General Functionality

It sounds great, but it's been a long time since this was what you saw. Now when you first log in, you see your hair attached to your crotch, your boots have no shoe laces, and the rest of your avatar is missing. Opportunities are shot, and experiences are few and far apart, unless you count experiences of increasing anger and frustration.

Vehicles? Forget it. Not only is it impossible to pass sim borders, parcel borders are becoming an impossibility too. Yesterday, I couldn't even sail on my own parcel. I had two boats disappear on me within 15 minutes. Once, I even got ejected into an adjacent sim.

Things are lost without a trace, and if you buy new things, they often disappear somewhere between payment and delivery to your inventory. LL just raised its own income - and yet the environment is more unstable than ever before. Nothing works.

With the millions of $US that float around, and all the RL businesses that have been seen floating about in SL at various times - it's a crying shame that the place isn't even online - and when it actually is, the term "online" is used in the loosest of ways.

I've just had a meeting canceled. Again. I've been trying very hard to have this meeting, but every time we are both ready, something happens. Griefers and a non-reponsive abuse department. Un-announced downtimes. Announced downtimes that just extended for 5 hours extra. Invisible avatars. Teleports are down. It's always something! We both have schedules, and we can't even get together on a god damn holiday weekend!

I can't actually remember logging on, having it all work for me, and going on my merry way. I can't remember when it last worked as advertised.

I don't file bug reports. If I filed a report every time something screwed up, I'd file in the area of 50 reports a day. After tangling with the abuse report system for about a month, I honestly don't think LL bother any more with bug reports than they do abuse reports.

Yeah, I stopped filing abuse reports too. I have absolutely zero faith in LL to handle them anyway.

Here's some current version feedback: It's a piece of crap.



Ariya Draken,
Now paying $56 instead of $48 every month for my parcel.
Remind me why?

And the unfortunate thing is that we're the ones paying for it, in more than one way. Second Life is currently more of a pain in the arse than my first life is in some places, which is why I've been tempted to ditch it so many times.

I try to stand up for LL in areas where they need the support. For example, today's hardware failure. There's nothing they could have done to predict or prevent that; computers are notorious for randomly sputtering and dying, as are their components.

The software, on the other hand, is something that CAN be controlled. Y'know what happens when I sell somebody something, or make something that is open to the public's use and it bugs out? "Oops! My bad, let me fix this for you and get you a discount. Thanks for pointing it out." I then reimburse anyone else that bought that product from me and send them a new one. Sure, I lose money doing it, but it's call RESPONSIBILITY.

When it's a public item on my land that shows a bug, I immediately begin work on repairing the bug.. especially if it's something like a message center or an in-game billboard, or a random pot luck deposit box. I don't want people discontent because something I made screwed up on them.

Another thing I do. New features? Absolutely! But ONLY if they are NOT going to interfere with existing features/code! I will never add something to one of my creations without first making damned sure it's gonna work right. Theoretical analysis doesn't cut it, either. I personally get in it and play with EVERY function until I find a bug, before I release it. And if there IS a bug, I make sure it's well-known while I work on a solution, if there isn't an immediate one.

I once helped code a program known as "Pirch" that not many people have really heard of. I personally fixed a good number of the bugs that lay inside and out of the core code, both in the program and in the program's Delphi scripts. However, the person that originally made the program fell off the face of the Earth, stopped responding to people's requests and just basically seemed to not care. Y'know where Pirch is now? In the archives of programs that were great, but neglected. I can honestly see SL heading down this path in the next few years, if things don't start improving drastically.

NO MORE NEW FEATURES. FIX EXISTING BUGS. DEAL WITH EXISTING PROBLEMS. QUIT NEEDLESSLY CHANGING THINGS THAT WORK! People keep crying this out, over and over all over the forums, but I don't see many voices being heard and responded to! It shouldn't be hard to respond and act upon the voices of thousands of people when they all want the same things.

To Ariya: Dear Angel, I too am greatly frustrated that the incompetancy once again caused me not to hold you in my arms tonite, to brush your hair with my fingers, to touch your cheeks with my hand, to hold you close. I will fight the bitterness that keeps percolating to the surface, but for how long?

To Myiasia : LL needs no support from us.. They need criticism. Too many people just tolerate their crap, until it becomes the norm and the expected. They could do EVERYTHING about tonight's failure. They just have too many 23 year old college graduates that think they know something, but in fact are just a bunch of clueless newbies with zero experience in the real world of stable computing. Have they never contemplated such terms as scalability? such terms as single-point-of-failure? LL is a whole bunch of newbies, with one hell of a product, but a product that suffers drastically from being managed by incompetants.

