Op/Ed: Seven Days in Second Life
by Pixeleen Mistral on 17/06/07 at 9:00 pm
by Inigo Chamerberlin
It’s not just me, is it? I mean, being a whinger or whatever is one thing. But noticing the current state of affairs at Linden Lab is another. And unavoidable lately. Just this last week is absolutely mind boggling.
Last Sunday I got an Email telling me I had no payment information on record (didn’t bother mentioning that my Estate charges were due within 24 hours though!) and would I please update my account. So I did, and, as usual, it failed to update. I reported this (again!) and was told to go to my bank and instruct them to make payments to Linden Lab/Second Life because payments to them were being blocked by my bank.
I asked “Why? What have you done now?” – I mean, fair’s fair, for the past three months there have been problems making payments to Linden Lab through their new payment partner.
Well, here’s the reply – a direct quote:
“The reason for the reoccurring (sic) billing problems is that some banks/credit card companies automatically reject billing attempts from Global Collect (which is located in the UK) for not providing the complete billing address of the user. These issues will stay unresolved until you directly authorize all billing from Linden Lab/Second Life.”
No shit Sherlock! So, you decided to change your payment partner for one you say doesn’t provide sufficient information to make a transaction - and I have to run around to my bank to fix your problem?
Well, besides not much fancying popping along to my bank and telling my account manager that in future all payments requested must be made to Linden Lab/Second Life, [elided by Uri], I considered my options carefully.
Something about the form I’d filled in when re-entering, for maybe the 10th time since April, my card details was nagging at me. I went back and looked again. Surely not? They couldn’t be THIS stupid? There must be a second part to the form?
I went through the process again. Card Type – OK. Card Number – done. Expiry date – done. Submit. “Your details are being updated”. Fifteen minutes later “no payment info”. Hey! Numbnuts! WHAT ABOUT MY CARD SECURITY CODE????
Yup, the “Crack Team” at Linden Lab had set up Visa Electron transactions NOT to ask for a three digit security code. And without that – as I know from my RL experience with online and customer not present EPOS – the transaction will NOT be accepted.
Not because of Global Collect failing to provide the user’s full billing address. Not because my bank was blocking payment to Linden Lab/Second Life. Because Linden Lab can’t put together a simple online transactions form correctly.
Luckily the form had other errors, one of which enabled me to convince it that my Visa Electron card was another card, thus causing the form to require a security code and making the transaction possible. Yes – I’m well aware that should be impossible for a whole variety of reasons, but it’s not, trust me on this.
And here we are, five days later, and it hasn’t been fixed. Which means anybody attempting to submit their Visa Electron details to the Second Life transaction system will be unable to, and thus unable to spend money with Linden Lab.
Why am I not surprised that Second Life appears to be suffering a recession at present?
Oh, and here’s the kicker. Linden Lab carried out the transaction approximately an hour and a half before my bank opened on Monday – so no way could I have gone in and attempted to get them to stop “blocking” payments to LL, which they weren’t doing anyway.
And to ice the cake, they attempted to run the transaction three times, tying up a sizeable sum for three working days before the system realised there was a problem and released the two spurious “transaction pending” sums.
And that’s just my problem with Linden Lab this week.
Now let’s look at the rest.
SUNDAY – Linden Lab’s phone system was on the blink, in fact for much of the weekend. Making it impossible to contact them by phone (handy when you need to try and contact a responsible adult about your payment info issues). Actually, that doesn’t seem that different from normal weekend “service”. Or normal weekday “service” either.
MONDAY – Nothing. The calm before the storm. Except the search system wasn’t finding anything.
TUESDAY – They paid the stipends they didn’t pay last week, but they aren’t sure they’ve paid them this week. Excuse me? How can you not be sure you’ve “paid” over L$30 million out? Even if all you did was ran your virtual printing press?
This is the same day Linden Lab published its “key metrics” BTW! – We know exactly how the virtual economy’s performing, look, here – but we can’t tell if we just pumped over thirty million L$ into it today or not. Yeah. Right.
Dare we ask how they can tell those “Key Metrics” bear any resemblance to what’s really happening?
Oh, and the asset AssHat system decided to have “one of those days”. Happy Tuesday!
WEDNSDAY – Update day. Be afraid, be very afraid. The AssHat system continued sick as ever. A bit sicker in fact as purchases weren’t being delivered. Friends stopped working. Search was lost. IM’s failed. The map was painfully sluggish. But as “updates” go, it was pretty good. As long as you didn’t really want to do much.
THURSDAY - The “Support Portal” fell over.
The AssHat system continues to cough, splutter and give a fair impression of being on its last legs. Having said that, I can’t ever remember it being on its first legs and that’s harking back to a population of less than ten thousand!
FRIDAY – Oh happy day! The drama day. Everyone braced for the usual real ballbreaker of a post at about 16:55 PST by Robin or one of her creatures were sadly disappointed.
