New Zindra Blog Post

Did Blondin and Blue have office hours today? Any info come outta those?

Heh, waiting for the week-end is *so* vanilla!

^V^

i have seen a couple already assigned, so it does look like they are starting the queue up again, albeit very slow, and the land isn't done yet, of course.

Office Hour Blondin Linden is online here:

http://www.slapt.me/wiki/index.php/Office_Hour_transcript_-_Blondin_Linden:_07-08-2009

So, now we have it black on white:



This means exactly and unambiguous: people on mature-land, - and I think these are much, maybe thousands, including me, myself and I - who want the same freedom for creativity, self-expression/self-design, spontaneous acting as before, have to grab new land from an auction, or from a landbaron, or from a resident who sells a small amount land and to take land which will be in most cases not equivalent to the former land and they and me will have to pay astronomical prices (again), to be on Zindra under the same conditions like before on mature-mainland.

This is remarkable - because for that we have a word here in Austria. I know also the english word. Since new I am careful on the forums, but this word would start with the letter F and it would end with the letter D.

F***D

Clearly and open right into the horrified faces of the customers.

Me is extraordinaire angry again!

Suspending it all again for a week or two is not a good move imho. LL have had plenty of time to plan and execute this move and even though they shut up shop for a few days until yesterday there were lindens on duty that could have sifted through what tickets there were already.

My business is suffering, traffic has gone from an average of 18/19 K a day to about 2K and that figure is only down to the fact my wife is working on the slapt.me website and is working on the website whilst on the land. Its only the fact that our RL business pays for the land and its tax deductible and not directly out of our own pockets so to speak that we are staying and waiting this out. Many are not as lucky as us to be able to write off the tier and SL expenses each month and they are the ones I feel for.

We are losing renters daily and the site is a ghost town now as we cannot plan anything and I am sure there are many in a lot worse situation than us. LL should have planed this better and knowing that they were going to do this some 9+ months ago it shows what an amateur company they really are in so many ways in the planning of all of this.

Just my thoughts though

Well, true. No more delays. I have also an interest to not hang endless between wallpaper and wall and to see as soon as possible some ways to transfer myself and some friends over to Zindra for well known freedom reasons. It seems this will be then via auction or something...

LL could now start to show literally serious work and results, I mean, work in a kind of *athletic* sense...like a Tour de France bicyclist. And if they have to dope themselfs for that, then they should! Means: hard work for the money! I have no longer mercy with them, hahaha. Sweat, I want to see them sweating, all brain and all muscles under high tension 24/7, full stress, like 1920 workers in a USSR steel facility! I want to see them lose weight and roboting like no one before on earth.

If I think what extraordinaire excellent hard work and logistic runs in - for example - a 5-star gourmet-restaurant every day, kind of military inspired organisation rules in these ktichens, hahaha, and this for hundreds of guests every day, or if I think how famous the US are for creating their worldwide broadcastet Entertainment things like this M.J. funeral event just one week after he died, and if I think, that (well, all sarcasm) 18 months are three times more time than to plan and accomplish one of their favourite hobbies like "Operation Desert Storm" - or just a simple Cheerleader group while these football events, then I expect something similar to accomplish *this* Zindra mission now with a high professional attitude.

Just that.

I filed my first support ticket for the swap at 10:06am on june 29th, and another one at 11:44pm on the 30th with my second round of picks.

Those 2 tickets were 8822 numbers apart

700 My ass!

^V^

First:
Blondin is right 8822 > 700.

Second:
It is just one (1) very simple select statement in the database to get the number of Zindra swap tickets. Will take any programmer there not more than 1 minute to get the number.


I find it amazing to listen to emplyees of an Internet Service Provider like Linden Labs who claim to know that little about maths and their database ...

Instead of claiming not to know the basics of his job, why doesn't he simply tell: "No comment. I don't want you to know that number."

But they weren't all Zindra tickets. There's about 38 hours between those tickets times, so assuming normal background ticket load (which is highly variable, but gotta start somewhere) there's about 195 tickets per hour, or 7410 non-Zindra tickets that one might expect in that interval. Given the variance in background ticket volume, the ticket numbers could indicate only a handful of Zindra tickets, or thousands--no way of knowing based on just those numbers.

