Thoroughly Disgusted

I am truly fed up with the deplorable level of "Customer Support" I have experienced thus far from LL. I'm also wondering what precisely constitutes "QA" in that portion of the cyber world, because when I managed a QA team we certainly had multi-platform testing and if a "change" or "upgrade" was going to put 1/4 of our clients out of service we sent that crap back to the drawing board and let the devs' have another go at it until they did better. (And before anyone has any wise ideas, I began in Dev & moved to QA- so yeah- I DO know how it goes both ways.) We also had beta testing done by our employees- not our end-users. (This is a beef I have with another game I play as well) I have spoken to numerous people now who have the very same problem- and are being ignored in the very same way.

My first complaint, polite I should add, to LL was on April 23rd. I noticed upon return from a vacation that the game was completely non-functional "all of the sudden". I asked for tech support, sent all the info I could imagine they might need and heard NOTHING. I got the auto-reply and zilch thereafter. Next- I came here where another user spent a lot of his personal time trying to help me troubleshoot LL's problem (in the end, I am utterly NOT convinced this is an end-user issue. I am no idiot, and my machine handles better games than this one just fine.) He was a kind person, and LL would do well to HIRE the man because I still haven't heard WORD ONE back from them. Whatever changes they made in 1.13 or 1.14 completely destroyed my ability to play this game, after paying premium fees in advance for April & May and being unable to use the service. (Thank you again AWM Mars, you rock) Here is the thread in question: (I have since tried every other imaginable "fix" and/or workaround LL had to offer on every page of the website and in the automated emails, to no avail)
/111/80/179043/1.html#post1481483


Eventually, I had to wonder what the BBB record looks like for this outfit. Sure do seem to be an awful lot of ticked off customers following this past townhall (read through the user comments, they read like a continual rant and with good reason) And here is what I found. You can read through the wide range of complaints (I've seen good companies with one or two per category.. but seldom so many of DIFFERENT categories and I'm including the big league companies there. I intend to add my complaint to that list, given that I still haven't heard a single sensible response outside the auto-reply, and that it appears they'd just rather shut down those with ATI Radeon cards silently than admit to having ruined our ability to use the game and offering A) A refund of our money B) A work-around or solution. To date, I have had ZERO assistance or even acknowledgement from LL.

http://www.goldengatebbb.org/commonreport.html?bid=57373


In short:
"Based on BBB files, this company has an unsatisfactory record"

Woah, hang on, so ATI Radeon cards have problems with SL? Does that cover the Radeon Mobility series as well? ... I have a X1600 on this laptop and while I can log in, nothing loads and everything is set 'waiting', or stuck loading.

My ATI works fine but the LL customer support does suck.

Greetings Thank you for reading, I know I am ranting but wow- LL has me incredibly irritated with them. Yes- my specific card is the ATI Mobility Radeon 9700. It's a Dell Inspiron I'm using, although I've tested SL since on several machines with different setups & drivers. So far, the only person I've found who is completely unable to play since v 1.13 is my niece- and that's because her machine is extremely outdated & does not meet the system requirements by a looong shot. With my machine what I experience is that I log in just as I always did- however I move in fits & starts, chopping and jumping around as though my graphics card can't handle it. This is why it is so easy to blame the problem on the end-user I think, or on their internet connection- because initially it appears to be lag or the end-user machine that can't keep up. But I noticed they're statement about supporting only the radeon 9700- and ABOVE recently I had to laugh. First of all- do they intend to just keep raising the system req's and expect users to upgrade to keep up with a single game while many others move at a more consistent pace? Now first- I'll grant them I'm not on some ultimate gaming machine. This I know. However...I manage very well with other system hogs & graphics intense games. BF2, The Sims 2 (all episodes, and the Sims is a huge system eater as we all know) World of Warcraft, Oblivion, I don't even know how many games I've paced this baby on & this is the first problem I've had. The only problem. I have trouble believing that LL added SO much advanced graphics intense updates in the prior 2 patches- that my laptop can no longer keep up. I'm just not buying that, not when an inferior system/gc actually IMPROVED in performance in v1.14 (my husband, who is running an old NVIDIA card) They just need more compatibility testing- in Beta- before rushing to push things into production. You simply do not DO that with a hot server in my experience, not for simple "improvements' to the product. You might risk that in order to address a huge issue- more like this one lol, but not for the changes I saw listed in the patch notes for 1.13 and 1.14. I mean- this not a beta test environment. People are paying for the "privilege" to play this game, including me, and I don't appreciate being shut down & then ignored when I ask politely what the heck is up- and when there are so many others with the same setup I have- being ignored too. You may be one of those. Please note- the trouble AWM (thx to him again for his patience) and I had finding new drivers for our mobility cards IS the fault of Dell on that one- however- after all the rings of fire getting that updated, it did NOT fix this problem- nor have I noticed any significant improvement in any other game I play with the new driver. Since it hasn't made things worse however, I've left it be- mostly so LL can't blame my problem on an outdated driver like I'm an idiot. You may want to look at that thread (referenced above) if you are on the same setup so you can update your driver as well- if you wish to.

