Linden Priorities

Why is it the community must vote and get huge support to fix issues such as land transaction bugs, protections from mistakenly losing land to automated systems, and other various malfunctions in SL, but instead keep getting things that aren't really asked for by the community at large. Voice chat? Sculpties?

Don't get me wrong. I think new features are cool and necessary to keep SL growing, but then so is fixing the "boring" stuff too. I wonder how these things get prioritized, or do they even at all?

Most companies work in this fashion, they like to show progress. Introducing new features is good publicity and yes that will sometimes get a higher priority than bug fixes.

However you'll probably find that the people fixing the bugs aren't the same team who are introducing new features.

It's not that you have to vote to get things fixed. LL has more work than time and voting is a way to tell them which issues residents want fixed.

Personally I'm pretty psyched about sculpties, though they do scare me a bit. This could (eventually) be a huge change for the way the world looks. And, at least in theory, people can use fewer prims to get the same result.

Oh I think they are cool too, especially for the few who can actually do 3d modeling. Then again i think being able to teleport when I want is cool as well. LOL

It's the fewer prims that I'm truly excited about. I want to make some decorated tent poles for the shop.. but that would require waaaayyy too many prims to do it at this time. I'm going to learn to at least learn Blender even if it kills my brain!

But I do wish they'd fix the issues too or at least stop introducing new ones.

I think voice chat and sculpties are actually bad examples of new features vs fixes.

Voice chat wasn't developped by LL, they licensed the code from one company and another to host it all, so it didn't take any Linden dev time, only the licensing fee plus the ongoing costs for the hosting.

As far as sculpties go, I think Quarl Linden is a new addition? If so, that didn't divert any dev time away, it's just another hit on the budget.

It's probably better to argue that the time spent on our new lovely super-nova sun and the shadow on float text (since removed I think?) could have been used to actual fix something since it involved the original development team.

I'm sure they are spending dev time to implement the voice chat into the SL viewer though. Perhaps if they made a big deal about the work going into fixing things the same as what they do with the new features, people such as myself would see they are actually working hard to get some of these things fixed.

I do agree about the new gigantic sun. That one should be filed away in the debug menu right next to the cheesy beacon.

I figured it out about the gigantic sun last night.

Last night the Twilight Zone episode was on where the earth was moving slowly towards the sun and it was getting hotter and hotter and everyone was doomed. (Except in the episode, it turned out that was a dream by the girl who had a fever, and in fact, the earth was moving AWAY from the sun, and it was getting colder and colder and everyone was doomed.)

So I decided that the huge sun was LL's secret signal to us that we were all doomed.

If you want to suggest to the Lindens that they spend more time fixing what we have rather than introducing new features, sign Project Open Letter, available here:

http://www.projectopenletter.com/

4340 signatures to date.

coco

Yeah, we see how well Project Open Letter worked. They did a town hall then released Age Verification and everyone picked that up as the newest cause. I don't know if it was the plan all along, but it seemed to work!

I really think the only people that should be able to sign project open letter should be people that log regular time in the Beta Grid because they're the only ones actually helping the situation.

Everybody wants some cake but no one wants to help make it!

not all bugs are found on the beta grid. I myself have done a great deal to report bugs in the REAL grid. I don't think that makes me any less of a contributor.

You are misinformed if you think that Sculpties (user defined mesh) and Voice Chat were not long standing requested features.

The voting helps prioritize, just sorting through all the bug reports takes quite allot of time; the voting process streamlines this. See:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Bug_triage

I guess I'm missing something. Something big.

We have to have voting on which bug we want fixed first because the developement team is busy pushing out new features and the bug stompers are swamped. Is that about it? That's what I'm hearing here........and have been hearing ever since I came to SL over a year ago.

Why are there so many freaking bugs? What the heck have they been doing for that last 4 or 5 years? Shelving bugs? Pushing features?

I know where LL's priorities are. It's so much more fun to "push the envelope" than to fix the shedded letter inside. At some point in time, the bugs will bring you down.......and those cool features are for naught.

But requested by what percentage of the community?

The oldest post I could find for voice chat was August 2006 and reading forward there just wasn't a gigantic demand for it. So based on the information I could find, I wouldn't consider that to be misinformed. Now if this was a big request by friends of Lindens or certain minority dev groups rather than the whole community at large, then I could be misinformed.



That isn't that far off the mark. I remember seeing a quote from someone at LL (maybe Philip) saying that they let their programmers choose what they want to work on. Now who is going to want to fix the hard or boring stuff when they can just play all day trying to make the cool stuff work?

Don't forget that many of the issues havn't been bugs.

A bug is a problem with the code due to an error in coding.

In LL case most of the issues are load issues and load issues often need complete reworking of code to improve - i.e. lot of time. This means working on the database backend to fix the problems. This means the UI guys ( who don't know databases ) are FAIRLY free to work on developments such as sculpty's. Voice is again probably handled by a team who actually don't have the skills to work on the backend.

That said LL have told us 70% of their developers are working on bug fixes and sorting performance issues. This is more than most development teams will run and close to the max feasible ( heck could well be pushing the limits ) - teams are more likely to run 30% bug fixing not 70.

In short..

1) things ARE improving.
2) LL got caught out by rapid growth. This means that plans for expansion have gone completely out of the window and they are playing catch up. 6 months of catch up is short.
3) Because many of the issues are load issues they will NOT show up on the beta grid. This is because, despite the best efforts with innitiatives like announceing load test sessions, the beta grid is nothing like a live grid in terms of database sizes and load levels.

