Op/Ed: Schwanson Schlegel Blasts the Lindens
by Alphaville Herald on 05/01/05 at 10:25 am
On New Years Eve Schwanson finally vented about troubles he was having with Second Life and Linden Lab, and if the discussion on the SL Forums are any indication, the problems are not isolated to his case (and of course we all have experienced the recent downtimes). In Schwanson’s case the complaints range from loss of valuable inventory items (including his 15K L poker table by Mr. Fairplay) to the frequent downtime, to being billed 42 times in December, all of which was compounded by his frustration with the Linden’s futzing around with the idiotic kiddie grid. Essay follows. Thanks to Schwanson for permission to reprint.
Ten Points in Favor of Abandoning Second Life
by Schwanson Schlegel
________________________________________
There comes a time when, in the course of participating in an activity, you must weigh the pros and cons of your continued support. The last month has left me with both a bad taste in my mouth and a long list of cons.
A month ago, it was announced that the asset server was sinking under the sheer volume of data residents of this world were dumping on it. A plea went out to clean and reduce our saved objects, specify our trash folders. In the spirit of good citizenship, and the selfish dream to find items more easily in my groaning inventory, I began to organize. This was the start of a month long nightmare.
Granted poor timing was a factor, as in the middle of my spring cleaning the asset server took its first dive, taking a majority of the grid with it. When the simulator I was in came back to life, 18 hours later, I found that the crash had taken half my inventory with it. Everything in my object inventory after “M” was gone.
To anyone who knows me, importance of items starting with the second half of the alphabet should be readily apparent. You can imagine my horror at losing “Roulette”,“Sheep”, “Slots”, “Sex Ball”, and the hundreds of other items that make Schwanson “Schwanson”.
After speaking with no less than 6 Linden officials, via IM, email, and on the phone, working for hours with them to recover my items from old backups, most of the items recovered will not res. I just get an error stating that the object cannot be found.
Well OK, its just objects, and it was a one time glitch, and its not the end of the world. Things can be remade, re bought, replaced. I also brushed off many many hours of downtime on multiple parcels I own or have interest in. My island, which anyone will tell you is the lowest lag / highest sim FPS shopping area in Second Life, has been down for many hours at a time. Our group land in Clyde was down for 18 hours.
Then in a Murphy’s law on steroids twist, Linden Lab charges my credit card 42 times the week before Christmas, putting both my family’s holiday and my mortgage payment in jeopardy. I was starting to get a bit peeved at this point. To their credit Linden Lab did fix this fairly quickly. A week later though they had more trouble and were unable to charge my normal tier fee.
Today was the icing on the cake. Yesterday I bought a Texas Hold’em table from Mr. Fairplay for $L15,000. I looked forward to logging on today and setting it up and playing a game with friends.
Not only was Second Life down all day, but when I am finally able to log on the table is nowhere to be found, another “glitch” in my inventory. I contacted a Linden, who said they won’t be able to even look for it till tomorrow. If the other issues with my inventory are any indication I think I can kiss 15k and my table goodbye.
So lets take a look at my Second Life cons list:
1. Even after a year and a half of opening Second Life is not stable enough to rely on being able to play every day.
2. Our inventories are transient data, its seriously questionable that your data can even be recovered from backups.
3. Even when support is friendly, helpful, and sympathetic to your plight, many hours of working on your issue still not recover data even when they can see it.
4. Second Life cannot even offer the stability level of $5.00 a month web hosting let alone the level of stability you would get from spending $400.00 a month like I do.
5. I have lost some level of trust in their ability to correctly bill me.
6. Promised upgrades to the existing system, such as increased communication with the outside world, improved physics engine, and improving client side lag have been pushed back again and again.
7. I still, a year and a half after the issue was first addressed, cannot use my top of the line ATI graphics card, one of the most popular graphic card companies in the world.
8. Linden favoritism, fickleness, and lack of a focused plan to deal with equipment disparity seem to have had an effect on attempts at commercial enterprise throughout Second Life, especially islands, and alienated a large portion of the population.
9. The promise of Intellectual Property rights for content creators has been trampled on. The lack of adequate controls to prevent reuse and with no ability to guarantee the safety and continued existence of player creations negates it. The glowing PR release that brought many of us into this world a year ago seems little more than that, a marketing scheme.