All they got was the news that something was preventing L$ purchases – you know, US$ in and Linden Space bucks out? However, not to disappoint, Cyn made the supreme sacrifice of hanging about until 18:12 to tell us that L$ sales were being shut off for the weekend. I see – not that the L$ purchase system was broken you understand? Just, it was Friday, so screw it, we’re off?
No. Not at all. Linden Lab made a decision to switch it off! Right! And poor Cyn drew the short straw.
Oh, and she did wish all a “great weekend” before running for the door. So, that’s OK then.
We won’t talk about the exploit early this Sunday morning that made all scripts readable by anyone – that is just how we get the new week off to a fast start.
One week in Second Life
Ignore my personal gripe over the credit card processing shambles. I’m a self centred sod, so you ignore that. And the problem anyone trying to spend money with a Visa Electron card will have encountered. And still will until they finally fix that form. Just look at the rest of the week. Six days in Second Life. Five of them with fairly serious issues which will have affected quite a few people. Many of the issues affecting the SL economy:
Search lost again
Transaction failures
Inability to process the purchase of L$ for US$
Stipends â did we pay or didnât we?
Is it any wonder that the SL economy is showing signs of recession? Infrastructure failures are making it difficult for customers to find products. When they do find them the products may not be delivered.
Customers may be short of cash due to unpaid (there again, maybe not – who knows?) stipends. So they try and buy a few L$ through LL and…
Add to that, unpaid rentals. And unfortunates wrestling with a dementoid CC system. Is this a recipe for a healthy growing virtual economy? For an investor-pleasing bottom line at Linden Lab?
If anyone there thinks that, they really do need to get a grip.
BurnBabyBurn
Jun 17th, 2007
Yep. And the biggest reason why it attracted so many people was the “freedom” promise, which they’re now relinquishing, too, in favor of shiny, happy double speak content regulation rules. So there you have it.
And by the way, Reuters is reporting that women are now outnumbered THREE TO ONE by men.
http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2007/06/13/second-life-growth-cools-women-outnumbered-3-to-1/
Did they report this accurately?!!? If this is true, Linden Lab’s service is in a GIANT HOLE and when they disrespect the community that helped put them on the map, hoping that the new waves of easily offended “mainstream” signups will account for their losses, frankly, they deserve it.
Angel
Jun 17th, 2007
“Stipends â did we pay or didnât we?”
Hide the champagne from Doris, the smartquotes have hit again.
Tenshi Vielle
Jun 17th, 2007
Are you trying to tell me that LL paying out L$30 million doesn’t put them in the hole? O_o Explain that one, please.
JimBean
Jun 18th, 2007
yo Inigo – shut up. leave SL already, or quit whining.
thanks.
Bullshit Caller
Jun 18th, 2007
The way I see it, LL will probably be gone in 5 years.
-They lack professionalism
-They tend to do things with short-sighted self-interest
-Support is horrible, especially when it comes to financial issues.
-They rely on vigilantes to uphold the law
-Are into fucking over their users to appease investors and companies that make use of the grid for their own promotions.
The bubble is going to burst, ladies and gentlemen. I would not be surprised if that happened by the end of the year. Ever been to half these corporate sims? empty. Hell the newest playboy sim is one of the tamest sims in the game! You’d think they’d recognize the fact sex sells in the virtual world.
Also, why did they, despite the obvious fact they have an erection for anything British at LL (they answer the phone in a faux British accent, a bad one at that.) switch their billing company to one in the UK? why not keep it in the US? why make it harder? or is it easier to go “oops, blame this company in the UK for losing your money!”
This, and the fact the TOS is very one sided and self-serving and basically states it can gut its users for everything and then kick their asses off the game, I dont see this failed venture capital lasting much longer.
The whole “BUY VIRTUAL REAL ESTATE WITH SPACE MONEY CONVERTED FROM REAL MONEY!” was an obvious sham from the get-go. it’s also a stupid concept. That’s like saying this site is virtual real estate. It’s like when disney land offered you to buy fake money to buy things in the park, where mostly everything worth buying needed real money to buy.
Hate to break it to you, but even in the short time I’ve been playing around with the game, I can even see the entropy kicking in, it’s affecting everything. I have fun playing it, but that’s it. anyone who expects more than it just being a fun fantasy thing to play with for a while is in for a world of hurt.
Aski Kaurismaski
Jun 18th, 2007
OMG! I’m shocked! SLH discovered that the new crap billing policy is the main reason of the current recession!
But but but… according to your colleague and technology/economy/ageplay/Leninism expert, Prokofy Neva, the main reasons of the recession are: the “casino bounce” and (wait for it) the “cynical olbies” who instantly cash out their stipends or “let them sit in Ginkos for ages building their retirement nest eggs”. Bad, bad olbies!
Anonymous
Jun 18th, 2007
30M L$, Tenshi, not US$. And they’re not paying them, they’re printing them.
Fortescue Fromage
Jun 18th, 2007
Isn’t calling Linden ‘a den of pedophiles’ over the top and even defamatory?
