Lost Inventory, & free/Basic users

True, but I could never give up those mints on my pillow every night.

I suspect it is because Linden Labs shorthanded staff is already overwhelmed by the number of support tickets, AR's and complaints they get from premium members. Limiting that intake from basic members makes it easier for them to cope with the workload.

I can't imagine this is not the case. And probably the information they are getting now is representational of what they would be getting if they were hearing about every single problem.

Thanks. I'm a gamer, & a programmer, & a smart guy, & I've spent a lot of time learning about SL in a short time (my RL work-out program has suffered!)...though I feel I have a LOT left to learn. You should see the newbie questions I ask on the NCI Group chat. Today I'm learning how to take stuff in my Inventory and put it in a box But I HAVE already made my first customizable HUD!

I guess...but as you can see from forum posts & inappropriate JIRA issues, Inventory loss keeps happening (& who knows how many Support tickets), so clearly they don't know the root causes yet.

Bear in mind, even if Basics are allowed to send in a ticket, it doesn't mean they all will. Some won't know they can, some will find the process too difficult, some will send so little detail that it's of no use to Linden in troubleshooting so it'll be ignored, etc.

I clarified the JIRA issue that it is not specifically requesting that Linden HELP Basic users (though actually I think it should when we lose items)...it is requesting that we be ALLOWED to help Linden! By giving them data (ticket info) to help them track down bugs that affect everyone.

Cool, I don't know anything about making huds (come to think about it...what do I know)..

I think you answered your own points there. Basic users should have support in recovering inventory because for _anyone_ to lose inventory, damages a keystone of the entire SL economy.

I'm really shocked that LL are claiming that they "have no way of recovering" inventory that can't be gotten back from the information in the KB article. The old instruction we were given was to report inventory loss via IM to a specific Linden but I suppose even that is out of the window now. The claim about "there are too many lost items" seems like a real wimp-out to me, because SL is a piece of software and so inventory losses are presumably programmatic - in other words, when they find one cause of inventory loss and fix it, several thousand items could be restored (as they in fact were when they fixed the "invalid parents" issue a few months ago).

I don't know. 1.3million people have used SL in the past 60 days. Only 92,000 people in SL are Premium. So only 7% of the population has even the ability to enter an Inventory loss ticket. That's if they experience a loss. And if they then know they can do a ticket. And if they don't find the process too difficult (some people complain submitting tickets is too hard, or they may not speak English well). And do they then even give enough detail that Linden can use it to help find bugs?

I have to think that if the other 93% of the population were allowed to help kill the bugs that Linden would learn new things out of that. And just because Basics were allowed to submit tickets, that doesn't mean Linden has to act on them. But at least the data is there, to act on, to research, whatever Linden pleases. And at least then Linden isn't COMPLETELY ignoring what Basics contribute to Linden's financial health.

All figures from here:
http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php

Are there any possible causes of a lose in inventory? I have about 15k and I've yet to lose something that has not come back, granted I had one left boot that took a few months but it DID return.

Is it caused by having too much inventory? Certain items more suceptable to loss than others?

It's probably too time/money-intensive to find everything. If they find it quick/easy, fine, you get it back, otherwise, too bad.

And you know what? I'll even accept that for an answer. But they should then do their DARNED-EST to fix the problem so it doesn't happen again going forward. But they're not. Because they're ignoring 93% of the diagnosing data.

Hey, maybe someone should sell item insurance in Linden! Or, Linden should have a small fund and if your loss is confirmed, they re-imburse you out of that fund. Perhaps with the item itself, so it isn't subject to schemes just looking to grab some L$. All you can get from the fund is...an object/clothing/animation, etc., if you can prove you had it and now lost it.

I've just lost my inventory for the second time..........have no idea y it happened either time. Didn't crash, wasn't in a high traffic area (a little deserted island i call home). I logged in yesterday, went to put on my jeans and nothing there and being a girl, i then looked for my hair.............nothing........everything gone except the gorgeous locks on my head.............then shoes............nothing..........had to go dancing in my barefeet!!

I did the clear cache thing twice and rebooted both times and waited........then waited some more........went from about 4000 items to 1600, did searches and all the folders r empty.

I hate going back to the hair suppliers and asking them to replace as they did so kindly the first time, but i will, a girl's gotta have good hair.

I'm going to try again, but have already started shopping again and I HATE shopping even if it is free.

This is my second AV, no problem with my first one ever, so what's the difference. Both of us are basic users.

So, besides the clear cache and starting in an even emptier sim, any other suggestions for this weary girl??

Unfortunately the only thing I can add is that sometimes stuff does come back. Eventually. Slowly. After many months.


Yes, it does not always come back. I would imagine that SL has lost residents from this issue. I, for one, would have left SL shortly after losing my inventory if not for one strong reason not to leave. That was a while back. Most of the inventory did not return, though some of it did, eventually.

The one that's frustrated me most is that I had a nice custom AO that I made up, and it became useless when several of the no-copy animations were lost FROM INSIDE THE AO - I had no idea that could happen, but apparantly it did.

