Blog: Coming your way soon: the Second Life Support Portal

Well that makes perfect sense too - since they know how many premium people they have and how many Large land owners - due to transactions.

So they can plan out how many support people they need a lot better using that information.

How can they plan it when they insist I'm not who I claim I am?

they are fixing that too, thats tommorrows blog post I guess.

They'll charge me whether I verify or not so it's a bodge not a fix

Hey

Id like to nominate Cyn Linden for the Linden Tech Writer job -

That Blog Post is Clear and to the point. It gives the details and THEN explains why so people can get the main points without having to read all the background.

If Cyn had written some of the other recent Blog Posts (Verification and Ageplay) we might have had a lot less to argue about lately.

Um how the times has changed, Wonders how many users in the basic form will quit. But really how many willbe jumping up to paying levels. But one questen, so there is no fee at all for additional accounts? So everyone has to be on the same level a premium? Why not just those taht have freebie accounts the option to pay for 9.95 ? makes no sence not to try to get more money in the full accounts? Why down down even the 9.95 people will to pay it?

usagi

The problem is, those products are generally a bit more reliable than SL, and they don't have a discipline issue as SL does. I sincerely hope that the implication that premium users will be able to "submit support tickets" is something new, and will not mean that basic accounts can't AR or report bugs - that would be game breaking.

Also, I agree with Ceera that someone who buys a lot of L$ but maybe never wanted land should also have an option for getting premium support. Perhaps a recurring Supply Linden buy order that also gives you premium support?

This is the only concern here I have. Free users get griefed and spammed and abused as well and if there is no way to report offenders lets face it the number of premium account holders is quite small and the number of premiums that may encounter a bug or need to file an abuse report will be even smaller.

Seems to me that anyone should have this basic service.

I have yet to actually put in a help request for anything really and emailed linden labs twice. Once when i got ported for no reason and again when the capcha system was impossible to use seems to me that even these issues are not "premium" only things either

Actually I can't think of too many premium only issues actually ..

anyhow I dont consider a help ticket system to be a valid reason to upgrade but that is just me. Yes I did downgrade a month ago because I had no use for mainland land and the stipend alone was not enough to keep me paying for this membership. Would I reupgrade for the ability to access a basic system of support which is present in most free situations the answer is no .

There was a decent BLOG going on until people started playing Blog Games and switching names. oh well not everyone need to play them .

who's doing what now? lol

Yeah, it is very important for us to get efficient and quality support from LL's supportor..
hope this is really solveable..

[email]support@secondlife.com[/email] will no longer be functional?

It would be nice if the premium and concierge level people would post screen shots of the support pages so basic and unver folks can better answer questions from the premiums and concierge people on how to use the service system the basics don't have access to.

Help Island Public is being dual purposed as the place for new users to go to advance a bit beyond the most rudimentary skills and the place for basics and unvers to go when in need of support.

I don't think I've ever seen anything at Help Island Public that would be of much use for a support need, other than the occaisional mentor, which are available elsewhere.

at this stage nothing is for sure.

Surely, it's functional as a group email address, where ur email will be selectively directed to a dedicated LL's supportor..

All basic members to the back of the bus!
Do we get our own toilet to?

LMAO! Sorry had to get that out... There is NO WAY IN HELL I am going to start paying monthly again for a SL account just because they offer me support on something full of more holes then swiss cheese. lmao. Nope not gonna happen. Fix the major issues first then I will think about it.

Damn what a perfect cash cow....
First, have a system full of problems with ticked off users....

Create a support center for people to scream about these problems....

Charge to connect to that support center by getting everyone to sign to a prem accout....

AND STILL DONT FIX THE ISSUES....

That = $$$$$$$$$ in the Lidens pockets and still no resolve for the major issues.

NO THANKS! I'LL PASS.... Please drive through.... Come again!

I like it. Although I'm a concierge user so why wouldn't I.

As far as free accounts only getting website support? Welcome to the real world. This is what you get with any free software, limited, typically website and user based (forums) support. If you don't pay for the product, why should any company pay to support you? It is the way it is for pretty well any free software you get. Many companies give products away for free and charge for support, good example: Linux.

Problem with that is there are plenty of older acts that did pay to get them and are being lumped in with the freebies.

