A Long Time Resident of SL Speaks

That's great, Strife. But right now, SL doesn't work.

coco

My feelings towards SecondLife are very conflicted right now.

I've been accused of being an 'apologist' for LL many times in the past, and I guess I am. I've put my heart and soul into founding and maintaining an online world in the past, and (on a very small scale) I've experienced some of the pain that LL's staff have undoubtedly gone through. So, perhaps I oversympathize with them a bit.

Even so... I've been staying away from SL for the last 3-4 months. Partly because it's summertime and too nice to be cooped up indoors. Partly because even just building has become such an unreliable and frustrating experience that I've stopped enjoying it.

I have faith that LL will, someday, put more effort into polishing than into proliferation of feature, and I'm okay with waiting, to a degree. Once stability becomes more important than gradual inclusion of new features SL will become stagnant and unchanging. Many of you want that... but it makes SL a sitting duck for competitors to over-take, (should anyone think the effort of competing really worthwhile.)

Voice is very newly introduced, we all know that any major new feature takes time to shake out. I admit I haven't been in-world enough to notice most of the annoyances associated with the voice client, other than the communications window changes, which certainly has some major quirks so far. (The irksome auto-sizing of IM sessions most notably.)

Anyway... I do plan on returning, soon hopefully. My lands are full, I've been wanting to tier up so that I'll have room to build more.

I'm just patiently waiting for the weather to clear somewhat first.

As broken as things may seem now, they still need to move forward with the migration to Mono and some newer version of Havok. I have no expectations of 'lasting stability' before those events... or for some time immediately after them.

Sometimes bones must be broken to re-set them correctly.

They might patch things up for brief intervals, but I'm pretty convinced that things are going to get significantly worse before they can get better.

So when is this migration thingy going to occur?

coco

Thank you Kathy and Brenda for your kind feedback

I am up way late and I never know if my night rambling is making sense until I read it the next day

In regards to Kathy's post and particular problem, I would like to say that I have been out and witnessed the "Amazing Non existant wall"and man oh man... what a wild and wooly problem that one is!!! I would like to make it clear that I was not trying to intentionally shake anyones branches or discredit anyone's problems, moreso just add a differing point of view.
There ARE definately people in SL that have SERIOUS issues with the grid and with Kathy's particular issues, I am more than a little surprised that she has been as kind and calm as she has. I think I would have jumped up and down a LOT harder.

Anyway... Im sorry if anyone thought I was making a statement aimed at Kathy or detracting from her opinion in any way, that was certainly not my intention.

I wish I knew. Honestly, it may never happen at this rate.
They clearly tied up with infrastructure/operational problems and new other new features at the moment.

Thanks, Rusty!

Ok - my other "when" question - I asked on the recent blog entry when these problems mentioned on the blog would be fixed.

Do you have any guesses as to that?

coco

(holding an envelop up to my turban, ala Johnny Carson... )

October 17th. But not this year.

Seriously though...

Every system grows until limitations prevent further growth. The failure is either graceful (further growth requires exponentially more effort) or catastrophic (too much growth causes things to collapse or starve).

The game is "spin the bottleneck". Every performance obstacle they compensate for reveals a new bottleneck somewhere else, and often it is difficult to predict where the next problem is going to manifest.

The SL experience is somewhere in between those two, survivable failures and increasing levels of inconvenience.

There's no way LL can grow SL fast enough to keep up with us, and if they could, we'd just grow that much faster.

In regards to Kathy's post and particular problem, I would like to say that I have been out and witnessed the "Amazing Non existant wall"and man oh man... what a wild and wooly problem that one is!!

I am new to sl and can't comment on how bad it is compared to before (except to say that it is bad). But I will say that invisible prims (prims you can't see that block your path) and ghost prims (Prims that you can see, that are not phantom and that you can walk right through) were know bugs to the sim owner on land that I owned. They both have occurred on my land and the sim had to be restarted, which fixed the problems all three times.

I read it. Didn't understand all of it, but I could figure enough out to realize that it basically says, "The dog ate my homework and your check is in the mail."

Technical issues are part of a virtual world, and a vast number of SL users are technically oriented/educated. Why not tell us what technical issues are going on when they occur? You have the power to notify us through system admin messages when you are going to kick us out of a region in 2 minutes, why not tell us "don't drag no-copy items to land you don't own" instead of waiting 3 days to acknowledge??? Why not note this as an issue in your support messages to me about a lost item which, curiously, was lost during this issue, instead of having me run around implementing 45 different fixes which I already indicated I had tried?

There's a vast disconnect in what they know and what they tell us, with some good reason, but the amount we don't get to find out about things that deplete the goodwill of SL users is reaching a tipping point.

Grrrrrrr.............

