Normally I'm a thankful person...

But I played City of Heroes for more than two years without seeing this many bugs, crashes, fixes... I love SL. Love it. Very happy, grateful resident. But this really isn't working well. Linden Lab isn't creating confidence in its' user base this way. Maybe they should consult with Blizzard, or someone.

This is why I went from premium to basic. I felt I was getting more consistent "play time" on the forums than I was on the grid.

I really had seen no problems with the grid until the past little over a week...

Now, I'm not defending SL, 'cuz it IS pretty wonky a lot of the time, but...

well maybe it's cuz I was playing when they first came out with it, but CoH was SO buggy and SO laggy for me that I just had to stop playing (That and I got sick of grinding constantly or being forced to group with "OMG! U guyz is so meenz to me!" "DUDE! HEAL!" "No wayz, man... ur not teh bossa me." "HEAL, MAN! PLEASE!" "See? U r ded. I didz taht to teche u a leson. U shud be nisr to peepl" morons or "Ok. You, Blaster. You need to stand right here. No, one inch over. ONE inch, not two. Jeez. Ok. Now, When you see the boss take two steps into the room. Not three, two... You must do this this and this, then wait for 13.734296 seconds and do a rain of fire, then put your left leg up on this box and twist 47.5 degrees westerly and shoot your sniper, then caltrops." "Um... can't I just go over there and blast away while the tank is holding aggro? I mean, I'm level 28 and it's a level 12 Boss... I'm just helping out my friend" "You noobs drive me crazy. Why don't you lern to play properly?" psychos.)

Do you get to upload sounds and textures in City of Heroes or WoW? Do you get to make cars or horses do whatever you want or get the ability to actually SCRIPT your super powers? Didn't think so.

Nothing's more annoying than people trying to compare SL to common online games with 1/8 of the features.

SL isn't perfect and LL isn't the best company out there, but you're basically saying "my teacher in grade school was able to keep us from getting into fights. So why can't the President of the US stop violent crimes?"

Comparing SL to any other traditional online mmorpg is like comparing apples to lampshades. In a game like CoH the content is static and resides on your local drive, and what you can do in the game world is strictly limited. In SL the entire world and all its contents is streamed to you in real time and can change at any moment, and what you can do in the world has very few limits. Not that SL's instability isn't highly fristrating, but LL is doing something that's never really been done before by anyone.

To be fair, what Linden Labs is attempting with Second Life is far more ambitious than City of Heroes or any of the online roleplaying games. Allowing users to easily create content for the game is the main thing that pushes the technical limits of Second Life.

However, Linden Labs should not overpromise Second Life as more than it is. A lot fewer people would be looking at Second Life as the next internet gold rush if they knew more about Second Life's flaws. I think a lot fewer residents would be disgruntled if they didn't come here expecting something that Second Life can't deliver.

City of Heros isn't a real-time ever-changing streaming virtual world. Second Life is VRML, CoH is content in a box. You really can't compare the two.

Not that I don't agree there are a lot of bugs in SL...but keep in mind, it's because SL citizens can change or add content on a dime, there are so many bugs. It's really hard to encapsulate all the problems, when users keep creating so much content and code. At least...that's one of the reasons.

EDIT: Shoot, chip, you beat me to the obvious one-two combo.

On this... I agree with you 100%.


What amazes me is all the outrage on the forums as if any of these inconveniences or problems are NEW. They've been with us, to varying degrees, since forever. I get the impression that things are somewhat tolerable, and then a person bumps into a real annoyance and looks around to see who else is annoyed, finds many are and assumes it's some new crisis.

This is a world teetering on several edges at the same time. There's gonna be headaches.

LL may not charge most of the residents... but nothing comes without some sort of cost.

Chip, I want to hang with you one day and play SL like those guys I used to group with.

"Ok, Chip. Here's what you do. Take that upper tattoo and apply it. Then, once applied, you have to set the skin shade. Make sure you set it to light enought. GOD! LOOK what you did! You noob! You set the shade too dark. God. When I made skin textures on my other character, I knew what to do! What do you mean you don't have caltrops?"

(Sorry that last bit is because I never got caltrops on my blaster and it used to drive the anal retentive, "Let me tell you how you should play the game" types absolutely insane!)