Tuesday 25 March 2008

Enough with the Frequent Problems!

Second Life seems to have problems on a weekly (or daily?) basis. It wasn't always this way, although I think it's more that Linden Lab is being more public about the problems on the blog and SL isn't necessarily more unstable than it used to be (although that could still be the case). There have been announcements of problems today, yesterday, Saturday, Friday...I'm getting tired of linking, but there were also problems last Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Along with many of these problems (including all of the ones I linked to) comes LL advising people not to make any transactions, which can significantly hurt business as some have pointed out.

This pattern has been going on for a while, and I'm starting to wonder how LL is responding to these problems. It almost seems like they are just working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, but in the process are not making any attempt to actually figure out how to prevent the problem from happening again in the future. With the frequency of these problems, and the fact that they have been going on for months at this frequency, I find it very unlikely that all of these problems are caused by unique issues. Some of them must be recurring problems that we have had before.

Now, with all the linking I have done back to the official Second Life blog, it's very likely that a Linden Lab employee will end up reading this post. I understand that you want to fix these problems as quickly as possible, but I, for one, would prefer to have the problem persist for longer if it means that you can take the time to diagnose the cause and make adjustments so that the problem isn't likely to happen again. I think in the long run this will make the users of SL happier and increase the uptime of your services in the future.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

As one person pointed out on the SL blog recently, it often seems as if they have severe service disruption during peak times, and it's almost as if someone at Linden Lab (finally) notices the disruption and posts a notice, then goes out to lunch (and a short after-lunch nap). When they return (invariably at less congested times), they start looking into the problem, and lo and behold, it's [Resolved] already. What a stroke (pun intended) of luck!

That combined with a bit of news (rumor) I heard yesterday about some of Linden Lab's very-short-term plans with regard to server-side changes, I'm starting to develop a serious "fuck you LL" attitude.

One thing is certain : I have absolutely no motivation whatsoever to continue to spend thousands of hours making content for a platform that even the developers don't care about. If it's going to be down every day, and I'm going to continue to get less than 5% of my previous sales average, and they are going to continue to ignore Jira issues that we file and deploy server code grid-wide that we *ALL* know is broken, well... I have *LOTS* of other hobbies and interests.

Colin said...

If you have a link to these rumors, I'd be interested to read them.

I guess we can just hope that when the company gets their new CEO, s/he will be able to get the company's act together.

Anonymous said...

I hesitate to discuss the rumor, just because the nature of rumors is such that they can't be completely trusted.

I will say this, though : If the rumor is in fact true, it will be time for some soul searching on my part about how much I'm willing to dedicate myself to SL in an ongoing basis.

I won't leave, necessarily. I've got too many friends and responsibilities in-world for that, but I'm also a Metaplace Alpha tester/developer as well as being in the beta for two other as-yet-unreleased virtual worlds, and I can certainly ramp up those efforts in compensation.