Secondlife is useless...

Other than meeting all my wonderful friends on the game, it's become useless otherwise

Secondlife is becoming a joke. How can you update something only to break it more? I mean, WTF...really, and they are suppost to be professional? Not to mention all the broken stuff in the game is putting a big dent in the business market....how can people shop when things don't work correctly?

Point is..I don't think they care enough or these simple bugs such as "attach to" and "copy/paste" would have had a hasty fix. It's just sad.

I'm very upset about this..what drove me to post was the permissions on the animations I uploaded. Each window I put up is the same dern thing..so I can't set the permissions OR copy the UUID!!! So this delays any work I was trying to finish.

Send in bug reports constantly! We need to get someones attention to get to this matter promptly!

Damn you LL, some of us have businesses to run....

Its been 5 weeks with my current problem.

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They do not contact me, even after the 9 tech support emails I have sent them. I am cancelling my pay account because lindens are too friggen SLACK.

I SAY EVERYONE REVOLT AGAINST THESE SODS

There's better games out there and less stressful!

They don't deserve to have our business!

I do feel for you and the problems you are having but I am curious about these "better games". Where and what are they because I've found nothing that has the flexability that SL offers.

There are ALOT of people watching with eager eyes for something similar to come along so they can jump ship. That's the biggest reason why we put up with the quadmire of bugs, lag, greifers, etc.. because as pathetic as SL has become, it's unique.

Alot of us have deep rooted friendships in SL and don't want to just pack up and leave. But watchout for the day something comes along similar enough to SL, you'll see the erossion effects of not listening to your paying customers, increase in the frequency of (number of unaddressed) bugs and poorly implemented 'features'.

Well, you know if something else comes out similar to SL, heck yeh I'm jumpin ship and taking friends along. For now...I have to put up with SL as it is and pray to god nothing else major happens to corrupt the business flow myself and others have worked so hard on in game. Cause you know they arn't going to refund/help/reward us anything for loosing so much...yay.

actually there is a game engine that offers MORE than sl, it's not public yet.

you should tell people the name of that game engine , because alot of us are perfect to do beta testing for such a thing after spending so many years in sl

well the engine has the capability but it's not open to testers, and the several titles using this engine aren't SL type of games, but the engine is completely capable of doing what Sl does but on the next gen level. I'm just commenting on the fact it's possible and one of the people who designed the engine, talked about doing something like this as a maybe "fun idea" since it has the power and extremely better modibility and history and wealth of information on it.

It's probably the engine that I talk about in the last half of this post.

I simply posted a thread asking why everything is so slow and full of bugs on the Answers Forum and instead of being polite and answering the question, they just pull the thread. I have been a resident of SL for almost 3 years and it is so sad to see what it is becoming. I love the idea of SL, but I am at the end of my rope. When something similar comes out, I will definitely try it. They only seem to care about getting new accounts, not about keeping the old paying ones. I would be embarrassed right now if I was a Linden.

SL is not just an engine or just a service, it's both and requires people that understand both to keep it going.

Competition to SL is inevitable.

- some will be ignorant of the lessons learned by LL and be doomed to repeat them.

- most will be riding on SL's coat-tails, loudly touting that they don't have the same problems sL does... but don't think for a moment they won't have other as of yet undiscovered annoyances that will still drive customers bonkers with frustration.

- some will come up with completely decentralized models that don't rely on an authorative management corporation to run it and it's residents will be constantly dealing with trust issues, most non-techie types paying amateur techie types to host servers for them. Overcoming several types of trust issues will be a *serious* challenge.

- and, perhaps, some day some truely inspired and brilliant folks will come up with an SL-killer. Question is, what will you do until then?

I'm reasonably sure we're in a rough patch now because of changes made to help SL scale to the population we have. Things will get fixed.

If it bugs you terribly.. step away and come back in a month or two.

I agree, my personal problem is that the Lindens seem to have their own agenda when it comes to what they should/shouldn't fix. User input is next to completely worthless. For instance, Philip Linden made that big fuss about 1,000,000 users by the end of the year. Yeah, we hit it, but at what cost? Residents in world opposed the proposition of no-ID users monumentally, but the Lindens did it anyways (after all, the Lindens are a company producing a product...it's gotta have potential if they ever wish to sell it off, and sell it's residents time). However, amidst all of this requiring compromise, or at least the facade of a rigged debate - thank god the Lindens did the only sensible thing at about the same time...enstated Rofflecopter as a last name. The vote system is a joke, and this is no democracy. About 4-5,000 votes between hundreds of residents opposed no-ID, but the Lindens checked it off as "Acknowledged," and then later: "Cannot Be Done." They own the means and the ability to completely screw up our world...we only own our respective in-world products. That's about it.

