no more online help????

what is the matter with second life. do they no longer care for their customers. it is bloody frustrating that they no longer have live help. when is this going to end?????

Live help hasn't been alive in months, so they ditched it. Took forever to get an answer, if you got one in the first place that is.

Mandy C

With the loss of Live Help, Linden Labs has now totally insulated itself from the need for any real-time intervention, or assistance, or involvement with its community. I was stunned when the only real-time, in-world link we had was severed.

It's the equivalent of any community in real life saying we have shut down all 911 emergency services lines because we just can't support or manage the volume of calls we get. So no more emergency access to police, fire, or life squad services. How ridiculous to even contemplate.

Someone breaking in, threatening your life? Email us. Oh, you have a raging fire in your home? Check our comprehensive library on fighting fires. Sim just bellied up? Email us.

When the only group who can provide emergency services to its community, both insulates and isolates itself in real-time from its own community, it's time for new management.

I truly, for the first time, feel abandoned by Linden Labs. Have a problem? Drowning in the middle of an ocean void? Fire a flare. Maybe someone will see it. Maybe not. And even if they see it, they may elect not to respond. Ask the victims of the Titanic how they feel about that kind of a policy.

I rarely become angered. But this is bullshit. And all the blathering about new and improved comprehensive source documentation totally ignores the need for continuous vigilance and true emergency responsiveness. It is called stepping up to the plate and accepting the responsibility to maintain the well-being of your own community.

I don't care how much people wish to malign the service that was in place, it was a LIVE LINK to Linden Labs. I have the upmost respect for ALL of the people who volunteered their valuable time, and life energy, to service their community. Was it their choice to shut it all down? I think not.

I have asked around, pretty extensively, with those who were on the firing line, INCLUDING Linden Labs people. And when politely asked why Live Help was abandoned, they just mumble in their beards, and scuff up the ground with their shoes.

For all of the candor claimed by Linden, the serreptious way Live Help was abandoned was a magnificent case of spin-doctoring, and slight of hand. No splash banner "Message of the Day" that said "We are considering shutting down Live Help. Please let us know what you think about that in Forum Blah-Blah." It never happened. Not even close.

That there has been only 1 reply to this post, and only 14 views to date, saddens me.

I look forward to Thursday's Town Hall Meeting, to see if this thread even makes it to the agenda.

I was really upset to learn that live help has been discontinued. I totally agree with Jean's point of view regarding live link between LL & residents.

I understand it can be a ressources issue, as more and more residents are online and all of us are experiencing problems and there were prolly not enough people to handle every request. Live help is useless because it's overloaded ? No problem, just discontinue it. Wrong answer. Fix the bugs and scaling issues instead.

In its final form, Live Help/Help Request wasn't meant to deal with true support questions, but merely as a starting point for every day questions/problems, or to be directed to the proper place for help.

If a sim is offline, it's more efficient to be able to report it on a form. If a neighbour's/Linden-owned tree/litter is overhanging your property, it's more efficient to simply file an abuse report and have a Liason get to it one by one. The same with support questions (why am I banned?) or billing issues (why can't I put my credit card on file?), particularly because Liasons wouldn't even have access to that information.

The real problem was that neither call-in or write-in ever got a number of people anywhere, so Live Help (increasingly so over the last few weeks) became the preferred method of giving a volunteer/Linden a piece of their mind.

Despite the multitude of claims to the contrary, Live Help helped a great number of residents who were stumped or stuck by either helping them directly, eliminating possible causes, or simply pointing them to the proper support channel and really wasn't crowded with the obvious "I have a box on my head, how do I get it off?" 1 minute old newbie questions.

If all the normal methods of support (phone, email, billing, concierge, abuse reports, etc) are functional and prompt and don't unnecessarily bog down Live Help, the current system would have worked just fine, staffed by volunteers with 1-2 on-duty Liasons who simply monitor while doing their own work.

The majority of - active - helpers wants/wanted to keep Live Help going (if you don't see a need for it then there is little need for people to ask for a solution to their problem on the resident forums either), if only because there are plenty of things volunteers can handle (and with a ticketed support, everyone would have the choice between volunteer-based and Linden-based) and because it would greatly reduce the amount of "trivial" support LL has to provide in favour of increased responsiveness to legitimate problems.

Unfortunately a lot of the people who keep up with events feel a volunteer help system is useless, and those who it would benefit are clueless on where to go, so I doubt it will ever be revived .

I always thought Live Help/Help Request was great. A little slow sometimes but I've always thought you guys got a bad rap - way better than the perpetual whiners around here would have people believe.

In my opinion, Live Help was a very important part of Customer Service, which until POL came out seemed to be abandoned entirely. LL, SOONER or LATER needs to get serious about Customer Service. Its an issue that is not going away. Live help was, and can be in the future, an important component of Customer Service. Doing away withCustomer Service was an idiotic decision.

Jeez people, if you are going to be bitch, be informed. Read the blog entries about the CS revamp and the threads on here that are showing that the new methods are beginning to get the kinks worked out to be quickly responsive to immediate needs.

