Taking AWAY Live help, Psychotic Lindens calling it an upgrade!

Removing Live Help entirely cuts off the most immediate form of communication to on-duty Lindens. Not answering and not listening are two very different things.

I can deal with a lack of detailed response to a live message to LL, but I cannot deal with the idea that nobody may see the important information about a sim crash or other emergent crisis at all until an email is read.

People scanning the constant flow of LIVE information posted to Live Help keeps human intuition in the loop. Certainly not all information posted to that system can expect a human response, but knowing that humans are monitoring it for the most important issues is both a comfort and a show of faith on Linden’s part that they do, in fact, listen.

Removing 911 from your local phone system and calling it an improvement is the sort of bone-headed idea that costs lives in emergencies. What will it mean here? I leave that to you to decide.

, I have to agree with this poster.

Now when your sim is going down, or has an FPS of 13 and needs a reboot, the Lindens don't have to know about it!

That will be so much nicer for them.

coco

It seems as if this is the only part of Robin's blog entry that you read, or at least that you wanted to read.

and yet you missed these bits: (Emphasis mine)

This is part of what Robin blogged about a few months ago. It will probably be a good thing, and no, I don't believe for a minute that the intent is to leave residents with "emergency" situations in-world hanging, it's actually a way to better prepare Linden Lab to handle these more urgent issues in a timely way, while still giving due consideration to the more mundane issues which currently flood the Live Help queues.

I completely agree with what Robin Linden is proposing. Today, Live Help gets inundated with so many non-urgent (and often trivial) matters that they can't promptly deal with real emergencies. A "disconnected" triage system is exactly what is needed.

(For computer geeks: incidently, we do the same thing when massively scaling computer architectures... move synchronous call bottlenecks to priority-based async message queues.)

-peekay

I hope you're right, Zaphod.

coco

Unbelievable. Even though they are supposedly creating a new help feature that wieght's things differetly they still have not learned the basic lesson that they need to implement a new feature concurrent with the old feature and only remove the old feature, as useless as it may be, AFTER the new one has proven effective. What is so hard to understand about this idea? It's not the first time it's been mentioned. Every single major change they make where they remove support features people have suggested that they keep the old feature until they prove the new one works and every single time they ignore it completely!

WTH!!!!

I don't care if live help is mostly in-effective at least it is something. They're trading a bad something for absolutely nothing...in addition they want to further tax the phone lines which we all know is outsources, and further tax the e-mail support which is already overrun for several weeks while they finish their so called feature...which may or may not ever get finished.

LL, I don't generally bash you, but you are very foolish if you follow through with this "plan"

Of which you know very little about. We'll see I guess how this all pans out, but there is the usual "sky is falling" response to this development.

how is 3-5 weeks of only phone and e-mail support "sky-is-falling"? Phones don't get answered and neither do e-mails. As pointed out in the blog comments, Lindens can hide thier in world status making it impossible to know if any are online. Linden Villiage is usually deserted, no Lindens are following their "office"hours because they aren't required, and help island won't allow more than 40 people on it at a time.

I'm not saying that their new support won't be great, I'm just saying it is extremely foolish to take away live help before their new system is fully integrated and tested for effectiveness. If Live help is so overrun and has been for months, then how bad would it be to let them keep plugging away for another 3-5 weeks? I've seen a couple blog posts of extremely UPSET live helpers because they've been trying to get accepted for a long time, recently got accepted and now it's going away. There are peole who actually WANT to do the job, let them do it!

Yes, I reported to LL that there are land bots in SL over two months ago! I think the word still has not gotten to them.

err I hate to say it they are simply redoing live help its all written there. The present system is going away which isnt working and they are replacing it with a better help system plus putting people ingame for what I would call "live live help" hehe plus thinking or moving towards other stuff for new residents in the form of "live live help" which does not exist now.

I'm wondering how many people read past the subject line because its apparent from the posts that either they did read the actual blog words and are intentionally ignoring it or just read the subject line of the blog and decided to just fill in the blanks for whatever reason.