10. On top of all these issues Linden Lab has announced that they are now dividing their efforts and creating what amounts to a second program, catering to children without seeming care to the fact that the residents are fairly unanimous in the opinion that this world is still half baked.
Corey
Jan 5th, 2005
I am not an SL resident. I am not sure of the compatiblity of my grahpics card, and on top of this when i attempted to sign up for the trial my debit card was not accepted.. but still, I have been nmore then a little intrigued. Moslty, all i have found is good. People love SL, it has not gotten a single bad review in all that i have read… But, a few things few and far between have pointed to some .. fickleness of the Lindens, and minor problems in the implimentation of the game. I a glad this post has been put in an area I do have access to..
Mr Fairplay
Jan 5th, 2005
Just wanted to tell you all that Schwanson got him self another free copy given by myself, after Philip Linden him self verified that more than half of his inventory went missing including the $15K poker table. In regards to the other issues Schwanson has had to go through I can safely say he is right in so many ways. I just think if Philip got him self a better set of coders no offence to SL’s current programming squad. The game could be greatly improved in a matter of months. I mean they got that $8M USD investment maybe it’s time to put it to good use? Another thing the Login server is a joke, I am sure alot of people will start quitting the game sooner or later or seeking alternatives like other MMORPGs like WoW and such. I don’t know about you guys but I haven’t played SL alot recently it’s too annoying waiting 1 zillion eons for the Login Server to establish your connection to SL. Saying all this SL still one of the best MMORPGs out there in terms of creative input, freedom of use and its boundless possibilities. Let’s just hope Philip pulls out a miracle and saves us from all that login torture!
Storm
Jan 6th, 2005
Mr Fairplay, 2l is probably the best on the market when it comes to login time, mostly because of lack-of-stress. WoW at one point took a day, and had waiting lists, and SWG easily takes me 10 minutes. 2l takes 2-3 minutes. If you guys can’t wait that long, your pretty pathetic.
ava
Jan 6th, 2005
This guy is right on target its patetic how the lack of service has gone on and on for some time now. Most ppl are too stupid to realize that these problems started soon after their pr person Robin started. As far as hiring new coders hell yes that needs to be done asap unless LL likes to fail. One thing I have noticed more than anything is what they say they want and what they do are two very different things. What have they realy done to push these ideas forward? More often than not they just tell ppl what they want to hear, instead of realy doing anything. They will push this world to where the money is no more. Don’t kid yourself its not a meta verse its a business.
Prokofy Neva
Jan 6th, 2005
I would have to agree that the Lindens do not provide good customer service on issues beyond the most routine matters — like billing snafus, lost money, lost inventory, etc. They have a wonderful in-world live help system that is really great with routine problems, staffed by older player volunteers. You can even access the people called “Lindens” who are telecommuter customer service types in some case not unlike a Tigger, but just 10 times more accessible and helpful and yet not the object of cult-like followings LOL. There are even other more supra Lindens who actually do coding and content, I gather, and these people are not above answering their e-mail. Yet, when it comes to the back office guys and gals who have to sift through billing and account problems, let alone client-side technical problems meaning you can’t even get into the game, they are suboptimal. This runs counter to the received wisdom about LL, that they are so customer friendly. After being abused in the TSO system, we are so frantically grateful for the little crums of attention represented by even remote repeaters of Town Hall meetings or lots of patches seeming to fix bugs constantly, that we forget that there are certain RL standards of customer service that apply to say, a Time Warner or a Verizon, that we don’t apply to LL because if we did, they’d fetch up short. I’ve had billing problems, lost money problems, and had large purchases that debit, give server messages, and disappear into thin air. Fortunately the manufacturers were very helpful in providing copies but it’s a risky business for them obviously. To his credit, Andrew Linden worked over the holidays to fix my disappearing GOM deposit and the balances of others who had been borked in their crash. But since GOM went into it with a receipt showing an instant chargeback, and I went into it with a transaction record showing deposit on GOM records but not deposit inside SL on avatar, it should have been really easy to fix, yet it took days and constant inquiries to both parties. Still, I’m going to stay with SL but just be more cautious in my savings and my purchases there. TSO still hasn’t given me the promised magic tree for the 2nd anniversary. In SL, you can build your own magic tree.