Your customers are losing faith in you.

Regularly, we encounter problems with stability, connectivity, functionality.

IM's sometimes (admittedly on a rare basis) get lost in the ether, deciding to be delivered 5 minutes, an hour, 5 hours after being sent. Teleporting is nearly akin to russian roulette, in my experience teleporting you to a logout one in every dozen times. Loading for textures, scripts, basically any asset is slow, on any connection speed, for many people, for lack of the capability on the grid's end to provide reliable performance. At times, during those rare, yet especially bad, moments, even transactions become unstable, with grid issues causing SL business vendors to fail to deliver items purchased from them. Even the second life website is wonky at best, as I'm here looking over the forums I'm having to reload repeatedly until I don't get a 503 error, and this is pretty common, not just a temporary issue occurring at the moment ( and I must ask you if you really believe yourself capable of building a virtual world on the internet when you can't even host a website with some semblance of professional performance ).

When someone in SL attempts to do something, it is to the point that many of them that I know and have spoken to do not have faith it will happen as it is supposed to. Your system and your service has become so infamously unreliable that some people have, at the back of their minds, a constant and nagging expectation that it will fail to serve them as it should.

This is not healthy for the future of SL, when we the residents are so accustomed to its endemic failure of functionality that we always believe failure to be one of the likely results of an action.

We want to see SL overcome this, succeed, and grow. However, some of us are really being forced to consider if we want to endure the frustration of wading through a system that can't be trusted to do what it claims to do. Please, address these issues. They're a detriment to us all, they may cause SL as a whole to suffer, and when SL suffers, the residents suffer. Some hiccups will of course be a matter of fact, we all accept that, but this conglomeration of issues is well beyond anything we're willing to agree upon as an acceptable margin of error... and it's quite likely to put people off of SL, people that could have contributed to it, in some way or another.

I will log in again when I don't see any of these kinds of threads.

I find not opening them works for me

Depends how seriously you take it I suppose, I sometimes complain and vent a bit on the forums or in JIRA issues regarding something that's really pissing me off. But ultimately I still log-in to SL where bugs are pretty much just a running joke, the number of times I have to say to friends "One sec, SL's being stupid" is pretty ridiculous, but so long as the bugs never get so bad that I completely cease to enjoy SL I'll continue logging in and building things.

I agree it's still worth putting in the time to log in to SL and enjoy whatever it is you enjoy in-world, but there are times when it just gets frustrating... especially the disappearing IM's. That is just sad, I mean it, that's really stepping into the theater of the pathetic. If your servers can't reliably relay a short bit of text from point A to point B, you've got a problem. IM's aren't stored or logged server-end, and only need to be bounced from client to server to client... the technology there isn't complicated... that could be done reliably in 1991 for goodness sake, what's keeping this from working right? Is there even anyone working on fixing that?

That can cause misunderstandings between people, sometimes very aggravating ones: business owners and clients, friends, or even between a person and a linden whose IM doesn't bother to arrive.

I'm not going to stop using SL because of these things, they don't prevent it from being functional overall, but they do prevent me from having faith in it... and sometimes from enjoying it. When you try to teleport somewhere, or send a message to someone, or do any number of other basic things, you're aware that in doing so it may fail completely, and so you really can't have faith in that feature... even the basic, long-standing features that most people would tend to think have been perfected long before now. A lot of the most basic things that SL does, it cannot do all of the time. That's unprofessional, and it bothers everyone from time to time, and we really need more than just a promise that it will get better at some undisclosed point in the next 6 months or more. We could really benefit from seeing some good, solid progress here, a deposit on that check you've written us by making the promise. If we could see you resolve one of these common problems sometime soon, it would really let us know that your commitment to stabilize SL is not just a statement given to appease the residents.

Barring these problems, I'm really happy with SL, and with what people can do with SL... but until they're resolved, I'm also disappointed in it... and I can't really trust it.

We're loosing faith? That's funny, I think LL is doing the best with what they can. If you think you can write better code then I'd recommend applying for a job. But never assume you speak for all SL paying customers. As for the IM issue, yes it's bad, but not something I'd really get worked up over.

I don't presume to speak for all customers, of course. But I know many others who really do express opinions which speak to a lack of faith in LL's problem-solving or preventative capabilities.

Lots of people really do seem to be resigned to the notion of the problems continuing in perpetuity, and that's saddening really, because we know LL is capable of fixing these problems acceptably... I know I beleive they are capable of fixing them, or I wouldn't even ask. However, I'm not certain I beleive they -will- fix them acceptably, at least not to a point where the margin of error is within what I'd call a "reliable" range.

I'm prone to hyperbole, it's true, but I really do feel like a lot of people seem to really lack faith in what they expect from LL.

If you had been in SL in 2006 and much of 2007 you would realize how much has improved. There were sometimes days where you could not log in. LL is improving the software, just because they aren't prioritizing your pet-bugs doesn't mean they are doing nothing. Hazoc4 & MONO will both go a long way toward improving the core of SL, once those are in place then thy can focus on minor things like IM's.

I personally would love a complete re-write of the login system to work like Windows XP and other software that handles multiple logins. Living in a house with multiple users makes logins a pain. Currently everyone has their own login icon on the desktop so we have to trust each other. I would love to see this, but I'm not going to gripe about it in endess posts like the small minority of users seem to do in this forum.

They won't even fix orientation island*, puzzle over their retention problems and anyone is hoping that the endemic problems of 3 years will go away soon?

As to the oft-repeated "if you can do better why not work at LL", it reminds me of an interview question that a colleague found informative to ask: "If upon being hired, you found you were working with morons or assholes, what would you do?".

