Premium Members Deserve Compensation!!!!

I normally just lurk about in here and read what people are saying, but this has prompted me to speak up:

Everyone who has a problem with the level of service they are receiving and threaten to give up their premium account... DO IT.

Everyone who is talking about leaving the game... DO IT.

In this capitalist country that oh so many people hate, yet clamour to be a part of, everything follows the dollar. You can sit around and threaten to do all day long but that will get you nothing.

Linden Labs would be foolish to respond to threats; all that does is open the door for people to begin crying about every little thing and expecting action.

If you leave, and take your money with you - Linden will have to either A) accept it as a loss and carry on. B) Fix it to recover the profit or C) Ignore it and wither.

Either way, you win because you are not forced to endure this awful downtime and stability issue that seems to bother everyone so much.

So -- put up or shut up. Follow through with your threats and take your money elsewhere or stop threatening to do so. It really isnt productive.

Me? I play SL when its up, and I do something else when it's down. I have no stress.

Slingo?
Don't you mean Kermitt Quirk's Tringo?

Know what? You're right.. HOWEVER.. Sir.. its a GAME.

If you can make real money playing it, I say, more power to you. But most do not.

As for my pricing before I post? Please.. gimme a break... It was a ROUND figure.. ever here of "rounding"? It's something someone does when there are different figures to be used. Did you know you could pay annually and ONLY pay ABOUT (don't want you to get upset by this figure too) $6.50...

My POINT was compensation is silly... MAKE your money in the REAL world.. IF you can make money in SL.. GO FOR IT.. but dont expect to get reimbursed for down time on a GAME

Grow up

*sighs* Somehow, I am not going to hold my breath on seeing either thing happen. I'd be very happy if they'd at least do the last one. I do visit the Preview grid.. I've reported small issues that I've noticed, which in turn make it to the main grid.. Those small issues add up to a major pain in the behind situation.

I'd like to see something like this:

1) Save new features for once a month installation. The other Wednesdays are reserved for actual maintenance and bugfixes.

2) Make new 'features' that are only flash and glitter and not an actual functions OPTIONAL. Give us the ability to turn off the idiotic flash.. it adds nothing to the game except waste processing power. And SL doesn't need to waste more processing power

3) When improving an existing feature, keep the old version as a default and let the players learn/absorb the new additions. Don't make the new additions the default, because it takes a lot of time to get used to a new system.. time that is wasted going, "OMGWTF?!" Some of us are set in our ways and it's easier to convince us to change if you don't try ramming it down our throats.

4) Test the new features for a month. If you are going to add 4 new features per a month, set one new feature a week into the preview, stacking them. Sometimes two new features clash code-wise and cause bugs. This will give you a chance to figure out which ones are causing it.

5) Give more people a reason to try the preview grid. There is no reason for the average user to spend their time on the preview, when they could be on the main grid earning L. Maybe have a list of people who have reported the most bugs in the preview, a top 10 or 5, posted on the website. Add a reward of some sort, if you wish, just encourage people to get on the preview grid.

Targeting the most reasonable, "intelligent" post I've seen in this thread thus far...



Quickly addressing #2 - I think LL's fully aware they pretty much fucked up this last update bigtime, and Joshua seemed pretty apologetic to me when he was announcing the status on the post-update server fix to handle the email crashing issues. And I think everyone completely agrees that there needs to be a better way for LL to handle client updates. Obviously there isn't enough testing going on in the Preview Grid to label it a "test" server if every update is going to result in just as many, if not more, broken features than new ones. Some of these bugs you see after *every* update are those so glaringly apparent that any bughunter would have discovered in no more than a half hour of play on a dedicated testing server.

Number #1 though, aren't premium accounts receiving compensation every Tuesday in the form of stipends, whether you log in to play that week or not? I'm pretty sure downtime doesn't affect that in the slightest (other than an instance where the servers may be down Tuesday, in which you receive your money Wednesday or whatever. *shrugs*).

