The Euro Update Experience
by Pixeleen Mistral on 08/11/06 at 10:41 pm
A nuisance for everyone
Eloise Pasteur, European Affairs desk
On those occasions where it actually improves our experience it’s one we may look back on gratefully. On those occasions where it makes things worse, we swear about it for some time.
But, have you ever stopped to consider what it’s like for those of us that live in Europe? We understand Linden Lab needs its staff around for the update in case things don’t run smoothly. But rather than losing a morning we lose an afternoon and evening. Those of us in GMT time zones lose 3pm – 8pm, further East into Europe that’s ’til 9 or even 10pm. If SL is purely social for you, that’s bad enough – how irritated do you feel when the grid is down on a Saturday or Sunday during US peak times? Well we get that each fortnight, not every now and again. How happy would that make you?
But if, like me, you try to make some sort of a living out of SL, it’s a disaster. My work habits, because I’m dealing with Europeans *and* Americans, have altered so I start about 10am and work though (although rarely solidly) until about 10pm or later if I must. Downtime of upgrades regularly knocks at least 5 hours out of that, and because things are never that stable after an upgrade essentially limits me to a five hour working day once each fortnight.
As a scripter there are some things I can do outside SL of course, but they are limited, often I need to check things run how I expect in world. For example, I’m making a sort of tour bot at the moment. There are people that have already done this, but there are some specific things in this one that I needed to include. I can check that the script will compile and that I’m using all the variables and things, no problem. Catching errors in logic and debugging them rather requires that I’m present in world so I can see if the bot goes where and does what I’m expecting! When, as happened with this update the client changes the specs with less than 24 hours to go (sadly all too typical) and you’ve got to sleep AND lose 5 hours, it’s a cataclysmic. Is it LL’s fault? No, but it’s still a major factor of any job, any deadline.
If I were a texturer by trade, and like almost every scripter I know I do a bit of texturing, I can spend the time in Photoshop playing with textures. With some of the tools I can try to guess whether they’ll work on an avatar, I can hope they’ll work when applied to the prim I want, and so on. Productivity isn’t destroyed, but some of the steps become tricky, and they’re the (hopefully) final steps each time.
If I’m a builder (and I’m not really: I can stick prims together, but it’s not my forte) I’m screwed. This isn’t a plea for out of world building tools and importing our own meshes (I’m not a builder, so they wouldn’t make any difference to me) it’s a statement of the impact on my working time.
As a teacher I have a day a week I just can’t teach. That’s not a real disaster, I just teach on the other days, but it does mean my weekends aren’t as free as I might like.
And meetings… don’t get me started on meetings. If I’m doing RL-waged work for someone I pretty much expect to see them during the working day. They, of course, expect to see me during the working day too, and many (although not all) of the people I work with are in the US, just because the US is still the biggest single home country for people in SL. They quickly lose the “Oh, let’s make it an end of day meeting” approach… explaining that the end of their working day is my midnight or later usually has benefits and shock value since US culture seems to include starting work far earlier than in the UK and the rest of Europe. Of course, that often means meetings first thing: Say 8-10 am SL Time – any day except a Wednesday, just in case the update schedule gets pushed back. Suddenly only four days a week for meetings. In any other job, that’s cause for celebration. But I can’t do much other work when SL is down… so it’s only good once a fortnight.
What’s to do? We could hope Linden Lab would stop advertising “come to Second Life and make a living” but it isn’t going to happen is it? How about a move to a system that doesn’t destroy 5 hours or more every fortnight. Downloading updates from Apple for my OS happens in the background. It takes a variable but short amount of time to download, I restart and there we go. Rolling restarts are the closest we’ve got to that. Can we hope that Linden Lab will move to a system where they will have more and more rolling restarts for updates, and less and less fortnightly downtime? The blog is telling us so, but how long will it carry on with the current system? Working 9 days in 10 sounds lovely to some, but when you’re fighting to build a business it’s not so good. Even when I work weekends, which I do, there are things I can’t do with many of my clients because their business needs require me to meet them during the week: they don’t care that I work weekends to make up for the time that downtime steals, nor should they.
