An Alarming Cry For Linden Labs & Residents of Second Life

Dear Lindens, Residents and potential investors of Second Life,

First I will hope you will read all the way through this letter before coming to a decision or conclusion on your stance about the issues about to be discussed.

My name is Cody Rauh, I am CEO and Lead Developer for Iota Studios. I am a self taught entrepenuer with fair college education and respected talent for the market I work in. I have had four years experience as a community administrator, and 3 years experience almost as a 3D content creator, along with 6 years of experience in graphic design. No I am not superior and I am not better than you or any other, this is not another down with Linden Labs post ( AKA: I hate Second Life posts ) and this is not a complete insanity of love for the lindens and all things on Gods green earth if you believe God created earth.

Before I get deep into the subject I would like to thank Dustin, Teeple, Spike, Guy, and Lexie Linden for your outstanding effort and work in second life to help our residents day in day out.

Now to get down to business. As a company owner I have over 100,000US$ tied up in company assets, labor hours, and potential profit into second life. Yes I am not big like IBM, Microsoft and other top of the food chain companies but I feel I still deserve the same respect and credibility, since I make my living working full time within Second Life. I earn my money working very hard to build the very best possible for my clients.

Lets start with things in the first order we usually experience them when using second life....

The Problem, Glitch, Error:

We all know these things aren't easy to resolve and no matter what happens you will find there is problems of many varieties in any piece of software or product you buy, needless to say second life is not different, and while it has its fair share of problems I don't think it is what causes so much tension between Linden Labs and its customers.

Second Life could have 3x the issues it currently has and still be allright if it would fix its problems with....

Liaisons:

Though I know some very hard working and highly respectable lindens in world I have seen an increasing pattern in rude unprofessional conduct by the lindens. A display of uncaring and inconsideration no matter the loss of the customer.

Lindens General Reply " Please email concierge or billing ".

The Liaisons general response it to find someone else, the liaisons in many different ways are nearly rendered useless. With all respect for the people in those positions they need better training, and more exposure to Second Life before being hired. You need to arm your employees with information, make them effective leaders and helpers in the company. Most of them can't even tell me common knowledge that I as a 8 month old user in second life knows, and I spend 90% of my time with my head buried in prims working on client contracts.

Support:

I will say this with absolute blunt honesty, your support is a joke. It is a tarnishing mark to the legacy Linden Labs is trying to build with SL. The lindens tell us to contact support outside of Second Life, I understand that it takes time but there is no excuse for no replies, and failing to respond all together to your clients. I have sent dozens if not hundreds of request for resolutions to issues that I haven't even heard back on and have been sent over 5 months ago. How is your support helping us? Why have it if it won't do its job? Why tell us to contact them when we know we only get answering machines or no reply at all no matter what method we use.

Issues in general:

it takes you 5 days to transfer funds to our paypal so we can wait maybe another 4 days, that is 9 days total but you can withdraw money from our accounts instantly, and if our money happens to be in limbo and we have to pay a automatic charge for linden labs from our bank without having those funds we pay overdraft fees not cause we don't have the money, but cause Linden Labs takes it sweet time in getting stuff done.

Slexchange generally can transfer the same amount of money atleast 3 to 4 days faster on average than Linden Labs.

What matters most:

There is several problems in Second Life but the worst one has nothing to do with an in game glitch it is your customer service. If you can't find a way to fix your customer service issues how much longer do you think you will last before you bleed dry. I have been a loyal customer and investor in Second Life for the past 7 - 8 months. But I am finding it harder everyday to support Second Life when I am not seeing the results of what I feel is a growing success.

Some of you will reply to me with hateful posts:

Q: If I can do it better then why don't I?

A: First I can't do it better, but I want to bring forth a very real issue, this isn't a matter of me being better than anyone it is that linden labs is failing its customers.


Q: Why are you complaining your making money in Second life right?

A: I am not a simple basement dwelling user looking for an arguement, I am a respectable company owner that feels that Linden Labs will not take efforts to fix its methods of providing us with better service till we take a stand and let them know we want better.


Q: Aren't you probably just some angry newb wanting to make some futile effort to make Second Life look bad cause you were banned from your account?

A: I can't prove that I am not, but if you think about it how many times have things happened and you weren't treated respectfully or took a ridiculous amount of time to have an issue resolved that only needed 5 minutes time.

Q: Well don't you think it is cause they have 4 million users and are over worked?

A: then hire more employees to balance out the work load, it is a simple concept and Second Life makes enough to support more employees, if not they need to spend time figuring out a better way to manage their profits in order to provide necessary things to keep the company and its projects running smoothly.



I hope you all take this as a respectable and non hostile letter with a serious topic, and not judge it as a kid at home playing fakes probably due to my weak sentence structure , grammatical errors and inability to write essays on a professional publishing level.

Please feel free to support this topic, reply or leave a comment possibly discuss, I am both open to positive and negative feed back I may recieve for my views and opinions expressed in this post.

NOTICE: if this is posted in the wrong forum please post the correct subforum to post this so I may post the thread in the appropriate location.

Warm Regards,

Cody Rauh
CEO of Iota Studios
1.580.334.7770
[email]iota_studios@hotmail.com[/email]

Office hours are 8am - 4pm Monday thru Friday.

Very well thought out post. I agree with just about everything you pointed out except maybe the part about every software having bugs and glitches and people will accept them as part of "life"...........yeah there are problems in almost every program but people will only accept those problems if the resolutions of the problem recieve the highest priority which has not been Linden Labs' response............instead it seems adding new features is the highest prority. The problems continue to stack up with few fixes. People will tire of that quickly........I know I have.

