I know, I know, I’m at it again…. I have to agree with dinee I’m bitching. Maybe it will make me feel better by ventilating. So, my home sim got disconnected from everywhere a few days ago. No, it didn’t crash. I could go into it, move around, etc, ad nausem. Just want’s connected anywhere else anymore. And if you tp’ed to a neighboring sim, there was a giant hole where it should be. It took the private sim owners hours to get LL to fix it. I feel bad for them having to deal with problems like this.

Oh, and just when it looked like teleporting was working really well in the last few months, it’s now mostly once again, an exercise in frustration. I think the real issue about bitching is that Second Life is really cool. And we all want it to be a good experience. I tried out There.com for grins, and after about 3.2 minutes, I determined, it was a joke. But I did see there were a lot more Avatars in the same area then you would ever see in Second Life.

Hmm, I think the Project Open Letter campaign was not a total loss. Maybe that shows that complaining does do some good. Time will tell.

-Veyron

In the past eighteen months, Second Life has expanded, growing from a small community of early adopters to a platform supporting millions of users. Linden Lab has created a world that inspires a deep level of passion in its users and provides unprecedented opportunities to share creatively, socially, and financially.

With explosive levels of growth often come unexpected problems. In keeping with your company’s policy and rich history of resident involvement, we the undersigned would like to take this opportunity to address some concerns that we feel have gone unanswered for too long.

There are some consistent, ongoing problems that are getting worse under heavy load, not better, and are not simply irritants but problems that are causing financial loss in some cases, which is unacceptable. Here is a brief list of the main concerns:

* Inventory loss - this is a devastating problem that is worsening. We have no ability to protect our own inventories through backups, and are trusting you to protect that data. This is the highest priority. Sensible inventory limits (on non-verified accounts only), combined with better management tools and ways to protect our inventory ourselves would help to mitigate the problem as well. Regardless, this cannot continue - we will not accept financial loss as a feature of Second Life. It is your responsibility as service provider to ensure our data is not lost, and you are failing us.

* Problems with Find and Friends List - we continue to see search outages on a far too regular basis. It is bad enough trying to get anywhere without being able to use search, but many users are also paying money for classified ads. Our friends lists just do not work reliably any longer, after years without an issue with them. If America Online/MSN/Yahoo can provide presence information for hundreds of millions of users, surely there is a way to make our friends lists work again.

* Grid stability and performance - teleports fail quite regularly, especially under heavy load. Attachments end up in places they did not start out in, and sim performance varies wildly. None of this makes for a very pleasant experience for users. Long promised improvement to physics and scripting would help dramatically to reduce these problems, but there are a lot of other scalability issues as well. It often feels like the grid is coming apart at the seams. The promised use of limiting logins of non-verified accounts during peak load has been severely lacking. This would be an effective interim solution to load issues, but Linden Lab seems unwilling to use it.

* Build tool problems - the importance of build tools that actually work as promised cannot be overstated enough - we rely on them to create content. Prim drift, disappearing prims, imprecise placement, problems with linking and other issues with the tools need to be addressed. Too much time is being spent trying to work around the problems.

* Transaction problems - inventory deliveries are failing with an alarming (and annoying) frequency, leaving merchants with the burden of replacing missing content and having to try to confim the transaction in the first place. We trust that our L$ balances are accurate, but given recent problems, that is a cause for concern as well, and one we place our full trust in you to ensure its accuracy.

We remain fully supportive of Second Life and are more than willing to continue doing our part to help, but our confidence is steadily being eroded due to a general lack of communication and the apparent failure to successfully address the many issues detailed above. What we are asking for is that these problems are addressed immediately, ahead of new features, and that we are able to see tangible improvements. We accept that this will not happen overnight but it also cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely either.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Linden Labs needs to fix the serious problems with Second Life if things are going to continue. The last post about Koz loosing his inventory is just one of many symptoms of what is going wrong. Rather than adding goofy things like voice, wouldn’t you like to actually be able to use a vehicle? Not worry about your inventory? Have more people in a Sim? Stop doing the lag dance?

I could go on and on… but here’s an open letter Cristiano Midnight of SLUniverse is putting together to Linden Labs to get Second Life fixed. If you care about the world we play in, please sign it. We can get Linden Labs to pay attention.

-Veyron

Koz Farina of BlogHUD has lost all of his inventory. I blogged about it before, and now it’s hit someone again. I wonder how many other people this is hitting we are not hearing about.

UPDATE: It looks like Koz got his inventory back. Yeah!

Thank God. Linen Labs is going to fix the so annoying “X has left the session” messages in groups, very soon now. On a positive note, I have noticed that teleports seem more relibable since the upgrade. Anyone else have the same experience with teleports?

