PRETTY TICKED OFF RIGHT NOW... Priorty madness

You know, I hate to keep having to smack Linden Lab across the head... but I also hate the continual nonsense that keeps coming up on a regular basis. I sometimes wonder if LL is a professional corporation or a bunch of amateurs spending all their time playing rather than conducting business. (Yeah, I'm going to be pretty blunt in this one. LOL. At $10,000 a year...we have a right to be blunt).

You know I only bring these things up to improve the company and the program. Others just tell you where to stick your game-- and leave.

For several months now we have been told by LL that they are prioritizing programming and updates. They are paying attention to the most important things and putting other things on the back burner. So for example, they can't provide group officers with a way to contact their group members because programming resources simply don't allow time to be spent on that right now. They can't give sim owners the ability to assign a "Sim Manager List"... because there are other things that "take priority" over such a minor thing. Sim tools and land tools are still lousy because well, they're just not on the "priority" list.

But then with release 1.7... we see an undoubtedly all-important, immediate need HUD FEATURE which allows people to create HUD devices! Wow, I'm sure that was at the very top of the user VOTE list. I can see how that would surely take priority over giving land owners better sim security tools. We sure needed HUD devices more than major bug fixes! Yeah man, I am SO glad we now have HUD devices! How have we ever gotten along without them until now?

Now folks, I can understand the irresistable urge of putting something "fun" into the game now and then. But when you have users leaving the game because of bad performance.. that's the time to put "fun" projects waaaay on the back burner. You don't have the right to take time from client needs in order to play feature games. You are a business; you do have an obligation to your customers.

This is why people scream every time LL tells them they can't implement a feature because they "only have so much time they can allocate" to such things. Yet we keep seeing things like INGAME MOVIES that don't work and actually crash end users... requiring yet MORE programmer resource time to fix those bugs. We see things like HUD devices and other new "features"... that really have nothing to do with sim stability or game functionality or Second Life just plain working right. We're still experiencing severe texture lag and time dilation problems... and you're creating HUD devices?

I have to pose this question to Linden Lab: are you a corporation in business to serve your clients, or a bunch of teenagers who are playing some kind of big game on other people's money?

Clients are paying you too durn much money for LL to sit around making "toys" rather than stabilizing the platform. That's basic business folks. You're selling a product and it's not working very well. So file 13 the "fun" projects and get down to work. Durn, if you people were working for me (or any of my associates), heads would be rolling at this point.

And Linden Lab wonders why users get so irate.

Come back to in a month bro. You are a bit worked up over this. I understand you are frustrated and all that, but you are not helping your cause by continuing to express yourself in this manner. I've read a good deal of your posts and it boils down to the same thing, you've stated your point, its maintained for as long as the board exists, we've heard you, so you can stop posting the same stuff over and over. Thanks. I hope you can get away from it and relax a bit, that much stress isnt healthy.

I enjoy reading a good rant once in awhile. And no, I didnt put HUD devices on the top of my priority wish list. Hopefully I will have a use for it in the future and it will make me go,
"oooooh". Till then Id rather see some basic needs fullfilled.

You know, I've seen you post similarly time and again with the same message; perhaps you should take a break from the forums as that much condescension can't be healthy.

The emperor has no clothes. In fact, he is *acting* as one *might* expect from someone incapable of distinguishing between important and trivial. I have seen this same conduct manifested by other development managers, usually in the form of "my boss is so indiscriminate that he cannot prioritize at all and is thus having our team attempt to do everything simultaneously and therefore we are getting nothing accomplished and all twenty of us are frustrated as hell and have been for six months or more". This lament is usually followed by something like "the best hypothesis that us senior developers have been able to come up with is that boss-guy is some sort of not sane and we don't like that conclusion, that's why I'm talking to you". In my experience, when someone has been driven to this point, their concerns and reports are dead-on, but their explanation isn't; this is almost always a manifestation of the Peter principle and results in a development manager who is truly in over his head, cannot admit this to himself, and so inadvertently inflicts that confusion and fear upon his staff.

Insofar as the business model of SL makes many of the customers effectively developers, they often feel the same sort of collateral "damage" without the benefit of the close contact that traditional staff of such a scared manager typically have, so his actions will appear even more perverse, arbitrary, and infuriating.

And, yes, I am an organizational psychologist (by schooling, but not by vocation).

