Your customers are losing faith in you.

Try logging in now (01:30SLT). Frickin grid is offline (and has been for hours) and so is all communication to LL.

Took me three days to get time to go online and look what happens!

Adamas

I have to admit I absolutely love Second Life. I am fully addicted!! I have been part of this wonderful world since 2006. The first day I found it I never returned to my other online fun. The entire concept of SL is brilliant. I can do things I couldn't do in my first life. I can fulfill dreams that was only once a thought without any possible chance of coming true. I feel as though I can be me completely. I can be as daring as I desire and its ok. I can own multiple business and watch them thrive to life. I can plan events and watch my club explode with laughing and fun loving people.

Then there comes to days like today. The horrors of what I hope wouldn't happen does. Another planned event shot in the back by a sniper waiting for the perfect timing. I come to log in and forced to update sl. I had been avoiding it due to hearing all the complaints. Yet today of all days forced. I had no choice and it was a living hell from that point on. Moments to the start of my Clubs Event and I am dealing with absent buttons, a new look. Settings that took months of playing with to run correctly totally screwed up. I can't move without everything turning gray. My own Avatar looking like a zombie with blackened rings around my eyes. Problems that only stack one on top of the other. I can't send notices, IM's not working, I can't change my clothes to the theme of the Event, I can't build or set up the prize give aways. Money transfers going stale. Do you think the hired DJ wants to hear that moments before the start of the dance, sorry I can't pay you? Does lindens even care?

I spend more money in SL with my membership, my tier cost on my land, ad costs, then any other bill I have a month in my first life. Why can't I get the same quality in service? Why can't I call Second Life and voice my woes as I can when my electricity goes out, or my cable or internet? Why can't I get one on one help like I can with my bank or when I buy a car? Where is Second Life when there is a problem that needs to be solved.

I just don't understand the continuous changes they call upgrades when the problems are never resolved. Who cares about new things such as voice when transfers are stale? Who cares about the new look of buttons or the set up when the lag is so bad you can move? These are the issues they should have every team looking at..Resolve these before changing the new look of a button that works worse then the old!!

All I really ask at this point is one day...one day without lag to dance with a loved one. One day that I can hug him. One day when my words are not lost in space and never seen. Just one day Lindens, Please. Just that one day to take a stroll in a beautiful garden, take that balloon ride without fighting lag and get booted out of second life again and again. I know its a dream, but is it possible?

I find it quite strange that any1 can really defend LL. All u need to do is look at the issue tracker. LL repeated says to file an issue, which makes no sense. Looks as if they have 2 people working on them, and it doesn't make any head way at all. Those defending LL must not have substantial money invented. I have found myself, like many, expecting that i can no longer watch videos, and its better to just play music on WMplayer instead of inworld. Voice what a joke. Running skype will running SL is much better. So what is the point of all this crap if we cant use it. Im sure there are some lucky people out there, but still. The many asset server problems is totally unacceptable.

Few people have promoted SL as much as myself. I just cant now. Why would i want to subject rl friends to this. Many no that I'm an sl'r but when they ask now, i'm way to embarrassed to promote it now. Its sad.

Did LL not establish a mainetance day. I expect lower sales on wednesdays. What i dont expect is to get a mandatory new viewer on a friday. This is something we would expect from some guys website not from an established 5 year old company. This happens over and over too.

My new account status:

Your current status: Downgrading to Basic

ahhh....

I find there are a few types of people in life. Those who are disappointed with poor performance and constantly demand better, those who take what they can get and make comments like: "love em or leave em" "my country right or wrong" "if you dont like it leave". There are also those who never speak out at all and simply act.

I admit my personality type is to dislike ineffective and failed enterprises. I believe that the BEST customer is the one who complains. This is because the customer who complains is sending you a clear message I WANT TO DO BUSINESS.

