Buster's 1.6.1 Land Dump

I have put all the land I had slated for large projects up for sale at around $4 per m2, and some as low as $3.5 per m2. There’s a bit more than a sim out there CHEAP. (Mainly in Gourdneck, Ess and Ironjaw) Go get it!

The 1.6 and especially the 1.6.1 upgrade have been a complete disaster for me. For the last week I have spent all my time installing, reinstalling, re-logging, and experimenting with what causes crashes.

My 1/4 sim Buster's Ranch parcel returned most of the prims on it to my inventory. Weeks of work down the drain. I could put it all back, but it would take several days with no guarantee that it won't just happen again. I will NOT try to build anything big again until SL stabilizes.

There are other very discouraging factors:

- Still no information about where, when, or even if telehubs will appear in the new continent
- Missing roads next to my property, including one where the road ends next to my property line. (How do you orient your build when you don’t know the elevation or placement of the road, or even if there is going to BE a road).
- Traffic at zero for so long I had no idea whether my efforts to attract people to my land were having any effect. (Ok, now the traffic numbers are there, but MY PRIMS AREN’T. Sheesh.)
- Convoluted explanation of “developer incentives” lends credibility to suspicion that “developer incentives” are for FIC only (as in FIC = good old boy network).
- General instability of the SL client. (I crash several times each session now. Prior to 1.6 I only crashed a couple of times).
- Amateurish and naïve approach to 1.6 upgrade

I’m not “quitting SL”, but I’m not building big any more until I have some comfort that my builds will work, and would continue to work after future upgrades.

Buster

UPDATE: IronJaw and Ess land has already sold. Large tracts still there in Gourdneck and Clear.
NOTE: posted in Land and the Economy to inform the folks who usually read this forum. If others feel the same frustration I feel, it devalues land and injures the economy.

I'm really sorry to read all this, Buster.

You're the kind of new person Sl should be attracting -- not part of the FIC, fresh, with good ideas, intelligence, technological savvy but not all those usual wiki prejudices -- really, your contribution has been great.

I've loved to watch your builds go up and it chills me to think all that work that went into Ironjaw could just disappear. I've never read that people's work disappears here before, whatever the sim crashes, lock-ups etc that they endure. That is really worrisome and unsettling for anyone who is trying to do a large project.

People reading this might think, well, that won't happen to me...but it could...and there doesn't seem to be the kind of response you'd expect from LL given the level at which Buster was investing. That is, there doesn't seem to be service for those at that kind of "medium trading level" or "low trading level" of land dealers, who aren't at the grade of a Anshe Chung or Blue Burke, but who constitute an important and healthy competition to them, which they themselves recognize as valid. It means the game is growing...or could, if a player like Buster could be greeted and helped.

The "amateurish and naive" approach might be debatable, but what is troubling is how many players are willing to just roll over despite these severe problems.

I wonder if the last straw for Buster wasn't this telehub three-card-monte. I share his concerns about this, and I hope he will remain in the game and keep sharing his perceptions and pressing these points, even though for now I guess we won't benefit from his large builds

I agree. There have been few fresh practical minds like buster.

LL should take heed.

I think it was either a glitch in the auto return, or maybe somebody figured out how to prim-bomb it, creating lots of new prims so that my old prims got returned. Auto return was not turned on, though, so I don't know how that would have worked. Funny thing, though, it happened between 1.6 and 1.6.1. In 1.6 everything was there, when I logged in with 1.6.1, almost everything was gone. Nobody else's land seems to have been affected; it’s just my one large parcel. The sim also disappeared a few times and booted me off the system -- it was very weird.

I'm in the software business, so I have a little insight into what goes on. Linden is far to cavalier about patching right up to the release for software that has such a large user base. They should not fool around like that. You just can't make a patch in the morning and release it in the afternoon, so to speak. As soon as you patch, you have to test it all over again. The "naive" part is that they seem to think they can always predict the scope of a patch, so they continue to patch during, and even AFTER testing. I would think that for something like this, there should be a code freeze something like two weeks before the release, and any post-freeze patch should restart the clock and delay the release.

Especially for a GAME, a new release is a real disruption for a lot of users. I would guess I spent a total of 8 hours upgrading and troubleshooting between 1.6 and 1.6.1 (most of it on 1.6.1). And still, the UI is jerky and laggy compared to 1.5, video crashes constantly (I have just turned it off), and even flying across a sim border with no attachments has crashed me half a dozen times since 1.6.1. I would have a much higher degree of tolerance if I believed Linden took reasonable steps to make sure that wouldn't happen, but I get the impression that the just slap it together and do unsystematic tests. (i.e., they "pound on it". While "pounding on it" is necessary, something a little more structured and systematic is also required. I see little evidence of a systematic QA, instead I see "pound on it".

I would have a lot more confidence if I saw evidence of a code freeze somewhat in advance of a release.

