Of course I'm going to continue to whine about the probs

It is amusing reading the posts from those who would rather roll over and take it silently vs. at least speaking out in some form (or forum as the case may be).

It is beyond comprehension how LL manages to survive with what must be a totally incompetent quality control management process. I've only been around since December and it has been a steady stream of technical incompetence. Yes, incompetence. Having been a CIO in rl I don't think it is a stretch for me to say I would have been fired if I continually rolled out business systems as flaky as this game is. It reminds me of the days when you couldn't get into AOL during prime time because they only had like 5 modems for every 500 subscribers. They didn't get their act together until the words 'class' and 'action' were used together.

Baby-steps people. Baby-steps. I don't give a rats ass if your business plan pushes these upgrades or if it because whoever runs the show believes progress = a never ending series of upgrades. When your system takes one step forward and two steps backwards you need to put the town hall meetings on hold and work on the problem. If that means getting more people working on the problem who know how to not only fix it, but test it before it is rolled out, then do it.

If Linden Labs manufactured cars the fatality rate on our highways would quadruple. Lip service and falling on your sword only works for a short period of time.

OK, fire away flamers. I know it's an old topic and everyone is tired of reading messages from people like me bitching. Given my tier and what I pay to these people I'll write what I want.

I'm just going to continue sitting here pondering the irony that is the 'Connect' button.

One thing I want to know is.....

There was no update recently.....there was no change management for us to log in...........

What caused this to happen out of the blue? thursday ...No problem. This weekend....I've been trying since this morning....nothing....and it's 5 PM.

What did you Lindens do? Here's your solution. Undo it.

1.5 worked flawlessly for me. ever since 1.6, I've had troubles like you wouldn't believe.

There's this thing called testing...regression, acceptance, usability. You guys hear of it?

I don't think LL has any QA testers left. They surely all must have been fired by now ... that's what I do for a living and I sure as hell know I'd be out on the street by now for releasing this kind of crap. Unless they have no QA ...

Keman Dingo

I'm going to call BS here. I don't buy what the CEO says .. because the few times I've managed to log in, VERY few of my friends were on. Out of a list of over a hundred, where I usually see 15-20 on, one or two were on and that was it. Everyone I know can't log in. This isn't a growth issue, this is a "We f****d up and we can't fix it at the moment" problem.

Clock is ticking, days are going by. Tick tock...

BS or not, eventually there will reach a point where growth won't be the source of the pain. I'm already tallying up my refund, I pay _way_ too much money for all my land to be inaccessable for this long. And you know what? If the dwell is any less than what it was before, I want a refund in that too.

Maybe I won't get it, but I'm certainly going to ask for it. I'll no sooner be nice to the Lindens and overlook this than they start offering this place out of the goodness of their hearts- and not $100 a month!

Keman Dingo

WAAAA WAAAAAA LINDEN LAB ISN'T GIVING ME SECOND LIFE FOR FREE WAAAA WAAAAA

Torley -- I appreciate your positive attitude. I try to maintain one but lost mine after five hours of attempting to login yesterday. I agree that it is helpful to assist in the QA process but I also appreciate the needs of those who wish to vent. Some can do both.

I will respectfully disagree on the incompentence point of view. I don't believe that incompetence reigns from the top down but there are some problems with their operations that even the user community cannot fix.

But, it's another day and we'll see how the upgrade goes.

This is why LL gets away with pooh-pooh'ing their problems and taking a, "You'll get nothing and like it!" attitude. People like you who cannot comprehend how these systems should work. It is easier for you to attack those who have legitimate gripes. Sad but I guess in a simple world, simple minds take whatever is shoved down their throats.

This is how I look at it:

If it was a free service, I wouldn't complain so much

BUT, since I pay for this service, I have the dern right to complain about things...

simple as that...

I've said it before, I'll say it again. CAVEAT EMPTOR. You paid for this shit when you signed up and read the EULA. Too bad, so sad, if you don't want to hang on till the next fix, then leave. Hey, it's not like they're FORCING you to pay, right? After all, the customer is -always- right... you know, when they leave.
"People like you who cannot comprehend how these systems should work." Psh. One, that's not even a sentence. Two, don't go flinging around your baseless assumptions; I know just fine how these systems should work, yet, guess what, problems happened anyway! Under your logic, under the way things -should- work, we could fix the problems simply by gathering around in a large circle and chanting "THIS IS THE WAY THINGS SHOULD WORK!! LALALALALALA."
Complain all the fuck you want. Just remember that it ain't gonna do jack because you're paying for ENTERTAINMENT, not starting a GODDAMN SOCIAL REVOLUTION!

For Lenin, comrade!

What, are you one of the ex-QA software testers for LL who got fired over the weekend?

Just trying to figure out what else would make you post this kinda of attitude.

Lemme get this straight.. complaining won't do any good because this is entertainment, but if it was a social revolution complaining.... would work?

Try the orange coffee pot and re-think your logic because it sure as hell is beyond stupid.