Hardly fair

I do concur with this point, $9.95 onetime accounts should get more, maybe not as much as premium, but more than the freebies.

SL is set up so there are different ways to 'pay for the product', being premium is just one of them. If everyone was premium and thus had their homes/business on the mainland so as to not waste the premium fee, there wouldn't be many island owners as they wouldn't be able to make money from selling/renting the space.

Between home and business, I have 10k of land, my monthly payments enable the island owner to pay LL and keep it going. With my monthly land fees, my ad fees and the amount I spend in uploads, my contribution to keeping things running is more than someone with 512sm on mainland and their $9.95 a month.

If everyone now went premuim and moved to mainland to get their monies worth, it would cause more work for SL dealing with everyone's payments individually as opposed to Island owners collecting for them.

What makes you think all premium members live on the mainland or would move to the mainland if they went premium? I know TONS of premium members that have mothing to do with the mainland, myself included.

BESIDES, island owners already will have better service than premium, so why would they become premium if they aren't already?

AND you can not get support for any land you are on if you are renting on an island anyway, LL will not deal with individuals on islands, only estate managers and the owner. The island owner is your support channel, since you are paying them. This is part of the steps to decentalize sim hosting and open source sims.

Absolutely, positively, NOT!!

I gave LL my credit card information back when it was required, and back when things actually worked.

Granted, I did have a few 'newb' panic moments, like when my brand-new jetpack had me careen offworld, and I thought I'd be stuck forever, and I tried Live Help to get some info.

However, earlier tonight, I had something happen that, as an older user by now (1+ years) again had me panicing: my L$ balance dropped to absolutely nothing in the blink of an eye.

Turns out what happened was a glitch caused the viewer to recieve a '0 0 0' money reply, and what the viewer gets is god, and I went from six figures to zilch in the blink of an eye.

Had Live Help been available, you can be damned sure I'd be on with them instantly.

But to treat me like absolute garbage and shunted off to an ineffective web-based 'help' because I saw this shit falling apart long before anyone else did? No. Absolutely, positively, NOT!!

I think you can see where this is going...

Well I suppose a support ticket system is better than nothing. My ISP uses a support ticket system and they're notorious for shunting problems, queries and complaints into limbo.

Ceera actually raised a very important point. Alot of calls to the help desk will most likely be player/avatar related stuff (how do i do this, how can i do that, so-and-so greifed / stalked / spammed me, dmca violations, etc.), but what about reporting system problems (this sim has serious lag problems / is about to crash / has crashed / is under attack from self-replicating objects / particle spam / etc) ?

The should be a way for anyone regardless of their account status to report system problems and have them dealt with quickly. Only 1% (not sure... could someone correct me if i'm wrong on this) of the SL userbase is premium or concierge level, so the chances are that the first person on the scene when there's a major system malfunction will be a basic account and most likely an unverified basic account at that. If everyone had to wait until a premium / concierge account turned up before being able to report serious system problems on the grid it could lead to poor performance and system mantenance on LL's part.

However, if there is a fast-track line for reporting system faults, there's a high likelihood that it will get flooded with routine 'help' requests thus rendering it close to useless :\

The "ticket" system is something new. It's a helpdesk system of sorts that enables them to accept, triage, route, track, escalate, etc support requests.. This is a new system that has been in the works for the last several months. AR and BR functionality is most probably not going to be limited to premium accounts only. That would be dumb.

As for buying L$, remember, Linden Lab only gets a small transaction fee when you purchase L$ from the Lindex. It is a resident to resident trading system. LL doesn't pocket the USD used to purchase the L$. The residents who are selling do.

When this support system ramps up, it will be difficult to sustain the argument that "there's no value in premium membership, I don't want to own mainland." Premium membership will now have a universal appeal in the form of enhanced support services. In Ceera's case, this would simply mean cashing out a few L$ in profits each month to cover the membership fee. For others, probably an out of pocket expense. In any case, a pretty nice deal, provided the system is efficient and works according to plan.

Also worthy of note is that with Open Source Server coming, Linden Lab will gradually withdraw from the land provisioning business, and turn to other products and services as sources of revenue, further minimizing mainland ownership as a benefit of premium membership.

The Ticket system seems to be the way in the help world. I'm running into it increasingly. It seems to be an effective method in theory, but as with anything it is only as good as the people behind it.