Samm it is not silly, it is customer service. If you go to a movie theater and the movie breaks or doesn't work, don't you ask for your money back? Most movie theaters may not give money back, but they usually do give free tickets to other shows to please the customer. That is the basis of customer service, to please your customers. In a situation like this where people do actually pay to play this game when there are alternaive games to play out there means there is a vested interest for the lindens to please their customers otherwise they risk losing it all. It only takes a small trickle to leave before the dam breaks and a flood of people leave the game. The lindens should bbe working with us to prevent this. It is in their interest to work with their customers to better the product. However if you notice in these postings, their words are very absent from these proceedings. To any lindens reading these forums, you know you have angered the majority of people that play SL. You need to fix this and fast! If you are listening, tell us what is going on, give us meaningful fixes and solutions instead of just sitting on the sidelines doing nothing.

Nanoo, the lindens are going to be taking that away from new premium accounts, it is only a matter of time before they go after all the premium customers and take their stipends as well. This means they are slowly taking away any reimbursement they have ever done and are not replacing it with any system. BTW, if the lindens are listening, you lied to us when you said there would be a new program to replace the developer bonus that used to be given out.

Some would prefer compensation in "time" returned.. if you understand that at all?

I may not be so annoyed at the update if it were not the fact that this update made the game worst. We would have been better off without this last update and then we have to incurr all this downtime on top of it. Now we are stuck with another update shortly just to fix all the stuff this last update broke.

In my opinion, it was a very poor decision to push last wednesdays update live as it was not ready and it was horridly flawed. I have been trying to craft the last couple days and have been cussing out LL the whole time. They would be wise to consider if this is the way they really want to treat their client base.

Wooohoooo keep going !!

The forums are always exellent reading with the grid is down.

I still can have fun !

I always wonder why do the people who want this, want that are alsways the whinners when the grid is down. Or if an exploit is found they are the victims. But oh no don't bring the grid down and try to solve it. They may loose something to whine about !!

I understand very well, thank you. I was making a general point. But it seems like some of you like to nit pick small details of a posting.. whatever..

You know, people.. downtime is a necessary evil of MMO's. Its GOING to happen. But starting a thread about compensation every time it happens, is not going to get you anywhere. Think about it. Someone starts this every time. Has anyone been compensated yet? I dont believe so. So is it getting you anywhere? I dont think so.

I just dont see the point of bitching about it everytime.

I said my peace.

I agree, how can we plan events when you go down so often?

Okay, let's forego the fact that everyone here agreed to a Terms of Service agreement saying the opposite of the thread topic, that "you agree you don't get any compensation and Linden Lab can do anything they want", basically. While that may not seem fair, we all agreed to that. Let's also forego that Linden Lab does offer compensation when there is downtime for more than 24 hours.

Okay, there's been, what, maybe 12 hours total of unplanned downtime since the release on Wednesday?

12 hours is 1/2 a day.

On a 30 day schedule, at $72 per year, SL costs $6 per month.

So, we've lost half a day, or 1/60th of a total month, or $6 / 60.

If the original poster REALLY wants his ten cents back, I'll be happy to provide it to him in L$. Even if you want to say 18 hours, or 3/4 of a day, that's $0.15, and a full day is $0.20.

Does it suck when a step forward causes two steps back? Yes. Has this release been especially bad? Yes. Could LL do a better job prioritizing what they're working on, maybe guiding by priority instead of hippie love? Yes. Does that mean we should stop moving forward? No.

For once, many people who complain whenever there is a change or release to move forward have a reason to complain, yet due to their previous crying wolf and abuse of the infamous Netscape <blink> tag, it sounds like all their previous posts. When you say "Worst Lag Ever" or "Buggiest Release Ever" every time there is an upgrade, your credibility quickly sinks. This isn't what everyone does, but an extreme example of what *some* people do. When people like Cristiano, Lordfly, and Selador, who are normally positive about SL and speak their points well without constantly being negative, all turn negative it means something. When you're constantly negative about any of LL's actions, or the upgrades, it lacks that kind of credibility.

Onwards and upwards. There's a big difference between constructive criticism and whining. Remember to offer possible solutions, other than, "Stop upgrading! Rollback to 1.3!" The moment SL stagnates, we're all dead in the water.

Regards,

-Flip

I know as i am those things but i find there are far more important things in life than to be a moaner

Most importantly tho, Never, Never invest into a game that which you cannot afford to loose without then crying about it when you do, because if you do, then thats just plain stupid and dumb

My final point is that please remeber this is a new technology and as such is evolving, i missed out in 2003 wen i thort it was a rubbish game i so wish now i had of been more forward thinking person, as i wud have loved to have been a part of the evolution since then, and that includes all the bugs and problems .............

