A matter of priority?

I'm a fairly new SL resident - who's rapidly becoming a somewhat disenchanted one.

Since my preview period, during which none of the present problems were evident, I have invested in excess of US$350 and some additional US$500 worh of L$ in various SL activities.

At this point I'd quite happily liquidate the entire investment (taking the inevitable losses) and walk away, but for one very special person...

One of the things that I find especially annoying is the fact that LL seem to be quite happy to continue conducting their own commercial activities (auctions, tier charges, etc) at a time when it is all but impossible for paying customers of LL to access SL and cary out their own commercial activities.

I appreciate the fact that Philip Linden, and other Lindens, have posted recently regarding the current infrastructure situation. But it has been clear for the last 7-10 days that something was going seriously wrong. During that time repeated requests for assistance (mine anyway) have been met with an indifferent silence. And not much appears to have been done to correct the problems until they have reached the current monumental proportions.
Indeed, much of LL's public activity seems to me to be concerned with socio-political issues within SL.

As for the internal commerce of SL - proclamations such as "Make real money in a virtual world" are beginning to have a distinctly hollow ring about them - it's damn difficult, nay, virtually impossible, to make money in SL when you simply can't get in to carry out the necessary activities to make that "real money"...

My feeling is that LL needs to get a grip and start ensuring that the infrastructure is up to scratch. Continuing in the present fashion is likely to result in a long term loss of confidence in SL as investors and business people loose money, then cut their losses and ditch SL.

I feel that LL should confine themselves more to managing the hardware and software aspects of SL and leave the social engineering to the residents. Play at social engineering when you have a reliable infrastructure if you must, but give it up until then please.

I'd be interested to hear any comments more experienced residents may have on my observations, or on the current situation.

I couldn't agree more. I'd like to see them throw all their manpower at fixing servers and making the servers stream reliably, then waste their time borking up events calendars, chasing land barons off the Land Sales list, etc. etc.

I think a really good sign of good faith would be to freeze the auction right now. It's immensely annoying to me that I see some things on there I need to try to bid on but I can't be sure of what they are because I can't get in world to see them, and I can't be sure that if I buy money for my character, that it will be in his account such that I can then bid on the auction for the item in Linden dollars. I guess I'll just have to try it.

I have considerably more invested in this game than you, and I"ve generally remained a hardy soul about it, not complaining about the technical down-times, but complaining more about the social engineering (and I wouldn't be so hasty in leaving the social engineering to players, cuz there's PLENTY to complain about there and PLENTY that needs a weather eye there, too).

And I have to say that lately, I've begun to notice some really annoying losses due to poor game performance that affect my bottom line. It's really quite noticeable in the last month, where it hasn't been before. Maybe it's because I've put more into it and expect more, but I think there are just some plain serious technical problems that hurt business:

1. I lose tenants because they can't log in. I have quite a few notes from people just explaining that they can't log on to pay their rent, and they hope I give them a grace period. Of course I do. But some never ever log in again, I see.

2. I can't finish building projects because I keep crashing when picking textures, or crashing for other unknown reasons, even with shadows clicked off blah blah.

3. I'm spending way way too much time trying to get video players to work on group land for people. They keep having problems, and they assign these problems to me since I have to deed the object to the group. But sometimes the problem is just that video doesn't really stream for some people and for the game on some sims -- and it's just not working at full tilt yet. We're told that the whole video thing was a kind of consultant exercise, where somebody who seems like a resume-polisher was brought in to kind of use SL as a guinea pig to test this out and is realizing some things he needs to change now. [Thats's my highly jaundiced take on it, anyway -- draw your own conclusions.] That troubles me -- that they'd think of some top-of-the-line bell and whistle to add, but then low-ball on the support for it.

4. People who were supposed to be buying land don't buy it because they fear a bug or a lag that is happening where payments aren't going through, and they look like they don't own the land, even though payments have left their inventory. Usually Lindens handle this and fix it up, but it only takes one of those things happening once to burn a person for a good long while.

5. When vendors can't log in to service their vendors, or when their customers can't come to buy stuff, they can't justify renting.

6. I've purchased land on the auction that turned out to be a total liability. For various odd reasons, I simply couldn't fly there. Now, Jauani Wu thinks he has "taught me to fly" but of course, me "not knowing how to fly" isn't the issue. The problem is just that new sim or sims area has a bad sim-seam problem. Both me and my various would-be builders and would-be tenants try to fly to this sim, then give up. I've got one fortunate tenant who managed to get out there and set himself to home so he doesn't have to think about flying. I kept trying and trying using all the methods, i.e. removal all attachments, use flight-balls for speed, stay away from sim corners, dog-leg around sim seams etc etc. -- nothing works. In the end, I sold part of the land to someone who lived there and already had "set home to here" fixed for herself, too.

Honestly, you buy something on the auction and you can't use it because you can't fly to it????? How bad is that???

7. Various people doing projects, i.e. builders or events hosts or whatever, can't log in and can't get things done with me, so all of us suffer, their business and mine.

8. I keep trying to log in at all hours of the day and night because I'm well aware of my CS backlog. I know that when I do log in I'll be facing a wall of urgent requests. And at least some people will blame me for what is happening to their game because either they don't know better or because I'm merely the closest dog to kick.

All around, it's not good for business. In my six months here, I'd have to say it's not ready for serious investment not only due to performance problems but due to a persistent anti-business climate among a certain player base and tacitly, at least, from the company.

Still, I actually don't care about all this. I'm not fussy. I'm here to play a game, and play store, and learn about it all. I make some money, I have fun.

Other games have endless boring sim skilling or levelling up beating bosses.

This game has endless re-tries at the log-in screen while you work in the other level, and has beating the odds on things like being the first to get logged in, get your Linden dollars, and get the auction land you want next to your existing land before an ugly box builder or laggy club gets it LOL. Some games have dragons. This game has lag monsters.