I've all but given up on any customer support...........it just does not exist. You lose something, be it inventory item or real life dollars, you are just out of luck. The only advice you will get from LL and many residents is "don't spend more than you are willing to lose"...............as if this was a great big virtual game of chance (gambling). What kind of answer is that to a pretty big problem? The excuse given is often "it's cutting edge technology and if you can't handle it then perhaps you should look elsewhere for your enjoyment"...........in other words I can just leave. I've been invited to do just that several times by a few here in the forums by trying to point out what you posted.

Some of us do actually enjoy and "love" Second Life.........but are finding it harder and harder to maintain that attitude. An effective system of real customer support and a very real effort of fixing known issues would quickly turn my disappointment around........as I think it would for many others in this world.

Hope you don't get flamed too severely for your post. It's more than worth a decent and honest discussion.

You are a pioneer. For that we are grateful. However, pioneers are often the ones who have a terribly difficult time.

good luck.

I would be very ignorant to argue with the reply you posted to one of my comments, Yes I agree with you, far to many efforts to advance without any effort to stabalize. Most of the ancient empires in history did the same exact thing, to far to fast, but not enough concentration on the foundation of their empires. A logical result was the implosion of all they built and and believed in, I feel this is a very close comparison to Linden Labs methods of virtual expansion. I wouldn't dare call Linden Labs imperialist or tyranical but I do believe they are not taking the time to concentrate on the people that keep Second Life running. While most would argue the most important aspects of keeping a community stable, I believe time and time again, that people are the basis and the most valuable resource. If Linden Labs with all it has provide us with us doesn't find a way to better resolve the issues that cripple the very people that are the life of Second Life then it will surely decay away into a virtual ruins like so many empires before it.

Nice analogy.

It is also ironic that LL is keen on promoting that everything but the terrain is created by customers yet they keep making business decisions that make such construction ever more frustrating.

I've been trying since Thursday morning to get help in regards to a script that SL is complaining "Missing from database" despite it being there a few seconds before the issue arose, hoping that I can somehow recover it (it USED to be in the database, and had been for some time, surely that copy is still around somewhere? In a save-state or whatever, I don't need a roll-back, just one script). I've yet to see a live-helper respond, and support hasn't given a peep.
This of course has me concerned because the script is took a lot of effort and now seems to no longer exist, and while I'm sure there must be a copy somewhere, that copy isn't likely to last forever!

Since I started in SL in 05 I've seen a consistant and very real decline in customer service and this isn't down to membership increase LL has degraded the available avenues of interaction between themselves and the userbase to a point it is arguable it simply doesn't exist. I have a small shop but myself and my partner have invested thousands of hrs into content creation and we love the program and what it affords us that said LL's sheer lack of response to serious issues affecting their users is the worst I've ever seen. We had an issue with some of our items being cloned and despite assurances from Phil Linden at the time of the copybot fiasco about cloners being severly dealt with SL and LL did nothing aside from an auto response "issue investigated and resolved" meaning they actually did squat. Our only real feedback from any Linden was take all mods off leaving anything copy or modify means the mods can be broken so now we sell everything NO MODS.
I dislike the lame comment "but its only a game" to many in here it isn't the economy is real and actively promoted by LL as such. They seriously need to look again at the way they deal with customer service the current system simply is not good enough.

One small counterpoint for consideration:

Keep in mind that Liasons (and likely many Lindens) aren't (and shouldn't be) empowered to provide authorative answers or action on every topic, question or problem.

Like any organization, people specialize and take on responsibility and accountability for making sure things work a certain way.

When anyone can do anything, anytime and without being answerable to anyone... sure, customer service can get much higher marks. But the chaos that results usually makes it a short lived victory.

Which is, undoubtedly, why someone at your level of investment is likely referred past the front lines to a queue where... hopefully... the right person or people will be able to review your problem and try to help.

Sadly, when a service staff is overwhelmed with people demanding things that they may, or in may cases, may NOT be entitled to, I've no doubt it can sour their attitude towards "general customers".

It's a challenging time for SecondLife. It will be very interesting to see how the next year or two play out.

--
UserX: "My Blipity is broken, it's your fault, you need to fix it."
Support: "Um... I've never heard of a Blipity... did you create it or buy it?"
UserX: "Bought it. It doesn't work."
Support: "Did it ever?"
UserX: "No. And you need to fix it, cause the creator isn't responding to my demands for my money back. Or you need to re-imburse me cause I was ripped off."
Support: "I'm sorry but we don't get involved in player disputes."
UserX: "Why not?"
Support: "Sorry but we don't answer the question "Why Not?""
UserX: "Why... Oh @%&@)#*$ I want my money back!"
Support: "Did you have any other questions or problems you wanted me to help with?"
UserX: "@#)%@)#$*#$@ YOU!"
Support: (heavy sigh in RL). "Have a nice day." (close IM window)

Cody/Perafim:

What a well written, articulate post. I DO hope someone at LL reads it and starts kicking it up the food chain. I am not an LL or SL hater either...I love it but I share your concerns. You articulated, much better than I did, some of the same concerns I have. In thier seeming haste to grow the numbers to attract businesses such as yours, LL may be unwittingly throttling the very goal I believe they are going after. System reliability will ultimately benefit all users, be they RL corporate, in world small businesses, and recreational users such as me.

I believe that if you sent that post via an e-mail or even regular, first class mail it should get some attention.

Thank you for the taking the time to draft such an impressive, well written letter!!

If you ever need an in world secretary, let me know!! [I am only partially kidding]

I wish you the very best of luck in all of your endeavors, RL and SL.