Guys, the ticket numbers are for *all* support tickets, that's why they are up in the millions. You need to subtract the average of 195 tickets per hour for normal support tickets.

Therefore for Valerius, we have 37.6 hours between his tickets, and therefore expect 7,332 normal tickets in that time. The excess Zindra tickets are therefore estimated at 1,490. That's only an estimate. Since they made a special queue for it, they should be able to give an exact count in a minute of looking. For that matter, it would have been nice to have set up a web page showing the current queue length, and current ticket number being served.

Well, the initial rush over the first few hours was so much higher than the background rate, you can be fairly sure that was mostly Zindra tickets. Ticket numbers jumped by 700 from 10 to 11 am. Lets assume a 50% variance in background tickets, so from 100 to 300 per hour range. That gives us 400 to 600 zindra tickets in the first hour.

The next data point we have is 2.5 hours later, at 1:36 pm, and the numbers increased by 863. That gives us anywhere from 110 to 610 more tickets in that interval.

Between 1:30 and 4:30 we had another 879 tickets filed, or an average of 290 per hour. Thats starting to get close to the background rate.

Overall, we had 2,450 tickets in the time from 10 to 4:30 pm. So the estimate comes to 1,200 +/- 600 Zindra tickets over that time span.

The number they have given us of 700 is at the lower end of this range, and its been a few days since, and some more have probably come in. They have worked off about 160 ticket numbers that we know of from the first few minutes, or perhaps 140 actual Zindra tickets. So around 20% completion. It took them about 4 days to get that far, so at best we are looking at another 16 days of ticket processing.

All I know is my ticket was filed at 10:09am and is number 4551-6484440 and still marked as "NEW"! That's ridiculous! Despite the linden crap of not processing any tickets for 4 days that means they’ve processed far less than 9 stinking minutes worth of tickets in 10 damn days now! Even subtracting their 4 days of stalling that’s still far less than nine minutes worth of tickets in 6 damn days! This illustrates to me... 1) They are totally incompetent (which I already knew)... 2) This whole fiasco is about driving the adult traffic off the grid... 3) lindens ability to be truthful is zero! At this rate they’d better push that date back to December 24th not July 24th!!! And yes, now I’m angry!

It was a totally expected side effect of their "first come, first served" plan. Everyone who knew and cared about land selection tried to file a ticket in the first few minutes.

In reply to your points:

1) Not totally incompetent, just terribly understaffed, and unwilling to use the thinking power of us residents. There are maybe a couple dozen people over there doing this adult thing, and even those are not full time. There are thousands of us, and many of us have experience in related areas. And we definitely have more experience in SL itself.

We *told* them they should collect land requests, and *then* design the adult continent according to what people wanted. That way it would be the right size and have the right kind of land features. Did they listen? No.

2) I disagree with this point. In fact, by creating Adult rated land and adult search checkboxes, the Lindens are officially admitting SL is full of adult stuff, and providing ways to find it. If they wanted to remove adult stuff off the grid, they just needed to tighten the community standards and enforce them. Instead they created a whole definition just for adult stuff.

3) My experience with them, and I have been closely involved with this from the start, is they don't actively lie to us, but they don't talk to each other much, or know how to talk to us very well. It's now gotten to where documentation I wrote for the independent slapt.me site is being ported back to *their* wiki pages, cause they suck at writing clear information.

My own best guess is it will take a month or so to finish processing all the move tickets, perhaps two if they cant' support having the team at the initial level. The people doing the move tickets have been pulled from doing other stuff, and they probably cant leave the other stuff alone for months either.

What surprised me was how few zindra tickets have been lodged. 5% of the grid at the time of the announcement (and this is mainland only) is around 250 sims. Without knowing any average plot sizes it's hard to guess but assuming at least 8 plots per sim that's 2000 tickets alone.

This of course would vary because of groups owning multiple plots etc but I strongly suspect that the low numbers are because a lot of the non blog readers (90%) and non english speakers (can't even guess at a number here) just aren't aware yet.

@ Daniel. This *is* management incompetence. I've had to pull some pretty dire projects out of the mire down the years but I've never seen anything like this level of disorganisation. The staff of LL may be nice people but they're not actually paid to be nice, they're paid to do a job and in theory to the best of their ability.

