoyed. We're trying to help Linden Labs turn Second Life into something good, but right now, we're seeing an increase from LL in sticking their overall fingers into their overall ears and going, "Can't hear you! Fingers in our ears!" Yeah, we can file bug reports and JIRA tickets, but they don't give you the free flow experimenting of a technical Live Chat or phone call.

Prime example: My husband had the weirdest case of "Ruthing" that I have never seen before. You see, he appeared ruthed, but even waiting an hour didn't change things. Couldn't use any of the workarounds such as editing appearance, because the appearance was grayed out. Couldn't change shapes or anything because the folders were empty and never 'spawned' so to speak. Did the whole log out, clear the cache log in, log out clear the cache, log into a different sim, another different sim and all that. We even detached EVERYTHING and did the routine, only to find that they were reattached the avatar was logged back in. Couldn't even teleport. We could move just fine, but buying anything meant losing it the moment the avatar was logged out.

Basically it was like the avatar was never disconnected fully from the world.. but never fully connected either. So, he contacted Live Help and eventually, after dealing with a poor over worked volunteer, got Char Linden. Nothing was resolved that night, because of both RL (such as needing sleep to work with) and the fact that Char needed a tech to look at it which takes time, of course. His wasn't the only avatar suffering, but it wasn't wide spread, so there weren't many 'examples' of the issue. The next day, since he was work, I had his avatar online for them. And mine.. two separate computers, mine was on his computer this time, which proved that it wasn't our end, because Raudf was completely unaffected.

Char had to relay information between me and the tech, which is frankly, a Liaison's job. Finally, after most of the next day having gone by, I was told they were ready to test a potential fix. Which was grand with me. They had to briefly isolate Pooley but whatever it was they did it fixed it after a quick log out and back in.

I don't think we could have fixed the issue without the free flow chatting, experimenting and such required to fix bugs. JIRA's great for seeing if others are suffering it, but... *shrug* It just seems more artificial.