I deal with this problem every day in RL. It is more important to get the software right than it is to release it on time. Any company that does not understand that is doomed. (With the exception of large, well capitalized and entrenched companies like Microsoft or IBM.)

That's an annoyance, but its the glitchy software that is the main problem. Besides, I'm NOT going away; I'm truly addicted to SL. I'm just not doing BIG any more, I'm just going to build for my own pleasure for a while. If it becomes clearer where Linden is going with this, I'll be right back in there. In the long run I really want to get my own sims and do things like golf courses and aircraft pylon racing. The game just isn't ready for it yet.

On balance, I think Linden does a pretty good job, and I disagree with most of the heat they take. (To be fair, a lot of users are far more naive than Linden.)

Any time a programmer says, "I just fixed the last bug", you'd better back up everything and hide. There isn't any such thing as "the last bug", its always two steps forward and one step back. (Well not always, sometimes its two steps forward and eight steps back.) That's the software business. The surest way to know that something can happen is to hear a programmer say, "that can't happen". That's because programmers (and I AM one) don't check for what they assume to be true, they don't defend against things that hadn't occurred to them. Then on top of that they make lots of mistakes. ALL programmers, everywhere, that's their nature.

I'll take "reliable" over "kewl" every time.

Buster

I'm not going anywhere, especially if y'all are going to flatter me. I'm here to stay! But I'm just going to become a $100 per month SL junkie instead of a $600 per month SL junkie.

This is the culture I find everywhere in the game, and you've epitomized it. It troubles me greatly. The assumptions of what they know to be true are so great, that their default is always "client-side" to every question you have about any trouble. "Client-side".

So much they didn't think of...because they aren't really walking through it...using it...and the mistakes...well...you wish there was more humility. There isn't.

Random, the truth is that Linden Lab is terribly terribly scared of be accused of favoritism. So they take great pain to provide same support to everybody. This doesn't stop with "medium trading level". It effect the top investors same way.

Buster,

You've probably tried this already, or heard about it, but I was having similar problems after 1.6. I was crashing constantly, I'd be fine for a little while, and then crash ten times in two minutes, often immediately after reconnecting. It was great, then someone mentioned that the Shadows option under graphics preferences was a common cause, turning that off has pretty much stopped my crashing entirely.

As for the build disappearing, can't say that I blame you for tossing the hat in on that. We had a few small things disappear, but if one of my larger builds disappeared I'd probably not be interested in putting it back up anytime soon either.

This is becoming like an urban legend LOL.

I, too, clicked off shadows and clicked off video streaming.

Still crashing.

Just because it doesn't help everybody doesn't make it an urban legend. Many people actually do benefit from this. I tried a lot of different things just as Buster did, one at a time, trying to get some stability back. Flicking this switch did it for me instantly, as well as a lot of other people I've met. I still crash on very rare occasion, but no more than I did in 1.5.

I have two crash situations now, one having to do with leaving and entering plots with video playing (and generally crashing on stopping video), and the other seems to be related to sim crossing. I've bug reported both. Most of my problems went away when I completely uninstalled and reinstalled from scratch.

But after a full reinstall, all my settings are reset to defaults, what a pain in the ass. I got spammed with newbie messages, how to do this and that, I get popups when friends log on and off, my own name is over my head all the time, etc. etc. I can't remember all the tweaking I had done with fog settings, distance drawing and so on, so I am sort of experimenting and reestablishing my settings all over again. I couldn't remember how to turn on the debug menu. What a pain in the ass to have to figure all this crap out again. This is not "fun", in fact it feels a lot more like my day job.

When I have some time to spare I will see if I can nail down what causes me to crash on sim crossing -- only happens one in 20 times or something. Video was easy, just turn it off. (Disappointing, though, because I really wanted to play with video. It would be cool to put my web cam on my TV screen in my house. Crash, crash, crash.)

Heh, I hear ya on the video. I turned it off as soon as I installed 1.6 because I'm running SL under emulation on Linux. I haven't even tried installing QT yet, but I have a pretty good idea of the functionality I could expect out of it. Some day maybe I'll try it anyway, I might be pleasantly surprised.

Anyway, best of luck in tracking down the problem.

It's a bit late now, and perhaps you did ask about it, but a friend of mine had most of the prims on her island returned after the 1.6 upgrade (and only a fraction actually turned up in people's inventories), and LL eventually did a successful roll-back, restoring everything. Maybe that wouldn't have been possible in a sim where other people own property, but I'm just wondering if you asked before throwing up your hands and selling everything.

I had the same video crash bug which thankfully went away when I reinstalled quick time.

The healthist thing about the SL land market is fair trade. Even better than that is land traded at acceptable margins. All I see on the market now is overpriced land mostly traded by those not understanding the market and getting caught up in the hype.

Then what was the whole concierge system about?

Anyways, favoritism is not giving a superior level of service to people who pay more money. That's just smart business.