I've actually joked about this before! However, even in jest, my ideas were shot down for reasons including:
* It would be way too popular
* As such, it'd be unscalable
* We're moving towards giving Residents better tools
* We aren't the police
* It would be way too popular
* As such, it'd be unscalable
* We're moving towards giving Residents better tools
* We aren't the police
Well "too popular" is easily balanced by price, if it would be too popular at $20/hr, then charge $40/hr -- if it's still too popular, then raise it to $100/hr -- perhaps with a refund if an actual bug or problem is discovered due to something on the grid, asset server, or sim.
I've also been getting into video bug reports and taping myself. I have a feeling this will be increasingly popular in the future. And I also visit Residents inworld to watch things happen for myself--you couldn't have said it better. I like being a witness. Wouldn't it be cool if we had some easier way to "record what I'm doing and send it to LL after"? E.g., the future of video bug reports? As right now, we have text and still pictures. I think with greater technology, everything's eventual.
If you want to empower residents to police themselves and to provide enough information to solve bugs that don't have visual manifestations (problems like the LoD bugs, or distorted prims are "easy" to report.)
EVERY resident, if they own the current parcel or not, let alone if they own the sim (or estate) -- should have some ability to identify what scripts may be causing problems. In many cases there are events taking place in, or across multiple sims, that aren't owned by the participants -- sailing being the one I'm most involved with.
In one case, we found an Animation Overrider that was causing problems -- but only discovered it by accident when I happened to be in a void alone, just me and a boat I was working on and I had the sim stats up measuring how various changes to the boat were effecting the sim, when the other skipper arrived and I saw a huge sudden spike in IPS and scripting frame time. Since there were only 2 dozen scripts in the sim between the two of us we were able to track it down. If such tools were available to ALL residents, then Life Help and the Linden Liasons would actually get called out less often, and when they are called out -- they can be directed to very specific problems.
It would be nice if when we went to go do a bug report, it could snapshot and DISPLAY sim data, top 100 scripts, current frame times, etc.
Also, I don't know how often TD info is sent out to the clients, but I've been in sims where there are obvious TD spikes happening, and with a half-dozen scripters present all watch TD and calling out each time it drops below .75 -- we discovered that 1) some of us would never show a drop at all 2) those that saw the drops, didn't always see them happen at the same time. If we seeing that, then I know if someone from Live Help responds, there is a chance that they won't see the spikes.
grrrr... It is very frustrating when we don't have the tools to diagnose problems ourselves, it's made worse when response times are slow, and it's doubly worse when by time an overworked volunteer or liason does respond the symptoms have already begun to allievate themselves OR the respondant takes one look at the sim stats, says something like "I don't see anything wrong here. Clear your cache and restart." then teleports away to another request...
