Near Sim Destruction

ElvenGlen sim has been in operation since April. But was not deeded to a land group. We had tried once before to do so... but it started destroying existing prims. We reported the matter to Lee Linden at that time and was told it would be fixed.

Tonight, we joined all sub-plots on ElvenGlen into one large 65000m plot. We then set land to ElveHaven land group, and deeded land to group.

IMMEDIATELY we started losing prims at an alarming rate. We lost a total of about 1,000 prims in the few short seconds that land could be reclaimed, at which time the loss stopped.

Prior to deed to group, we had about 13,500 prims on the sim. We decided to track land object figures, with our fingers on the button. These are the results of our tracking:

Following deed to group, the system showed presence of 55,452 prims! It also shows intent to DELETE 40,515 prims.. which would have effectively destroyed our entire sim!
As it was, it destroyed more than 1,000 prims... which will take us weeks to locate and replace. Jill Linden placed a rollback order so that it might be restored without all that work. But what is most irritating is that we have reported this error before-- and now months later-- it still exists!

This is not a small bug. It is a total destruction bug. Why was this not paid attention to when we first reported it last April? How can these obvious math errors occur without throwing up some kind of system flag to halt a potential disaster? And why didn't the system give us some kind of alarmed forewarning so that we would have time to reverse the problem before blindly destroying 1000 prims?

Are we irritated? Of course. But not nearly so much as we are desirous of LINDEN LAB TO PAY MORE ATTENTION TO USERS WHEN WE REPORT SUCH THINGS. While we agree it is important to maintain development of future features, it is MORE IMPORTANT to fix the current problems that have existed for months-- thus avoiding an angry populace. We have a whole grievance list of items such as this that have needed to be handled for months... but have not been addressed. Maybe this is a good indication that there is need for LL to pay more attention to user feedback. At $2,400 per year per sim, better service might be expected.

The big reason I suspect would be they are madly working to get 1.7 ready for rollout in the next couple of weeks. It's a bug yes, but as of right now it affects very few people. Considering the problems with the asset server, teleporting, security and the opening of the teen grid on top of 1.7 and Havoc2 its understandable that they may not have a real high priority on that. I know it sucks but did you think to ask if the bug was fixed before doing whatever you tried doing again?

Well the bug can be circumvented very easily just by... wait... wha.. you SPEND HOW MUCH!!!??

Sorry to hear that the ongoing problems with ElvenGlenn have not been corrected. I know you and Wayfinder have been trying to get Linden Lab to address and fix the problems for months.

There is one item I have not seen mentioned in the many posts. Has Linden Lab actually changed out the server? I was having wild swings in performance and Statisitics on my sim shortly after taking it. I talked with Anshe and then Jack Linden. Jack initiated a server change-out. Voila! Perfomance problems went away.

Might be worth a try, if you have not already had a server change-out.

Take care.

E.

Blueman, anytime someone owns a sim, they pay $195 a month in "tier" so that does add up over a year. Expensive hobby, but oh what fun!

Kathmandu, that is a good question. We were attempting to spread the wealth of sim maintainence duties among our land group. There is always a need for picking up litter that is left behind as well as assisting residents with changes in thier plots.

Elror, good suggestion. I think we shall pursue that. I believe that we asked for a new server back when we opened ElvenGlen. I do know that it has had to be reset several times since then.

Tries hard not to laugh. Okay, first of all this assumes Linden Labs would admit this was a bug in the first place, and if they did, I have no doubt the response would have been "Yes, the bug has been resolved, so you should have no further problem. Sorry for the inconvenience."

As for their other work, it seems we are a bit too accepting of the new features being the reason problems do not get resolved. I will tell you from 20+ years of experience in the industry that typically with large systems there are two teams, one for development and one for maintenance. If there weren't you would never see new features appear or you would never see major bug fixes.....hmm, wait, maybe Linden is only using one team. Well, now it all makes sense as to why these problems continue!

Good comments Kath, but two thoughts on this:

It's not a problem that affects very few people. Pre-built land is deeded to group all the time. This has happened to two sim-holders that I personally know of-- how many others has it affected? Does it affect only private sims or smaller chunks of land as well? I have seen similar issues on small plots (ie, incorrect reporting of existing/available prims). So I have to disagree that it's a seldom-experienced issue.

Like Sargus pointed out and I have pointed out in other forums, asking LL if a bug has been fixed is like talking to a wall. First of all the wall doesnt' answer... and if by some miracle it did... it simply doesn't know for sure. We tried another method: we deeded a small chunk of land first. The small chunk experienced prim returns after a period of 5 minutes. The figures we read reported (we later discovered, incorrectly) that there were too many prims on the land, so we equated that with the prim destruction. We decided to join all land on the sim, imagining that we would have the same 5 minutes to examine figures and determine if the bug still existed. Imagine our surprise when we lost about 1000 prims within a period of 10 seconds! We had no time to reverse the deed-- which is one of the issues... why doesn't land WARN people before it starts wanton prim destruction? What poor safeguards!

We consider ourselves fortunate that we already knew how to un-deed land. If a person was not acquainted with how to do so and had to hunt for it... in one minute the sim would be obliterated.

Bottom line-- They weren't working on v1.7 when we reported this bug back in March. They have had months to correct a known sim-destroyer. How much more top-priority does one get than a known bug that can destroy entire sims with no advance warning?

LOL. Actually *did* laugh out loud at that one.

Yup, purchasing a sim these days costs $1,200.oo US up front. Then it's $195 per month ($2,340 annually per sim). So TWO sims costs a whalloping total of $7,080.oo the first year! Now you know why rent on SecondLife is so high. The only way to really own a sim (unless folks have so much money they use it to light their Faberge candles) is to buy a sim and lease out land in one form or another, either in dwellings, leased land, or shopping mall spaces. Otherwise it's just too durn expensive.

That's why people get so ticked off at issues such as this. We're paying far too much money to have client needs and mega-bugs ignored.

As far as I know, our server has been swapped out once. Although that did not return us to our initial average FPS of 950+... it did bring us up from 25 to 350 FPS av. So it's pretty obvious a server can make a difference-- either for better or possibly worse.

I would agree that switching to a different server might be good at this time... but in truth, as mentioned, these problems exist all over. So there may indeed be local server issues... but it's the old addage of jumping from one frying pan into another.