Suggestions to the Lindens

Author's Comments: This is a list of suggestions that I believe Lindens not only should take, but is also my belief that these are imperative to Second Life's future. Please read the post in its entirety before posting your comments.

Discussion points:

To the management and executives of Linden Labs, the following topics are in my belief issues that need immediate attention. They require much thought and quite a lot of solid planning and consideration.

1) The grid, database servers, asset servers, and networking assets need a major overhaul. The database and asset servers are ineffective at their current capacity. They seem to have defects that are affecting the economy of the game and are detrimental to the growth of second life. The networking problems are creating more issues to include high ping, time dilation, and packet loss issues. They seem akin to problems with road congestion on large city highways yet are becoming more and more prevalent to second life.

2) Complete re-training of Lindens in the role of liaison in customer service. The majority of the helpers do seem to want to help for the most part, however they all seem to be technology based hires, not customer service experts. This is leading to not just miscommunication but a total breakdown of the trust of the help request staff. Specifically saying you do not have enough employees to handle the amount of requests coming in, does not serve anything but to foment this air of confusion. Having better trained personnel will help reduce the amount of headaches you have coming from the help request staff. They will answer questions more effectively and will be able to at least give people they are speaking with a much more pleasant feeling that their issues are important and will get attention.

3) Compensation programs for residents during time when unexpected grid or other issues prevent your economy from being able to operate. Perhaps this does not mean simple monetary compensation as many have always scoffed at that idea by equating how much the cost is to the average resident. Compensation of some sort is necessary however as your residents do pay for a service which is not being met. Perhaps instead of focusing on just one type of compensation, focus on others such as reduced fees for a period of time. Maybe give all your premium members an extra 100L and the non-premium 25L for downtime when its unscheduled.

4) A residents' bill of rights. This is an idea I had of creating a bill of rights that the lindens will agree to always have for Second Life Residents. Stuff the lindens themselves will agree to follow as a measure of goodwill and a standard for how the lindens act and treat their residents.

5) Focus Groups and surveys by the lindens to determine what issues are affecting second life and discussions with groups associated to help create polite and more beneficial discourse with residents. This will go far to sow seeds of prosperity. It will allow any new change in policy to be able to be met with more acceptance and perhaps will steer the lindens away from massive amounts of bad publicity in the future.

Closing Statement:

I have created this to try and shed some light on issues that I believe are important to other residents. I feel the lindens need to know where they should focus their resources to better handle future problems and concerns. To those reading this. I understand that this may have stirred up a veritable hornets nest but I feel that these issues must be viewed. I do wish to have this discussed. Please keep your comments as constructive and beneficial to this topic. I hope many of you feel the same with me on these issues and will show your support for this.
In closing, these items are not to be taken in any specific order, except for the first as I believe it needs the most resources and thought to bring about progress that is sorely needed.

Thank you all for reading this:
Raven Welesa

If that is a question, my resident answer is: Relax.

And it begins!

I said that statement as calm and in as clear of mind that I can possibly be in. I also asked for constructive comments. Something that will further the discussion, not just write it off as ranting.

LMAO

Sorry, had to post that

About compensation for down-time; rather than working with money which would be very painstaking to work out per person, why not simply tacking the down-time onto tier or account payment dates?

While I agree with nearly everything the OP says (but most especially with regard to Customer (and I would add, Conceirge) Service, which is effectively non-existant. However, many of these ideas are things the Lindens are aware of and, in some cases, working on. Point number one, for example, is currently a high priority for the development team--that's why we keep getting grid updates without viewer updates.

To be effective, suggestions like these need to be made where the Lindens will actually read them, and where they have an opportunity to respond to them. I would encourage you to take this list to a Linden Office Hours sometime. You'll get a much better hearing there than you will here, and you might find out something useful about implementing these ideas.

Kam

Not too long ago, people were screaming that the grid was unable to support 10k in-world at once and not capable of scaling to a larger user base. This weekend, apparently, SL hit 40k in-world at once. I would have liked to get a screenshot of this but was busy doing some custom landscaping work - creating, reshaping and texturing many prims - and SL was behaving so well that I didn't notice we had hit a new record. While SL can be annoying sometimes, I don't think it needs a major overhaul - it does need bug fixes, though.

More often than not, I think packet loss and high pings are the result of sim bugs rather than network issues. Also, I'm curious why you say that network problems create time dilation.


I've almost always had good luck when contacting Live Help/Help Request. Had one Linden once that was a little short but they weren't rude.

More people is what they need. I would like to see (many) more resident volunteers doing triage for LL.


Not gonna happen.


Interesting but also don't see it happening. They're going to stick with the TOS and CS.


There is a voting feature on JIRA and the Feature Voting stuff here and a Feature Request forum. They've also opened up Linden Village and some Lindens have posted their office hours. This area still needs work but I think they're making progress.