WTF? Restricted Logins?

OK LL ... you've gone TOO FAR!!!

I got ready to log in today to go to work in-world, and I get a message:

Login Failed.
Second Life logins are temporarily restricted in order to make sure that those in-world have the best possible experience.

People with free accounts will not be able to access second Life during this time, to make room for those who have paid for Second Life.


You've got to be kidding me, right? I may be a free account, but since I have no need to own land, I see no reason to throw away $70 USD / year. I spend plenty of money in-world for my personal business, and for the club I manage. I am a contributor to society. I've been in SL for over a year, I'm not some n00b. Hell, I'm even listed in the index of the Official Guide to Second Life.

But, because I don't pay you $70 / year, you won't let me in? I have appointments with clients. My business is suffering because of this nonsense.

If you insist on placing login restrictions, I suggest you restrict free accounts of avatars less than xx days old. Personally, I don't think you should restrict it at all. You are costing me MONEY ... and that's money that I can't put back into society. I pay rent and tier to my landlords, which they in turn pay to you. So you can't say I'm a "free" account.

Come on Lindens ... snap out of it. Come back to your senses and realize you're hurting SL society.

There was a huge debate about this the other day in the Resident Answers forum, where everybody was being annoyed by one girl who was adamantly demanding that this be done. I guess she's really happy now, since it "appears" at least, like a Linden was listening.

I for one would like something in the middle, preferring to agree with the prospect of limiting things by payment activity. So if you are contributing in any way to the SL economy, you should be treated thus. Payment info on file and being used shows that you are here for more than simply griefing or dancing in clubs. And anyone who is receiving revenue from a business is quite obviously contributing so there should never be an issue of them not being able to access.

I hope this clears up for you quickly.

this actually would be good if they restrict it to payment info only those who have payment info because a LOT of people still own land in second life but just do not pay the 6 bucks a month fee.

However if you only allow members who are premium members in second life you are going to lose a LOT of people... and to be honest i dont see how you can do this without having a fair warning.

I dont think this is right...and i hope you decided to hold off on this for a good while....

but one good thing if this does go into effect that it would elimate a LOT of the lag. however you would most likely lose a ton of good people in second life.

but for sure it would cut down on the greifing ten fold methinks.

Though to be honest money wise for there sake doing that would really take off a ton of people who play second life and actually do spend lindens...

sighs.

Y'all know, of course, that a more direct and effective way of dealing with this is to email Linden Labs, call them or submit a support ticket. No one in Resident Answers can do anything to help you at all.

I would expect these forums would be overflowing with complaints if this was happening with moderate frequency.

correct, something is a miss here, once I see it with my own eyes, I will report back

To be fair; the fact you spend a ton of money in-world isn't strictly relevant, when you buy linden dollars, or cash them out, you pay for the service of buying/selling linden dollars.

Premium accounts however, are paying for a premium service, which includes the right to own (actually own) land within Second Life.

I'm not saying it doesn't suck, and really LL should right now be working their asses off to remove every single central point of failure in SL, but the harsh truth is that right now SL DOES NOT support the numbers of people that try to get on it, bots sure as hell don't help this any.

I can't even understand how the system could have so many single points of failure; so one inventory server goes down and takes thousands of accounts with it until it's fixed? So one asset server goes down and it takes tens of thousands of assets with it until it's fixed? So one database server goes down and everything fails? Where's the redundancy? Where's the distribution of load? It's like we have thousands of simulators all piping millions of requests through one crappy machine somewhere that LL just pats affectionately in the morning in the hopes it won't roll over and die.
Why aren't asset services etc. distributed across the thousands of simulator servers LL have, with multiple levels of redundancy? They do that and so long as the network's up to scratch we have scalable grid that can support 50,000+ people without blinking, and one which a failure doesn't prevent things from working.

I really don't understand the architecture LL seem to be working with, but working sure ain't the operative word there.