Attachment points to your avatar that are seen only by you, think of those windows when your playing a first person shooter that allow you to chat or see your life bar and armour value. It is an imperative thing for weap makers and creating a new system that values guns and fighting over the common bull everyone wants to spaz about.

As for wayfinder, if you don't like their service, then just take a break and try RELAXING! Do what i do and not spaz about the world. It's comming along nice and slowly because there are alot of issues that need to be refined. If you think 1.7 is bad, lets reroll back to V2 of SL, see how you survive with all object's having always physical objects. I'd love to see how some these guys who spaz would deal with older verions of sl. Sorry to say, but SL is not a business for everyone. It is entertainment ^_^

Yes, certainly there are bugs, but I've been in-world a lot in the last few days, and have noticed everything quite usable. Slow textures are still a problem for me, still at times taking much longer to come up than they should be. But overall, no major complaints.

I agree with the policy of fixing bugs first, but when there's an endless supply of bugs, you need to throw in some new features along the way. It improves customer satisfaction for the people who want the features.

There will always be people who are happy with the product, and people who aren't. A company needs to work to please both groups at the same time.

I think the hud features was on the small features list, although it looks like a big feature, its just 8 more attachment points that only you can see, and we did also see improvements to land and groups, for land, land cant be set for sale by accident without getting a popup about price and who its set for sale to, and that needs confirming, as far as group tools go the ability for recalls has been removed so no more group griefing. The major feature was sim performance which does still need some tweaking regarding texture handling and stability but the actual effects of the code can be seen when you can see places like icedragon easily holding 80+ people

Counter suggestion: if ya can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Sorry, amatuer psychologists abound, but that doesn't fix problems, eh? This isn't a case of a company failing to make upgrades to a game for which we paid 30 bucks. This is a multi-million dollar corporation that is not performing according to customer expectations, and not living up to their responsibilities to the clients. When people spend hundreds/thousands of dollars a month for a system, that system not working has nothing to do with the customer being "stressed" or "spazzing out". It has to do with failure to fulfill contractual obligations-- ie, provide a basic stable platform.

I mean, wake up guy. All over these forums people are complaining about 1.7. On one thread, a tester of the 1.7 beta stated point-blank that the current problems were known and reported prior to 1.7 being released... and LL released it anyway. So rather than fixing the bugs in the test area as should have been done, they unleashed it on (supposedly) 50,000 people. What is that nonsense?

Hey, if I hit hard in the forums, it's because we go to Linden Lab privately and never hear a word back. When we're paying almost $600 a month for their services-- that is inexcusable. So guy, thanks for the patronization, but no thanks. I call 'em as they come and until Linden Lab gets their act together and starts acting like a responsible business-- customers are going to continue to dog them. Because they're not doing their job.

Pyp, I've known you for a long time. How much money a month do you spend on Second Life?

Your daily routine is to go around chatting, showing off weapons, pulling out sound file after sound file, playing funny animations. Those activities don't really require a lot of the system, do they?

Come back when you own three sims and have large monthly bills come in-- without proper tools to manage those sims. Sign the checks each month, month after month. Then you might have some ground to preach to others about life, the universe and everything.

Until Linden Lab has stabilized the basic system, they have no business using resources to create "toys" of questionable value. I'm sure that in the long run the HUD will be a nice little thing. But like the movies system... it was brought out at a time when attention should have been dedicated to other needs. And yes, maybe there will be "basic needs" for the next year. That's the breaks. Yes, there are some things in 1.7 that rock. I admit that. But people who claim that "1.7 is running pretty well" have just got to not be paying much attention.

For the record, I'm not stressed out; I'm a customer that is tired of paying for sloppy programming.

k, so don't?

LOL. How many times have I seen this. "If you don't like how SL works, stop paying for it."

Tell you what... next time your car malfuncitons, don't try to fix it. Just park it and stop driving it. k?

Said it before and I'll say it again...

Travis, I totally agree with you on this. There are always bugs to fix. However, there are bugs, and there are major bugs, and the major ones need to be attacked and fixed before new features are installed. It's never good to build a house on a shaky foundation. Fix the foundation first.

But regarding new features, does "new feature" necessarily mean some limited-use toy? Why can't a "new feature" be much-needed and often-called-for land tools? Wouldn't it be better for a new feature to be user-definable avatar movement so those super-laggy AO devices can be disposed of?