Coincidental Avatar
Jun 18th, 2007
>So, you decided to change your payment partner for one you say doesn’t provide sufficient information to make a transaction
I think they do provide sufficient information but somehow American spy state wants extra information, which is not needed in processing the payment. (Your grandma too is authorized to pay your bills!). Providing that unnecessary extra information from the EU to the USA is probably illegal.
And usually it is very stupid to provide information from customers to competitors.
What was the unauthorized use of my information stuff called? Theft?
To protect myself I’ve stated the rules of using my computer on my computer. Unauthorized use of my property costs 1 billion EUR. Any lawyers around who want their share?
>the biggest reason why it attracted so many people was the “freedom” promise, which they’re now relinquishing, too, in favor of shiny, happy double speak content regulation rules.
I don’t believe your claim as such.
But LL indeed told something else in their marketing tout than the truth: “SL is an extension of RL located in California, USA”.
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jun 18th, 2007
Well the week just finished with a bang – or possibly a whimper.
On Saturday well over 500 items (actual complete objects as well as a few ripped apart) vanished from my estate while I was elsewhere in SL.
No, “items are being returned due to….” notification.
No parcel or autoreturn settings changed.
Just “Now you see it, now you don’t”!
No new items in inventory either – or at 0,0,0…
It was late, I was tired and had had quite enough, so I left it for Sunday. Come Sunday I logged on, did clear cache-logoff-logon. Waited nearly an hour for inventory to load and found 19 items in Lost and Found! 14 of them concatenated “objects” (first time I’ve seen that new icon!).
Well no way am I going to try rezing any of those – I did about 6 months back (before we got that nifty new icon) and spent the rest of that weekend gathering up junk from all over the island, much of it underground. And a couple of months later I was STILL finding ‘missing’ odds and ends in unlikely places!
So – a rollback seemed in order. After all, this wasn’t due to me screwing up, it was just one of those things that you hear about happening to other people… Only this time it happened to me.
Did a bit of math and figured a good safe time to rollback to and placed a request.
6-7 hours later – bear in mind you can’t really USE the sim pending a rollback – still no action, so I did an online Concierge chat:
“xxxx: Hello Inigo.
Inigo_Chamerberlin: Hello xxxx I put in a Rollback request about, oh, 6-7 hours ago nothing seems to be happening?
xxxx: Ok Thanks for letting me know. I’ll see why rollbacks have not been worked on sooner than that.
Inigo_Chamerberlin: Thank you
xxxx: You’re welcome. I’m going to begin rollbacks now. Thank for using Livechat.
Inigo_Chamerberlin: TVM Bye”
Yes, a tacit admission that rollback requests aren’t being attended to in a timely fashion!
Two boring hours later I went to bed – it was that or wake up with a QWERTYASDFGHZXCVBN embossed cheek!
According to the email I got the rollback actually took place a couple of hours after that.
Dashed in to see if it had worked – and…
singBit of a curates egg really. A lot of stuff back where it was supposed to be, but a lot of stuff still missing.
Bah! I think I might take a short break – this has stopped being fun and is becoming tedious and irritating. Maybe I need to get some distance on it? Come back with a different viewpoint?
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jun 18th, 2007
‘Isn’t calling Linden ‘a den of pedophiles’ over the top and even defamatory?’
Not where I come from – the media coverage of the Ageplay/Pedophile incident was sufficient to give SecondLife a whole new image in Europe.
These days I don’t think recommending SL to a friend would be a smart move for instance.
They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity – but in this case, I have my doubts!
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jun 18th, 2007
‘yo Inigo – shut up. leave SL already, or quit whining.
thanks.’
Tell me then, should I be satisfied with the weeks events? Should ANYONE be satisfied?
Would YOU be satisfied with the payment cock-up I uncovered? The well publicised failures – you DO read the blog I trust? The script exploit?
I can only think of one type of person in SecondLife who’d be cheer-leading for LindenLab at this point. And that’s a LL employee.
Sure, it would be convenient if I, and everybody like me, left. No one to criticise LL.
Here’s an idea – why not rewrite the TOS (it needs that anyway, I have that on pretty good authority) so it makes criticism of LL punishable by seizure of all assets and immediate ‘unpersoning’?
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jun 18th, 2007
‘And by the way, Reuters is reporting that women are now outnumbered THREE TO ONE by men.’
Yes… I suspect that figure is based on the details provided on signup. My estate seems to attract a fair number of visitors, from all over the world. However, the vast majority (90% maybe)appear physicaly female and have female AV names…
Go take a wander round at random in SL, do you see three times as many male AVs as female? Nope…
And voice is going to be the real killer. I’m amazed that, with access to the real sex of the vast majority of the residents who matter – Premiums and up – LindenLab are still hammering ahead with voice. After all, anyone with a grain of sense should be able to see how this is going to play out!