I wish people would stop treating the Lindens like some wonderful deities, the fact of the matter is - Linden Labs is a company, and you are being sold a product. If you don't like what's going on with customer service, please - complain...don't take a break and accept it.

nope that engine isn't very good (I would say it sucks but I won't), the engine I'm talking about... it's something sl players wouldn't really know about i'm sure.

I've been in SL for about 3 weeks and although I've experienced the problems of lag, missing textures etc. mentioned so often on here - I think the world is great and I put up with the problems.

Of course it would be better if the probs didn't happen though. If a competitor to SL did come along, it might relieve some of the pressure on SL and maybe in future years we might be enjoying Gran Tourismo standard of graphics, maybe with voice-chat that can be distorted to make people sound like what their avatars might sound like! Just imagine!

please give us a clue then, unless you're under an nda.

Hi Jopsy, I appreciate your optimism, but I think you are not looking at the big picture here. I am fast coming up on my second year in SL and it truly is "slipping away" in my opinion.

The point is (IMO), LL has not learned any lessons. They have ceased trying to fix the social aspect of the game in deference to their currrent mantra that "new social orders" will emerge spontaneously out of the chaos they created when they let go of the reigns themselves.

While it's obviously and trivially true that "self-organising communities" will in fact emerge, they won't truly emerge until SL is a completely decentralised and open-source product, indicating the demise of "Linden SL," or at least it's marginalisation in a world of many competing SL's. This vain hope of theirs is therefore less a solution for SL itself, than it is a signpost to it's own eventual death.

In terms of the tools, the user-experience and the physical requirements for playing it, the game it is on a downhill rollercoaster ride. Everyone can see it. The number of new features or fixes of long standing problems is somewhere between zero and almost zero, yet the number of bugs and (worse) restrictions introduced keeps rising.

Basic abilities like the ability to build shapes is being reduced or "bugged" with every release. The ability to texture objects has been so severely restricted that no one can even attempt to texture anything complicated or detailed anymore. Scripting abilities have been severely curtailed as well. In short, the ability to do almost anything physical within the game has been either reduced or frozen in place over the last two years or so.

Performance has degraded to almost unuseable proportions. I have the same machine I had last year (except with more memory), and my user experience has been steadily declining, often in a dramatic way. There are problems I brought up many times with the experts in great detail like pulse lag, occlusion errors and so on are not only never fixed, they are never even dealt with.

What's worse, there is no longer even any connection between the performance indicators the user is able to access, and the bugs and poor performance they may experience. Many people I know are in the same situation as I am in that all the indications (ping, FPS, packet loss etc.) they can access show that things are rosy. Yet the actual user experience is that of walking through thick lag soup on an empty plain in a sim that steadfastly refuses to do anything at all.

Overall, immersion has severely decreased, building and scripting ability has been dramatically reduced, and performance has gone significantly down. These are just facts.

If it was just the social problems caused by LL's stupid move to increase enrollment, or just the horrible lag and bug problems caused by LL's ill-thought out server "optimisations" I could take it. But both together are a double whammy. There are huge numbers of older players just waiting for that slash-dot announcement of the new game to jump ship to.

It's clear to me that LL is also aware of this "end of the road" coming up.

What do you think the purpose of the sever "optimisations," the letting in of the "million griefers" and the general code clean-up that have been the three main preoccupations of Linden Labs over this last period is?

They are readying the game to be sold of course. Whether the person they eventually sell to is Microsoft, Google, or simply the average user by going open-source, they are engaged in a "product polishing" act if I ever saw one.

and i thought DELL had really crappy customer service

Well iv now been playing for 2 days im new at this but oh my god this could be so so much better the thing its self is good dam good im addicted allready but slow loading times of buildings and stuff really lets it down i mean i can enter a casino and it can take a good 10 mins to load it all now is this just me or are all of use getting this im using a 128mb graphics with 512mb ram and a AMD 2.4 is this anuff?i think this game really could be great with the probs sorted out its the best a largest life sim iv ever seen to me the sl website offers now help really as a newbie and the buying land is very confusing the the hart odf the game is there allso arnt they beta testing other v of it? so would this mean a good sl is coming with bugs gone?


ps srry in advanced for eny spelling misstakes please dount flame me !!!

