Region crossings fail

[Liv Leigh]

The past few weeks people in the sailing community have been experiencing a dramatic change in behaviour of Region Crossings. And not one for the better...

Despite Rodvik Linden's nice words at the SLCC keynote speech, nothing has been done so far to improve reliability of region crossings. Sailors, pilots and others are getting annoyed with this. The number of in-world events in our community has been dropping for many months now due to those issues, many just left SL altogether or only log in occasionally to chat and stand still in a corner.

How are you guys planning to bring new people in and keep them interested in Second Life if you fail to improve the platform's basic functionality? Tell me.... 

[Alexi Raynier]

You ask a good and important question and the answer may lie in last weeks RC restarts on blue steel server.  After that lag and region crossing were fine for a good while then gradually diminished, but that offers hope that LL is on the right track here and that the storm of restarts we recently endured may actuall bear fruit.  That, however , will not happen if LL remains under the illusion that thing are fine, and will depend on player vocalizing their problems here in the forums and not giving in to the spin masters who insist that sl has no problems and that any problems you are haveing come from your viewer, computer or ISP.

[Liv Leigh]

If they wish to continue to believe the problems that I and every other sailor or pilot in SL have, depend on our ISP's or are otherwise due to our own fault, Linden Labs has a serious problem... And not just with their credibility.

In the years that I have been sailing in SL I have seen dozens of friends leave the scene: enthousiastic, fanatic people, people who wanted to make a nice platform for sailing simulations on SL and just gave up on it. People who rented land in large sailing estates, spent real money on virtual boats. Many of them are simply gone now.

All this unrealized potential... It is still there.. but for how much longer? 

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

I was prompted to do some checking last night, after some troubles with region crossing and sever packet loss.

1: I did various speed tests to servers in different parts of the world. My connections to elsewhere in Europe were good: close to my line maximum, good ping times, and zero packet loss.

2: Some parts of the USA also had fast, reliable, connections. Some did not. I had great trouble making any connections to test servers in Texas and Arizona.

3: Both the SL website and  SL itself were showing extreme sluggishness. At one point I had a burst of 38% packet loss reported by my viewer.

I think from that I can rule out problems at my end of the link. There are times, known to me, when my ISP struggles, but that affects everything when it happens.

The problems might still be attributable to who LL gets its connection to the wider internet from. If so, Linden Lab have a contract. If they're not getting what they paid for, the Lindens need to do something about it.

I have wondered if the move to HTTP has changed how the LL internal network is used. Are there new bottlenecks?

And, the last few weeks, there has been the hassle of the OS upgrade. Does some obscure configuration file need tweaking?

I've given up on anything that involves region crossing for the nonce. TPs are unreliable too. Sits and stands have been bizarre sometimes but, so far, the perverse and fetishistic sexual encounters have still been working.

[LukeFlywalker Fittinger]

I have been an SL pilot for over 3 years now and have been experiencing region crossing failures like never before. I used to be able to fly long distances on the mainland and only have problems with ban lines and full regions. Now I crash on the open water LL sims. This is not isolated to mainland sims. Our group has 3 private regions, 2 full sims and 1 homestead and it is impossible to cross and keep and aircraft. It is even a problem just crossing with an AV. 

Now I have to ask myself and others this question. What company can continue to provide a product that works correctly maybe 70% of the time (I'm being generous), at the prices LL sells us Second Life for, and stay in business? LL should thank their lucky starts they have such loyal and forgiving customers. BUT here is one customer who is running out of patience and coming to the end of his loyalty and forgiveness.

 

Luke Flywalker

[Liv Leigh]

Luke, you are not the only one. The lucky part of the story for Linden Labs is probably that they have a product with a lot of potential at their hands and a nr. of enthousiasts that see this in their customer base.

 

The unlucky part is that they don't see how their inability to make things work properly in-world has driven many people like you and me away already in the course of the years. I have seen and heard too many sailors in my community who simply gave up because of SVC-472. They are replaced by new ones to a certain extend, but the growth has stagnated. Much in the same way all of SL has stagnated now.

 

What can you expect if you try to use our communities to market your product to new customers but fail to repair the product's shortcomings for it's existing customers? 

[Orca Flotta]

To make itt short: Vehicle users of all kinds are no happy campers anymore, never really been happy in the first place.

Question for us is what are we going to do to get LL give us some serious commitment to fix their grid?

Hanne, Vickie and me have announced to stop all our races for TrYC ... but what use is it? - LL won't even notice. They will be happy for less tragic incidents in the public waters, if they notice anything at all.

Fi and Charlz are talking about giving up their sim and become hobos. - How will that help? LL are loosing so many sims right now, one more won't bother them at all.

I'm thinking about giving up my premium account and toss my little parcel as well. - LL will laugh their asses off.

I think only heavy pressure, applied by the big estate owners, will make them listen and put more effort into fixing all the problems.