LL will be bought out by a company that is capable of managing software development, scalability, failure backup. It will happen this year.. Mark my words.. Let's just pray it is not Sony.

Breka Dejavu

Agreed.

Sympathy and tolerance is something you get from a fan-base, when you supply a free product with no profit margin.

SL is a multi-million dollar business! When the shit hits the fan, we do not tolerate, sympathise, forgive and forget - we criticise! And by God, we have every right to!

If you think we are pissed, I'd love to see the e-mails Anshe Chung must be sending! Woah! Reading those must be like sitting your ass down on a hot barbecue! There are people here that have hundreds of thousands of $US invested, and SL isn't even operational any more!

Second Life is reaching a breaking point, and LL probably know it, even if they refuse to admit it, or adress it.

AD

That's why, I thought, they have multiple redundant asset servers. So when one goes down others can pick up the slack.

If the DON'T have multiple redundant asset servers, I suggest they get on the phone to Network Appliance *pronto*. If they have anything left from that 11 million, a few filers and front end boxes would be an excellent place to spend some.

Do take note of the other stuff I said. Also note that even internet backbones, which are typically made up of a butt-load of machines for the purpose of redundancy, have been known to fall apart temporarily due to hardware failure. All it takes is bad memory in a single machine to corrupt data enough to make it unusable. Garbage in, garbage out as they say. And believe me, I've had that sort of thing (albeit to a much lesser degree) happen on my own network in the past where more than one computer is handling the same data.

I'm not standing up for what they do have full control over. But think about it - most things these days have some sort of redundancy or "fail-safe" that's supposed to keep them running. But there is ALWAYS a chance something can go wrong where there either is no redundancy, or where redundancy can't be placed. A car, for instance. If one spark plug blows out, the rest will keep the engine running. If the front left wheel falls off, however, what happens? What happens if the transmission falls out?

Same thing with an array of computers. Hard drives can fail, but others keep it going. But if memory goes bad in the middle of processing data, or a CPU burns out on a machine that was critical to another computer in the system? I don't care how much redundancy is there, things can still get pretty messed up.

DUDE!!! I think you need to take a break from SL if it is soooo bad. It is a shame that forums of all types have to put up with posts like yours. You are an end user who has made assumptions based on PERSONAL OPINION who uses these forums as a vehicle for your anti-SL rhetoric and excessive whining. The structure of your thread meanders and is without factual merit.

You are probably on ignore/mute by the Forum Moderators so save your breath.

It is now 8am PST and SL is still down. is this the Great Inplosion I had predicted?
The Rebelion of Overdriven Servers and lack of the ever growing need for more Bandwidth?
*Trembles at the End of the World (SL) The Apocolips Is Here.

I'm still here. I'm still paying. Tell me again how I'm anti-SL?

Me, voicing opinions over the fact that I'm not getting my money's worth - especially with a drop in fuctionality and an increase in cost - makes me a CONCERNED CUSTOMER. Sitting back, paying, and keeping my mouth shut while the place falls apart around me makes me an easy mark, not a concerned customer.

To partake in a discussion, you actually need to do more than say "You have no factual merit". You need to enter your own opinions, and better yet, prove me wrong. You've done neither. You don't have to agree with me, or my complaints, but your post doesn't actually disagree my complaints - it just attacks me personally. If you have something to say about server stability, customer service or anything else along those lines, feel free to speak up.

If all you want to do is attack me, then sit down and be quiet. That kind of input is not welcome.

Ariya

Voicing opinions is all good. Critique is all good. Bitching on the forums when you don't even bother to file bug reports is neither voicing opinions or critique, it's bitching on the forums.

Paying customers have a right to complain when the service drops to terrible standards. The fact that I don't bother sending in all those bug reports any more doesn't mean I'm any less of a paying customer, or have less right to expect an acceptable degree of functionality.

It's not "bitching" and "whining" just because I'm fed up with filling out reports all day. I do actually have other things I like to do when SL is online, but fill out reports. Thumbs up for all you guys and gals who file bug reports every time something goes wrong. I'm sure you got extra cookies over Christmas. It is however not my job to bug test the SL servers. If this is what I wanted - I'd be on the beta grid. Right? Maybe get a job at LL as a bug tester, and get a pay check too.

