An Unstable grid is bringing SL down

New people come to check out SL and crash. They lose inventory, they freeze up, they can't TP anywhere, take your pick. They certainly won't buy into it.

People invested in SL are leaving. They are getting disgusted. They are dropping their financial investments.

Selling and renting land now is becoming harder and harder as rents and land prices drop. All financial indicators are telling us SL is in decline. No, its not because you been adding land too fast, thats not it at all.

Its not the economy, its not the gambling ban (voice went in the same week), its not a loss of interest, its the grid and instabilities. Its the growing bug list and the inability it seems to get a handle on them.

Now I know a few weeks ago LL seemed to finally understand this and said they were going to fix it but when is this suppose to happen? It surely hasn't happened yet. Can anyone honestly say anything is better then it was a month ago?

Personally I don't think the grid has been stable since last March. A lot of people that invested in SL and a lot of people who have jobs in SL depend on you to provide a stable platform for us to do our thing. We really need you to fix this. We need to reverse this negative spiral SL is in and get back on track.

These inventory losses have to stop. These crashes have to stop. This growing bug list has got to reverse. And finally this lack of communications on LL's part has got to stop. What about this Jira thing? Personally I think it was a good way to shuffle the problem off to the sidelines and off these boards. It seems to me that it has done nothing as far as making the grid better.

In the mean time I will be watching my investment and business going down the drain as the grid spirals into the abyss.

You know, I have no problem going back to a simplier time pre-voice, pre-whatever. Back when the grid was stable and people flocked to SL to have fun. Back when the aggrevation level did not exceed that fun level. Do what you have to do but bring back the happier times please.

This is a bit like lag, a very noticeable problem but no single solution.

The bottom line is that LL are battling scalability problems caused by initial design decisions. However, they need the grid to grow so the problems show up and they can fix them, slowly, one bug at a time. That is no comfort to anyone - the performance of the grid will always lag behind its technical ability. Remember when the grid broke at 25 K? Now that is a population at which things work very well. Eventually we will reach 100K and then 200K and each time new problems will show up.

The population in rush from 6/6/06 has been very rewarding to many content creators, myself included. Now we have to get used to a lower rate of increase and fewer buyers. The number of residents logged over the last two months tell the real story.

My grandchildren play the teen grid. Never any problems there. Also, since we are in the Australian time zone, not many others to play with, so a little boring.

Distributed, concurrent processing has never been easy.

Remember when one could log in reliably within the first 5 minutes after a grid update? Now I'm lucky to get in an HOUR.



Logged in the last 60 days:

6-Aug 1,629,849
19-Sep 1,363,009

There's 300,000 residents that stopped logging in a month ago.

Hey! I got here in March!

The rumors are true! I really do make everyone shaky, feverish, and unstable. That's hot! Glad to know I still got it!


BTW I agree with you on every point

Also promotoing SL as a "VOICE" ready game when the client is not as stable in voice mode. LLABS went in to a all out PR effort (5 weeks ago)to bring in Japanese users. But what happened? Well they ( at that time when we had a chose between non voice and voice) they lead new unknowning users to VOICE client. Well as many know that client at that time was not stable. Leading to many to sign up but few to if any to stay. Another joke was to believe a well know japanese chat site TEACUP.com ( which is filled with under 18 years of age/ trollers and griefter) ( mostly non japanese living in japan etc ) would help reach japanese population. Again another failure. A stable client alone with a more realiztic way to bring in and hold users is neeeded.
Instead of trying to be a game of which is not, LLABs should promoto it as a "AS IS". Because once people realizie SL is lag filled griefter and hacker fun zone etc. people just leave and never come back. Whats worse is the bad rep doesnt not help increase population ( real Population not alts ).

usagi

Well that was a PR blunder in my opinion. I don't know if LL believed it or they were dupped into that line from their voice partner. All I know is a lot of us customers were screaming that the grid was buggy enough and this was going to be one more straw on its overstrained back.

I do know that the population of SL was growing just fine without the prospect of voice being an issue and it has declined since it was introduced. Voice and the ban on gambling hit the grid at the same time... coincidence? Makes for some interesting conspiracy theories. I mean really, the timing was impeccable.

Gambling was banned on that wednesday and the beta for voice went in that friday. The grid was terrible that weekend, absolutely horrid. There were rumors of grid attacks by angry gamblers because people believed it had to be something like that for it to be that bad. Of course there was no evidence of attacks and the only sign of angry gamblers was a feeble protest at one of the welcome centers. Was it a conscience decision to have voice and gambling hit at the same time?

Ok yes before voice the population was grown in a real sence, but not in that fake stats that they said was in increase of over all users that to was BS. Anyone that seen those Google stats fpr SL knows they were incorrect.

Communication from LL is abysmal. When I wonder what will happen once a viable alternative platform appears, communication is the first thing I think of because LL has alienated residents and I believe the lack of brand loyalty will be the difference.

For a current example: The SL blog's most recent post on the Beta Grid was six days ago. It claims the Beta Grid was down for six hours for scheduled maintenance on Sept. 15 and 16. ("we will be doing essential electrical maintenance work at our co location facility in San Francisco that requires us to take the Beta Second Life offline for the duration of the process." And after the maintenance period: "All affected hardware is back in service." But according to residents, some of whom have come to rely heavily on the Beta Grid, it was down before the scheduled maintenance and hasn't been accessible since. The most recent communication from LL on this subject was six days ago, and it was innaccurate.