What kind of strange bizarro world do you live in, Jacques? None of the new methods work. None. Try it yourself....and it seems like you are the one with too much time on your hands, complaining about people who have a serious problem and are attempting to get some response to it. I have in the past usually had to get a reset of my home sim once or twice a week..and help request was great for that....just drop them a line with the name of the sim, and within a half hour at the outside someone always responded. Did not always get my sim reset...sometimes it was not misbehaving by the time they got to look, sometimes is was a maverick script that they found and got rid of....but most times they saw the problem and did the restart. Now this can not be done..period. Look at the birthdates of the people asking about this...and the number of posts. (I am thinking of Jean Severine's post here)...this is not the normal group of whiners and complainers...these are people who are used to just contacting the right people and getting things done....not wasting perfectly good inworld time complaining for all to see just to feed their egos. Oh wait...now i see why you commented....

Yes Live Help has gone, and I used to love sitting in my tree, listening to the wildlife and doing some Live Helping, I'll miss it.

If I want to continue helping the only way I can do that is to do it "in person" on a HI or OI, not as flexible for me, but I'll get to actually "meet" people.

Live Help had issues, scaling, people doing the work, burn out, congestion. (imagine half an hour of nothing, and then 20 minutes of more people than you can deal with, then nothing, then... it is very hard to cater for something like this in a Live Manner)

I loved doing it, and would do it again, but I'm open and willing to trying the new system.

Geeky,

My point would be, under the new system, that sitting in my tree listening to wildlife is the only thing I will be able to do as my sim fps sits at 2, and wait patiently for the week or so it takes to get a response from support. What you were doing was a useful thing for newbies, and I am sure improved their early sl experience greatly. What I am missing is the necessary support to be able to enjoy it at all.....like a working home sim.

Being willing to try the new system is one thing...and I was. I did not start complaining when the changes were announced...I waited until I needed them and used the new process. I have now been waiting since Tuesday for a response that would have made any difference at the time I asked for help. I am not just bitching for the hell of it. The new system does not work. Period. The old system may have been slightly flawed, but most of the time did work. There is no comparison between works sometimes and does not work at all. I will take works sometimes please....^_^.

*breathes in and out and tries to relax*

I would really love to know why everyone is convinced that the only thing Live Help dealt with was newbie questions?

"I just bought a private sim and noone can tp over"
"About Land says I have 8,000 prims left but when I try to rez something it says the sim's full"
"I have horrible sounds on my land, see the sound beacon but there's no prim there"
"I get 'Login packet not received' when I try to log in to my sim but any other sim works fine"
"I gave my SL partner mod rights, but I still can't modify any of his/her objects"
"I read the KB on transferring group-owned land but it's not letting me increase my contribution in the other group"
"I dropped a script somewhere on some sim and now it's spamming me and I can't mute it"

The above would be the typical help request I'd answer and in most cases sucesfully assist with and if those are "newbie" questions, then there really isn't anything that qualifies as "experienced". I've helped people who were a month old, people who were a year old, people who've been here since 2004, unverifieds, premiums and private sim owners.

I just got little over a month of helping, and during the times I was tagged up 9089 unique residents made calls and my guess would be 50 about how to get back to OI, 200-300 about how to stop dancing (that one was quite common) and 20ish about how to open a box. So all in all the percentage of newbie questions was insignificant.

Getting to your actual point ... ticketed support is supposed to take care of that. Live Help was used far too often as either an easy way out or out of desperation, where the problem really couldn't be solved live and a ticketing system (assuming it's fast and responsibe) would be far more useful, but that's still no reason to marginalize everyone's effort to "helping newbies".

And I realize I'm touchy on the subject so if anything I said was too direct or forward then I'm sorry .

Live help didnt just deal with newbie questions. Helped me greatly when we had a griefing attack. Problem was exactly as Kitty put it, if the Lindens did their job it would have been great.

Sorry sorry...badly phrased....i oversimplified in an attempt to keep the post from growing even larger than it was becoming. That being said..and certainly not limiting what you did to simple newbie questions...we are told that all that information is available right away online at a number of places...they wouldn't be lieing about that would they? (well..maybe....^_^). I do think the volunteers should be there also..in much the same capacity..you might not know everything, and it might get to busy to respond to everyone....but it's still a damn site better than whatever exists now. You and I both know that "ticketed support" for the circumstance that I am talking about is totally useless. It does not work. I challenge anyone to tell me it does. Next time your home mainland sim works it way down to 2 Sim FPS and your Time Dilation is pushing .10 and it takes you ten minutes to move across a small room....go and submit a ticket...and sit back and wait. Might as well..you're not going anywhere fast.....and neither is Dogbert Tech Support...I'll bet they manage to outwait you...^_^

To be fair on them, the ticketing system isn't operational yet so there's a chance then when it is operational things will be better than they are now.

The only problem I see with it is that it will be prioritized so a "I can't log on" will get thrown in the "To Answer Later" pile until all the "My sim is acting up" ones are resolved and there is a never-ending stream of both, so I suspect only some kinds of tickets will be handled better and the rest will go as unanswered as they are now.

Took less than 5 minutes to get my home sim reset using the form. No need to wait for any kind of response when all you need is a reset, or griefer objects removing. The reset of the sim or removing of objects should be response enough.

Not operational? No way..can't be true!! Only a seriously demented sociopath would tell people that something is the answer to their problem when said something doesn't even exist yet. You certainly aren't suggesting that all of LL is now entirely staffed and run by demented sociopaths are you? Shame on you...^_^

Yes Sys....that would be response enough. I had never heard of that happening before, but I have no reason to doubt you, so I will discontinue my harrassment of LL until I have the need for it myself again...then I will be able to see it you are right and it does work. Believe me, I will be quite happy to go back to being a non poster.....