Does trolling give you some sort of pleasure? If so, how did you reach the point where you are at in life? I've been doing it all wrong if you're the one having fun here.

Keman Dingo

Your first sentence is absolutely brilliant. I think I'll write that down in my notebook of people I pissed off today.

What makes me post this shit? Well, you folks are actually posting legitimate complaints about how the entirety of Linden Labs exists only to please you guys, and HEAVEN FORBID if something that should be ABSOLUTELY PERFECT could (OH GOD) break, and of course, I come in purposefully being a jerk because there is NO WAY IN FUCK that anyone alive could look down on such a huge issue of NATIONAL, nay, INTERNATIONAL, nay GALACTIC IMPORTANCE! How foolish of me to believe that there were more important things in life than paying for a video game! How idiotic of me to believe that human beings had enough common sense left in their bones to actually find other things to do with their time! Boy, I feel stupid now. Thank you for beating some sense into me!
I hereby retract ALL MY MALICIOUS COMMENTS! Go do whatever the hell you want with however much money apparently bubbles out in delightful streams from the pores on your body. YOU'VE EARNED IT!

So how does it feel to spend money on a product you can't use?

If you don't mind, send it to my paypal account.

I'll keep posting stuff that makes you feel good, coming up with witty responses you can try to knock down with flame wars on the internet if you keep sending me cash.

Why... I see an entire entertainment market possibility here. Getting paid to feed trolls, or otherwise being paid to write things that enduce other people to write nasty remarks in response to, and feel better about themselves in the process.

It's win-win.

Brilliant!

Keman Dingo

This does remind me of the early days of the internet where every ISP I knew couldn't handle the growth of their subscriber base (I remember downloading Java at 20 bytes/sec). It also reminds me of the time Yahoo! had to remove graphics because of growth problems, or when Ebay had its series of outages. In all these cases, the problems were the result of unexpected growth.

Unexpected growth does not mean only in the number of subscribers. Back in the 80's, the developer of a small-business inventory system failed to predict the size of the inventories the system was going to be used for. Consequently, the floppy-based backup method it used took several hours, during which nobody can use the software.

The truth is almost every system release will have some problems come out in the wild that did not appear in lab testing. Even more so if that system in question is the *first ever* of its kind -- there are fewer past mistakes to learn from. In LL's case, the developers had failed to predict the growth of scripts that checked for email. I think mostly this is a consequence of not having better object-to-object communication tools -- which they had identified as lower priority than fixing other things, for example ghosting. (Remember ghosting? That used to be the most-complained about problem posted here in the forums)

I think the Lindens have done the right steps, profiling what caused the most server load, and rolling out a patch to fix it.

This is not to say that testing is useless, however it does have its limitations; and sometimes you will have to fix problems as they arise.

There's an elephant in the parlor.

There are trends ... there can be a growth trend, and there can be a loss trend.

This has triggered a loss trend. With fewer people logged in to SL, the attraction to be on SL is lower, with the lower attraction is fewer people, etc.

I logged in last night and the person with the highest dwell in the entire game was at 1600. The 10th highest was about 380. That's pathetic. There is noone on. There is noone buying things.

Yet the bills keep coming, rent still costs money. I'm still demanding a refund for every day things are down, and LL is still ignoring me.

I worked for Exodus Communications, the colocation facility that hosted Ebay when it went down. I was part of SA Services, responsible for the systems that monitored customers bandwidth useage and uptime. Our SLA was measured in MINUTES. When ebay went down for a few hours, there were HUGE losses, all auctions had to be pushed back, and there were many sour auction owners who felt their auctions didn't sell at high enough prices because too many people visited the site and didn't get anywhere. They wanted their money back. Ebay was under incredible pressure, and Exodus (and my team) very much resented their attempt to put the blame on US .. but it was not us. The time I'm referring to involved their own mistakes-- a bad patch of cat5 feeding their redundant connection. Still, they lied about it with huge press releases, and their auction base temporarily hung precariously on the verge of decline.

Not many seem to understand what a few hours of downtime can cause with a large user database.

_days_ ... multiple days. That's death. That's inexcusable. That's fire-every-qa-manager, that's time to sue SOMEONE for gross negligence because you're about to lose the business you've worked years to build.

And yet it continues. Which pisses me off, because this was a great system with great potential. Many of my personal friends were on here. They're not now.

They're leaving.

They won't come back, because they'll move on to the next bright shiny object.

That's the part noone grasps. There's no point of being on here if noone else is on here. If it was free, fine-- it doesn't cost you anything. But I budget only so much in my entertainment expenses per month. If I move on to something else, I can't afford to keep paying for this account at the same time. I'm hardly alone.

This is terrible and really pisses me off because I liked this place a lot. Just f*&#& set the damn HD's to READ ONLY and stop messing with them. Even that's better than what they've done. Restore a backup from prior to the problem, toss in inventory limits, and work people through the problem. I don't understand the extent of the problems. But it may be futile at this point.

Keman Dingo