Seriously, you muppets want money for this?

I have been in SL a while now and have seen lag worse than it is now, I also compare it to another program I was in that would crash, no warning, and be off for days at a time. It also cost to be in cause if you didnt pay all you could do after 10 days was sit in your room and go no where. One thing that bugs me and has already been spoken of is the camping. It serves no function, Im sure Im not the only one who when seeing lots of campers wipes that area from my LM and not go there again. Maybe there needs to be a limit on alts as i have been reading in the forum many who have said they have several alts they set up to camp while they sleep or play.
Lets get to basic facts are the members total counting all the alts one person has as one or are they singular ?

Singular.

yes, SL had been worse.
That is true.
Some time ago there was the famous Wednesday, when updates and such went live and the grid was down for about 12hours or more.

But wait - we now just experienced a 12 hours of "SL is unusable" time period.
Plus several of those "SL is unusable" time periods almost every day in January.
SL had not been that bad and unusable for about 2 years now, to my opinion.

//------------
Estimated subjective service availability < 66% here today.
Availability forecast for now: all is snafu again. Not guilty.
//------------

People dump $15 a month into WoW, and if they can't login once every month, they get rabid.

Here, in Second Life, there are people who've put down thousands of dollars to own land here, and can't access it.

People who've bought this land, built it, cultivated groups... and they can't get on... their members can't TP to their land... etc.

And, this is happening EVERY DAY. Despite what bs you may have read, LL actually makes 40-50 million a year. They are making a very good profit off of us. Why shouldn't we demand service?

Currently, I'm one of the people who's been screwed by the OpenSim scam. I'm blowing around $150 a month on an Open Sim about to leave(I rent for now), with plans to buy a full sized Island next month.

Considering the horrible service, I'm reconsidering dropping over $1000 down, and $300 a month for a server I'll rarely be able to access.

Hell, people with OpenLife can host a region with four or five times the capacity as LL on a personal computer, hooked up to a DSL line, and get way more reliability out of it. Why does my sim cost so much to maintain again?

I think that if things keep going the way they're going, then we're going to see a lot of people like myself consider keeping their money.

I'm glad there are some people, trolls aside, who get what I mean. On one hand you have someone like me, paying around US$50 per month for tier on a little land. On another to have other people making proper investments in the regions of thousands of dollars per time. These people have real business plans and real ideas but those plans depend on LL returning a certain level of service uptime.

Lately that uptime hasn't been there, nor has the support from LL. We've had blog posts explaining the problem, promising the tasking of additional resources but it's all just so much damage control to keep us peons aquiescent and paying up like good little addicts. The promise of stability had been repeated for years and is never made good on yet LL think a few words in the forums is all it takes to keep us enthralled in their svengali-like spell.

From me paying $50 to someone else putting in $1000 and all the way back to someone putting in nothing at all, the user experience is the same. Bots lag out the malls they're supposed to attract people to, logins are blocked, people are arbitrarily logged out and even the most basic of functions is often blocked or broken. Even free users are due a refund at this point! There is no business case for putting money into SL at moment either personally or as part of any investment.

I joined SL in March 04, I think on v1.2. I feel qualified, therefore, to talk about the "good old days".

I used to be one of those people who was baffled by the complaining of people about SL's reliability. SL was usually reliable for me. Apart from a couple of epic system fails, of which I can remember two or three off the top of my head, including one in the middle of our 24 hour fundraiser for Tsunami victims, SL was mostly a painless experience for me. Of course we complained about the fail but we loved LL and overall things were okay. There were moments of crapness, but they were forgiveable. Whinging about lag, of course, is the right of every SL resident. I even came up with the first SL joke*:

How many avatars does it take to change a lightbulb?"
-- Five: one to build it, one to script it, and three to bitch about the lag.

Lag has always been with us and always will be. So will the occasional system failures. That kind of thing is something that's only to be expected of a system of this complexity. We can live with that.