The problem is – voice does seem to work (sorry about that, but I have to call them as I see them). And if it works, there’s not much excuse not to use it (I’ve held long conversations with people and found the exchanges faster and more accurate – there’s much more information in the tone of your voice than you’d imagine – it’s actually BETTER than type).
But the problem is going to be that assumptions ARE going to be made about the sex of those who refuse to use it – maybe unfairly in some cases, but it will happen.
At which point SL is suddenly going to become a whole lot less fun for the cross-gender players – who I believe are largely male in real life.
Will there be a sudden slump in logins, possibly even a rise in account cancellations? We’ll see – when the first ‘standard’ voice client is released.
As for those figures Reuters released – maybe LL are actually trying to prepare everyone for what’s coming?
Nicholaz Beresford
Jun 18th, 2007
Well, Inigo … been there, done that … just on another area, that is source code and fixing bugs.
I guess none of us will change LL, they are living in a reality bubble and doing things their own way and at their own speed (and ultimately it’s them who will be paying the price or reaping the reward).
My solution was (and is) to get a distance and do my stuff as it works and ignore what doesn’t and meanwhile don’t put too many eggs into the Linden basket (luckily I’ve never felt like buying land there).
As long as people are still complaining loudly, things are sort of okay for LL because people still care. It’s with quiet withdrawal and silent disbelieve that things get really dangerous for them.
Aetuneo Novi
Jun 18th, 2007
Calling Linden Lab a den of Pedophiles would be defamatory, as there is no supporting evidence, and a lot of evidence against that (see the new polices to prevent ageplay, for example).
Calling Second Life a den of Pedophiles would merely express your inexperience in the world, and would be excusable as ignorance.
Basically, you’ve confused Second Life and Linden Lab. Not a very common mistake, I think.
urizenus
Jun 18th, 2007
Inigo, I understand you were just making reference to the negative rep SL has in Europe these days, but to me “well known” has a factive connotation so I removed that line. Linden’s didn’t ask me to; I’m doing it because I think the comment is going to be misread as a serious charge, and I don’t think that is what you intended.
Annonymous
Jun 18th, 2007
I’ve had two accounts. Closing one due to fraud before opening another over time. First account was terminated when Linden had the break in some time back.
This second account is not much better. I recently worked on two sims, and found that entire buildings would be thrown to 0,0,0 as well as numerous items that could not be retrieved. This has not been a new issue, I was aware of it. But the inventory loss in real USD is now in the hundreds.
A bigger issue is the stance Linden is taking on various issues. When a sim owner with over 100 sims sells the land with intent to resell the same over time, the real truth comes out. Iv’e seen thousands of dollars lost on a single sim where the owner threw everyone off so he could re-sell what had already been purchased to others. The abuse reports for those months were thick. Sometimes 15 per day. Nothing came of it. All came back resolved witht those that truly owned and paid for the sim thrown off, land locked for no resale, covenant removal and term changes carried on by the sim owner.
The land scam will eventually take Linden down the tubes. It takes time and evidence gathering, also takes a larger majority than a single few being thrown off their land.
In this case, the people whom purchased the land were adults who paid their monthly tiers, paid a large amount of money to own, and ended up understanding that not only is nothing owned in SL by anyone other than Linden, but that in fact Linden has such poor service due to harboring the scams that they have no other outlet besides banking in foreign countries and laundering the assets.
The scam “Will” create class action in the future, and Linden will eventually deal with the illegal activity that they are harboring.
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jun 18th, 2007
Ok Uri, no problem. I’ll rephrase it then:
SecondLife, that well known product of Linden Lab, has, thanks to a decision by Linden Lab (which was protested by the bulk of their customers) not to insist on proof of age/ID as a prerequisite of signup, attracted a great deal of publicity in the European media which has tarred Linden Lab and SecondLife with the very unfortunate tag of being infested with pedophiles and perverts.
This new-found notoriety does NOT encourage me – or any one else requested by Linden Lab to do so – to trot down to their local bank, ask to see their account manager, and stipulate that, because Linden Lab’s chosen online payment partner is being blocked by the bank (which they AREN’T) will the bank please cease doing so and make all SecondLife/Linden Lab payments regardless of imaginary account blocking (note: the Linden Lab eMail I have on file specificaly says I should require ‘billing from Linden Lab/Second Life’ to be unblocked – leaving little doubt I’m involved in SecondLife).
Put it another way. With SecondLife’s new found reputation, one of the things I, and I suspect a LOT of others, won’t be doing, is admitting our usage of SecondLife any more than absolutely necessary. As for recommending SecondLife to acquaintances – forget it!
Now – IF Linden Lab can’t handle that situation there are two things to consider. Firstly they should NOT have their billing department staff deliberately misleading (the technical term is ‘telling lies to’) customers about why payment information is not being retained and why payments cannot be made.
Secondly, if they think that I’ve been nasty in outlining the situation they have put their customers in – the ‘remedy’ lies in their hands. They have a presence in the UK. Go ahead. Sue me.
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jun 18th, 2007
Aetuneo – I haven’t confused anything with anything else.
