I have been in Second Life now for some time. First off, let me confess that I am one of those special kind of users, a full on addict. So my views are bit colored. I put up with far more than an average user probably would. I use the service far more than normal people do, and I bitch probably more than other people do. I’m in that 5-10% userbase of heavy users. But you already knew that.

Next I want to be clear, I am an eternal optimist. I want things to get better and I want to see Second Life succeed. I love the place, but then with every minor and major grid implosion is is being coming more and more clear that my optimism is not going to be paid off.

The other day Tiessa and I were discussing how things were on the grid. I commented that it seems like there’s a minor disaster every day now. She said, well, it used to be a major disaster every day, so obviously, it is getting better. I would argue that it is not getting better, it is getting worse.

I have seen things pretty bad on the grid. Major outages, inventory disasters, so many client crashes in one day I couldn’t even begin to count them, yet for how much better we are now, things are getting worse. Why? It’s a time and distance thing. Things have not improved enough given the amount of time that has past. It’s a slippery slope and it’s not obvious that it is happening.

Most of us put up with a lot – a lot – of basic shit with Second Life. Why? We really do love the people, the environment, and potential the place has. We got past the hideous learning curve, the icky UI, and the crashes. I think most of us try hard to overlook a lot of the warts of Second Life except when things go really wrong.

1. Ridiculously low number of avatars a sim can support without going into the toilet.
2. The joke it is to walk or gawd forbid try to drive or fly from one sim to another.
3. Hair up your arse. Hippos on your friends list? Other ludicrous problems.
4. Lack of foresight causing no end of problems.
5. Lag me into the ground.

The sad part a few of these problems could be assaulted with some brute force. Yes, it’s not the smart way to go, but it does work. A few years ago I figured out that a faster computer is much cheaper than a few hours of programmers time, and usually guarantees results. Take the current Class 5 sim servers. They started appearing in October 2006. With 4GB of RAM and a Xeon 5148. That should have obviously made the sims faster, right? Nope, it allowed them to pile more sims onto a single server. That’s what’s really going on. Servers are now twice as fast, but not Second Life servers, and even if they were, it wouldn’t matter, because they would simply pile more sims into a single system. In fact, I would suspect that they are already doing this, which leads me to the next bad thing that’s going to happen… over-commit.

Ah yes, now when they really want to start making money, they will start to pack more sims into servers, more than they can really run all at full speed, users be damned. Like we would know the difference at this point anyway? Linden Labs gets to sell more sims without actually spending any more on infrastructure. I’m sure the temptation will be irresistible at some point if they haven’t done it already.

I play quite a bit in the Havok 4 sims, and I can honestly say they seem to have done nothing for lag improvement. So, that’s a bust. I hear concerns that the mono project will not make things even slower than they are now. One thing that is probably hurting lag is voice. I’m not sure how much it’s being used, but it has to be eating up a lot of bandwidth. That bandwidth is now unavailable to make things less laggy.

What does this all boil down to? Things are not getting better, they’re not really getting worse, but it’s moving sideways. Neither really better but not really bad enough to really raise hell. Instead of bitching about what needs to be done, let’s go over an obvious wish list:

1. More than 25 groups – duh – already said it won’t happen. It’s just *too* hard for them. Whine bitch moan.
2. More attachment points, maybe some more clothing points. (We’ll just ignore that one.)
   
3. No more inventory loss… uh – we’re working on that. We promise.
4. More than 75 avies in a sim without lagging the hell out it. You can’t tell me in 2008 it can’t and should be done. If they wanted to they could support 150. Hell – 250.
5. No more lag. Let’s try not introduce the word LAG into every language in the world.
   
6. No more crashing clients. Let’s be honest here – world peace and harmony will happen before it drops below 5% of sessions ending in a crash.

You know and I know. Linden Labs has made miles of promises and has miles to go. You know they can’t deliver on them. Let’s all be brutally honest about it. It ain’t gonna happen. Anyone who’s been dealing with Second Life and Linden Labs long enough knows none of these things they can actually deliver on. It don’t think it is for lack of brain power, I think it has been a management problem in Linden Labs. We see Cory and now Phil depart management rolls, but probably now a culture problem. They have years of bad habits that will be very hard to break.

Where are we going to be in future? We will be in the same basic place in spring of 2009 as we are right now. Bitching about lag, inventory loss, and crashes.

Where does this lead us? Ask Ultima Online what happened when World of Warcraft came along. Second Life survives because their competitors are incompetent. They limp along dragging us long with them because of that. But it won’t last. Nature and capitalism hate a vacuum. And that giant sucking sound coming from Linden Labs will soon draw – if it hasn’t already – a competentcompetitor. Think it can’t happen? Ultima Online had a huge market share of the MMORPG field, now it’s tiny.

When will it start? I think the first sign will be a change in the value of the Linden dollar. I suspect Linden Labs has is actively manipulating the currency market to keep the exchange rate more or less constant. I expect that will end at some point as it is costing Linden Labs too much money. Then inflation will start. The economy will fall apart. It will be interesting to see how they might try to control it. Price controls?

Second Life is at tipping point right now. It’s going to get better or it’s going to get worse.

-Veyron