Recently, however, I don't think it's at all an exaggeration to say "SL is worse that its ever been". I have stopped booking events at the weekend because there's simply no guarantee I will be able to get in. I've stopped assuming I will be able to upload textures and stuff. I assume, these days, that I will struggle to get in and struggle with staying in.

I had been working round this. Logging in at quieter times of the day, like now, to do building work and stuff requiring image uploads, etc as this time of day is more reliable. But I'm sitting here right now making this long post because I can't get in! Logins are disabled and the number online is dropping. Yet when I go to the status page, there's no info about the current fail.

I'm simply not making my tier any more, and with the exchange rate as it is, it's expensive for me to maintain my current commitments. I doubt I'll leave, as I love playing too much and I'm sure LL will sort this out eventually-- and I do want to expand my empire when things stabilize again. Apparently though, it seems improvements are on the way. I look forward to seeing how things are this week.

SL *is* worse than ever at the moment. Definitely. There's never been issues over such a long period of time before that so completely affected the service.

* possibly.

I'm not quite at that length... but pretty close and I would have to disagree that this is NOT a hiccup. Sure there are fluctuations in quality of the service... but overall it seems to be a downward trajectory. There was only one period in my memory that was close to being worse. At that time there were complete outages. No one online, not just logins disabled.

While *just* being logins disabled is a slight improvement, it is still really bad. This period now is not quite that bad but at the same time there are persistent serious serious bugs... which have taken 6months or more to be identified. Some have fixes in the works... but many of them are several versions out... or fixes pending for the next server release which has been tried and failed more times than I can remember now. Pushing further and further back those other serious fixes scheduled for more distant upcoming releases.

We are not talking minor issues here either. Like inventory loss problems, script failure problems, extremely bad physics problems, texture loading problems, and the list goes on. Not to mention other backend problems like the core database and VPN problems that continue to plague the system.

While 2008 was not as jarringly turbulent as 2007 perhaps, it was a consistently low bar which overall I'd say was worse than 2007. And 2009 is starting out in the gutter.... accompanied by the announcement of purchasing (and decommissioning) of the web sale sites, taking away that much more choice. From the looks of things 2009 is going to be even worse... I keep hoping that LL will turn things around... but it is just one slap in the face after the next.

My oldest av joined in 2006, and I can still say I've seen worse...you old timers need to take some herbs for memory. There was a little while in Fall 2006 and in Summer 2007 when we had outages & service interupptions steadily from week to week. Also, sim crossings were worse then, it was so easy to crash a sim that 3 avatars armed with spammy & loud gestures alone could do it if they mapped them to hotkeys. This is just a rough spot.

LMAOOO!!!

I guess you meant OpenSpace here and not OpenSim.


I call BS on this. I run Opensim servers since November 2007 and personally I think you cannot honestly claim this. Those are theorethical statements that don't match reality.
Or, maybe I have a different idea of "reliability" than yours.


Because even if you hate Linden Lab, they provide -long story made short- a service that is more complete and reliable than any other grid service provider.

Maybe in the future Linden Lab will be forced to lower their prices because of decent Opensim-based alternatives -I sincerely hope so- but right now, I don't see Opensim as a viable alternative for mainstream Second Life users yet.

You know what I love? I love hearing a good friend of mine be told: "I'm sorry, we can't do anything about your lost inventory because you're not a 'premium' member."

Premium member meaning you don't spend the stat $20.00 a month to be so. Meanwhile, she's bought and owned various pieces of land, has a store. She's probably fed about $800.00 a year at least into the SL economy from her RL pockets over the last three years.

But, because you spend money on what you want and contribute to SL, we won't consider you a "premium" member unless you shell out another 20 for next to nothing.

Having her own store that does quite well, I might add, and contributes in meaningful ways to the SL economy that doesn't even include what she has poured into it out of her own RL resources, means absolutely nothing to them. Less than nothing.

Which, tells me, stop contributing. Why waste your time? Unless you are willing to simply throw the 20 a month at them, they don't want you, your business, your time or the money you spend in other ways.