-Veyron

Okay, who has had enough of IM’s about this? No one say another word in a group again until this is fixed.

Kill me now.

-Veyron

Well, this is fun. I love doing the cha-cha lag dance. This new release is an equal opportunity lagger. Ever sim I’ve been in has had the worse lag I’ve seen since last year. Linden is working on it, obviously, but wow. Looks like I’m not the only one who’s having a bad day today. Sorry to hear about your hard drive Vint. I know how painful it can be to loose data.

-Veyron

p.s. Vint, try this web site for backing up data….

With the upcoming imminent demise of the Second Life ratings, there is now a review of some of the 3rd party rating systems at SLNN. I’m less than thrill with this entire situation. First, it means people who have accumulated a large positive rating will see it disappear, so much for that investment. Next there is obviously a large group of competing rating systems, all incompatible with each other. Lastly, they all have some degree of cost at some level to be useful.

I’m also not happy with yet-another-HUD to try to run, install and fit on my already cluttered screen. Or some obnoxious close to an advertisement balloon hanging over my head, screaming “rate me”.

Why couldn’t Linden Labs come up with a better solution? Or at least some sort of common API for these vendors to plug their rating systems into so that the scores would show up on avatar profile and being able to rate them through the client. But then that would have defeated the purpose that they eliminated the rating systems in the first place, they didn’t want to host the data. Fine, then extend the API to plug into someone else’s database. Seems like a dump and run on Linden Labs’ part.

Now I feel slightly compelled to try to pick one of these services out and use it. Anyone else feel the same way? Any going to use one over another? Forget ratings entirely?

-Veyron

It’s a common complaint I heard from the guys. Maybe more like an excuse. I don’t know where to buy anything to look good. Most, but not all, of the guy’s avatars in Second Life look like a clone, or something right off of skid row. I know most of the girls look pretty outstanding and tricked out with animation overrides, accessories, nice skins and killer clothes. Comes from that disease most of us girls have - shopaholicism. It’s made worse by the easy justification of the low cost of a Linden dollar to real currency, which for some reason fogs reasoning about how much is really going to be spent.

I know there is a lot of places in Second Life for clothing and fashion for women, but boys, you need to start catching up. One of the best place to keep up on men’s Second Life fashion is Men’s Second Style blog. It’s updated pretty regularly, and done tastefully. Links, reviews, and where to get what you boys need.

So, stop looking so pathetic, and start dressing up boys! You’ll thank me later….

-Veyron

Okay, so I have a huge inventory of clothes, shoes, and other assorted items. That comes from being a shopaholic. Some people can sympathize. The unfortunate part about this large inventory is that this represents a a rather large personal investment, which I don’t really like to think about. Not only for the cost of that inventory, but the amount of time I put into acquiring it and “organizing” it. Reading about inventory loss in the Official Linden Blog sent a shiver down my spine. Removing your inventory by setting it to the default, sounds rather horrific. I think if I logged in and found my inventory missing in would probably have a nervous breakdown (well maybe not, but I’d definitely start throwing things)….

I’m even more astounded to read from Lordfly’s blog that Linden Labs does not backup your inventory. A substantial amount of my objects in my inventory are no copy, which prevents me from making a backup. But let’s just say I could make copies of my inventory objects and put them into a container and store them in a running sim. Look what happened to the Blue Note. A database crash fried the running plot of land and Linden Labs response was, should have had a copy of what you needed in… drum role… your inventory…. It seems to be a catch-22.

Linden Lab’s is going to try to defend themselves with some boiler plate terms of service, etc ad nauseum, that they are not responsible for the database. I don’t think that will work, you cannot have it both ways. It is inexcusable. My inventory has a comparatively small value, wait until someone’s inventory with a high value gets fried and cannot be recovered - send in the lawyers….

-Veyron

Once again, I’ve reached my limit on groups. It’s a rather perpetual problem for me now. Someone creates, requests I join, or I want to join a group and another group has to go on the chopping block. How I hate to whack a group. I suppose there has to be some limits at some point otherwise I’d end up being in about 100 groups. But 25 seems too small. Maybe 50, at least until I’m up to 50….

At least there is The Fashion Consolidated Group. It’s been a real lifesaver of groups and lists. Still, I’m in a few other clothing designers groups, mostly to get freebies and other news that’s not getting posted to FashCon. If you are short or out of groups, and you want to get Fashion Announcements, you need to join this group.

Last gripe is the alert… “So and So has left the discussion.” Do I really need to know this? Do I need to have a ping and a pop up on a new group to let me know this? Is this some sort of self replicating feed back loop Linden Labs has setup? I love how I can be logged in for an hour and a new group will popup an IM with only that message. I just love it for its pure annoyance factor. Anyone know how this can be turned off?