And they wonder why people leave Second Life

I understand that the logistics of running the Second Life grid must be one hell of a task. That said, the announcement by Linden Lab that in peak usage times they’ll be disabling some of the in-world services to cope seems farcical to me. It’s the equivalent of shutting off the lights on a passenger airliner to maximise power for take-off, except in this case the lights are off for around four hours.

The services affected are:

“* Avatar profile information will not be trasmitted to the viewer. This affects both floating and embedded profile windows.

* General group information (name, charter, etc.) will not display in floating or group embedded group info windows.

* Groups will not show their member lists.

* Group owners and officers will not be able to eject group members.

* Group proposals will open the UI, but will fail to create.

* About Land will show 0 for traffic.”

Some will argue these aren’t show-stopper services but I know some people heavily use the avatar profile and group services. Furthermore, it’s the principle of the issue – I’d go as far as to say I’d rather a couple of thousand people less be permitted on the grid with full functionality than the ‘solution’ proposed.

Linden Lab are claiming a fix is on the way – you’d want to hope so because a plane full of passengers sitting in the dark doesn’t make for an experience people want to pay for again.

Comments

  1. Zak Claxton says

    We ran into this today during one of my live music shows, and it was definitely annoying. Tips and other L$ transactions were also haywire as well. It’s pretty typical for LL to spring this stuff while the grid is simultaneously suffering such horrible performance that it’s hard to even move, much less bother checking profiles and so on. The latest update has been a nightmare. Although I’d like to have confidence in the SL platform as a whole, it’s this continual “one step forward, three step back” approach that will make it easier for people to jump to another platform once a truly viable alternative comes along.

  2. Marsoups says

    Teething problems….

    I believe this sort of thing is inevitable… At least it’s an improvement over the things just randomly going down — it’s actually showing that they know exactly what will be down and what will be able to handle, so I don’t see this as a negative thing at all, in fact, I think it’s a sign that they’re making progress 🙂

  3. Marsoups says

    Teething problems….

    I believe this sort of thing is inevitable… At least it’s an improvement over the things just randomly going down — it’s actually showing that they know exactly what will be down and what will be able to handle, so I don’t see this as a negative thing at all, in fact, I think it’s a sign that they’re making progress 🙂

  4. Did they change the text completely on the linked page? You post makes it sound like they’re announcing a new policy but I read it as a (completed) temporary change.
    “Please note that all of these effects are temporary and will return to normal behavior when we re-enable these services at approximately 4:30pm SLT. “

  5. Wolfie Rankin says

    Some people give up too easily too.

    The question is, where else do you go?

    Yes I could hang out in another virtual world feeling pointless.
    Because a lot of other places are very basic and very pointless.

    I know a lot of people who look at other offerings and sneer and say “There’s no furries there”, and I do too.

    I spend all my real life being human, I’m not spending my virtual life as one…
    No offence to anyone, as the song goes: “Do what you wanna do, be who you wanna be, yeah”.

    So a few upsets in the techie side of things don’t bother me much.

    Wolfie!

  6. Thanks for all the thoughts so far folks.

    Dolmere – it was a temporary thing for a few hours but my understanding is it’ll be a weekly thing until the underlying issues are resolved.

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