Second Life Gets Embarrassed on Live TV

Well that was a load of crap. G4TV tried to feature Second Life on "Attack of the Show" just now and despite the wonderful build by Versu Richelieu and Obscuro Valkyrie, the whole thing was soooooooo poorly handled by LL.

Despite Jeska's efforts to try and get people to take off bling and such, when the host of the TV went live and tried to fly into the SIM it was full and he couldn't get in. Not to mention that no one told him about turning the sun on so the screen was pretty black. Couldn't they have TP'ed him directly into the sim?

On air he said that the game was taking a while to load, then he said that the server crashed, which of course didn't happen. Overall it just made Second Life look so bad.

bah.. And people bitch when things are kept secret. There are often *needed* un-malicious reasons for doing so. So sorry this happened.

What a shame.

i think it's not necessarily a bad thing though. instead of people coming here expecting a super-smooth experience, now they now..

lag happens.

i did try to IM him with instructions on how to bring the sun up.

i also tried to TP him in, but i couldn't due to the server being full.

but don't forget, you could tell Kevin digs SL.. that come across quite clearly i thought. and his explanation of SL went far to describe how open-ended it is. if i saw that on G4, it would interest me.. people of an SL minded nature will raise an eyebrow and use a little common sense to figure out that it was just a heavily-loaded server.

plus, people saw his pants with Sarah on them (the crotch to be specific).. that's only possible if there's a way to do your own textures. and tell me it isn't true that most people similar to SLers would *drool* over that feature! not to mention the castle that was "completely player-built"! ..even with the mention of (and visual) of particle effects.

what people saw was like a glimpse down the rabbit hole.. i don't know about you, but i'd jump.

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wow, this post took much longer to write than it appears.. when i started writing this, there were no other posts, just the original. lol..

Info about time and location of TV spots should *never* be leaked to the general SL populace in advance. They should sneak them into a nice, lag-free sim and show them around, incognito.

Cyb, we dont need more people like us. We need more "normal" people.
SL will never get anywhere without a mass market appeal.
A true Metaverse must be ubiquitous, a part of everyone's life.

that would be a fantastic sequel to this episode. something they could turn into a semi-regular piece on Attack of The Show.

i think the future is brighter, not darker..
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edit: Eggy.. i concede that you have a very valid point. at this point we should start looking to expand into a more commercial-type base. without everyone, it won't keep flowing so nicely.

excellent point.

But AOTS (not LL) announced the cordinates live on air quite a while before they aired the segment (which I missed because of a 4:30 class). If they wanted it kept secret, they would have done so. Instead they picked a very public sim (Lime) and told however many thousand people watching the show about it.

What the Egg said.

Hopefully, they will be open to a sequel.

coco

I hope this serves as an incredibly embarassing accidental expose which will bring Philip out of his rose colored prim and start actually doing something about the beta-quality monster rather than simply playing unrealistic promotional videos that make SL look like Quake 8 instead of Lagfest'05, talking about the "grand unrealized" concept behind SL, and beating the "money for nuthin' and your chicks for free" drum.

SL suffers from an inverse network effect whereby each additional player reduces game quality for all. However they need money to improve things and that requires revenue which means more players - "converted" ones - which in turn makes it less able to convert trial users to paying customers because the performance stinks. Scylla, meet Charybdis.

The SL vison is a damn good one, but LL has failed to meet the challenge of their phenomenal growth. I have long believed that this is primarily due to two main causes: the gross difference between the hype and the (virtual) reality, and Philip's peril sensitive sunglasses which have caused actual Lindens to say "no, it doesn't take minutes for me to rez a new locale must be your firewall or sumptin".

Despite it all, I actually have hope that SL2 could concievably dodge the scalability problems of the SL1 prototype. Here's hoping that this unfortunate media event will increase that probability.

Well said, Malachi. Honestly, as much as I dig the potential SL offers, it is a mess at the moment and completely unprepared to grow any bigger than it is at present (some may even argue it shouldn't have been allowed to grow as much as it has).