Nowhere did i read they were removing the help system I read they are revamping it and putting in a better one and a more responsive one. I'm not sure what is wrong with that but from what I read assuming its properly implemented its going to be an improvement.

Anyhow I think at this point people are needing something to complain about they are not removing live help in the way you say they are they are basically changing it. People complained about the volunteers being useless and needing more Lindens well they are doing that and so now I dont get what the issue is they are putting more lindens in and a better support ticket system that will go by urgency plus basically putting a new live help system in in the game

sheesh ..

Not unexpected but that comment 1 or 2 behind the main linden comment made me laugh... that was the one about someone using the post as an excuse to bitch (bitch being a verb in this case) about how premiums still don't get any special treatment.


Edit: apologies to Tristan, I didn't credit him for that comment until his reply made me recheck and see that he posted the comment and it is Comment #152

Exactly. I think my problem (rare I have one) should come before the unverified newb that cannot get the box off of their head. It isn't an excuse to b**ch it is a very valid concern about the lack of quality premiums recieve as far as support is concerned.

I agree that premiums really should get some incentive since LL has effectively made premium accounts worthless but I think it's rather selfish at this point to want better support for premiums when at this point nobody is getting support period... if/when LL gets support working better across the board I'd be right behind you in the push for LL to give a priority queue for premium member help requests.

Hmmm... LL is going to a ticketed type support system. LL has also said that they want to add value to the premiums. 1 + 1.....

Just 2 weeks or so ago Live Help was really useful, when a complete mainland SIM was destroyed and needed a rollback. Mia Linden showed up there after the live help request - I don't know if another help way would have been as fast and helpful.

eMail is slower, and phone? Well, not all users are US based, calling from Germany for example isn't as free as from the US. Not to forget that speaking and understanding spoken english is a tiny bit different from writing/reading.

Oh well, I'll see what happens when the next bigger problem shows up for me. I really hope that some advantage for premium users will be installed.

I don't think I can blame them for this.

I think I've called live help two, maybe three times in two years (ok maybe four I didn't keep records) for things I felt were important (actual loss of assets etc).

On the other hand I know people who happily said things like they hit live help every time they can't TP or buy shoes or whatever.

Just think of SL as a psychological experiment: "How rude can we treat them, with how much more ignorance, bugs, lag, limitations, removed features, lost money can we torture them, before they really freak out?"

I became fatalistic meanwhile. I do not expect any sensible or methodical action from Linden Labs anymore. That really helped a lot. Brought my blood pressure back to halfways normal again.

It's not the volunteers who are failing and can't keep up, it's LL who can't keep up with the support demand. Billing problems, account issues, private sim problems, etc have no place on LH because there is noone there who can resolve those issues yet they make up a rather big portion of the requests that end up coming in.

There are certainly plenty of inappropriate resident requests that really shouldn't be asked, but compared to the above and technical grid problems, they're really just a minority so those are really not clogging things up.

In a lot of cases there just isn't a replacement for interactive help either. You can make suggestion after suggestion and get feedback on what works and doesn't work until you - hopefully - eventually solve it. Frequently it turns out that the initial problem which does occur on its own, is merely a side-effect of another issue. Giving the solution for the initial problem won't fix things, because you're actually dealing with a whole different one.

At the same time, Lindens have always maintained that Live Help is an invaluable pulse to let them know when the grid starts acting up, because some of the time on the tech's end nothing is showing wrong, but then 50-100 calls in a few minutes say otherwise, so it ends up getting looked at and resolved. Going to Live Help to complain that "tp's/transactions are failing" is easy, but noone is going to make a support ticket for that.

Residents end up handling requests very differently from Lindens as well. If I end up having a request about sound spamming and the person isn't familiar with sound beacons, I'll just tp over and help them locate it because they're not the easiest thing to figure out. I still can't help them get rid of it, but at least they'll know which parcel it's on and who to contact or abuse report. Lindens - rightly - don't have time to do any handholding or waste a whole lot of time on just one request.

