Completely disgruntled

I know of no other way to describe my feelings than by comparing SL to the "great" World of Warcraft. There is an INSANE amount of money floating around SL. REAL money, not just some infinite supply of some fake gold and platinum pieces. So my question and frustration becomes this... why is it that SL is so inherently unstable? If WOW was HALF as completely unreliable as SL is, no one would play it. The only reason people even deal with this crap is because of the vested relationships and financial commitments we have made to this program. So I ask YOU linden labs, WHERE IS YOUR RETURN OF THIS INTEREST? Your priorities seem to be misguided. Something is inherently WRONG when you release an update which is EVEN WORSE AND MORE UNSTABLE THAN THE ONE RUNNING PRIOR TO IT. There's another company that does that (Microcrap). You can call me just another disgruntled customer, but for once in my 2 year experience on this program I would like a real answer as to why you have made ZERO improvements in the stability of SL as a whole.

Hmm because people don't take money out of WoW and they pay to play it, LL revenue is peanuts compared to WoW

If I bought and rented land in SL, the cost a month is more than Wow costs a month.

I like SL because it is free form and you can build what you like. But its still under construction what comes to being under construction for being perfect.

There is a big difference: in SL you can, but never have to pay real money. You can upgrade to premium, buy land, pay tier - all with Lindens earned inworld.

I'm still not sure how you can compare the two.
One, awesome as it is, has no user created content and is pretty static with the content it does have. They add new features etc. every once in a while and don't make major changes very often.

The other is pretty much nothing BUT user created content (and all the headaches THAT must entail) and is constantly updating, upgrading, adding new features etc.

Would it be nice to get it stable? Hell, yes. But to compare it to WoW is apples and oranges.

WOW - to - SL : apples - to - oranges

Is why WoW and many other virtual worlds are a lot more stable and scalable and choose to avoid unlimited user content.

Is why SL in not as stable and scalable.

Right, it's the user-created content. Well, that's the biggest single-ticket item and what makes them difficult to compare.

The main reason for SL instability is that they're focusing more on scalability than stability. "Growth is Job 1." More users online more of the time. This makes a certain amount of sense because SL players tend to put up with instability. At some point, they'll reach the top of the growth curve, and then they'll start focusing on the players they lose due to stability (and other) issues.

It makes sense from a business point of view. Sure, there are other business models that also make sense, but this is the one they seem to have chosen.

Of course, it's not a "100% growth, 0% everything else" thing, because if the stability is so poor nobody could play for more than 5 minutes, it would cave.

Yep and when someone gets the right balance inbetween they will be the winners.

Yep, and then the Chinese will copy the hell out of it.

Or the Koreans. ;P

Yep which leaves LL with the choice of keeping us a pretty pictures and clothes platform (but for gawds sake don't try and move anything quickly because the physics suck) or progress to where the winners circle is.

Which is why you can't compare them...

Me, I'd rather build stuff and express myself creatively... you know, create user content... than grind levels, killing the same thing over and over (and over and over... and over), or, worse, group with a bunch of 12 year-olds calling each other "fags".

Two completely different things that looks similar.

Also, throw into the mix the fact that most of the other MMORPGs section off their worlds onto different servers, don't they? I seem to remember they do, but I haven't played in a while, ever since I got sick of hearing "LFG" "LFG for what, homo?" "I'm not a homo, you are, gayfag" "Chuck Norris is a homoist" "Chuck Norris blah blah blah..."

......when the boogy man goes to sleep, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris!

I have suggested, that SL created some instances too. For example if I wanted to build my house into a forest, then that forest could be an instance that is copied for all other forest dwellers too.

In the current situation SL has just land, which is built tight with houses. But if you keep the forest the same for all people, then you could have user created content with nice sceneries for everyone. Your friends could visit your house by selecting your name and clicking "visit".

There could still be public roads between different forests and between different other locations. Those roads could be maintained by LL hired maintainers. Also there could still be some areas that are user maintained but common land, so not everything would be instance based. But if LL offered both styles, then that would make all people happy.

So, then you, and 14 other people all live at 101 Forest Lane.
Which doesn't make sense geographically, and LL is trying to make SL have a geography.

Well but sure there could be lots of different kinds of locations to live in. My address would be Forest Lane 101 a.

