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I dono, i think all of the above added a certain rl spice to sl at times, keeps people on their toes and stress tests them and sl.

Because I cant get into SL .. For some unknown reason the apparently no one can figure out .. I have been able to think a bit about SL . . And I will say simply this .. WE dont need a CEO, to us this is not a business, it's a world we made for ourselves. We are residents, not customers. Neighbors, not co-workers. Friends, not associates. What we need is a Leader, this is not to us a commercial enterprise, it's a world without borders.

So I'll get back to my screen that says .. and has said for the past week ..on multiple computers (one of them never ever had SL loaded on it) on 2 OS's.. and 4 different Viewers ... so dont tell me to clear the cache again .. 

Login failed.

The system is logging you out right now. (((It has been doing that for a week))) Your account will not be available until 2010-12-29 06:50:02

     and the time just steps further into the future .. and soon it will say until 2011.......

The only way I heard this issue is fixable Bowluv is ask one of your friends to ask the sim owner you crashed out on to be rebooted. Once that's done the log off session will be forced and finally you'll be actually logged off and able to log in. I hope this helps.

@Galileo:

I used to have a premium account.  I believed, like you, that I should have a stake in the company.  For that dedication, LL took away gambling (instead of fixing it to make it legal), bait and switched me out of my island, and forced people out of their land and onto Zindra.  All while the grid barely worked, crashed 3 times a day, and lost countless millions of dollars in people's inventories.

So I quit my premium membership.  I will not pay money for junk, and after 5 years, I expect far better performance than LL has provided.  Even so, I'm still paying 100$ a month for land, purchases, and my own server for music and video streaming.  So if you think I'm not invested and not spending money here just because I'm not a premium member anymore, you are VERY much incorrect.

My thinking is that membership needs to be made two-tier and that everyone has to have a credit card or paypal on file to be here.  No other game (or VW) is free -- why should SL be?  Have it so everyone pays something, and everyone can buy land instead of just the premiums.  Why any company would make it cost extra to spend more money is beyond me.  Have Basic cost 2$ a month and you can buy land.  Have premium cost 5$ a month and let that have additional phone support.  Most of the problems are solved and everyone can then buy land.

I quit my premium account because I got nothing for my money.  That problem still stands.  And while I agree some fee needs to be charged at the door, you need to actually give people something for their money, or they won't pay.  Me, I'd pay the premium 5$ bit IF I could make my prims 100m instead of being limited to 10.  That's an additional feature I'd pay additional money for in an instant.  But today, I get the same garbage system and the same care-not support and the same abyssmal experience whether I spend money or not.  So I don't spend money.  Make it so I have to to enter, and I'll pay something, yes.

But if you think everybody is going to hand over 7$ a month for sim crossing glitches, lost inventory and inability to do something as simple as message a group of people, you are fooling yourself.  I expect something for my money, and LL has consistently failed to deliver on its promises.

I agree with you Shockwave. I was a premium member for two years while I waited in hope for Linden Labs to get it right and make things better. Instead they continually let us down. SL is screwed up. That's okay though because there are better places out there on the internet that DONT have linden labs' mark of failure all over it. I might pop in once in awhile to say hi, but i definitely dont spend anymore time in SL. it's not worth it. Linden Labs would have to pay me real money to get me to login for any real length of time anymore.

  To Rod: it's a good idea not to step onto a sinking ship. Good luck! youre gonna need it!

A very warm welcome to Second Life, Rod!  SL has been a part of my life for coming upon 5 years now and I dearly dearly love it.  My friends in Second Life are just as real to me as any real life friend I have.  I hope you will handle the running of Linden Labs with care and that you'll listen to us, those who live in this virtual world and call it home, while still being able to keep a firm hand on steering the company the way you think is best for growth.

To that end, Scruplz Magazine, would like to formally request an interview for our readers that brings to light your views on the artistic side of living in Second Life and possible plans for our future that will inspire.  In world press can be good too!

Welcome again!

aliannalogan@gmail.com

The performance of SL is getting worse and worse for me and many others that I know. I became tired of owning a sim (had two sims at my peak of ownership) that was basically unusable because of the lag and other problems.(like ghosted avatars stuck in the sim). A good friend had her store in my sim. When that did not go any where, we opened a live music club. This had some interest but the lag even took the fun away from that.

It is not very fun to have people crashing or even the singer crashing over and over and unable to log back in after a five to ten minute wait. Or the countless IM's from people who had a friends avatar ghosted in the sim, then becoming angry at me because I am unable to restart a mainland sim.