However, I am only a paying customer.

Oh and, again, if your only reason for posting is to attack me, shut up.

Ah, but this actually happens fairly often... and usually the Internet routing protocols automatically route around the failure within a few seconds to minutes. Very very few of these failures actually produce effects that are visible outside the temporarily panicked NOCs at the ISPs.

The problem here seems to be that they didn't actually have any redundancy for the data store, and it became a single point of failure.

You shouldn't need to care how much redundancy there is, because that's what the redundancy is for. The fact that you're posting this means that you *do* have to care how much redundancy there is.

I'm not saying you do not have the right to complain. Complain all you want. But I also have the right to complain about the complaining, which I am happily exercising here, what with the grid being down and nothing better to do.

What I am saying is this.

You say you believe SL is "a piece of crap". Now that implies you think LL either does not care about the quality of their product or are too incompetent to implement it. You have also stated you don't believe they react to bug reports or abuse reports.

Now, tell me, if you are right in the above, what exactly do you think you as a "paying customer" are getting out of this "critique" on the forums? If they do not care enough to read your bug reports, do you think they care any more about general whines here here? If they are incompetent, do you think you suddenly made them less so by telling them what they work hard for is a "piece of crap"?

If you think it's not playable, your only real choice is to write a detailed description about why you think so, and then quit. Take your money and your support elsewhere, and hope that if enough people follow, they'll take the hint. If you still think it has a chance, and want to help with making it better, throwing around stuff like "piece of crap" is not going to work.

I file bug reports when I find a bug that is not listed as a known issue (or when I miss it in the known issues page) - not every time something does not work.

This is not meant as attack. It is meant to explain my point of view that as long as you play SL, you are on the same side with LL. They want to sell you a product, you want to buy it. By giving them your money for a product that is not necessary for your survival or health or comfort, you are implying you think they deserve it. If you think what you are getting is crap *or* you think the people who you give your money to are unethical cheaters, then don't buy it.

Do not give your money to people who do not deserve your respect, unless you really really have to do so in order to live a decent life. And then fight it in courts.

Larrs, mate, grow up. How else is someone to express their concern without expressing their views and opinions? The poster sounded quite knowledgable to me, and their opinion worth having. As for your good self, I suggest that you learn a few conventions about pruning long quotes before you put in your own views.

I'm sorry you feel that this is a good thing to do.



I say that the current version is a piece of crap. SL itself, I think is a spectacular product, with potential beyond my wildest dreams. It wasn't always so unstable. It doesn't have to be so unstable now.

I know they don't do much about abuse reports. They just proved it to me a few minutes ago. While I understand that they are overloaded, their e-mails do give you an adress which to turn to for further questions. They have told me quite clearly that they do not intend to answer those letters.



I hope to raise public awareness. To show people that it's not acceptable and that you have a right to complain. If no one complains, things don't get fixed.

Doing it here, in public, also means there's no ignoring it. You can misplace a bug report. You can ignore it. This is harder to ignore.



I don't want to quit. It's an easy thing to say "take your money elsewhere", but where? There is no third life. I can't replace SL with WoW. I am thinking about quitting. I have been for a long time. The only reasons I'm still here is that I like the idea - what SL could be if the bugs were fixed, and the fact that I happen to be very very fond of another player here in SL. She and I *are* however considering telling LL to go jump in the lake and just use MSN messenger instead.



Good man. I guess perhaps I'll do the same if I find a new issue. However, it's the same old things, over and over and over and over... I reported them all long ago.



I can tell it's not an attack. Your post is well thought out, and I respect that very much, and it's why I'm answering as detailed as I can.

I'm paying in the hopes that they'll fix things. In the hope that I'll get to keep my island, and not have to build it all over again, in the hope that I'll get to keep my almost perfect parcel, and neighbours. Paying and remaining quiet is a way to signal a job well done. Leaving and takling the money with you is a sign of catastrophic failure. While we are close to the latter in my opinion, I'm still living on hope here - and as such I pay, but I also complain, trying to get things out in the open. Get things changed.

As far as my abuse complaint is concerned, if I lived in the states, I'd be on the phone to LL now - or long ago in fact, and I'd consider legal action. I'm however not in the states. I'm a million miles away. I can't fight an american court battle from where I am.

Ari

Alright, so what you wanted to do is give constructive critique and have people talk about it, because you care about the potential in a product you want to keep on using?

