Is LL really incompetent?

So much criticism about how LL develops their product.

Considering we are all are passionate about SL and/or the emergent community, doesn't that suggest that LL is succesful at what it does?

LL convinced me that it is very reasonable to spend over 1000 USD on a terrain mesh that i can't even save on my own HD. talk about salesmanship!

How much of the harsh criticism is really a result of a glutonous "I want this and I want it now! The customer is always right!" culture?

Jau-Jau, are you trolling?
Weren't you the one pointing us to virtools and the like?

Most of the critism is from intelligent It professionals who know if their company did the same shit LL does they would be sued, out of business or from an employee standpoint fired. The majority of complaints are well thought out. Yes we have our blingtard gambling chair camper who complain about losing out on their phat loot, but there are a lot of legit concerns from the community that are ignored.

I mean currently we have to wonder....


Is LL in financial trouble? They have customer working for them for free, and they seem to be trying to squeeze every penny they can out of people dumb enough to pay them (land store WTF?!?!?!!?!?).

I used to work for a company that every person in the United States knows, whose products most people at least brush up against every day, and which is known to a not insignificant portion of the rest of the entire world.

They were far less competent than LL. It was amazing on a day-to-day basis they managed to stay in business and out of jail, let alone to maintain their reputation.

This has very little to do with the actual state of LL but it is good to realize that badly run companies can be successful and well thought of and conversely, complaints and perceived problems do not necessarily reflect on a company's competence.

No poll?

yeah, for people looking for a reliable development platform. like you!

i'm here to play!

The difference is that LL is producing results, while the "intelligent IT professionals" are just jawing.

I'm an intelligent IT professional myself and I learned years ago that there's no way to compete with what someone only has to imagine that they could accomplish in your place.

Allie

And to be totally honest, LL doesn't seem to be run any worse than any other MMOG company out there (yeah, SL is not a game, I say it, but it's the closest point of commonality for this comparison). They're all seemingly incompetent if you pay any attention to their forums.

They remain better than the run of the mill; LL's worse day beats Verant/Sony Online's handling of Everquest. And even though people like to trumpet World of Warcraft... again, a casual browsing of the forums reveals Blizzard is apparently the antichrist on Earth.

It's funny how all these companies insist on having people run the works instead of perfect automata.

I'll actually answer this seriously

For me I don't think it is 'I want this and I want it now!' there are certain features I would love to see - but I've done my feature suggestions and placed my votes, and I bring them up when conversation swings that way.

What sometimes makes me shake my head is the way things seem to be half taken up and half finished then move onto the next 'big shiney'.

It's how I would go about doing some hobby MUD.. work on this some, work on that some, finish that off later- OH NEW IDEA! work on that a bit.

The difference is, that was my hobby with maybe 3 - 5 people joining in. It wasn't a buisness - and it wasn't treated like one.

I see a lot of that reflected in some of the updates since 1.4 - a hodge podge of 'shineys' and bunch of things left unfinished (what I've dubbed 'Godots') and because I can't see behind the wizards curtain - the picture that I see seems very disjointed.

OMG! *bows* Trojanman!

On the other hand, to continue my analogy, you probably wouldn't believe how long it took for Everquest to add in features that were commonplace on the very text-based MUDs it was imitating, let alone ones to match the competition when it came along. Not until World of Warcraft was there any serious competition, and even today I believe EQ is still more popular than EQ II.

And with City of Heroes, my quick-fun MMOG of choice, the much-vaunted skills system is kind of the local version of the Havok 2 joke here in SL. ("Yeah, it'll come right after Havok 2 and web-on-a-prim.", you know.)

Yet both of these have much larger audiences than SL, and quite possibly make more money; no, if LL has a problem it is not relative competance or lack of. I think it's a problem inherent in the design of Second Life - you can only sell building materials to them who are, in fact, interested in building something.

You know Eboni I think you may be onto something here. I usualy say "No way is LL in financial trouble" but after thinking over all the changes this year. I would have to say yes they are in some serious financial trouble. Might be a good time to liquidate, just in case.

Cat

This is a very legitimate point - to further the comparison:

I used to play on MUDs regularly with a group of about 6 people - invariably within a month I'd end up on the admin team and take to coding, the part I really enjoyed - creating and building.