I'm not a libertarian... but I do prefer that LL meddle less rather than more in setting the social direction of SL. Some meddling is inevitable unfortunately because no amount of computer arbitrated rules and permission systems will properly empower or defend the rights of people online.



The center cannot hold? There are many obvious benefits and drawbacks that come with a single monolithic "federal" infrastructure. I wouldn't be so quick to say that a "completely decentralized" anarchy model is going to be our salvation. Walls will go up and the seperate islands will drift apart each pretending the others don't exist. Money, property, avatars will not be transferable because there can be no level of trust between isles.

If development and the code base goes open source, it's only a matter of time before the isles themselves shift from "won't trust" to "can't trust" as version drift sets in and content becomes completely incompatible with other branches of code.

Sure, some day the current monolithic 'meta'verse will fracture... but complete decentralization would bring back the old days of MUDing when there were thousands of worlds, a few of which linked in some kludgy way to each other, but for the most part all were private enclaves of people that ventured out rarely.



I've been around a slight bit longer than you so "new" to me still includes radial leaps forward like
the ability to upload custom animations.
The scripting additions that allow outbound connections rocks...
flexi-prims are incredibly fun and add huge visual bonus to avatars and builds...
the new lighting code is a much appreciated fix to the lighting problems that existed even before the local lighting problems with v1.7
the level of detail control helps with performance around people with massively intricate hair... without adding extra prim-attachmenet restrictions

I'm not sure how many bug reports I've filed since I started but the majority of them HAVE been fixed.

Sure SL has a long way to go.... but I think you're being rather unfair saying that there's zero fixes and zero new features.




I had a pulse lag like problem too, associated with a "sky update" event every few seconds, which has been resolved.



If I were to guess... that is associated with sim saves, and I've heard it is being worked on. Likewise, I do see problems at times with physical events causing severe sim degredation and crashing. (I'm guilty of crashing my home several times this weekend narrowing that down. :-/) It is a definitely a problem.



I disagree. A year ago... I flat out gave up with trying to be on SL on a Friday or Saturday night. The latency was so bad that building and scripting was just impossible. Now? It's still noticible during peak periods, but I can function at least, and with several more people in the same sim when a year ago I would be in the sim alone and still struggling.



You think things would be peachy if LL had just not bothered to deploy any optimizations?

For LL to be viable, SL *must* grow. Pretending we could live perpetually in the world that SL was a year or two ago is somewhat naieve, something this complex and that small can't fund itself effectively. Yes, SL may yet be a victim of it's own success... and I certainly don't envy LL their growing pains. But the world MUST grow and evolve.



Polishing? You just finished accusing them of not even bothering to use rough sand paper.

I don't know the minds of LL's execs... but seriously... who would buy SL? Microsoft isn't in the content management business, SL is too 'closed' for Google, SL is too progressive and strange for AOL, Blizzard or SOE? SL is too much of a wild beast for them.

There are *huge* financial gambles surrounding SL's rather lawless frontier economics that may not survive the next meeting of congress. The only for sale scenario I see as plausible would be LL planning get bought up by some off-shore outfit so that it won't be held accountable to US law.

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Curse your negativity... I don't like being a positive devil's advocate.

"who would buy SL?"

Amazon

I doubt it.... they're retailers.

The millions necessary to buy and support SL would be a poor return for them.

It's hard to sell books and DVDs to people that spend all their time online playing.

myspace.com on the other hand...

If I were to bet, I'd place my money on Google. Google seems interested in absolutely anything that's even slightly related to the internet. Hell, they have office aplications on the web now. SL or something like it looks like just the kind of thing that Google would snatch up.

My problem is that they seem to be meddling anyway, and they're ignoring a lot of tools that the market can provide if they provide a market mechanism. Someone wants want an anonymous alt? Let them pay for it. Someone else wants a free alt? Then they can identify themselves. They want builds that attract paying customers? Then they should kick back a few lindens on every dollar they get from a paying customer to the people who created the builds that paying customer spends time in.

See, it's started: http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/26/amazon-s3-for-the-win/