Force Linden Labs To Restrict The Grid

Today, I was unable to TP from my house to a parcel I paid $300 USD for. I have spent at least $1000USD since I first logged on, which makes SL the most expensive software I’ve ever used in my life by far. But can I go to the land I bought with that money – money that is now in the pockets of Linden Labs? No!

Why? Because it’s the weekend. And right now, 30 thousand noobs are sucking up resources that the other 6000 of us need. These noobs clip a giant Q-tip to their crotch and walk around demanding sex with their pasty skin, flabby shapes, and ugly hair. And then they ask why when you refuse their advances. They are rude, obnoxious, and broke. They do not contribute creatively or financially to the world of SL, but they still have equal access to the simulator resources as anyone else.

I for one am sick and tired of hearing how Linden Labs will restrict the grid to those of us who contribute financially when the grid is stressed. To the best of my knowledge, this has never happened. As is the case every single weekend, I either can’t TP or when I do, my shoes are in my hair and my hair in my crotch. And oh how I love to be “ruthed” when I log on.

I propose that we land owners and paying, registered residents start organizing to put pressure on Linden Labs -- while adhering to the TOS – to start restricting the grid as they said they would. I am open to suggestions from others in this situation as to how to best do this. But it’s about time we had a stricter “no pay, no play” policy in SL until resources meet the demand of mooching noobs. Here are my suggestions:

Flood the Linden Lab help phones with complaints at organized times.
Setting up email generators similar to those of political campaigns.
Asking sim owners to ban “No Payment on File” noobs.
Consumer boycotts that hurt Linden Labs without targeting vendors.

Anyone else have any ideas or comments on my suggestions? Please reply here or IM me in world. That is, if you can log on.

We pay. SL belongs to us. It’s time we did something about it.

Thank you,

Persephone Bolero

so what you suggest to do to "curb" LindenLabs, you obviously have no leverage and the massive uproar didn't happen yet and i do not see it happen anytime soon.

Frankly, I think she makes a good point. This is ridiculous, and it happens every weekend. What are we paying for here?

When I am unhappy with a product or service I send them a polite letter explaining why I am dissatisfied and never use them again. I get the satisfaction in telling them they lost a customer and move on to something else.

I think Persephone's frustration is shared by many of the SL's heavy users whose payment in rent makes up the bulk of SL's profit. While Linden Labs is not incentivized to restrict the number of users at any time, perhaps protesting as she suggests would alert LL to the issue and induce them to restrict usage at peek times. I don't mind noobs particularly -- we have all been there at some point and in some way -- but it does seem unjust to take money for land and then inhibit the renter's right to use it. I hope that Linden Labs is responsible enough to address this issue soon. Perhaps LL just needs decent competition to motivate it to change.

Edward Althouse

That's an excellent suggestion, and it's worth considering. Of course, the Linden's competitors don't begin to compare in potential. When SL works, it's the best thing going.

But, every weekend, it doesn't work. So, I will need to consider selling off my land, restricting my purchases, and preparing for the eventuality that I will have to abandon this life until such a time that it is functional.

Or, they could just restrict the grid when it's over stressed, as they said they would do. Then, I and many others would be willing to invest more in this service, which has far more potential over its competitors.

What LL is doing is quite obvious. They are following an internet business model, which has been very successful for Google and others. Offering free services casts a wide net and increases sales. And, in the case of Google and others, it doesn't cost much more to offer free services to 1 million people over 10 thousand. It would make sense that LL offers free accounts, and I wouldn't expect them to stop doing so.

All I'm saying is that they should do what they said they were going to do. Restrict the grid when it's over stressed.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/02/16/contingency-measures-to-ensure-service-as-second-life-grows/

Because Google can do 10 million searches, but the SL database can't handle 35 thousand avatars. Linden Labs is making the same mistake that AOL did in the 90s. They offered more services than they could provide. People signed up for AOL and couldn't log on. It wasn't long before AOL was begging people to come back.

