Why can't LL talk to other companies and learn?

I want to start with sharing a very pleasant experince I just had. I cringe at calling any customer support lines thanks to nightmarish experiences with SL, so when I got a response minutes later from the Gametap support saying to call support I felt 2 things, #1 surprise at getting a personalized response so quickly, and dread at having to call a support line.

Again I was pleasantly surprised to get through very quickly, speak to a human being and get the answer to my problem in less than 5 minutes total!

Now I know Gametap is a pretty big service. It is available to many different countries, it has a large userbase...I don't have any numbers, but I know it's pretty big. Now if Gametap can offer excellent technical support for hundreds of games, why can't LL provide good support for one?

Oh yeah, and OMG!!! Gametap has an official FORUM!

Ok..so a bit off topic, I know, but does anyone know why LL is so loathe to talk with companies that have good customer service ratings and take some ideas from them?

one word: resources

another word: blinders
a phrase: self-delusional
a sentence: They still act like they are some kids in a playground.
questions: Business? What's that? Oh, you mean like work?
response: Work is no fun.
pipe dream: How about we just sit here, play with what amuses us and people will just send us money
realization: OMFG! people are just sending us money
exclamation: Is this cool or what?

Musicteacher, I totally agree with you. I've played other MMO's before coming to SL. Every MMO I've taken part in has had <2 weeks wait times for replies except SL... I certainly hope that they were merely caught by surprise by all the newcomers lately and that in a few months the situation improves. It's very frustrating when you have a simple question that only they can provide an answer to and having to wait 1-2 months forthat answer...

I have been in serveral online games/communities...

one thing is everywhere the same: People complain about support!

Morwen.

Nope, support has been this bad for years; there was no element of surprise at all.

The increase in players has only made it much more obvious how lousy LL support has always been.

There has been a lack of support even before i came to SL, but it has got worse since the free accounts cuz it brought in so many people. LL just isn't able to handle what they got their selves into.

I am currently recreating in an MMO that shall remain nameless. I don't complain about support, nor does anyone I know. That's because we don't need to contact support; things just work.

They announce patches which are actually tested before being released. They have scheduled outages which start and end exactly when the schedule says. I did a major upgrade of my system and I didn't need technical support from the MMO or its customers - it just worked. No reinstallation needed, no cache clearing, no new drivers, no "is it just me or does this not work with <New Graphics Card>?".

In the unlikely event that I'd have to contact support, they might be terrible. I have no idea, nor likely will I.

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I can sympathise with LL at least a bit here, though. If you looked at some of the very early MMO games, they had huge reliability problems, just the same as SL does now. Look at forum threads from the beginning days of Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, or Anarchy Online. At that time, nobody knew what kind of server system you had to set up to run a MMO of that type, and most people weren't prepared to invest in it because there was no knowledge that it'd make the money back. The kind of complaints SL is getting now seem a lot like them.

Now the nature of the servers needed for that kind of game are known. "Our consultant, who's worked on 3 games like this before, says we need X servers." "How do you know it'll pay back their costs?" "Um, it's an MMO and it'll be accessible from Korea." "Oh, of course. Here's a blank cheque."

But the nature of the servers needed for Second Life isn't known yet. Nobody's made a MMO with completely streamed regions before. Second Life has been the first to try doing what it does, and it's only just hit its major growth cycle. There, IMVU, GalaxyLife, MultiVerse - all of them preload regions, as far as I'm aware.

You mean resources as in money? Or is that people? Both resource shortages could be overcome.........if that is, in fact, the problem. LL has to be paying a ton of overtime to their techs, programmers and developers with all the problems they are experiencing. It's a lot cheaper to hire more and pay straight time than use what you have and pay overtime. So those resource problems can be fixed........quite a bit easier than struggling like they apparently are right now.

A good customer service department does not have to have real bonifide technicians manning the phones. Just well trained people who can accurately direct the problems to the appropriate people who can help. A few questions for the caller to answer will give a pretty good idea of where the call needs to go for better help. Would that solve every problem? No.........but it would get the caller in a queue that would more likely lead to a resolution. Or at least to someone who can offer a real explanation and someone who get the ball rolling for a resolution. That's what people want.........it fixed or someone who can help them get it fixed. An impersonal blog or computer answering system just does not do that.......too easy to get lost in the shuffle (and we all know it does get lost too).

That is good customer service.........people to people in a voice environment. And Linden Labs has none of that. So Linden Labs really has no customer service at all. And Linden Labs will not survive if they don't get something going soon.