What most disappoints me I think is that if they want to try and blame it on the end-user- they could at least have the decency to actually RESPOND to the customer support request to do so lol. Instead they let the email auto-responder software do the dirty work, supplying common sense suggestions & workarounds that read like a Comcast Tech Support cheat sheet. (This joke made in good faith mind you, my hubby worked for Comcast for 3 yrs so it's an inside joke- not knocking TS in general) That is not Customer Service, or Tech Support- it's blowing smoke imo, and I'm disappointed you know? Hopefully in the end, as it SO often does- greed will win out over laziness. They will realize how many paying customers were knocked off in the recent changes and fix the problem to retain the subscription fees. We'll see I guess. Sorry again for the rambling rant Maybe there are others who can commiserate.. The thing is- it's a GOOD product, it's a genuinely impressive idea- SL- but I cease being a fan when I am utterly ignored & worse- treated like the village idiot when I'm reporting a valid problem.

I just saw ATI and Radeon and its well known that ATI has become a pain to deal with. NVIDIA has been the choice for a while when it comes to 3D.

Greetings,
I've had both good & bad experiences with both ATI & NVIDIA gc's- depending upon the software I'm using & the machine it's running on. However, LL claims that SL is compatible with my card specifically here: (It says ATI 9600 or better for both req's and recommended, and mine is the 9700):

http://secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php

I realize my machine is hardly a gaming monster but it worked beautifully with SL up till the early portion of April. My machine has not changed since then- but SL has evolved version wise several times. Considering I had not even a SLIGHT performance issue prior to this- I am at a loss as to how this might be the fault of my machine. I also find it highly suspicious that several other players with the ATI Radeon Mobility GC are having the same/similar problem(s). This is evident in the townhall posts, as well as here in the tech support forum.

I do miss gaming on my desktop btw- which had an Nvidia card- however- this laptop does an excellent job with the other games I play. (WoW, BF2, The Sims 2, Oblivion, etc.) This is the first time I've encountered a problem trying to play a game on it since I bought it. There are times in Wow when I'm running an instance with a full group, have multiple AOE spells going off around us, and a screen-sized monster in the midst- and this machine still holds it's own just fine.

A positive update for other ATI R. Mobility players out there. I can't be sure what has changed, but something has- for the better. For the first time since early April I am able to play normally and am not stuttering about the SL world so that the game is unplayable. (in fact, performance now is equal to prior- day or evening) In an effort to help others with the same problem (whatever it may have been) these are the steps I'd taken immediately prior for what it's worth:

A) I uninstalled SL 1.15

B) I downloaded/installed the new beta for 1.16 (Hoping the prob had been worked on) I had tried rolling both forward & back before for what it's worth- but of course not to this new version 1.16.

C) Upon logging in.. no improvement. No dice.

D) I uninstalled 1.16b

E) I downloaded/reinstalled 1.15 and POOF- it's working properly. Mind you- I had done this many times prior to tonight (uninstalled & reinstalled current version) and it did not fix this problem. Only this evening. (Wish I could pinpoint it better) . But I can tell you that I did not make any changes to my PC hardware, my network or IC, or my drivers.

So... if you are also stuck in the ATI RM "limbo" and have been for weeks- give it a shot just for kicks- you may be pleasantly surprised. However... I am still disappointed that LL never contacted me once in all this time, via email or otherwise in response to my requests- but in fairness I wanted to report the good news. Now I'm just crossing my fingers that it sticks lol.

there were MAJOR changes from 1.13 to 1.14 in the way the rendering pipeline functions. On almost all machines this makes the game run much smoother and less jerky, but on some "older" GPUs (including the radeon 9000 series) this can cause problems. These happen more in the mobility versions of the GPUs than the desktop ones because the Laptop makers are slower on driver updates, and ATI only makes drivers for the desktop versions. Make sure you have the latest video driver, and chipset driver from the Laptop maker, as the new technology in SL requires that. If you still have problems you can usually always still get current SL to work by disabling some features in SL. You should look at disabling VBO on the Adv. Graphics tab, and maybe even more of the options to see if any of them will get it working right.

Thank you Missy- I did attempt many of the conventional troubleshooting options early on- with much thanks to forum member AWM Mars who helped me hit them one by one. The first thing we tried was updating my drivers- and I agree 100% that companies are absolutely horrible about keeping them current. (Seems they can't be bothered to) I had to eventually go with Omega, since Dell wanted me to use one past it's shelf life. (Waaay past it's shelf life) In the end though- it didn't fix the problem, but it was a step along the way. Here are all the items we went through in our efforts:
/111/80/179043/1.html

At this point- I can't really pinpoint what "fixed" the problem unfortunately, because by the time it was resolved (just this evening) I had tried so many fixes that my own process of elimination was scrapped hehe. In any event, it's functioning again for the first time since early April and that's what matters. I never have heard back from LL beyond one automated email response- and that was the crux of my complaint. I'm still grumpy on that topic- but- I'm glad to be functional again! Sl is a fun game, and I've missed chatting with family & friends there.