Market equity is a precious thing. This wasn't like a tradeshow where circumstances are expected to be monkey-wrenches on occasion. This was something for which preparation on many levels should have occurred and blatantly did not.

Outside of demonstrating the fundamental issues of intuitiveness (lack thereof) and the reality of the network effect, the only thing this 'spot' did, in all honesty, was show any true geek watching that LL isn't up on their game, ready for primetime, [insert slang phrase indicating a status of 'not ready' here].

The very worst thing they could POSSIBLY do at this point would be to get the mainstream attention. The expectations of the mainstream will kill this product long before any revenue they might generate could save it.

Hate to chime in with the me toos, but that is an amazingly succint description of how I'm beginning to feel about SL. I very much believe that the very architecture of the world needs to be reexamined.

An inverse network effect (exponentially increasing load) is not occurring. Load in SL is proportional (linearly increasing load) to the number of avatars in a simulator, that's all.

They just had an overloaded simulator filled with a mob of knuckle-heads.

~Ulrika~

Inverse network effects are not my metier, so I can't answer to the veracity of such a claim.

Let's get down to brass tacks. Don't you think it's bad that a sim can even be overloaded, though? It's a topic which gets hashed out every couple of weeks, but it's an important one. How can we continue to support a structure in which resources are allocated based on geography and not on demand? I've defended the geographical method in the past, but I've decided it simply does not work. Vehicle problems are abundant. Assets are a major drain. People can't congregate in large numbers. Resources are being wasted.

It would very much benefit the world if alternate architectures were explored.

I concur.

I also have hopes that HTML will bring decentralized texture servers which could help utilize bandwidth more efficiently.

That is a very fascinating, creatively lateral idea!

Whoa! That's an amazing observation. It's so obvious, I'm a little surprised I hadn't thought of it before.

Why couldn't SL offload a portion of a sim's load to idle sims?

~Ulrika~

Because the end goal is to allow people to run thier own simulators. Yes we may be many years away from that, but load balancing is a step backward in that effort.

Yes, that occurred to me when thinking about private sims. However, couldn't a cluster of group-owned simulators be used for load balancing (or whatever it might be called). For instance, if Nburg expanded to a second sim, it would be nice to steal idle cycles from our other server.

~Ulrika~

*sigh* something simular happened with Sage (the anime sim) a while back. LL went to an anime convention and sent a linden to visit the sim to show off SL and there was so many people it lagged a lot and then someone set off all the fireworks that were set up and made it worse. It just made us all look bad. :/

If you had a non-negative understanding of the system architecture you would be exactly correct, but as you don't, you aren't. I'd point you at the relevant white-papers but they have now been expunged from the LL servers (or are very well hidden).

I'm so happy we can all have these discussions in a civil tone!

You are right though - there are some elements that increase by a factorial rate.

Like chatting.

If you get 1 person processing chat, the sim doesn't have to check anyone needing to hear it. (Theoretically, the chat should stay in your own browser. Though, I'm suspecting it may be one.)

If you have 3 people, the sim has to process to see for each person if they are in range of the other speakers, etc.

The bottleneck of a singular (now partially sim-cached) asset server was a known issue since at least SL1.1. There was a post sometime in the last month by an SL2 developer who acknowledged the design limitation and indicated that that it was not being repeated. With 40 sims and 300 users the current architecture worked, multiplied by a factor of 10, it doesn't. There are ways to overcome this design limit, but not that could easily be retrofitted into SL1; as such they aren't even trying.

The SL1 group is working on putting band-aids on SL1 to keep it from falling over completely. I actually think they've done quite well considering the wholly unanticipated growth. But band-aids they are and will likely be until SL2.is as applicable now as it was in 1975.

I will put the burden of proving that load is an exponential function of avatars on you, then. A word of advice though before you begin, personal insults are not scientific evidence (edit: and neither are quotes).

~Ulrika~