Being nice people doesn't pay our bills and while they keep stuffing us around they're financially impacting a lot of people - along with the sheer amount of our time that they're robbing us of by having to deal with this.

as an aside.. did you see Blondin has put conditions on his monday meeting with the zindra alliance? he says he only wants zindra landowners and merchants. Which would be reasonable except there aren't too many of those since LL can't quite manage to process the tickets efficiently and is at odds with the group charter. If he wants that then I suggest he sets his own group up and does the background checking.

We discussed this today and the group will be kept open for enrollment for now as it is intended for all residents of Zindra regardless of if they own or rent on the continent. The group may be closed later where proof of land ownership or rental will be asked before they can join.

There will of course develop a logistical problem very fast with having these meetings as one can only fit 40 avatars into any one sim in Zindra.

There is already made a group for commerce on Zindra, but it is not open yet to anyone.

Well I for one didn't join the Zindra Land owners group because as of yet I still don't own any land there! I don't violate conditions of groups or what have you,so I'll wait until, or I should say "IF" I ever get moved!!! Yes I know, the frustration is starting to show so I’m sorry.

I did not mean to imply they are competent, not totally incompetent = mostly incompetent, lets say 80% screwed up. I think my comments on this along the months have shown me feelings on the subject.

On their effectiveness of communication...

their policy page "Maturity ratings and inworld search" https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=6363 https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=6363
= 531 views

Our page on the subject:
http://www.slapt.me/wiki/index.php/Adult_Content_Keywords
http://www.slapt.me/wiki/index.php/Adult_Content_Keywords
= 5,339 views

By the way, I heard a comment second hand:

"[a major adult business owner] said JP linden told him they had barely any requests for land"

Unless they think 700 or more tickets and having to double the initial size of Zindra is "barely any", apparently JP and Jack don't talk much. Just more evidence they dont know whats up.

Blondin did say at his office hours yesterday he would try to provide us with futher and better particulars next week:So that should be informative.

I submitted my ticket at 10:08 SLT... when the parcels started to be given out 2 of my 1st round choices were take like a lot of us so I went on the hunt... like many did. In my search for a 4096 I located a nice spot and when I did an "about land" is said Reserved for Ticket # 4051-6489419 ... 9419 is almost 500 higher then my 4421. And he received his land on July 1.

Today is July 9th and they still haven gotten to me ... their vacation seems to have slowed them down not made the transition faster. Someone tell me that SL age is not being calculated into who gets what and when ... I'm not against that ... It wasn't in the set of 'rules' I read...

"However, assuming tickets have complete information, the parcel assignments will still respect the first-come, first-served order.

Zindra is now 278 regions, twice its original size, and at least one new ticket has been completed.

Re: Ticket # 4051-6489419 , thats about the right ticket number for one *created* on July 1st early in the day. It's possible a new follow-up ticket was created for some reason, after an earlier one. Best thing to do is ask the buyer what happened. For now, I will mark it as "questionable", and not a definite line jump without more details.

Can you give us the exact location or any other details?

Curious what type of land those who are still waiting requested as their first and second choices. It seems like the least requested parcels would be doled out first simply because it's easier to get those out of the way first.

I know they said first come first serve but it would be very difficult to implement that in an absolute way, I think, seeing how many parcels probably overlapped in demand. But I am having a hard time explaining what I mean.

I have no idea how common this is--probably not very--but it may be worth checking back at old parcels you wanted that were already swapped to somebody else: they may have gotten returned to circulation.

My neighbor on Zindra got different land in the newly created part of the continent, so the neighboring land is available again. So there's some nice almost flat double-primmed protected waterfront that somebody may have wanted, now again eligible to choose.

(In case anybody wonders: Without going into details about the situation, I think it was fair to grant the neighbor a chance to select different land in this case. And no, not because I was such a bad neighbor. Not yet. )

Just watched the region I wanted, beautiful lakeside, get blocked by a 4096 parcel

Two days after they started processing tickets again, the new land in the SE of Zindra is still not open and accessible to residents. It looks like nice land too, with a river and beaches.

Funnily enough though, despite the land not yet being accessible, one of the sims (Gurumachi) has already been assigned to somebody who appears to own no adult businesses but who has "Second Life Real Estate Agent" in their profile.

I'm sure there is a very reasonable explanation for this. Meanwhile my 13th and 14th choices have now been snapped up.