Being a premium account I would call the help desk and ask for a sim restart. The answer that I would get was to file a support ticket or have the person whose avatar was ghosted file one. Of course these support tickets never have a response.So a waste of time and the ghosted avatars are stuck until the sim crashes.

I ended up throwing up my hands and selling my sim (Linden Lab's since no one really owns anything in Second Life) and decided to go somewhere else.

Maybe Rod is our Great White Hope and can fix Second Life. After Second Life being around since 2003 and performance steadly getting worse(most companies improve over time), I do not see how Rod ruin Second Life.

Welcome aboard Rod and best of luck.

Welcome Rod.

I echo two things said here many times already; I hope you listen to residents, and seriously take into consideration what we want this world to be.

This is a world, not a game.

I hope you enjoy your time with us!

OMG - Since the carnage of the last two years does this mean we will become a new zone merged with the SIMS, with new tools for Medal of Honour conflict? Bringing new annual FIFA matche tournaments and  Virtual Golf with personal coaching from Tiger Woods?

Please, please Rod, past success of eight years came from collaboration which allowed the likes of xstreetSL amongst other 3rd party online merchant outlets and education to take a stake in Second Lifes development.

Dont cut them all out, and please support the creators and land owneers whom build SL into what it was.

Congrats on the helm, Rod...  May you guide our ship through the waters to success!!!

bowfluv yeah sounds like you have stuck presence issue (ghost of your AV stuck inworld) make an ALT account you should be able to login on it find your main AV and contact LL to reset the sim and let your spirit free. or simply just contact them first and tell them you are stuck inworld (stuck Precence) is the term and need unsticking as you carnt logg in.

hope this helps

Wow!  Welcome Rod!

 

I'm suddenly reminded of the days when I spent five years hosting about 100 fan sites for The Sims, watching the artists disappear one by one, and saying, "Oh no!  Lost another one to Second Life!" 

Welcome Rod

Rod, Welcome! I just want my TV to work. I have SL Viewer 2 and my bf has Pheonix. Unfornately, everything gets blamed on LL.

The second thing i ask is you re-evaluate Linden decission to allow children in Second Life.

 

thank you.

Another point I STRONGLY echo.  Thanks MilosZ for making it here.

bowfluv yeah sounds like you have stuck presence issue (ghost of your AV stuck inworld) make an ALT account you should be able to login on it find your main AV and contact LL to reset the sim and let your spirit free. or simply just contact them first and tell them you are stuck inworld (stuck Precence) is the term and need unsticking as you carnt logg in.

hope this helps

Wow that still happens. That is why I have this avi, Spend my first New Year deep in SL withdrawal because of the Stuck Presence of my first avi. Of course it happened at the start of a long holiday weekend with no senior tech support to clear the problem. Imagine going form 20+ hours a week to nothing, losing cable would not have been as painful.

Second Life is an immersive, pluralistic, international, New World virtual country. As such, it is 10 years ahead of the market. Think Windows 3.0 or Netscape Navigator or even cellphones. All were considered niche products when they first came out.

Because Linden Lab cannot grasp this concept, the company has been trying to convert Second Life into a 3D Facebook, a virtual Disneyland, a corporate conferencing system, a virtual schoolroom and now a teen chatroom. All attempts to turn an apple into an orange have failed. The apple is now starting to rot.

Rod this is the core problem that SL has suffered from as far back as I have been around. LL never understood that they were already successful, that they already won and beat out all competition. If you can understand this, if you can talk to early residents about the SL they joined, even as recently as Aug '07 when I created my first avi, you will find that SL was the future and over the years that future has been whittled away until most of us are leaving. It's sad; I found a place that was the embodiment of all the wonderful possibilities I wished the RL could be. Everywhere I went, people were being who and what they wanted and no one gave each other a hard time about it. I often commented how I wished the RL was more like SL.

But now I see the RL is encroaching on SL, the "moral majority" (vocal minority more like it) has threatened LL, the corporate clients have expressed their fear of a wild west environment not understanding the vast potential of representing themselves in it. Not to sell product or host virtual conferences (yet another losing idea from the brain trust that is LL) but in simply getting to know the customer, being more accessible. I am more likely to buy products form a company I can gain a personal connection to. And that is what SL is all about. Personal connections in a way that is not facebook, not chat, not the Sims. SL is a vital, real community of people interacting through avatars in a virtual world of their own creation. I will miss SL when it goes through its final sanitization and becomes just another MMORPG to be sold to the highest bidder. But by then I’ll have moved to another GRID and the money I would have been paying to LL will go elsewhere.