Things have gotten better over time. I think the long time players can attest to that. But I think it is equally true that there are serious inworld issues that can make time here absolute misery. Baseline things like vanishing money, vanishing items, broken sales, inability to TP, friends and groups lists simply not appearing. My shoe in my anus.

My city council has similar problems. We have a bridge which for 2 years has not been able to have trucks or busses cross it. Yet they spend money on parks, and walkways and fairs. The public hates them, but retains them because "if you dont like it, leave". Well, until the bridge collapses.

Like Sony and Blizzard Linden seems to want to develop NEW rather than repair OLD. Maybe I just dont understand. But it seems to me I need to be able to see my inventory, move from one location to another and not have my shoe in my Anus MORE than I need voice, or water and sky improvements.

The system has been pretty effectively down since 7:15 pm pst last night, it is now 11:30 am pst to me thats pretty fundamental.

So love em or leave em? well as soon as there is a viable option, I will leave. Will i walk now, no. Not until something better comes along. Sony banked on that with Everquest and lost when World of Warcraft came along. Linden labs, look to stable basics.

Sepharad Porta

The difference Brenda is that anyone can become a programmer, it's not exactly rocket science (unless your job is programming the computers for NASA). All you need is familiarity with the programming language being used, patience and the desire. And basic math skills too.

And access to caffeine. Or gin, depending on the job and how it's going :}

I've been in SL since 2006, and I agree with the general consensus that some things have gotten better. Searches are easier to perform, voice is an interesting addition that cuts out some of the need for third party servers, and many of the little tweaks to the UI were actually intuitive changes . . . at first. Now when the updates occur I find myself frustrated that the buttons have once again been rearranged and my graphics settings toggled. The updates don't seem to be doing much to change transfers going stale or inventory disappearing. If anything that aspect has gotten worse.

This past month I've lost a lot of money in SL. Yes, it was refunded to me by the creators or my items were eventually delivered, but the problem was being handled by people who had nothing to do with the disruption in service. Where was LL's when $4,000L disappeared into the cybernetic ether? What of the five unresolved tickets put forth from my premium account this month?

In any other business format we'd have more of a concerted effort towards public service, but the anonymity that sometimes leads addicted residents to open multiple undercover avvie's seems to be affecting LLs as well. This unfortunate and remarkable drop in service has lead me to seek out alternatives. I'm test driving the Chinese' Hipihi later this afternoon. I love the idea behind SL, and I love what we've all created there, but it may be time to move on to a safer port. Maybe even time for the talented residents to get together and start our own grid. Not that I'd be the one to lead the project, just something to put out there for the entrepreneurial genius's among us

Umm, you checked out the quality of what the public education systems are producing lately?

Besides the fact you need to have a creative innotaive mindset, rather than just clock in/clock out.........
Oops hit a wrong key there somewhere making a reply to myself.............. where did that lunar module impact warning screen go?

Gin, probably.
http://xkcd.com/323/

Either IT has recurringly failed to deliver, or management has thoroughly failed to act as soon and as drastically as necessary.

Server-end performance is bad. I mean catastrophically bad. More days go by in a week with serious, debilitating server issues than go by without them, and those without them still suffer regular hiccups, stuttering, and quirks that make it hard to have faith in your actions in-world.

A few questions:
EVE online, another massively popular online universe, has an awful lot of concurrent users. (Those of you who think you know where I'm going with this, you'll be surprised). A while back, despite EVE not streaming content to their users the way SL does, or having to host databases with gobs of user-created content like SL does, CCP, the company that runs EVE, committed to upgrade their server cluster with what was expected to be a supercomputing cluster that could make it into the top 500 supercomputers of the world. Something which was then unheard of, a position that had never been held by a gaming-oriented system.

SL, which demands much more computing power and bandwidth than an MMO with comparable concurrency, is doing... what?