I agree that a new feature once in a while helps keep the game interesting. But right now, rather than another gimmick toy (I mean, why didn't LL learn this lesson from the movie player messup?)... how about a new feature that will actually benefit a majority of users, a "new feature" that has been missing from SL and needed for a very long time?

Wayfinder, first off I can undestand your frustation. I agree with you that some priorities seem totally out of whack at the time.

The car analogy would work, except you're leasing the car. If I were to lease a lemon, after so many months of being frustrated by it breaking down, I'd stop paying for it, and just take the public bus.

Limited concept here. Let's talk RL in this scenario:

You stop leasing the car. The company declares you in default of lease agreement. Your credit is damaged. They take you to court. You might win, you might lose. Costs you more in the long run than you want to deal with. And there is no public bus in your area.

Now none of this really applies to SL except for one fact: there's often more going on behind the scenes that makes "simple solutions" not really valid. That's the mistake people make every time they say, "So just quit." They're ignoring other factors, such as:

1) SL is a social environment. Many people have real friends here that they'd have to give up if they "just quit".
2) Many people have "dependants" on Second Life. In my particular case, I run 3 sims that people live in, work in, and a very large group around which many people center their SL activities.
3) I have a merchanting concern on SL which brings in RL $.
4) I have a business partner that relies on me. If we quit, that partner is out her investment in our venture.

So please, there are no simple solutions. And as a customer whose land group is paying several thousand dollars a year for this "service"... when the company is not providing what we need for that very sizeable expenditure, and when we can't get them to answer our needs individually... then one solution is to take matters to the forums and to the public-- which many users have come to realize seems to be the ONLY way to catch LL attention.

Is it effective?

Last April we were forced to take the matter of system-wide lag to the forums. Linden Lab strongly denied server issues and repeatedly claimed "client content" as the culprit. We hit them right between the eyes and sure enough, a month or so later, serious server-side programming issues were discovered to be a major cause of system lag. Go figure.

A short time ago we came to the forums with a major issue regarding sims sharing servers. Linden Lab initially denied that sims were sharing servers at all. A massive research project proved that they were, so then they started claiming that sharing servers had absolutely no effect on sims. We pushed that claim to just short of a forum war, with the resultant LL groupies and trolls piling in, totally denying our claims, insulting people and stating that we were pretty much clueless for ever making such a claim. Nevertheless, that post resulted in a Town Hall meeting at which it was revealed that yes, every sim on the grid shares a server and that yes, under certain circumstances "sister" sims can impact the performance of one another. Despite all the harassment to the contrary-- our initial claims were vindicated and a questionable company practice exposed to a lot of sim owners who prior to that time had been totally unaware of that situation. It explained to a lot of people a lot of things they'd been experiencing in land problems.

The point of both forums: It was not to be "anti LL". Rather, we and others emphatically demonstrated we are not clueless morons who will swallow every propaganda marketing claim made. We're able to observe, analyze, conclude, and when we discover something, we expect it to be taken care of (especially at the prices we're paying). We don't appreciate having the wool pulled over our eyes and we don't appreciate groundless excuses. This is a business. We're paying for service-- and we expect that service to be conducted professionally, not hap-hazardly.

But most of all, those forums prompted LL to look beyond what they thought... and they found things that seriously needed fixing.

If not for posts such as this in these forums, do you think that LL would ever be motivated to correct major flaws in their system? Do you think they would look beyond pre-formed opinions to underlying causes of system problems. Really, quite often LL doesn't even admit a problem exists until users pop up on these forums with proof that they do... and then something is done about it.

So don't be quick to dismiss complaints on these forums as just rantings of another disgruntled user. I can promise you right now that there are deep-core system problems that are hampering the performance of 1.7 and that will only get worse unless they are dealt with now. That's part of what these forums are for.

I'm not trying to bash Linden Lab. Neither are other users who post similar threads. We're trying to prompt LL to focus on correcting problems and providing major user needs... which ultimately can only improve their system and customer satisfaction.

Like the guy once said, "He's a good mule, you just have to catch his attention first."

As far as im aware we got movies with 1.6 because there was a new developer at the time who was more experienced with apple and quicktime etc, and it was a way for him to get experienced with the codebase of sl, ie work with something you know etc.