Nicole Simon
Nov 9th, 2006
It is my ‘luck’ that I actually find those times more atttractive than earlier ones, but yes, i hear you.
An agency which has gotten more into Second Life in Germany has started to do a once a week chillout on their place (clever way to raise traffic, but I am sure they still want to provice soemting
and they placed it on a day which would be cool for this: Wednesday evening.
Which of course is as you can guess the time … they are now doing it forced on thursday …
I understand that there is not one time to actually do it right for everyone, but for the future and a planned expansion they should really rethink the approach.
Quantum Daikon
Nov 9th, 2006
I fully understand the reason why LL runs the update in US work hours (I wouldn’t want to work one night every week or so)and when a major update is released it make sense to start the process in the morning so that any bugs in the update can be debugged in the afternoon. BUT, to give the Europeans a break, maybe a solution would be for the general maintenance and less risky upgrades to be started at about 3PM PST (11:00GMT). This would mean that the LL guys would only have one later evening finish every couple of weeks (which also means a sleep for them in next day
). That seems like a fairer solution to me especially as SL is now going much more global and need to think more globally. Thx Quant
Lewis Nerd
Nov 9th, 2006
I’ve said all along that maintenance should be at different times so as to not inconvenience the same not insignificant group of residents every time.
Europe gets shafted all the time. It’s about time the US got some too.
Lewis
Artemis Fate
Nov 9th, 2006
The problem you have here is that
A.) LL which is based in American times, doesn’t want to have to work a late shift so as not to disturb the minority group of non-US players, and it’s harder to start later in the day because they always manage to fuck up something critical, and they want to have the rest of the day to fix their own mistakes i’d imagine.
B.) Non-US players are still a minority of the vast majority of American players, so in terms of utilitarianism, it’s better to have the lesser group of subscribers get shafted than the majority. Even if the Minority of non-US is getting very large, it’s still a minority compared to the majority.
Hiro Queso
Nov 9th, 2006
Artemis:
A.) At the moment I agree with you, but if LL want to push SL to non-US residents as much as they appear to want to, they will need to re-think the 9-5 PST hours at some time in the near future.
B.) As far as I am aware, US residents constitute around 60% of the whole*, which if roughly correct, isn’t a figure you could really term ‘vast’. With Zee’s recent comment that ‘international sign ups now exceed sign ups in the US’, I think you will find US residents being in the minority sooner than you think.
*does anyone have reliable stats or quotes?
Random Writer
Nov 9th, 2006
US, even if it is 60%, then that leaves 40% of the world in about 12 other time zones (excluding the ocean time zones), as opposed to the US’s 60% in 4. (Let’s say they did do it 3pmSL time… that means Austrailia, is morning (I think, I’m foggy right now), and that means that the European daytime people get screwed out of ‘their’ daytime too.
Frankly, I’m US and I play during the daytime, not at night because I have a family to take care of. I play mostly when my son is napping. So it DOES inconveinence me. Don’t think that ALL US players are evening players. Not to mention that we are the ones that end up beta testing after the grid comes up anyways.
Considering how dead SL is at 3am when it IS up (I’ve been on during insomnia nights)… it’s a logical choice.
No choice is going to make everyone happy all the the time, but considering American work hours (and the fact that once an update is issued, even if we see nothing wrong, they still have to run some checks) that already leads them into a late day. They do it during the evening only 1 night a week, and we are looking at them staying up past midnight in some cases. One of the updates was a problem, grid up and down for more than 12 hours. That means at 3pm SL time… they’d be up til 3 in the morning. Then turn around and have to come back in time to keep grid watch when the grid is most populated.
Random Writer
Nov 9th, 2006
P.S. As for Zee’s comments, he can say what he wants. Before the Herald even broke, I was in resident forums exposing him and his ‘wonderful CFO’ portfolio. He can say anything he wants, there is nothing forcing him to tell the truth.
Besides, signups isn’t the big draw for me anyways, it’s active accounts. He just wants to show corporations that there’s a worldwide audience.