Prokofy Neva
Jun 18th, 2007
I guess the Economic Times of India is braver than you, than Uri, because they had no problem running a headling that said, “Second Life at Cannes Full of Perverts”
They quoted a guy, Norm Johnston of Digitas, who said, ““We’ve done a couple of workshops with clients in Second Life and it’s full of a lot of perverts…”
And this was run in the Google key words news feed for “Second Life” the last few days.
So while this fellow Norm and the Economic Times are saying “Second Life is full of perverts,” the Herald is supposed to be worrying about libel suits?
Re: >At which point SL is suddenly going to become a whole lot less fun for the cross-gender players – who I believe are largely male in real life.
>Will there be a sudden slump in logins, possibly even a rise in account cancellations? We’ll see – when the first ‘standard’ voice client is released.
>As for those figures Reuters released – maybe LL are actually trying to prepare everyone for what’s coming?
This is a great point. I think the Lindens are preparing the masses, if not themselves. We saw how Meta Linden reacted, trying to shame and intimidate a blogger from talking about this admittedly humorous phenomenon — but humorous in a way that rapidly turns to ridicule and hate and pain for those who have to endure it.
I see Philip busy preparing the masses ideologically, too, in a fora.tv covered event with Steward Brand last November that’s becoming linked around more now, have to go back and find it.
Basically, he thinks of Second Life as containing “truth serum”, and that people “can’t lie” in Second Life in the way they can in RL. He goes on to make the point that it’s very hard to convince people you’re the opposite gender and so people don’t get away with it.
Oh?
What *is* he smoking?
First of all, he’s implying that if you have the opposite gender, you are “lying”. This is a frequent claim, but I don’t think it’s supportable for many reasons — a person may be telling a greater truth about themselves in fact, or a person is not necessarily deceiving some member of the opposite sex intentionally, that may not be part of the transgender repertoire, although of course it is widespread. People argue endlessly whether that’s moral or not; I feel it is immoral, myself, but I can picture that for some, they believe the interface of Second Life is value-free, and like Vegas.
Second, he’s setting a stage of some kind of “normalcy” or “norm” (like Daniel Linden’s affirmed “norms of the forums where you’ll be ripped apart if you go against them”) whereby it will be “socially unacceptable” (among the Metarati anyway) or “uncool” to have the opposite gender. It’s already looked down upon, but people have enough political correctness instilled in them by the TOS to not act upon it. Now they’ll feel free to act upon it, aided not only by Voice but by Philip and other Lindens acting as if cross-dressing is going against the Second Life Truth Serum.
Anonymous
Jun 18th, 2007
This making it hard for people to buy Lindens is going to be the fatal mistake that kills us all.
coco
Dudeboy Ewing
Jun 18th, 2007
Yep same thing happend to me. Upgraded my account this weekend then tried to buy lindens and couldn’t. My banked called me and told me they had put a block on my card because they had had problums with Second Life and Linden Labs.
Forseti Svarog
Jun 18th, 2007
I don’t believe those gender count figures. Gender split by usage shows 43% female. The latest stats spreadsheet then shows 294,722 “F Count” and 823,330 “M Count” but what does this mean? LL doesn’t seem to say, and this 1,118,052 figure doesn’t match up with the active avatars figure (500K) or any other data that I see. So I think something is broken, but time and Linden Lab will tell.
Angel
Jun 18th, 2007
Can’t even get past the screen where you key in how many you want to buy, returns an immediate error on the first number.
4am SLT last night the database went down in a huge manner, no map, no profiles, no TP… was almost a return to the good old days of October-December when you had to TP via the mainland.
But still, they have 70% of their programmers removing bugs whilst the other 30% add many many more, and as we have seen each bug they squish adds others.
Nicholaz Beresford
Jun 18th, 2007
)) Basically, he thinks of Second Life as containing “truth serum”, and that people “can’t lie” in Second Life in the way they can in RL. He goes on to make the point that it’s very hard to convince people you’re the opposite gender and so people don’t get away with it. Oh? What *is* he smoking? ((
LOL, if he really thinks that (dunno, I’m not following is rants), he has lost more contact with reality than I thought.
—-
But besides that, speaking of Linden stunts and I think Inigo will love this, I’ve seen two troubling patches on the JIRA toady. What’s troubling is not so much the patches, but what they do to fix the broken behavior.
But see for yourself:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1203
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1217
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jun 18th, 2007
Not a teki Nicholaz, so that stuff doesn’t mean a lot to me I’m afraid.
Still, I’m shocked by the evidence that no one’s realised that the ‘cross-eyed’ ‘bug’ isn’t a bug at all! It’s LL’s way of normalising behaviour when the AV is buggered by their shoes or other attachments. Masterful – if you can’t kill the bug, integrate it properly complete with appropriate AV reaction.
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jun 18th, 2007
‘Upgraded my account this weekend then tried to buy lindens and couldn’t. My banked called me and told me they had put a block on my card because they had had problums with Second Life and Linden Labs.’