So, saying everything you said is fact (I can't argue one way or the other........but assume you are correct) the the folks at Linden Labs screwed up in planning, coordination, AND priorities. When you launch a sale, you prepare for it...........you sit down with everyone involved and "brainstorm" what needs to be done to get ready for the flood at the door. You never wait till you unlock the doors to the hordes to try to keep up. Piss poor priorities at best..........but most likely, way sub-par management. Both are just about the same. The results are the same........unhappy customers.

But you also have to understand that sometime things come faster then expected. I don't think anyone thought the grow that has happened would happen in the short time frame that it has. If you live near a river and you hear a storm is coming. You build a 2 foot wall to keep back the water, because you are just expecting the river to goto 1.5 feet high. All of a sudden, the river rises 6 feet. What can you do?

As for voice chat, I know that it has been talked about and debated since at least the time that There introduced it. User meshes have been wanted for a very long time too.

I don't think they anywhere near expected all the people they got. They got lots of them through no direct efforts of their own, either.

coco

Well depends how you look at it.

If you ask anyone I think they would ALL say that going from under 100,000 to 6,200,000 in a year is the stuff of pipe dreams.

Twice Philip Linden ( once at the start of 2006 ) said he hoped to be around 1million sometime in 2007. He also admitted to being surprised when registrations in October last year where running at, from memory something like 10 times the rate that they had been only a few months earlier.

Now I think his expectations and planning where fairly sensible. Maybe slightly conservative. But in 6 months we're rocketed from 1million to 6.2million residents. That is a MASSIVE rate of growth and one that few systems, if any, could cope with.

Maybe Philip should have been a little bit more optomistic and said , let's say, 1million by the end of 2006. But truly I don't think ANYONE in SL, 12 months ago, expected us to be faced with such a massive growth. In which case in fact Linden Lab didn't screw up but got caught up with their unqualified success.

WoW was similar, anyone who played it after release, will reccount stories of HOURS of waiting to get on servers and heavy lag in the busy areas.

Absolutely right. I 'looked in' in September when I read Reuters was starting a news agency in a virtual world. I found out here that SL had been going for a few years but hell! within a month of my joining the number doubled? And the next month it doubled again?!? WTF?
I think it's amazing it runs at all!



Hey, I figured it too ... wasn't there the biggest ever recorded Supernova last week? It's eclipsing our sun

Define "unqualified success" ?
Would 12 millions signups be even more successful?

The massive growth didn't just happen, with poor old LL as the helpless victims of it.
They turned on unverified, free registrations
The numbers climbed, and kept climbing.
LL never throttled back. They went full speed into overload.

We don't know if the wall that seems to be looming ahead is solid brick, or a phantom marking the ultimate sim-crossing experience. I don't think that anyone expects it to be a simple phantom. Just hang on for the ride!

Any downside of massive growth is entirely down to their judgement and choice.


"In which case in fact Linden Lab didn't screw up but got caught up with their unqualified success"
Maybe LL simply lost the plot along the way? - or were not looking when the plot escaped?

That statement is completely right. LL open up free registration and get caught with their hands down their trousers. Thats acceptable I suppose as SL is unique and there is nothing really to compare it to, so this mistake should be accepted and understood by us, their customer base. However some of the more major technical problems started straight after the implemetation of free registration so the logical course of action would have been to have suspended free registration at the 2mil or 3 mil mark and try and upgrade and stabalize the grid. However they didnt do this, which is their biggest mistake to date IMO. Now we are well past 6 million and they still havnt disabled accounts and allot of poeple have suffered 6 months of torturing performance issues.

Leaving free registration open for months, allowing it to cripple the infastructure is not forgivable IMO.

But I think we turned a corner with the release of the last mandatory update. SL is running allot better overall and personally I am very happy with performance. LL has also assured us that they are still hiring new staff and that over 70% of the dev team are working on fixing existing bugs and performane issues. These asurances should have been made months ago but at least things are getting better. Averidge of 40K people online during peak times and SL is running allot better than it did 4 months ago with 30K online.

So in reponse to the OPs post, I think LL have now got their priorities right at this point in time, it's just taken them 6 months to pull their finger out of their arse.

When it was announced, many of us told Linden Lab that it was a bad, bad idea. They ignored us, and have been proven wrong.

I'm quite sure that, if like every other online game/platform/environment/whatever, you had to pay to play, and thus be traceable, then this whole child porn thing would never have happened.

Broccoli

Yeah thats a no brainer and LL should had anticipated that. Allowing users to stay anonomous has just encouraged poeple with peodiphilic and other sexualy unsavoury tendencies to flock to SL in droves. It would seem that LL's biggest failing is not having the foresight to anticipate reponses to their actions. LL should have had plans in place to deal with all the major issues we have seen over that last 6 months but they seem to focus on being reactive (or non repsonsive) rather than proactive. Hopefully they have learned from these mistakes as they move foward.

Both points are true. We are all quick to think of Linden lab as 1 entity, but in reality it is several groups of people doing different things. They might seam like their doing nothing sometimes, but thats because they do not share to the public everything their doing. I myself have made the mistake of blaming the entire staff for a problem that only a small percent of them are responsible for. The quietness they shroud themselves with causes us to feel as if their just ignoring us and showing no customer compassion, but truthfully there are some lindens who would give all to help.

Well, that's true. I wasn't thinking of that.

But EVEN so, I still think they got more than they expected. Still, they did have the ability at any and every moment to throttle it, either by requiring credit cards, or by throttling log-ins (in a way that paying users could still get in); you're right.

coco