/me still looking for the top of my dragons head.... :/

Try everything you see here:
https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=4578
(note: direct links to support articles often fail, but if you visit the Knowledge Base first, or, maybe, click this link first:
https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417 then it should work. Or just go to the Knowledge Base, do a search on "inventory loss", and read the article "Inventory: Complete recovery steps and information about perceived loss"...that's the article to which I'm trying to give you a direct link)

And here:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Inventory_Recovery_Steps#USING_THE_BETA_GRID_TO_RECOVER_LOST_INVENTORY

And also vote for this Linden request:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-532

While I agree there is such a thing as "perceived" inventory loss, there is also such a thing as actual inventory loss. I lost many things early last year up until whatever patch changed the order of events for taking an item back into inventory after being rezzed. There was some issue where the item would properly disappear from the world WITHOUT properly reappearing in inventory. I agree with the OP that it is absurd basic users are unable even to report such losses any longer. It makes little sense to restrict problem reports to a very small part of your user-base unless you aren't that serious about tracking down the problem. As we can see even in this thread, many people assume that because inventory loss hasn't happened to them (perhaps they just haven't noticed?), then it doesn't happen to anyone.

Thankfully, inventory loss issues seem to be much less prevalent than they once were.

Yes... the first time I lost my ENTIRE inventory - hair, skin, clothes, everything. My av was still wearing clothes (non-prims) which were nowhere to be found in the inventory. Because of that, Linden Lab investigated even though my account is a basic account.

Result: They don't know what went wrong. They couldn't restore the inventory. They acknowledged that it was an "unsatisfactory outcome". They couldn't even tell me what to do to prevent it from happening again.

I created a new account and started from scratch because I didn't trust that account anymore. My new alt has just lost HALF of her inventory. The folders are there but they are empty. And AGAIN... I'm still wearing clothing I apparently don't have, but this time the prims didn't disappear.

I swear to God, if the items don't come back, I'm done with SL. It is supposed to be fun, not give me this kind of aggravation and hassle.

We've had a few people on the forums report exactly this ... multiple avies who've lost HUGE hunks of inventory. Usually, the inventory has over 10K items ... did yours, Quaintly? Yet, the vast majority of users experience no inventory loss at all. There seems to be something about the way certain people set up their accounts, or perhaps the PCs they play on, that makes this more likely.

This smells like a single, subtle server-side bug causing these massive repeat losses. Perhaps a timing issue, or perhaps a folder setup issue. If I were fixing bugs at LL, I would post a thread here to gather together as many names as possible who have suffered exactly this, dredge out the archives and compare their inventories before and after the problem, and get detailed info on their home setups. I bet the answer would then be fairly clear.
.

Or they could stop ignoring bug reporting data from 90% of their population & let Basic users help them fix the problem by allowing us to tell them exactly all of this info when we have a problem. And yet you commented against, and didn't vote for,
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-532 ?


I doubt that. We have very few options in setting-up our accounts or the software that could affect this. My computer meets LL requirements, and yet I lost a bunch of stuff for no reason.

It's a bug. It's a database, databases shouldn't forget stuff. 10 years ago I was writing multi-node multi-database commits with run-of-the-mill software. LL should be able to do it today. Or at least implement backups & checksums so when they drop the ball, they know it and can automatically recover your stuff except for the most recent additions.

If they didn't ignore bug data from 90% of their population they might ferret-out if it was related to account or computer setup. Heck, they could write a program to automatically figure this out from the data submitted (for users that include their "About" info like they're supposed to).

Would your stance change if you lost 6,000 inventory items tonight?

I'm pretty sure that Residents Logged-In During Last 60 Days == number of logins, not unique logins.

So if you login twice a day you get counted twice.

But even if you are premium they don't promise to replace your items, do they?

I wouldn't think that LL would be that bad at compiling statistics. A # of logins count is fairly useless and tells no one anything about traffic.


No, they don't. Probably too labor-intensive. But they could still gather data from everyone to figure-out the problem, even if they make no effort to recover your stuff.

Considering that "A poll with a random sample of 1,000 people has margin of sampling error of 3% for the estimated percentage of the whole population." maybe they really wouldn't learn anything from basic account holders that they don't already know from the reports thy get from premium account holders.

So on the other hand why should other people paying over $10 per month have exactly the same privledges as basic members?
Maybe if we all paid nothing or all paid the same (even if we had differeng amounts of land?) there would be no 1st, 2nd & 3rd class. Spare a thought for the poorer 4th class who never put money into SL, they are always finding things they can't do without payment info on file and have to wear near default AV's camping with mindless bots for most of their lives. They can't even read the forums, let alone post here.
World of Warcraft and most other online games only have 2 classes, Temporary and Paying customers.
If you don't want a game there's always newsgroups, Yahoo, IMVU and Active Worlds.
If you want something free for everyone to play where they can all make money without spending any, well you're out of luck, I suspect.
And if a basic member goes to AWOL for 2 years, all their stuff is still here when they come back, if a premium misses a few months payment they loose everything and log back in as Ruth. Now tell us that's not inventory loss on a grand scale.