It's called Brownian Motion, in the world of physics...inside a Linden Lab bubble, each Linden is working really hard, and making lots of progress on their own pet Linden-Tao-empowered mini-project, work which "moves" Second Life (and their bubble) through some (hopefully mostly-positive) changes...so the Linden boardroom hears departmental reports about these efforts, each moving successfully "foward toward its goal," and they see "great progress being made."

However, what they do not see, being inside the bubble, is that all these Linden efforts, when you add them up, create lots and lots of vibration, but no significant total movement of the LL/SL system toward any greater objectives such as stability, utility or competitive superiority.

Genius post, Parsimony.

coco

It would be nice to have a real "Status" page. Up/Down isn't enough.
Waiting for status updates or post-mortem explanations is fine, but not enough.

I want a stats page that reports trending information for the last minute, hour, day and week for:

How many successful and failed:
Teleports/region-crossings
Rez object attempts
L$ transfers
Object transfers
Asset lookups
Login attempts

And how many
Regions are online, down & the total number of reboots in each time interval,
and how many regions have simFPS or time dilation below 10.

We need a weather page. As in ' "weather" or not now is a good time to log in'.

No matter how intelligent a post one writes, or how many people write or email linden labs, I suspect it won't make much difference.

Much like most any online world, the owners are going to continue driving the thing into the ground and spend as little money as possible. Why? Because the beancounters took over.

Invest in more programmers, more servers, more reliable backbones? Why? We can get around it for less by making do with what we have. Buying more means trying to get a budget increase. But if we do nothing, we'll continue to make a profit with no risk. When we start to lose money, we can just increase our rates.

Worst case, we can always just sell the company or shut off the system. What are people going to do? Sue us for losing their fantasy buildings?

Unfortunately, when beancounters take control, no matter how much the company claims to care, they don't. We're all just numbers to them at this point.

IPO shares to current account holders...not THAT many...just enough to give us one concensus vote in the Board of Director/Trustee meetings...just one vote...instead of taking our hard-earned cash in LindEx exchanges, lost inventory and over-inflated land auction yields...at long last...

LET those of us who have carried you and built your reputation as a vital, dynamic product, completely gratis, (each of us) for some fraction of THE LAST FOUR YEARS, let us, AT LAST, become PART OF THE SOLUTION! Why DO systems developers consistently refuse to utilize their MOST valuable, and highest-potential, resource...their clientele??? Sharing the process is not a relinquishment of control, if you know what you are doing in the first place!
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When you think about it...it really does make a great deal of sense! Can they? Will they? Should they? I don't know, but if all the (high-class, nice-furry) rats start rushing, lemming-like, for the the gunwhales of a sinking ship, LindenLab's braintrust may have to finally acknowledge "who" REALLY turned their pile of wires and boards, and programmer brain-strain, in to something truly creative and marketable to IBM, Nike, Nissan, et al. ...and begin to HONOR AND REWARD those who are the KEY to their success, and to their continued ability to draw a weekly paycheck and quarterly dividend installments.

@Jellin: You win my personal award for 'most beguiling post'. Thank you.

@Rusty: I think you are spot on with your "spin the bottleneck" analogy. Growing a system like this, you're just chasing the next one and the next one and the next one ... trying to keep ahead of the screaming mob of customers ... I also agree that a decent status page would be SO handy, and very easy for them to do. Tho they might not like to have actual operational details so open ... might lead to people thinking the have fewer actually active members than they would like people to think!

@ Parsimony: IPO stock reserved for thousands of us? No they can't really do that, lol, impossible to administer and the SEC would be very unhappy. It's an initial PUBLIC offering, and limiting a portion of it to members would kinda privatize it, lol. I suppose they could make "friends and family" grants, but those are usually very limited. hmmm ... maybe if you are longterm FIC you might get a little ... dubious.

Thanks, Rusty! (I missed that post earlier.)

coco

My route to SL, started in the VR world of Adobe's Atmosphere.. it had the open creativety exhibitied in SL, but back in those days (7 years ago), chat was the norm, not voice, let alone commerce..
When Adobe abandoned the project, although I am still part of the 'collective' of 'geeks' still using the platform hosted on private servers (mine included), I went to Worlds.com for entertainment.. onto There.com for greater abilities and then to SL.... with a brief interlude to use combat games like Linage II.. I got sick and tired of the drama queens and the daily grind (just need one more level... and one more.. and one more.. ) I came back into SL with a renewed vigor, having realised, SL IS the internet future.. maybe not on this exact platform, but most certainly in this style of environment.
It was almost as though I had come full circle but now the platform I had started with, had grownup. The introduction of many 'bells and whistles' are simply a commercial desicion to make the platform more appealing to those that use similar platforms like There.com with voice as the norm there and some 'eye candy'. Unfortunately, the basic core of the platform is wholly unstable and the more they add, makes things worse never better, as planned.