At current situation there is no point to buy forest parcel, because the forests have so few trees that its barely a park. And when people move in, all the forests are cut down. But with instances every one who would like to live in a good forest, they could do it.

There could be forests, beaches, mountains, snowlands, etc. etc. That way every people could have their dream location with moderate cost per month. At current situation only the rich can afford whole island. But if everyone could have their own beach or forest, then that would get more paying customers for LL. And at the same time bandwidth would be saved, because you wouldn't need to have millions of trees. Just hundreds of trees would make up a forest and then just copy it for all forest living people and the ones who live there could also download the forest locally to their machine.

The forests could be modifiable somewhat, so not everyone would have exactly the same kind of forest (or beach or whatever). The modifiable area could be some land after the building site ends and before the copied forest starts. Or the user could just add bushes instead of building the land full, if he wants more personal yard before the copied forest / beach.

What comes to geographics, I suggested that there could be normal common land and roads too. The instance locations would be distributed into different geographic locations and people would have to walk there or drive a car or take a bus.

If this everything would be less user created, then it would also work better and be more enjoyable and game like. At the current situation all land is user built and its a mess with laggy stuff that don't even work properly. So I suggest more LL maintained stuff, but some user maintained too.

No. Once again, from the top. The reason that second life is so crappy and unstable is because it was built from the husk of Active/Openworlds, which was a very early version of this whole "virtual world" thing. Lets just put things in perspective...

Active/Openworlds run perfectly well on a powermac 7500 with a 100mhz processor and 32mb RAM.

Lets put things in more perspective:

Second Life has been developing, adding, and "fixing" this base code since its birth. Instead of starting over again with a much more thoroughly tested graphics/world engine, they decided to swipe something that was free anyhow and break it. You'll hear a lot of whining about how you cannot dynamically add content using engines like Quake or Unreal--which is technically true, but its possible to license either one of them to build in dynamic content if you want, and the Thief engine has it built in anyhow.

Second Life developers are not idiots--but neither are they rockstars. The biggest issue (and the thing preventing them from becoming rockstars) is middle and upper management who see the entirety of this monstrosity as a vehicle for the creation of "cool" points and dollars--not as a vehicle for the creation of "fun" for their customers. So they throw the OSX port at ONE developer and tell him to "make it work" while happily signing ultimately worthless contracts with the likes of IBM, Best Buy, Sony, and now various and sundry american television broadcast companies.

Second Life is garbage because of the way Linden Labs is run. It's crap from the very top down to about the middle, and then below that its just extreme and pretty constant frustration. Nice going, lindens.

There seems to be plenty of open space to me.



We already have "instances" -- Linden trees and plants. They're awful, compared to the content created by residents. And my friends can already visit me by clicking a teleport button.

This alone is one reason I get annoyed by MMO's after a period of time. I gave up on finishing the last mission in the first Guild Wars due to the petty childish nature of players.

I've seen worse.

Even Online FPS games are just as bad- Team Killers, Stat Padders, Exploiters, Cheaters, Being Accused of Team Killers, Lack of Team Play. Just petty, childish attitudes. Not like SL is without it, but not to the degree that it gets you banned forever for your 1st offence.

Sure there is also lots of open space. But my experience is, that most areas that users have built in, are full of houses. Some areas are tightly built, some areas are even more tightly built. Like if loads of people buy 500sqm parcel and put some house there, it has become popular to use skyhouses, because that way you get more freedom. We live very tightly in the real world already, so I would expect more openness in virtual world. If people buy 4000sqm parcels, that is almost as bad. Its not very big area to build on. And very often you get mixed styled constructions all over your land.



Linden trees and plants are not that much of instances that I meant. And if they do not look as good as user created trees, they could be improved. And if some users wanted to create their own forests, they could do it still by living in an empty instance and building the forest - but paying more than others for the extra user content.

But many people don't have the time or will to create a forest. Copied forest would be fine. Also even if Linden trees are copied, they count as prims anyway. But with a copy forest you wouldn't have to worry about prim counts, because the instance would be he same for everyone.

Though LL could update their instance sceneries once in a while so that users get more variety. Have they heard about procedural content creation? It is a technology where with a simple seed number the program determines how things should look. That would save bandwidth but still create nice random looking sceneries.