Interesting Dudeboy. It’s sounding like there are several problems with the account billing transaction system. The one I encountered causes the Visa Electron transaction to be rejected automatically but doesn’t trigger account blocking – because when I got the standard Visa transaction template to accept my Visa Electron (which it shouldn’t – THAT’S why they have different templates) the transaction was then completed without my having to get SL/LL or my card, ‘unblocked’ by my bank. You’ve obviously encountered one that causes the bank to flag the SecondLife LindenLab account debit as a likely fraudulent transaction if it also blocks your card.
The sheer ineptness of those responsible for that web interface is mind boggling. After all, the difficulty of integrating an online payment system with a simple web form is not high. Even I can manage that feat.
If I were LL management, what would worry me, besides the loss of revenue (we won’t talk about pissing customers off because LL has NEVER worried about that), would be the likely reaction of the banks to this continual triggering of their security systems. Having staff call up customers to tell them SL/LL have caused their card to be blocked is costing banks all over the world money. They aren’t going to allow that to continue.
Their next move – after blacklisting SL/LL is going to be to threaten Global Collect with blacklisting. At which point, assuming Global Collect follow the normal industry procedures, they will withdraw merchant facilities from Linden Lab.
And at that point things get rather sticky. Because the industry is quite a tight community, and once you loose merchant facilities it’s quite hard to regain them.
like_ummm
Jun 18th, 2007
haha ‘truth serum’. more like ‘pervert serum’.
Shockwave Yareach
Jun 18th, 2007
LL needs a Hacker Driver, one who hears of a fault and ensures that the LL programmers fix it immediately. Happy shiney people in their ivory towers can’t smell the poop the rest of us have to slog through. This manager doesn’t answer to anyone but Phillip himself and has the one mission objective of fixing the systems problems before they damage the players, LL and the game.
The first thing he’ll have to do is make it so LL has a US card processor again, and ensures that it F***ing works! Phillip can’t get that house paid for if we can’t put money into the game.
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jun 18th, 2007
US, UK, or Russian – it won’t work if it’s not set up properly and if the local interface isn’t requesting the essential info – like the 3 digit security code Shockwave!
dildo baggins
Jun 18th, 2007
Somethings about to blow….
Open Sell Orders at the Best 20 Rates
Exchange Rate Total Remaining Quantity
L$267 / US$1.00 L$7,470
L$266 / US$1.00 L$33,113,122
L$265 / US$1.00 L$39,602,066
Open Buy Orders at the Best 20 Rates
Exchange Rate Total Remaining Quantity
L$277 / US$1.00 L$15,655,898
L$278 / US$1.00 L$48,063
Shockwave Yareach
Jun 18th, 2007
It is exactly goofups like the Security code that the Hacker Driver finds and demands be fixed immediately. How many Millions a week is their failure to see something obvious going to cost them?
Sioban
Jun 19th, 2007
After reading this blog entry over the weekend, I checked my billing information at SL. I’m a paid up premium member with both a credit card and PayPal listed with for my account.
Last night, for no reason I can determine, my account was disabled! What on Earth? All I did while on line was dance, chat (PG rated stuff), and try on clothes and hair.
I’m wondering if this can be related to the billing issues, although I don’t pay the Lindens tier and my premium membership is paid up months in advance. I can’t find a place to get help until 9am Pacific time.
This is really frustrating.
Nicholaz Beresford
Jun 19th, 2007
Inigo, in both cases Giggs Taggart (the guy who made the fix) just reverted the source pieces back to version 1.16. Or in other words, both errors were such that Lindens change something and broke it.
jim jones
Jun 19th, 2007
ll probably does not have the level of professionalism to fix the bugs in their ah, system.
Fixing bugs, along with the drive and commitment to keep them minimised via testing [also an unknown concept to LL], is just not as cool as working on a new feature!
My guess is they are overweight in the “just out of university” programmer dept [because they are cheap to hire, fire, burn out and churn them].
The best coders work on kewl feature development, dude!
It’s just not, like, kewl working in the bug dept man. That’s for losers!
Testing is also for the losers in the QA dept.
Who have to find and fix the untested shitty fucking code written by the “best” coolest coders in “feature” development.
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jun 19th, 2007
Ah, thanks for the explanation Nicholaz!
Well, it’s been speculated, based purely on empirical evidence, that this has been going on for a long time – since I arrived in fact.
It’s interesting to see that it’s being confirmed now via other sources.
Reality
Jun 19th, 2007
Hey uh, Jim? Ever stop and think that to ‘fix’ the bugs would mean shutting down the grid for however long it took them to code up a new system and client? Ever stop to think that this may require them to erase everything and that everyone would have to start from scratch?
No – you have not. Be happy they are doing anything at all in the bug fix department – They could just as easily say ‘fuck you’ to literally everything.
clouds
Jun 19th, 2007
“I don’t believe those gender count figures. Gender split by usage shows 43% female.”