Most of the questions or problems I have a working answer for on Live Help are trivial things to me, but that doesn't mean lots of people aren't helped regardless because it's not so trivial to them. The average request really doesn't come from someone who's 1 day old, it's people who have been on SL for months or years and just ran into something they've never had to do or deal with before.

*applauds* The volunteers are doing their best and it's not their fault at all. Heck, they aren't getting paid to do the job at all and yet, they slog through it anyways.

Sadly, I am one of those who have used it for the account* problems and mainland sim problems.. because when I try to call the support phone line, all I got was an answering machine. *sigh* I know the volunteers can't help, but there's a far greater chance of getting a Linden on there than on the phone. And even then, it's only last resort, after I've tried all the self-helps I can possibly try first. I don't like to pester anyone when I don't have to, but I want the assurance that when I need them, they will be there.

My confidence has been greatly shaken, so I'm going with the strong disapproval of this until they can prove otherwise. I mean, during the 'Helpless' time, are our emails and phone calls going to be returned? They are hit or miss now as it is and in some cases nonexistent. So, I feel that having a lot of doubt is in order... and I hope like heck they do prove me wrong and make something great in it's place!

* = If by account problems you mean those that render the account impossible to play due to something entirely on the server side.

I didn't mean it's wrong for anyone to go to Live Help . Just that LL drives a number of people to it, because the normal means for support take far too long or just aren't effective.

A ticketing system is far better for anything that requires a Linden specifically, because it's not a hit-and-miss getting a Liason to notice a request right now because they'll be busy handling all of the calls they're currently in.

"I'm stuck not being able to log in and get 'Your account won't be available till' over and over" should get a support ticket and expect it to be resolved in a reasonable time.

"I installed the last update and I look all deformed now" should be able to just get answered in-world by volunteers and not end up waiting at the bottom of the queue behind thousands of other tickets because it's deemed "low-priority" and not worthy of a quick response.

I think most people would be perfectly happy if the Lindens officially withdrew from Live Help, and just made it the in-world equivalent of Resident Answers, with just a Liason or two monitoring the calls, but not participating. Anyone who wants to wait in the queue, or needs to because of their particular problem, can, and anyone who just has a quick question they'd like an answer to can use Live Help.

I really can't see what's so awful about a system where resident volunteers help as far as they can help, and Lindens only (or at least primarily) have to deal with support tickets that actually do require a Linden..

I like the idea of resident volunteers staffing Help Request for all the "I'm Stuck" problems while freeing Lindens to help premium users. It is unfair that premiums who pay less than the $125.00 land tier have no priority support option.

And why would it be so bad to have the volunteers helping the paying customers also? If you get your answer, does it really matter where it came from? If the question can be answered by a volunteer, we will answer it, if it is something we can't answer or do, we will let the Lindens take care of it. There really is no debate on this issue, once again, LL has spoken and it will be what it is. We can just hope that it is better then the system we currently have. Plus, with a ticketed system, it would be a lot easier to be able to move the premium users to the top of the list.

It is a matter of paid priority for me I guess to be able to speak to a real person. I will just have to wait to see how much better this new system is over the failing old system. But with the track record, especially lately I won't hold my breath. The whole ticketed thing worries me that it will still be a long wait and support correspondance through email can be very frustrating and time consuming.

It is interesting how most companies do offer real people to help paid customers while leaving self help options to unpaid people.
Of course as we all know LL is no ordinary company when it comes to taking care of customers.

Well, I guess it depends on what LL considers enough payment to them to make it worth their while too. If you own at least 1/2 a sim, you do get a support line that others don't. The question can then become when is a paying customer paying enough to warrant a direct line to LL? Is it $125 a month? $50 a month? $72 a year? a one time $9.95?

During all this time I have been a part of this community, I have noticed at LL does try to help as many people as they can, but they don't have the resources to allow everyone a one on one communications. If this new system is implemented the way that is seems they are going to, it should be a much quicker and more efficient then the current system they have. I guess we just have to wait and see.