May I suggest that next time when you want to do that, you don't use terms like "piece of crap" and "they don't care". While they might be your honest opinion about what the truths are, they are not really very good constructive discussion openers.

I have offered constructive criticism. I have offered bug reports. I've tried the abuse reports when I had to, and followed the rules and instructions. I've offered helpful sugegstions, and so on, and so on. I have done everything by the book since I got here - and I'm fed up. I'm tired of being ignored. The customer support here is the worst I have encountered anywhere on the net - and that's saying a lot.

I actually feel like LL do not care, and honestly, I'm not sure what else to call the current version, but a piece of crap. It's a million miles from stable. It's barely fit to run on the beta grid. They tell us over and over that inventory issues, teleports, etc have been fixed, and yet the reports pour in day after day. Reading the comments on the blog is rather frightening. A lot of people are very angry.

I'm fed up, angry, and fustrated straight to hell, and all the restraint in the world can't keep it back forever. I may be screaming, but if you went through the month I went through, watching the servers deteriorate from bad to worse, and at the same time being ignored by the abuse department, while crying behind my keyboard - you might not think so little of me. LL served me a real bad month, and I'm reacting to it. I'm human, and far from perfect. I'm furious, and I know there are tens of thousands more out there that feel the same way.

Perhaps I'm in a worse state than most as I've been dealing with the abuse department at the same time as everything else... It's taken a month of having shit shoveled in my face to get me to this point. In fact, under the circumstances, I think I'm showing remarkable restraint.

I mean... Jesus. Just read the comments for yourselves. Does this sound like a happy, satisfied community to you all?

http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/12/29/a-concurrency-of-20000/


AD

There are quite some bugs to be fixed and lots of things to develop in SL, but I too like the concept of SL as a virtual world. And there are many good things in SL, though recently it has been more difficult with land prices etc.

What comes to bug reporting, I have reported a bundle of bugs. Though I bet almost all of them have been already reported countless times. There starts to be so much bugs, issues, and 'features', that people do not want to search are the bugs already known or not. People just report them - or do not report. I would like to just report the bugs and let LL people to sort the bugs into duplicates or new ones.

The more open bugs there are, the exponentially more time it takes to find out is any bug old or new one. So that is one reason, why all the bugs would be good to get fixed as soon as possible. It saves time for everyone, too. When I hear that bugs do not get fixed, then I start to think why bother reporting. But if I report, maybe they fix it. Its like voting for what bugs will get fixed.

Well, anyway, SL is hugely complex game, where almost anything is possible. I am not sure, if this is a good thing. Maybe less possibilities and less bugs would be better. Of course lots of possibilities with no bugs would be the best. But at least it is essential that the most vital functionalities work no matter what.

Speaking about complexity:

Software development is about fighting complexity - in other words its trying to keep software program code structures simple and comprehensible enough while the program evolves bigger and bigger.

But as SL is about complex virtual world, is there some kind of a contradiction here? How can software developers keep software structure simple, when they are aiming at the most complex possible virtual world?

The basic virtual world laws are the same everywhere in that world. Like all land is just land and all teleporting is just teleporting and all scripting is just scripting. Where is the complexity?

I think that the complexity comes where people can build whatever they like and where there starts to be more and more people online. Also LLs have to take care about money operations in SL. Like LLs run a kind of money flow office where they think all day how much L$s people are allowed to buy and sell.

So, when there starts to be these basic things that are not pieces of cakes as such either, then these basic things sum up into a big complex realm, where LLs have to balance everything - while fixing bugs and adding even more features.

I think the only solution is to fix existing bugs and so stabilizing everything. New features are not that important, usability and ejoyability are. You can get more value with more the old but better stuff, too.

I remember one other game that had drastic changes. It had a wide online user base and they changed the old game engine to a new one. I think they succeeded well in that, so it is not impossible. In that world people could not build things, though. But things that are built are just data, which can be moved into other system too. The hardest part here would be that if people are allowed to get more and cheaper land in a new system, then what happens to the old land? Well, it becomes the old world, of course. We have seen this happen with Europe and America. Lots of people moved from the old world to America, creating space behind.

I am confused.. is this posting about the General functionality of the Game? Or just a matter of flameing each other?
I am more interested in what each member feels about the Functionality, and don't realy care if their expresion of their feelings are a bit colorful.
Personaly I would have to agree on many of Ariya's Points of View.
So please lets just stay on the subject.
Shjak