I probably did more preview testing than anybody else, enough to get a special thanks in the release notes, and personally i didnt expect what has happened to happen, even on the final build, im not saying there were no bugs as there are always minor bugs that affect a minor percentage of people or minor features or even undiscovered bugs but you get to a point in preview where you cant test anymore, we had 2 load tests where we begged people from the main grid to come in and managed to get 107 in a sim but as soon as the test was over people soon vanished so was hard to get any real load data over long periods of time but from those 2 tests everything looked good.

Do i think preview is a good idea, yes, many preview volunteers found some quircky bugs that got fixed before release which may not of got found, we also get the chance to give feedback on changes to features, like the volume control and map, also bother them about some old bugs which they need help reproducing to fix and have done so, along with the long list of old bugs they had already fixed.

In the end the release version will only be as good as they can push it, 1.5 was tested in house by a few people, 1.6 and 1.7 was tested by more and more people in preview and hopefully they will turn out alot better than 1.5, after the first few releases, but the gap between people testing in preview and the amoutn of people on the main grid is such a big one the more people testing really does help

Two things... the HUD attachments are huge and make possible a whole range of things that weren't available a month ago. It's not a little thing. It's going to be huge and will change the way people use SL in profound ways.

Also, 1.7 was a huge problem the first week. Many sims were basically unplayable. 1.7.1 was a bit of an improvement and 1.7.2 was a huge improvement. Some things still are not what they were before 1.7 (some issues with texture loading), but some things are much better. They are working on it.

Yeah, I'm aware of this. That was their decision. A lot of folks disagree with that decision. Those movies just caused additional problems with users (in the resultant crashes), cost LL more bug-fix asset problems, and did very little to benefit SL in general (if at all). The question was: why not take this new developer and let him "get experience" fixing simple bugs that had been plaguing people for ages? Or have him write a simple feature that has been needed, rather than investing such time in a "toy" that itself proved to cause additional problems on SL?

Not trying to drive this into the ground here. Just trying to point out the difference between responsible business management and playing games at client expense. As another user pointed out... time for LL to re-think its whole management concept and structure, because Second Life is no longer a "hobbyist experiment". It's a multi-million dollar corporation with an online economy and real business investments going on every day. It's time to start treating it as such.

The question Keiki is this: Is the HUD more important than the other needs that have been posted in these forums and in the VOTE area? Did users VOTE for the HUD feature? Did they vote it a priority above all the numerous bug-fix and other feature votes? Could the time devoted to developing that HUD have been spent on something more important?

So yes, 1.7 is improving. It has gone from totally unusuable to moderately usable. But it's also been weeks since the 1.7 release. And the question I and others are asking: are these improvements being arrived at as quickly as possible, or are fixes being back-burnered in favor of other "HUD" projects being worked on right now?

That's all it is. A focus of priorities in a sensible manner.

I just re-read this post and had ta laugh Pyp. Especially at that last line. It's almost classic. You mean "common bull" as in socializing, dancing, marketing/buying, parties, art shows, live music, classes, etc? You're talking about people who prize going around and blasting things over these "common bull" activities? LOL. Nothing personal Pyp... you and I understand one another.

Why in the world do people come to SL and expect a PVP environment? Such things have been tried time and again on SL... and it just doesn't work very well. If you want PVP and weapons and battles... go play one of the MMP games and let SL function as it functions best. I have nothing against PVP sims if people want them. But that limited-scope concept being more important than the things that occur on 99.9% of the sims on SL? I don't think so, Tim.

Sure, the HUDs will be nice... eventually. But maybe just a tad bit bad timing. Hard to read a HUD when you're dropping offline on a regular basis, lagging like a fiend, or can't get the HUD to appear in the first place. Matter of priorities Pyp. I know PVP is important to some folks. There are other places with much better PVP than SL. Go there. Right now-- users need system stability a whole lot more.

Please live your SL life by this suggestion...

Thanks. I guess it's not for me then. ^^ I don't make weapons...

Ooo it's far more flexible than that. You can put ANY attachment on an HUD point. (It's too bad they don't show up on regular pictures taken since they're a part of the UI.)

I set down a green-and-pink cube combo the other day and attached them to an HUD point, just for laffs.

You can put one of those picturechanging screens with photos of your SL friends and can run around with them in spirit!

first off, I totally agree with you Wayfinder 100%......


secondly, did you all know that HUD points are NOT visible by others!!! Only yourself...now tell me wtf is the point???? The only purpose I see it serving is so that you can walk around with your prim penis and no one else see it with transparancy shown.