Rod, I hope you will shake up LL, teach them that customer service is important and restore SL to its glory days. Sure you will hear some who will say that SL is finally a wonderful place for the family, but the reality is, 99% of the people who came here don’t want a place for the family. We want our adult world and we are leaving because that is what LL is taking away. We want what was, not what is.

Oh and for crying out loud, I don’t want to have to buy a $5,000 gaming PC just to be in SL, let’s kill the over the top reflective water and dial the graphics back to say 2008. I remember the days of TPing to a sim and seeing it all appear on my screen in one or two seconds, not bloody minutes. Shoppers don’t want to have to stand in the landing zone waiting for the building and venders to rez, they want to get in, shop, and move on. May I suggest you get a 4 year old PC running Windows XP pro and log into SL. If you can move about without lagging every 5 seconds, if you can see all the sim as far as the draw distance can be set within seconds of landing, then SL is fine, if not, then you will know what half the world is experiencing on their older PC’s which they can’t afford to update yet. Remember your customers are not just here in the US, but also in the favelas of Brazil, the small towns of the Czech Republic, and the islands of the Philippians. I really don’t want to lose those people, they enrich my life in both ‘verses.

All my best to you and with that my hopes for the future of SL. Honestly I don't want to leave, please don't push me out the door.

Ryuu I liked the majority of your post.  However I must say that EA is a soulless corporation that doesn't have a clue about "community".  Or they wouldn't be so fond of tearing them apart when they do not reach a certain dollar figure.  Look what they did to the sims online communities.  Or ask Robin Linden...oh wait you can't she quit Linden Lab....along with several other key employees.  Odd that don't ya think???

I don't think it's odd,  it just proved more so to me the disfuntional future of SL.  Pitty indeed. Other grids have a firm grasp on what makes up SL and I fully support them as they slam what is left of SL into the ground.

 

Open Source in the end?  Excellent,  Thanks LL.

i hope he dosnt mess up sl

Well said Ryuu.

LL has to work out what Sl is. Can it be all things to all people like they seem to currently think it can be? I don't think it is possible to make a swiss army knife application on the net. Everyone specialises.

In regards to the payment issue, I pay US$9 a month each for both my kids on Runescape. That is just the fee to use it and it is hugely successful because it sticks to what it is and changes things just enough in regards to graphics and gameplay to keep them interested. My son is 17 and still plays it at regularly. They have been there for years. So if SL wants to make a better individual user product with less lag, better service, and more flexibility on land tiers and their costs and prim allocation then I would pay that without a problem. Maybe drop land prices and put in a set monthly fee, with a free 3 month trail period for newbies. 

So the issue is what way is Sl going to go. I am sure Rod is aware of the issues. He would be very familiar, I would imagine, with Sl prior to making his position application, and he would most likely have been required to make a presentation, along with the other candidates, on how he would see Sl developing in the future. So at this stage we don't know what that future is that LL have agreed that Rod should implement. Things change. Maybe Sl will change for the better along the lines here that most have expressed. Maybe it will move to a totally different model and users like myself who have a relationship and a successful romance sim with my partner will be left with no choice but to move on. So on that note does anybody know of any good alternatives to Sl because that would be a great opportunity for another virtual world to pick up a lot of customers. What is the current best competitor for sl? Is there one? I hope so, but I also hope it won't come to that because I have invested so much in so many ways in sl, along with so many other highly creative individuals, and I think it could be brilliant in our wonderful little world of possibilities with enlightened management and appropriate improvements.

On another note there is a thread on unsticking ghosts and the most effective solution in the absence of a sim restart appeared to be just to keep continually logging in one session and it eventually clears. Hope it helps.

I wish you all the best and a bit of luck on the side. As I begin my fourth year in SL, I can only wonder the upcoming changes inworld and how it will be viewed. The last half of 2010 seemed to have been all about viewers and PG vs R ratings. I also miss the days of logging into community and creativity as do the posts above. I look forward to see what the New Year brings our virtual world and hopes you review the legacy years of how it was created. Full Steam Ahead.

Second Life is an immersive, pluralistic, international, New World virtual country. As such, it is 10 years ahead of the market. Think Windows 3.0 or Netscape Navigator or even cellphones. All were considered niche products when they first came out.