You see, I acknowledge that SL needs a lot more power than your average MMO, and furthermore, I turn that defense around and use it to pose a hard question: is LL actually prepared to -provide- that power? And please, don't dare to give a noncommital answer and just say that you have "planned upgrades", no, we're not satisfied with that. Give us specifics, and furthermore, have the courage to come out and say, in an absolute commitment, that you -will- invest the necessary manpower and hardware in order to bring SL within acceptable parameters (and I mean professionally stable performance), and tell us the point in time at which you will either have fixed your problems, or will eat your hat.

Now, as an aside to fellow residents with the "love it or leave it" opinion: No, I'm not going anywhere. SL is a second home to me, and I've invested too much to abandon ship now and watch it flounder from a distance. I'll be right here, bailing buckets of water if I have to, and I'll go down with the ship if I have to, but I'm darn determined to box the crew's ears if they point us all at an iceberg, and I'm hoping that doing so will be constructive. We love SL, likely just as much as those who created it, and we just want to stop seeing it struggle and fall under its own weight.

That is insulting. Sure, anyone can sit on some dumb "computer games" course at college or university, but what you have at the end is a code-monkey; somebody that churns out canned responses to common problems.
GOOD programmers are not so common; people who can logically break down a problem and come up with an innovative solution that solves the problem in not just a quick way, or a cheap way, but in a good way.
Code-monkeys look for any solution, usually the quickest/easiest, programmers look for the best available solution.

Just like anyone can pick up a brush and become an artist, but not everyone can become a GOOD artist. So if you honestly believe it's that simple, then you're obviously not a good programmer yourself.


The main issue I see with SL at the moment is that too few LL developers are seriously looking at bugs, and the open-source community is actually being ignored. Nicholaz has submitted a large number of patches to the JIRA that are still unimplemented despite being relatively simple fixes.
Meanwhile SL's servers are struggling because there are still too many central points of failure; database clusters, asset servers, log-in servers etc. SL NEEDS to be distributed significantly, really all central points of failure need to have their functionality distributed across all simulators. So instead of having an asset in a little cluster, you have it on five or six different simulators to provide redundancy. The big LL teams assigned to Windlight and so-on need to be assigned to these issues.

A system with this amount of users shouldn't have any central services that can just up and fail, taking the whole system with them. With properly distributed functionality the worst that happens is a small group of simulators crashes, so that only parts of the system lose functionality until they are fixed.
Can you imagine if the internet were run with a single central cluster hosting all the images used on websites? Or you couldn't connect unless you logged in to a single log-in cluster first? It wouldn't exist today if that had been the case.

I couldn't agree more.

Basically, at any given time, the entire grid's performance appears as though it is in a tenuous and unstable position, which is, as examples have proven, untenable over long periods of time (recently this would be defined as meaning that 76 hours without a failure is a rarity). To compound this, the carrying capacity of the system is strained heavily even when it's working perfectly, so the second something up and fails and whatever redundancy that's in place attempts to compensate, you now have fewer elements trying to handle a load that was already beyond the reasonable expectations of the former, more powerful combined system.

Basically it feels like LL is trying to tow 2 tons of cargo uphill behind a VW beetle and just praying that the thing manages to keep moving forward long enough to save face for giving a valiant effort.

This is not middle school. You do not get points for "trying hard". This is business... by this stage, big business. Either you deliver, or you default, there is no middle-ground. SL is currently in what is analogous to bankruptcy. The customers are paying for a service that LL doesn't actually have the resources to provide. They are defaulting on their contract, and providing a fraction of the services promised while using PR tactics and noncommittal promises to do damage control and stall for time with the hope that they can keep people paying them long enough to muster the lacking resources and cease defaulting on their contract.

The ToS may use legal language to absolve -liability- for defaulting on obligations to the customer, but that does not by any means resolve the impact upon credibility and goodwill which results, and those responsible for managing the future direction of SL need to keep this in mind and enact major, sweeping changes to resolve it before the public becomes convinced that the organization as a whole is a lost cause.