*/327/96/239895/1.html

That's such a tired argument anyway. When your phone company gives poor service and you complain are you thinking "Maybe I should go work for them to show it how it's done"
When the guy you hire to fix your roof botches the job do you decide to become a roofer? No, you call them and complain, and demand they provide the service they advertise. Every customer expects a certain level of service, and if they don't receive it, they complain. Some may be excessively whiny snits, but that's part of doing business. I ca see it now, a doctor is sued for malpractice and his lawyer tells the injured person, or their survivors:"Well, if you felt you could have done a better job, you should have gone to work for the Hospital".

Interesting analogy choice. It has been shown that for physicians that could potentially be sued for malpractice the the better the physician made the patient feel personally - attentiveness, empathy, explaining things - the less likely the doc was to be sued.

In the case of LL, acting contemptuous toward their customers probably has the net effect of making the myriad problems of SL seem far worse to those customers than they might otherwise be. If they had someone who actually cared about the customers as Torley did prior to LL brainwashing, or as the "Community Team" is supposed to but doesn't, the customer sentiment would likely be improved simply by that alone. 'tis true: 'tis true 'tis pity; And pity 'tis 'tis true.

I've had some friends delete me from friends list thinking i had ignored them..like I never got their IM..not even in my emails..they assumed if i was afk i would eventually respond and since i "never" got the im.. i didnt know "to" respond.

Yesterday i was online..friends and groups never loaded..for 8 hours straight. Now whenn i dont hear from a friend I drop them a notecard praying they get that.


~Lana Tomba

Many of us have applied, with more than sufficient experience and qualifications... and not even had a "sorry" reply - just totally ignored. Very poor service.

It's clear that LL need more 'customer support' people, not just tech guys... but seem unwilling to take them on.

Has nothing to do with reading them.
I haven't logged into SL in some time due to the repeated frustrations I've had and due to a lack of interest (why deal with the problems when I log in to do almost nothing?)
I stopped finding new things to do because the service was terrible, and then I stopped doing the things I was doing because the service was terrible (or other people weren't there, making "social events" meaningless).

When things sound like they're working properly again, and the complaints on the forums die down somewhat I'll try again.

same here, havent logged in months, cant do anything without a big headache, and frankly its not worth it

only thing that keeps me around is the fact the basic account is free, if i had to pay for it (which i used to) i would not even give the labs the time of day

hell they change the inventory menu more than they fix problems

Yup.

Its very, very simple. They...do...not...care...period. They are enjoying a monopoly since there is nothing similar to SL at the moment.

Of course, this will not last. You will see these nagging problems and issues disappear as if by magic once competition arrives.

I have lost all faith in SecondLife (and all inventory and L$)!

My story is too long to post here but basically due to what I believe was a billing error on the part of SL my account was disabled, purged, and pillaged. I have lost nearly all assets and all Linden. I will probably keep my account open as a basic account but I will not be contributing any of my time to SL. They really screwed me.

My whole story is here: http://blog.hypercubed.com/archives/2008/02/11/watch-you-virtual-ass-ets/

as an addendum, in the past few days failed teleports resulting in a logout, for me, have risen to 1 in 5, if not 1 in 4. That is, when I was even allowed to teleport.

I was actually wary of even travelling in SL yesterday because I knew I was pretty likely not to be able to.

(x) Subscribes

So, seeing you'll never login again then, can I have all your stuff?

Hell no.

I have to say that I am really pleased with and excited about the efforts to make both the viewer and simulators more stable, and I have a certain amount of faith that this will improve the SL experience.

However, I find it kind of appalling that despite these obvious and honest efforts to stabilize the simulators and the viewer, they all still seem to be completely dependent on the performance of a server/database backend which has stability issues in spades, in regular intervals. I for one would like to know what is being done about this side of the issue, because even a hypothetical and impossible perfect sim code and perfect viewer are useless if the servers they depend on are behaving like an aging Packard Bell desktop on its last leg.

Considering the regularity and similarity of all of the issues plaguing that system, any idiot can reasonably assume that the problems are endemic to the system. So, what's being done to make this system's design less flawed?

I know there has to be something being done, I nearly need two hands to count the number of times you've had to bring the SL economy to a halt while fixing these backend issues recently, and I know that has to be hurting the flow of L$ that assists in the profits of both the residents and LL, so share with us, please. It's rather unsettling that, from our viewpoint at least, you're treating an endemic and recurring illness with your infrastructure as though it's just an odd series of coincidental and completely unrelated little wounds that just need bandaging.

I have time-sensitive transactions which needs to be conducted *NOW*! I'd be more forgiving if recent SL downtime did not almost equal its uptime. However, I am no longer forgiving of the clearly inept management at Linden Lab. Fire them all and hire people who know what SL's customers need! (Hint: It ain't pretty water. )

I want my transaction money now! Thirty more minutes may well be too late!!! Linden Lab demands timely payments by SL residents for premium accounts; well, it works both ways!!! Linden Lab immediately runs to the bank with the money from my debit card. Why can't I now run to the bank with my own money presently stuck in SL?

This continuing mess of buggy clients and a completely unstable infrastructure/grid is unforgivable. I am losing money as I type! Even more, I no longer *ever* suggest anyone even look at SL. I prefer my friends and associates not wish to kill me for making their lives hell.

May SL die a slow, painful, and lingering death as another player more concerned about its customers (instead of pretty water and lining only its own pockets) eventually takes its place. As of tonight, that will be a day I cheer.

Been here since 2005.

Never had a problem.

Maybe I'm just lucky?