Birth and growing up is not an easy journey so instead of many being down on LL all the dam time we shud try and work solutions to the problems, as we are all part of its growth and if people dont like it i just so so wish they wud just leave SL and quit moaning, do as u say for a change and please close the door on your way out

Peace

Having been a resident for nearly two year I've seen the downtime frequency only increase. It has been, at times, very frustrating. However, what my time here has shown me is that its not going to change because I, or any of us for that matter, pisses and moans about it.

SL went down again. Whats new? LL's has proven its service to be undependable.

SecondLife, love it or leave it.

I'm not bothered about the "amount" of downtime. I'll be OK if SL went down 4-6 hours a day. However, they need to do this at a sheduled time. Then, residents can plan around this time.

So often? I've been in SL for almost three years now. I can remember perhaps a total of 100 hours of unplanned downtime in three years, over maybe 5 or 6 days total.

I'm not quite 3 years old, so let's say 1,000 days, or 24,000 hours.

Out of 24,000 hours, SL has been down for 100 of them (and that's a high guestimate), or 0.4166% of the time. Yes, less than half of a single percent of the time. Most ISPs would kill for that kind of performance, and SL is far more complex than maintaining simple web pages.

I suggest you reconsider your definition of "often". While I also find downtime frustrating, its important to keep everything in a realistic perspective.

Regards,

-Flip

Sometimes we run into a series of bad luck when it comes to downtime, and then we have long stretches without any. The last week has been especially difficult. Wednesday's downtime and rollback was due to a bug which _really_ needed to be fixed. Are we looking at other options for releases? Absolutely. We're trying to strike a balance between infrequent, huge releases that increase the risk of major problems, and too frequent, smaller releases. I think you'll see us move away from weekly releases so we can have more time for testing.

Last night we discovered an exploit that allowed non-owners to delete the content of other users. It was imperative that we close that hole as quickly as possible. A team of Lindens started working on the problem around 2AM and had it addressed and code re-deployed by 8:30AM. We're very sorry for the downtime, and we know it caused some _real_ problems for everyone, but sometimes it's to everyone's benefit.

I also want to address Maximum Commerce, who feels we were lying when we said that we would replace the Developer Incentive program. That program had run its course. It was very flawed and wasn't achieving the original goal any longer. As Second Life looks more and more like a platform for content creation, you'll see a developer program emerge that supports those developers who are offering creative services. The web site for developers is the beginning of that program -- showcasing work and putting developers in touch with customers. Ultimately we will be offering programs not unlike what you might see Macromedia or Adobe offer.

Again - we're very sorry for the downtime this week. We will be making changes to the release process so the frequency of downtime should be reduced. We're also looking at ways we can deploy new features or fixes without taking down the entire grid. In the meantime, we sympathize with the difficulties the downtime caused and we apologize for any hardship you encountered.

Thank you

I agree. I think it's important in life (any life), to pick your battles. Then, once you've picked it, know how to achieve an outcome. Some ways of communicating simply aren't conducive to getting the result you hope for. Credibilty does add weight also. When Aodhan McDunnough posted about a possible major problem with the texture picker, I definitely took notice, and knew something was up, as I consider him one of the most reasoned posters on these forums.

There are serious issues with this update, and definitely plenty of things to complain about, but this was driven home to me not by the number of posters, as much as some of the people who were expressing major concern.

tyvm. Sometimes it just takes someone to show some concern.
thx again

Nobody tests... they don't know how much they want the cutting edge stuff until they have it.

Linden Lab has EIGHT ( 8 ) QA engineers ;0

They had engineers up at 2am on a *Sunday* morning. So much for them sleeping on the job.

However,

I do agree that this doesn't exscuse the fact that all these bugs are there in the first place. It's understandable that bugs will happen, but the sheer volume of them lately, especially ones appearing in funcitons that were working fine before, is excessive, and I think points to a communication, and possibly personnel, issue in LL.

Wow Baba I never realized that.... They only have 8 QA engineers? No wonder they have a hard job of bug testing for all of Second Life..... Linden Lab sure is a small company!