I believe Reuters over Linden Lab any day of the week. It’s not really relevant, mainly because they got numbers from Linden Labs… I just want to get that out of the way.
Now, Reuters is talking about logins ONLY for the month of May, not the total active “population”. The entire active population doesn’t login every month so the numbers on “Gender with Hours” page don’t have to add up elsewhere. These are supposedly only numbers for those who actually logged in. “M Count” and “F Count” are supposedly the number who actually logged in that month for each gender. Notice that the female login population has slowly been declining, presumably eventually turning Second Life into one big sausage fest with a healthy population of transgenders to fill the void. I suspect there will be a rise in empty porn houses and bloody shoot-em-up scripted games.
Maybe they’re all going to Indigo’s house cause he’s such a playboy. Otherwise you can see a lot of female avatars in-world because nearly 300,000 people logged in for a month, it’s hard not to see at least one. But that presumes the gender avatars match with real world gender. We already know that a group of males like to play as females, either just to dress up and ogle the body and/or cybersex with it so they don’t have to spend $40US on a higher quality single player sex game (and then they claim they’re still straight which is the funny part). Or they do it for gender identity. Whatever. And there are females who do it too. The avatar alone shouldn’t be the sole determinant of real gender, obviously.
When signing up for the first time, I’d figure that most females would want to play as females (too noobish to know what they’re in for…) so they choose a female avatar and I would say likely select “female” as the gender, not knowing that they can change avatar gender even if they select anything else. so I say a majority of new signups are real genders that they enter on the signup page. The self-reported gender can’t be too far off.
Of course, certain areas in the world are likely to attract more real females than males and vice versa. But I say if you’re in a sort of “gender-neutral” area and the area is more than 3:1, you’re looking at pixels controlled by men.
Nicholaz Beresford
Jun 19th, 2007
Well, the source code for SL is an odd thing. It’s definitely in a rather good shape for a program that size and in the tricky areas, it’s visible that stuff was done by people who knew what they were doing.
I have made a flurry of patches to fix stuff, but most of it was pretty minor, and the bigger stuff was pretty tricks … there’s simply no large software without that kind of problems, so it’s not that everywhere you look, bad stuff jumps at you.
And those two bugs are more symptomatic than real problems. With complex software you’re sometimes bound to break something when fixing something else. But it’s the same pattern we see on the server side (were we don’t have the source code).
I think the biggest problem is that they’re too many things at a time with too little time at hand and don’t allow the dust to settle.
Dunno if Philbert is pushing them forward or if it’s just the excitement over new things, but if it were me, I’d put a full stop on everything new for at least three months and tell everyone to just make the stuff that’s here work, period!
They do have people with the skill, there’s no doubt about that, but they probably have too many juniors who are not entirely up to par with the challenge (which is not necessarily a problem in itself, you grow on the job) and at the same time are not given enough time to do those things, which in combination is a call for trouble.
If you ask me, it’s definitely a management thing, because the management sets the pace and the priorities.
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jun 19th, 2007
I think you just hit the nail on the head.
On many occasions I’ve heard Philip boasting, in public, about how quickly his developers can churn out code…
‘Never mind the quality – feel the width’…
jim jones
Jun 19th, 2007
“If you ask me, it’s definitely a management thing, because the management sets the pace and the priorities.”
Yes, of course. But don’t forget the culture -> http://lindenlab.com/employment/tao
Whilst an excellent set of principles to aspire too, in practice it just ain’t working cap’n. Well, at least from my observation – and some others too I suspect.
Specifically “At Linden Lab, you are expected to choose your own work, you have to decide how you can best move the company forward.” is possibly one area where the root issues lie.
As such it’s not specifically the junior coders fault per as they are still learning the profession, but given such an open mandate to work to my guess is the testing and QA process just ain’t as rigorous as it should be. The real pros at LL are no doubt flat up against the wall with their little deadline hells and who knows how much time they have to properly mentor and oversee the whole process properly.
Despite the cheap shot at the code base before, we know anything like this is going to be complex and bugs will always slip through but the more fragile the code base becomes through untested/unstressed pathways the worse the compounding effect of the same work practices become. Unless, as Nicholaz suggest, a code freeze is implemented to attempt make the current codebase more robust in parallel with a serious look at the development and QA practices to minimize future issues.
Of course, that would probably make you a luddite in the view of some SL pundits;-)
Nicholaz Beresford
Jun 19th, 2007
)) But don’t forget the culture -> http://lindenlab.com/employment/tao ((
I have thought about that a few times, but I don’t think it is a problem in itself. You know, the odd thing is that I have a post on my blog, where someone told me to not work for Linden Lab because they way I’m fixing the code now, I can pick my target and an am independent, while in there you get told what to work on. The post was anonymous, but the person said, he knew what he was talking about.
