I'm just curious because I play other mmorph games, (Guild Wars, WoW, most mmorph games, fps, strategy) and during their updates they have minor fixes to where all players recieve notifications to exit the game and relog again (no down grid status timeframe) prompting a new download. The bugs are fixed while the game is still going on they get a notification to just relog after each one is finished. Just a little inconvenience. Then the game commences as usual. Players who weren't in the game at the time just get the downloader update window and the game continues flawlessly. Don't get me wrong, they have their bugs like trade exchange exploits capable of shutting down the whole game economy, but they don't shut down their grids. I could understand if those PVP mmorph games had to shut down their grids, because they have PVP tournaments game televised, trips to Germany, Taiwan, 100,000 dollar giveaways etc. So one false battle could be detrimental during the competitions.
However, I know Secondlife is different. There is no game objective other then creativity and virtual capitalism. Which is EVEN more reason to not shut down the grid. There are real merchants using real money to start up their virtual businesses. If Secondlife wants to be taken seriously, this isn't just a game box you buy at Best Buy that brags about virtual avatar marketing. If the RL stock market was down as much as it was this week in secondlife, our world would be in a permanant depression. I'm focusing more on the merchants that spent hundreds of dollars, including sim land maintenance fees, and painstaking hours of building and creation of their products. Yes the residents deserve a better working world as a whole but not at the expense of hours consumed in the SL global economy. Obviously, SL is cute and entertaining at first for people destined to sit on poseballs in an advanced virtual chatroom, but it's the businesses that keep the residents. Keep shutting down that grid, it's real money being lost.