Because Linden Lab cannot grasp this concept, the company has been trying to convert Second Life into a 3D Facebook, a virtual Disneyland, a corporate conferencing system, a virtual schoolroom and now a teen chatroom. All attempts to turn an apple into an orange have failed. The apple is now starting to rot.

Rod this is the core problem that SL has suffered from as far back as I have been around. LL never understood that they were already successful, that they already won and beat out all competition. If you can understand this, if you can talk to early residents about the SL they joined, even as recently as Aug '07 when I created my first avi, you will find that SL was the future and over the years that future has been whittled away until most of us are leaving. It's sad; I found a place that was the embodiment of all the wonderful possibilities I wished the RL could be. Everywhere I went, people were being who and what they wanted and no one gave each other a hard time about it. I often commented how I wished the RL was more like SL.

But now I see the RL is encroaching on SL, the "moral majority" (vocal minority more like it) has threatened LL, the corporate clients have expressed their fear of a wild west environment not understanding the vast potential of representing themselves in it. Not to sell product or host virtual conferences (yet another losing idea from the brain trust that is LL) but in simply getting to know the customer, being more accessible. I am more likely to buy products form a company I can gain a personal connection to. And that is what SL is all about. Personal connections in a way that is not facebook, not chat, not the Sims. SL is a vital, real community of people interacting through avatars in a virtual world of their own creation. I will miss SL when it goes through its final sanitization and becomes just another MMORPG to be sold to the highest bidder. But by then I’ll have moved to another GRID and the money I would have been paying to LL will go elsewhere.

Rod, I hope you will shake up LL, teach them that customer service is important and restore SL to its glory days. Sure you will hear some who will say that SL is finally a wonderful place for the family, but the reality is, 99% of the people who came here don’t want a place for the family. We want our adult world and we are leaving because that is what LL is taking away. We want what was, not what is.

Oh and for crying out loud, I don’t want to have to buy a $5,000 gaming PC just to be in SL, let’s kill the over the top reflective water and dial the graphics back to say 2008. I remember the days of TPing to a sim and seeing it all appear on my screen in one or two seconds, not bloody minutes. Shoppers don’t want to have to stand in the landing zone waiting for the building and venders to rez, they want to get in, shop, and move on. May I suggest you get a 4 year old PC running Windows XP pro and log into SL. If you can move about without lagging every 5 seconds, if you can see all the sim as far as the draw distance can be set within seconds of landing, then SL is fine, if not, then you will know what half the world is experiencing on their older PC’s which they can’t afford to update yet. Remember your customers are not just here in the US, but also in the favelas of Brazil, the small towns of the Czech Republic, and the islands of the Philippians. I really don’t want to lose those people, they enrich my life in both ‘verses.

All my best to you and with that my hopes for the future of SL. Honestly I don't want to leave, please don't push me out the door.

Amen to all of that.

And kids on the grid will destroy SL. It's already segregated. People have already turtled and found their own private place and put up walls. This decision to allow kiddies will finish SL off. Just wait.I know several people who REFUSE to answer ANY IM from any person they do not know to be a verified account/adult adn who refuse to ever go to PG land. TEENS ARE HERE NOW AS ALL NEW ACCOUNTS GO TO THE MAIN GRID.. I think new CEO or not, it will be bad business as usual from LL. Too much damage has been done.

I already had a say with regards to service and a few other things but I failed to mention what several others have said.  And that is Second Life is no longer what it was; and sadly may never be again!  I really miss those first few years on SL (been here over 5 years). And I really am not looking forward to much in the future.  I have actually upgraded my computer so that I can move around at least in SL now but this is the last one !  As for Kids;  I shuddered the moment that news came out and I prayaed that someone would talk some sense into LL!  I really do NOT want kids here!  They and we were far better off when they had their own grid!  I sincerely hope you have read all these posts because these folks are saying what we have been trying to communicate to LL for ages!  Yes we older residents are leaving and I am about to become one of them!  I am sad and disappointed and grieving the loss of a good thing!  There are alternative worlds out there in the infant stages but with a lot more promise than SL has right now, unless someone namely you! can reverse the damage already done and prevent any more from happening!  Please pay attention this many people all saying the same thing cannot all be wrong!

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-22826?focusedCommentId=232576#comment-232576  because really... it all comes down to what matters to residents, right?   or are you just a hatchet man?  and yes, I'm the optimistic twin.

This is incrdible. Thanx for sharing this (even if only we residents watch it.)