My biggest concern, is that there seems to be no solid business plan from LindenLabs, most stages seem to be a knee jerk reaction, rather than planned phased stages of many other platforms. Over the years, we have heard noises and read statements about such things as the introduction of the Havoc 2 engine.. but all we have seen is 'candy to keep the kids quiet'. On that basis alone, SL has a lifespan... the statement released such as 'no scaleability', power outages causing grid failure (LL are at the core, a data center after all), 'we are on holiday' when there were major problems, all lead me to believe LindenLabs know they are on borrowed time.

I see my friends list (which holds a couple of thousand names) only showing now 20-40 friends online at any one time, most of which are those I have made in the past 6-8 months through business ventures, greyed out.. makes me wonder has SL as a social platform got a future, or has the emphasis now changed radically to a higher degree, to a commerce platform.

Soon I believe, SL will change again, those with free accounts will be given no choice, upgrade to a paying account, or get out. I, like many other 'oldies', took out a lifetime membership, at a time when LL didn't have much of a future, we invested by paying a large lump of money in good faith, only to have that removed some 6 months later, after joinning, and being reduced to a free account status without recourse or recompense/acknowledgement. I, like many 'oldies' have put more than money into this platform over the years. I forsee the future, whereby anyone using the platform will become 'pay per viewers' only. Some may see this as a good thing, but consider this, IF SL is to become the 3D internet of tomorrow, where will your freedom to surf gone to? You wouldn't charge anyone to look at your website, even if it is a business website. You would rely solely on sales and advertising budgets to support it, in exactly the same way as the 2D internet does now.

Seeing the likes of Live help, forums sections and the ability to chat to a Linden, removed behind a solid wall, makes you feel like you are just a number now, just like everyone else. The surge to gain more and more membership accounts, even when in reality the system could not possibly cope, a bad business move.

Arbitrary removal of whole sections of SL, entertainment like Tringo, Slingo and other core entertainment, and for some, income, being no more than an 'oldies' memory.

I have seen the pure white of a community platform, turnned through the various shades of grey in to a blackness of mergeance with RL, dawning into a business platform. Where not only commerce can thrive, but scammers and theives infecting the very core of the programme. People once in harmony, now at eachothers throats, viaing for the best possible position. Community is more than a word, it's an essence that can't be touched, only described by those most literal. Once it has gone... is there a road back to regain it? Is what we appear to have gained, a fair replacement, or just more eye candy?

Of course you are right...just to be clear, this is my primary account, so I def. don't qualify for long-term status, and the only part of FIC that ever applied to me is the first letter, and only last Saturday. after a full day of outside work, but I didn't stay that way for long (Aye, a bit of Irish Spring, and I am fresh as an April breeze 'cross the leas)...MHO, I abhor the forces of stagnation and despise those who actively advocate complacency and "the status quo"

To delete any part of this post would be irreverant. Thank you AWM! We may be spinning downward into the event horizon, but I look around, and, pleasingly often, find another spark of humanity with whom I am honored to be hurdling toward the abyss.

AWM that was so on point. I can't believe what you said about the lifetime memberships being reduced to FREE ACCOUNTS?! And still you stuck with them!

LL needs to pay some serious attention to what they are doing to the people who believed in them and loved them like you have. They need to do it fast, because if they don't they might as well start saving for a company burial plot.

Thank you for your words

It seems so long ago since I came to SL from TSO. I got here right after they stopped taxes and version 1.2 was released. We all looked like newbie’s back then lol. I was so glad when skins started showing up and eventually got cheap enough so I could buy one.
SL has always been laggy and full of bugs, nothing like the last year or so, but for some reason I just loved being a part of it. What ruined it for me was opening it up to free accounts with no credit cards required. It was such a friendly and tight community before that. With the flood of new people came a flood of griefers and jerks. People who could care less about the community. People who were just rude. I used to be a mentor and enjoyed helping new people at the welcome area, but after the flood, I just got sick of the rude people giving me a hard time and quit mentoring.
I am still here for some reason. I guess I just have hope that something will happen and it will be fun again. I hope I'm right.

They revoked your 4096sqm tier?

So, last night I was demonstrating SL during an interview:

During those 2-3 hours:

All of many teleports succeeded.

No 'Ruth's were seen.

A few avatars were grey/missing textured, but didn't stay that way long.
Outfit changes occured swiftly.
No attachments got wedged up my backside.

My movement was impeded only once (very slow falling to the ground) but I'd only just teleported into the sim, things were still loading up.

All rezzes from inventory succeeded.

Building/Editing was responsive. Saving/compiling scripts was swift.

No griefers attacked me, (though someone nearby did get hounded by noisy-follow-boxes).

No avatars lurked around inappropriate displaying 'broadly offensive' content.
(though I didn't go to the welcoming area).

I did, however, lose connection once, but reconnected without issue and carried on.

All-in-all, a very pleasant session online.

SL may have problems the rest of the time, but last night was fine.

(and, fwiw, I was using the voice-enabled client)