Peace.

I have been reading posts like this in the forums since they've existed. I've heard rants like this inside the main and beta grids since 2004. It has not changed. It will not change. Take it or leave it, but for gods sake stop whining.

Awesome entry!
And I agree the most with ''stop developping!''
We dont need new stuff, at least I dont.
All I want is a stable, reliable grid.
Windlight? Good! Nice fun! But it was not something I NEED to enjoy SL.
Voice? I turned it off, it lags a lot and I never used it.. why invent it?

Fix the TP crashes, the crashing in general.
Sim crossing! lag (of course) and those random logouts are a pain in the neck.

Stop creating new stuff.
Fix the base first before you build on it.

Yes. It is a hiccup and the issues of January 2009 are for the most part fixed.

So much for 2009 looking even worse.

In 2005 a friend of mine had class 2 and class 3 sims connected together. We were able to walk, run, fly, do cartwheels or whatever over the sim borders without a hiccup. There was none of this rubberbanding or walking offworld and praying you did not crash or get an annoying failed region handoff message, just a smooth transition from one sim to the other.

I am still waiting for them to fix this issue. Think they ever will?

We haven't missed your last disposable alt, so we're not going to miss this one either.

Ephraim Kappler roars laughing

I sincerely do not understand what all the fuss is about. SL runs so much better for me these days than it ever did - and I have been consistently online for extensive daily sessions since I registered in 2007.

Admittedly I upgraded my PC with a decent graphics card and 2GB of RAM last summer. The upgrades were essential but not expensive (my previous system was from hunger). I am still running a very middle of the road system on a basic ADSL connection from a developing country and yet I can have three viewers without any noticeable degradation of frame rate when I require the presence of a couple of alt accounts. The whole shebang is damn near flawless when I run only one viewer.

Mind you, I have to say the most recent crop of default avs is an atrocity: newbies these days are plug ugly.

Yep. sim crossings went into the toilet once they threw the doors open on registrations. What you call better, I can easily call worse. Sure over all the service isn't so bad if you don't do much other than play dress up and chat. But I cannot help but still dream of the time when I didn't have to pray when it came time to cross a sim border. I hope that rough patch gets smoothed over someday.

My memory is perfectly fine, just a bit longer.

Anyone remember "Project Open Letter" from early 2007? Maybe it could be resurrected?

Yes, I whole-heartedly support the idea of resurrecting an enterprise that was pointless even when it was first tried.

Not sure quite how pointless is was. I seem to remember that someone did listen, although I'm sure it didn't have a massive impact. If nothing else it gave people an outlet to vent their frustrations at that time.

This June will be starting my 5th year in SL, and I have to say I agree with the posters who say "You want me to PAY for this???".. I've been premium since I started in 2005, but I'm seriously considering not re-upping in June.. The only reason I might reconsider is the fact that being an old-timer, I still get the 500L/wk stipend, which if you do the math, is 2000L/mo, which at current exchange rates is between $6-$7US/mo, and since I'm on the yearly plan at $72/yr, or $6/mo, that puts me about even or a little over towards my shopping if the exchange rate works my way.. I donate my 512 tier to the Shelter in Isabel, since I haven't owned land in SL since about 2007. Since I love to build, BUT I won't go into the cesspools that SL's sandboxes have become, I run my own OpenSim sim on a $10/mo Linux virtual private server, thus having my own 64K s/m sim. Of course this may not be for everyone, since I'm a nerd/geek and have been working with Linux since 1994. I'm to the point where I'm considering setting up a small grid of sims for friends to build in.. With my building sweet-tooth satisfied, the only reason I come into SL anymore is to sightsee, hang out at the Shelter and help noobies, and lets not forget shopping..... Sure wish I could export some of the nice stuff I have in my SL inventory over to my sim... sigh.. BTW: if anyone wants the info on the virtual server email me at [email]tasman.perth@gmail.com[/email].. If you know Linux at all, its a piece of cake to get your own sim set up..

Tas