Problem with normal games is, that you have to download the game first wholly before you can start to play. With SL you could use the old style of downloading new instances on the fly, or you could select like 5 places that you want to visit and download them at night while you sleep or put them to background download. When the places are copies, they won't change during days. Only the user created part would have to be downloaded on the fly, or if there was no changes in it, no downloading needed.



I know people can visit you in the current SL. But my point was that my suggestions don't break the situation, because they could visit you in the new version too.

What shocks me is that somewhere in LL, someone actually seems to think it's almost acceptable to consider it business as usual when basic infrastructure failures impede or entirely prevent players from using SL in for numerous different reasons in numerous separate instances of failure for 5, 7, or more days in a row. Every day in recent memory there has been a significant failure that has made it difficult or impossible to use SL, or has rendered one or more features nearly or entirely unusable.

I've played a lot of MMO's, and not even in beta test phases have any of them performed this miserably. I was raised with the kind of old fashioned American work ethic that left me with the knowledge that is is what you just do not do. You do not do a sub-par job, and attempt to pass it off as a worthy product or service. Something major needs to be done. Applying one more bandage is not going to mend the broken leg that is making the grid go lame, fixing the (serious) symptoms one by one is not going to treat the causal disease that is quickly becoming endemic and crippling to the entire experience.

I'm insulted by the quality of service that passes as acceptable here. Were it not for my commitments, I would leave. Part of me is tempted to leave anyhow. I find myself really, truly disgusted. The amount of failure and the lack of the level of effort necessary to reverse them is a slap in the face to the people who are investing their money in SL. Problems continue to build and accumulate and LL is the little dutch boy, putting fingers in the holes in the dike and hoping no more of them show up... even as the cracks are growing outward and threatening to destroy the integrity of the whole.

Amen on that. I was raised with similar values and this is a complete disgrace. I mean, THE SYSTEM HAS BEEN WHOLLY UNAVAILABLE FOR MOE THAN 24 Hours. Even though we could log on for 10 and 15 minutes here and there, for the most part, the system has been non-functional since 5:30pm two days ago.

Why can't someone pull their head out and stop adding features to something before it's working in the first place? I use another BETA TEST product that's been pushed on me and have been for years, we all deal with it in the form of WINDOWS and no one seems to give a crap beyond complaining about it in the posts (I'm included in this group mostly because at 19 my buying power is limited and I have few choices ;P ) because daily we all keep using this garbage instead of pulling out our $$ and sending a message that it's totally unacceptable.

Why can't they just get it right? Because as long as we keep spending $$ to use a broken product, there's no need to fix it, they get their $$ either way.

- My Two Cents.

XX

My thought exactly, they are always coming up with new ideas and not fixing the old ones for their schwag fest. *think what goes on LL employees mind "Which did he go george which way did he go"*

The OP's question was clearly answered. Beign able to create and script pretty much anything you want from an apple to an entire city or space station complte with custom textures, sounds, and animations is why there is just no way to compare Second Life to any commercial MMORPG. There is NO other platform out there that does what SL does as reliably as SL does it.

That said, SOMETHING has to change.

The big draw for SL, as reiterated by the Lindens themselves repeatedly, is that you can literally turn your lindens into Dollars. Well thanks to the mysterious login troubles and now the "inventory system is unavailable" I have not been able to long into what has literally become my job for an entire day. This is lost productivity for me... which means lost revenue. And that gets old very quickly.

It is long past time to make some headway on stabliility issues. I can only hope and pray tht things will start to get better... because I'm honestly not sure how much worse they can get without making the entire grid inaccessible to everyone.

My current frustrations stated, I do have to say that whay Linden Labs has created here is nothing short of remarkable - and being able to create completely custom content is a hallmark step that will, in due course, change the face of MMO/virtual realities forver. Frankly, I wish I had gotten involved sooner.

As to the side point about instancing, I think that you fail to understand the architecture here. Having instances would be exactly the same load on the servers as having to provide multiple parcels/sims for multiple people. Frankly, if you want to have a forest around your house, the only way it is going to happen is for you to pay for it. Buy a larger plot of land, and protect the forest there. It's that simple. Goodness knows that when I move from my current parcel, I'm going to make damned sure that I have enough space around me that I don't have to stare out the windows at gaudy, ridiculous "land for sale" signs all over the place. As it stands now, I've built a box around my parcel and put a sky texture on it so I don't have to see what my silly neighbors are doing any more.