My friends would run around testing things I made and playing and having fun - it was very much like a tabletop game in that regard.

They moved onto Everquest .. which I looked at for a day or two... and went back to my coding until I found SL during a 'code break'.

They look at me dumbfounded when I show it to them, and I look at them dumbfounded when I look at EQ.

Currently I'm having little SL breaks at DDO with a small group of close friends.. I play a little bit and I enjoy it, but the conversation always goes around to 'We could soooo do a small thing like this in a corner of a sim in SL.....'

I like building things - they like playing things - we are two sides of a coin.. the same but different.

Why the heck is there no poll in this thread

No, not that company! Knew I shouldn't have used the phrase "brush up against".

Really Jauani?

Cause you can spend $1,000 a month - they are good salespeople?

I'm missing what they did to close the sale with you?

And how many others did just the opposite?

Once again, the ability to spend money is being equated with quality.

Linden Pizza makes you a pizza pie. It's a unique pizza pie, but it's a pizza pie nonetheless and you really enjoy pizza pie.

Linden Pizza presents you with your pizza. It's a delicious Chicago deep-dish pizza, steaming, filling your nostrils with delicious aromas and causing your mouth to water. You like your pizza pie, and you're really glad you decided to come to Linden Pizza.

Then, on your third or fourth bite, you bite down on something... crunchy. Odd, you think. You didn't order onions or peppers or anything remotely crunchy. What's going on, here?

Furtively, you extract the partially chewed fragment of pizza and deposit it on your napkin. Staring intently, hopefully out of view of the other patrons of Linden Pizza, you inspect the morsel, looking for agents of crunch.

And then a tiny antenna tumbles away from your napkin.

And you see it.

It's a roach.

You're upset. You were about to digest a roach. For all you know, there are more Linden Roaches in your pizza. In any case, you're upset. Linden Pizza may have tried to make a good thing, but other people could make a good thing, too, given the appropriate ovens, ingredients and motivation. It doesn't matter how hard they may have tried to please you. Your being upset has nothing to do with the lost potential of an amazing, memorable pizza experience. You're upset because the execution was staggeringly flawed.

You almost ate a fucking roach.

great post. heh.

This is the funniest thing I have read all day. Thanks for the laugh. I am going to pass this gem around.

Priceless!

The analogy fails because that "bug" made it to the "live version" of the restaurant (grid).

The analogy further fails because the roach is a clear intruder into the system. A more adequate use for your roach-pizza analogy would be the last time the grid was nearly crashed and Linden Lab firewalled it. -- A defect in their security allowed the intrusion of a malicious 3rd party code / roach and was nearly a disaster, but avoided.

Nice try, though.

they are. But it's a start. I doubt they have the ability to bring the Metaverse to promise, but hey, can't fault them for being one of the steps along the way.

why are you still visiting this restaurant? are you stupid?

this is your hobby too remember, siggy? if you can make a little extra cash to buy some booze and pay your internet, that's a bonus.

sure we have businesses in sl... "GAME businesses." we're all smart enough to realize just because LL calls SL not a game doesn't make it not a game.

we pay game rates for the service. we don't pay LL professional rates for the service. people want LL to develop the platform for people's business and provide them with a healthy population of consumers. for 10 bucks a month! oh i rent a sim, so that's about 200 a month. half of that probably covers the lease on the server i don't think LL is charging enough to owe us the kind of "resident developer" directed enhancement of their game that we would like.

i would love to see all those cool things that are half finsihed get finished. but i'd rather see LL finish the stuff they need to finish to draw more people. so that SL keeps growing.

They're the only ones serving Chicago deep-dish at the moment. Everyone else in the neighborhood is doing New York Style crust. Which is fine. But I like my deep-dish sometimes, too. Still, it'd be great if some deep-dish competition moved into the neighborhood.



Yes. You're right. There are absolutely no bugs on the grid at all. Nor have there ever been. We've never had show-stopping bugs plague the grid for weeks at a time.



Take it a step further, Hiro, and tell me it fails because Linden Lab makes software, not pizza. Duh.

You fail.

Call me when the supreme court has made reverse the attachment culling of the (finally arrived) metaverse.