And even if they are following the tao to the letter, there’s always a sense of orientation within that. This “how you brought the company forward” needs a reference point and I’m sure people will adjust themselves to that. Is fixing a bug bringing the company forward? Is a new sky more worth than having a reliable payment system? There ought to be some system of reward inside there, someone has to decide who gets a raise, and again, the management sets the direction … either in obvious or in subtle ways.
Would I have gotten a pat on the back for fixing the memory leaks? Would the person who fixes payment? Dunno, but not working for them (which is what all the open sourcers do) probably means more Tao than being a Linden.
But the irony on the other hand is, that this Philbert chaos is most likely what affords us the freedom inside SL (as far as you enjoy that). Someone with a strict inside regime, would most likely have created a strict in-world ruling also.
I may be totally wrong, but it’s my guess that if LL development was run by ways of mainstream management, the result would be a product, that was more reliable, but also mainstream and I’m not really sure if I would prefer that.
tjwelles
Jun 19th, 2007
Inigo Chamerberlin,
I’m not sure what you are driving at. It plainly says on the SL site that you can be the opposite sex in SL or whatever you like. Look, if a person can be a frog or a dragon, there certainly isn’t anything wrong with someone being the opposite sex in SL. The fact is, avatars have no sex. They are avatars.
People are taking this too far. If you see a female avatar, you call it she. If you see a male avatar, you call it he. Then if you believe they are not of the sex they claim (which truly makes no difference), you call them less than honest.
People need to get a grip. Avatars have no sex. And buying lame attachments that have a poor resemblance of any sexual organ doesn’t reflect anything either.
You mention it’s “Looked down on” to be claiming opposite sex in SL.
That is not what Linden Labs have promoted. They promoted and still promote this concept and always have. Read the site.
I recently tried something. I changed sexes in SL and appeared as the opposite around everyone I know. Without them knowing what I was doing.
The response was as expected. “Now we do not know if you are a female or a male.”
This is to be expected. For one, my point was it makes no difference. I could have just as well been a frog or a dragon.
I’ve made up my mind that I will now use two. One male / one female character and use a profile pic with both. Below I’ll state that I have
a split personality.
Some of this in SL is just over the top. All do to pixel banging/bumping.
This whole thing is childish.
tjwelles
Jun 19th, 2007
The above post is not posted by tjwelles.
Posted by: Nicholaz Beresford | June 19, 2007 at 02:10 PM
Inigo Chamerberlin,
That one is. Fix this.
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jun 19th, 2007
Durrrrrrr…. wot?
‘I didn’t post this, XXXXX did. But THIS is HIS not yours’
Do us all a favour, please – anyway, post-editing isn’t my department
Aski Kaurismaski
Jun 20th, 2007
“Not where I come from – the media coverage of the Ageplay/Pedophile incident was sufficient to give SecondLife a whole new image in Europe.”
“SecondLife… attracted a great deal of publicity in the European media which has tarred Linden Lab and SecondLife with the very unfortunate tag of being infested with pedophiles and perverts.”
Excuse me Inigo but where exactly do you come from? The European continent, next to the Olympus mountain in Mars?
I suppose that as a SLH “journalist” you have to exaggerate in order keep the drama levels high but your claims that there was “a great deal of publicity in the European media” and that SL has acquired “a whole new image in Europe” are way over the top if not a blatant lie.
I work in Germany and live in France, two of the countries where all the recent SLosphere drama originates, so I guess I am in a position to have an estimate about the “whole new image of SL in Europe”. The German “Report Mainz” is generally considered by the majority of the Germans as “yellow press” and it was mocked many times by the major German media for its “drama style journalism” (SLH anyone?). The French FdF (Familles de France) is an organization that is even more laughable by the major French media.
Except of the above two cases and some other insignificant articles, neither the German nor the French major media had *any* serious article about “SL being invested by pedophiles and perverts”. And most of the people I talk to, know SL as “that game that you can make money” and not as “the game that is the den of pedophiles and perverts”.
And your proof for that is that the SL signups from Germany (and possibly France) are *increased* the last two months (read your colleague’s Prok blog and the conversation with Meta Linden).
Nicholaz Beresford
Jun 20th, 2007
tj just mixed up which text a separator line and name belongs to (thinking the “Posted by ….” initiates the post and isn’t put blelow it to denote the poster).
Inigo Chamerberlin
Jun 20th, 2007
Don’t try and be a smart-ass Aski – The article below made the BBC News Website front page main article position on the morning of the day it first appeared. No searches or sub-sections required, the first thing you saw at the top of the news page. As the day wore on it was, obviously, displaced by fresher items and the following day was relegated to the Technology section.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6638331.stm
There’s no exaggeration needed when the UK’s premier news source runs a story like that.
As for the assertion that Germans and French are signing up in increasing numbers since that story was broken in Germany?
Well, I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly comment on the implications of that.
Panda
Jun 20th, 2007
“Don’t try and be a smart-ass Aski”
Translated: “Don’t be smarter than me”
Kauai Lane
Jun 21st, 2007
Since none of my credit cards will work with Second Life, why should I bother to be in SL?