I hope Linden Labs is wiser and realizes that they're at capacity. Time to make adjustments until they can meet the demands of their best customers AND those who don't spend money. AOL survived its mistake, but they had a lot more investment capital. Linden Labs may not be so lucky.

it is a wishfull idea, but it's like trying to stop a bulldozer with a toothpick.

Many people have this attitude, and it's unfortunate. Change is not only possible, it's guaranteed if there is to be an SL in 5 years.

Try logging on to AOL today. You know how many busy signals you get? Even their high speed is reliable. Why? Their customers complained and acted on it.

Granted, AOL had competitors. Linden Labs will someday have competitors too. They know this. What we're asking is so small. They wouldn't blow off their best customers now knowing it will destroy them when competitors enter the market.

Just restrict the grid when traffic is too high. We're not trying to stop a bulldozer. We're just trying to slow it down a little bit.

I'm sure that if restricting logins that way happens, people will instead log on Friday nights, get anti-idle scripts and mouse movers, and simply refuse to allow themselves to get logged out until Sunday night.

Simply put, put pressure on someone to restrict something to certain people, and the people you're restricting will pressure right back, and no one will win.

It isn't an attitude, it's just my opinion, result of a few years in SL , i might revise it the day you manage to rally 30% of the paying users to your cause, but i seriously doubt you will be able to get some organization in this big anarchic world.

Guess they havent felt the need to try it out. Not sure just how bad things have to get before they finally give it a shot. Myself, I dont play on primetime so I dont know how bad the people are suffering. I just read the aftershocks posted all over the place. I doubt its cus nobody is working on the weekend so theres nobody there to flip the switch.
" QUICKLY, THE NEWBS ARE GAINING A FOOTHOLD. LAUNCH THE EJECT SEQUENCE AND BOLT DOWN THE GRID" If things are not to your satisfaction, tell them. Not sure how to force them to comply with their own edict. Unless we all have a sick out, and dont show up some weekend.

That just might work. And most likely more doable than the OP's suggestion. The problem is that it would be extremely hard to get enough onboard to make it effective.

I wonder if we could be banned if each of us put a 10 x 10 meter single prim sign above (or below if you live in a skybox) our houses and businesses giving a date and time frame for boycotting SL? It might, at least, get LL's attention. Something needs to be done to get LL's undivided attention.

Hell I might even get a warning for just mentioning it here............

That depends on how they wish to deal with muckrakers, stirring up the pot of discontent.
Silencing you would be a drop in the proverbial bucket. There are way too many others to pick up your torch and hurry it along to ignite the bonfire of truth and liberation. Maybe it would be easier to send an email to Phil Linden and ask if there is something he can do to help the situation before anyone else gets upset. Obviously something needs to be done on their end to help alleviate the problems that 'we' the customers are having. The least of which could be more information posted to the official blog on the current state of affairs and what is being done to make our second lives easier. Show us some promise.

Nono, all you need to do is set a trigger: 30k online? Batton down the hatches. Doesn't matter that the noobs are logging in Friday night, as soon as it hits 30k, no more.

Maybe I'm just special - I did take a special bus to school back in the day - but SL hasn't been giving me many problems at all lately and the weekends have been fine.

TPs work fine (which is kind of amazing consindering how prim-heavy I am as a full dargon avatar by Daryth) and inventory is sometimes a little slow when I first log in but it's not that bad. Somebody had littered some scripty objects this weekend that were pushing people all over the sim - I filed an AR, sent the RT to Help Request and a Linden came by and cleaned them up within 5 minutes. When my home sim started acting up last week, I watched the stats for a few minutes then contacted Help Request and told them the sim was in trouble (stuck at 750+ downloads!) and somebody rebooted it within a few minutes - annoying for a bit but got resolved quickly.

From my perspective, compared to 6 months ago when the online population was 1/4 of what it is today, SL has gotten better.

I have yet to meet anyone that wasn't experiencing any problems. Perhaps you aren't on during peak hours.