Until LL gets rid of these centralised services whose operation the whole grid apparently depends upon, and which quickly become swamped with too many people online, this is only going to get more and more common =(

A bit of techy-trivia.. The main point of failure is the asset server.. EVERYTHING having to do with inventory is stored on the asset server , which actually is a group of computers. But here's the problem.. LL designed the SL grid using ALL opensource software.. Sims all run on Linux, asset server uses Linux as its OS, however..... LL is using MySQL, a pretty good opensource database engine for medium to semi-large databases, which is what the SL asset cluster was early on (2-3 years ago). Now, with LL's opening the flood-gates on free accounts, and 10+million registered accounts, each with several thousand or more inventory items, the database size has ballooned to many tens of terabytes in size, and basically MySQL doesn't scale well to these sizes of databases.. SL's asset database is now what you'd call a "data warehouse" in database administration lingo, rather than just a database.. The only way LL is ever going to permanently fix the ongoing problems with the asset structure in SL, is to "bite the bullet" and migrate the asset structure over to a database engine that was designed for data warehouses of this size, such as Oracle or IBM's DB2. The downside is these database engines are VERY pricey, and you can imagine LL is loath to spend the $$$ for this, so they keep trying to shove a square peg into a round hole with MySQL and we the residents of SL are paying for that, with the instability we are seeing... Having said that, I'm surprised SL works as well as it does... Other than the asset problems, I think SL works pretty well considering...

Tas

I'm not sure the issue is really the database software used. The problem is that if you load everyone's stuff onto a single machine, or even cluster of machines, then that's a lot of load on a single point within the system. Even if the software gracefully handles failures, and is quite good at distributing load, it's still just a single place for something to go really wrong.
They'd be better off making multiple smaller databases and distributing them out further, such as onto the simulators. The complexity there is in managing these smaller databases, but if they can get that right then have thousands of machines on hand with spare processing power perfectly able to do something like this. This way as the grid-grows, so does every system it relies on.

I am beginning to believe that this was a hoax or a troll speaking.

Has anyone else seen the message?

I havn't and I have a free account but have 'payment on file'.

What you say could be true. I can't say "me too" for two reasons. First, I've never seen it and second I'm premium (so the message does apply to me). But I keep thinking about the big controversy and blow up about a year ago when LL blogged about throttling log ins durring peak times to help with the problems that occur when the grid it bogged down with heavy log ins. It is possible that LL is actually restricting the log ins (finally). The wording of the message does bother me though........the people at LL are usually pretty careful about consistantly calling people using SL "residents". Not "people" or "users". But, who knows.

For the record, I want to add I have no problem with "free" (or basic) accounts having access to the grid and all the same things I have access to. But, if there is actually a need to restrict access then there needs to be a priority list of accounts to restricted in some way. The top of the list should, naturally, be the highest paying accounts and the bottom should be the lowest paying accounts. The "free" account is misleading........many free accounts pay a lot. But the "no payment information on file" don't. My list would run something like this (from the top down):
Concereige
Premium
Basic with payment info used
Basic with payment info on file
Basic with no payment info on file

If that hurts someone's feelings, I'm sorry. To me that's a fair way to do it and based on common sense.

I thought this was the same. but anyways. just restrict it to anybody with payment on file. during those times.

I'd say that was a pretty reasonable list, and although I'm not a premium account holder any longer (it simply wasn't worth paying for anymore in my opinion), as a "pay info used" account I don't think it would bother me too terribly much to be denied access in favor of concierge and premium account holders in times of high concurrency.

In fact, if that became a regular occurrence and LL were somehow able to resolve the myriad issues that result as a side effect of high concurrency, I might even be motivated to go back to premium even though I never intend to purchase Mainland land again. I think it's more likely that deferred logins *is* LL's fix for the problems arising from high concurrency, so I'm not holding my breath, but as I say if they could fix it at the cause then that kind of benefit might convince me that premium holds some value.

.

No, it's not the same. Payment info on file is someone who has given payment information like a valid credit card number. Payment info use is someone who has actually used that payment info on file to purchase something.........like lindens.

What of us basic members who pay tier to Linden Lab?

You're basic with payment info used.

Heck Suzanne I can't do anything about you being so old in SL.................LOL

I'm a Free Basic Account ... They don't respond to me and I can't submit tickets.


And to quote from the Second Life Support Center web site:

What if I don't want to own land?

The Basic account is the plan for you. Without having to pay any money, a Basic membership allows you access to Second Life at any time.



I assure you it wasn't a hoax, and I'm certainly not a troll. (search my posts)

This happened just the one time (so far) and I was locked out for about 10 minutes. I missed an appointment with a client because of it. She was waiting in my studio and wondering why I didn't show up. Fortunately, she was understanding of the situation and when I did finally make it in-world, she TPed back to my studio and we got her photo shoot completed.

I hope that LL doesn't make a habit of this.