I didn't say it wasn't giving me 'any' problems. I said it wasn't giving me 'many' problems.

It's not perfect but it's certainly not "ridiculous" every weekend.

And yes, I am logging in during peak hours and I live on a class 4 sim and I do lots of building & scripting.

I haven't been experiencing TP failures either. Sometimes they are a bit slower during heavy loads on the grid but that is it. No building or inventory issues either. I guess it depends where you account is stored or something.

My TPs tend to work fine (I usually go between relatively low-traffic sims), but packet loss everywhere is horrendous for me as no doubt the links to the outside world become saturated. When packet loss hits 20% or higher you know you're wasting your time; conversations with people I only see at the weekend are painful, and I'm paying to play, own land and run a business.

So I'm all in favour of restricting access to premiums and then payment info on file users. My thinking is this:
If network usage goes above say...80% then block users without payment info on file and give them a nice big message saying "To guarantee greater access flexibility, verify your account or upgrade to premium today!" and provide links to upgrade.
If the usage goes above 90% then things are going to get messy, at which point we restrict access to premium accounts only so they're guaranteed a bit more bandwidth to play around with.

IMO the same should also be true of simulators, ie if it's over 50% full then restrict no-payment info accounts, if it's over 70% then block non-premium and if its over 90% full then block everyone but land-owners.

I understand that a lot of no-payment info players are great people, having fun and so-on, but I (and other premiums and land-owners) are essentially paying to have them steal bandwidth from us when we may need it the most. I don't want to unsensitive, but if they're not paying for something, then they really shouldn't be taking it for granted anyway, as free things cost someone something somewhere!

This would basically be the same as peak-rate and off-peak, if you can't afford peak-rate, then you don't expect peak-rate service.

I almost wish they'd change the term 'packet loss' to something else. The term kinda implies (at least to me) that you've bumped up against some network limit but all 'packet loss' really means is that something didn't make it between you and the sim within some amount of time. It's not much more useful then the Check Engine light in a car.

More often than not, when I start seeing packet loss, it doesn't really matter how many people are on the sim and the problem goes away if I can talk Help Request into restarting the sim. If the problem goes away after a restart and the same number of people come back to the sim, the problem can't be that a network limit has been reached..

Then why do the lag problems directly coincide with the number of people online?

Same here, I'm talking about sims that are normally perfect, where 1% packet-loss is unusual. Same sim when there are 30,000+ online (like now), yet same number of people in the sim itself, and I'm getting an average 20% packet-loss. The reason information isn't getting to me in a timely fashion is because it isn't able to leave SL's network due to all the other requests leaving at the same time for the other tens of thousands of people

Because the system is under stress and the system is more than just the network. The problem could be the network but it could well be something else. Maybe a server has leaked memory and is thrashing, maybe a disk is overheating and spending lots of time in retries.

I was just trying to say that packet loss is a symptom of the system not behaving correctly. It doesn't say why the symptom is happening, just that it is..

I posted a version of my suggestion on having auto-blocking triggered by network stress to the JIRA tool:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-87

The summary being:
A computer somewhere monitors the network periodically. It takes the peak network bandwidth (the highest recorded amount of outgoing the data the network was able to sustain for some reasonable period, refreshing of course in the event some part of the network goes down so this stat would go down too) and divides by the number of people online, thus getting the bandwidth each person online can reasonably expect from the system. If this value (bandwidth per person) drops below some acceptable minimum (say 256 or 512kbps given the nature of SL) then the blocking will come into effect, immediately blocking unverified log-ins.
If the minimum is still not achieved, then verifieds are blocked too, meaning premium only. It also mentions doing the same to simulators in the event of frame-rates falling (opposed to being by capacity).

This gives huge incentive to verifying and maybe getting premium, hopefully increasing the cash available to LL to better account for growth of the grid/more users online. So as premium members grow, the grid can grow for them with the money they provide, with the non-premiums getting to access the grid during the less busy periods.