MicSteel Newman

Yes, all that stuff costs money...but not NEARLY as much as the $300/month/sim that LL charges. They are raking in the bucks, and spending them SOMEWHERE, but not enough of it is going into basics. SL's core code is...a nightmare that needs to be started over, with different basic assumptions: The users have been showing LL for a decade that the initial architecture is inadequate, but LL has been adding patch after patch, rather than applying intelligent oversight. One is led to believe that they don't HAVE anyone with the requisite intelligence AND the desire to manage such a project AND put up with corporate leaders with inadequate vision or empathy or sensitivity to users' needs and desires. I wouldn't volunteer for that job! I understand that LL runs four to six sims on each server. That means they have no hardware challenges: $1,200 to 1,800 a month will buy a hell of a piece of hardware. But that's not much of a problem with SL.It would also pay the salaries of the average IT tech, if the tech were responsible for as few as a dozen servers. I'm assuming HUGE inefficiencies, here, and monstrous greed and financial siphoning to other projects; something on the order of %1,000 or more. The challenges are in the software: It is apparently not open-ended nor scalable enough for the uses to which user put it. UUIDs? Pah! Random-number generation is idiotic, when you consider the average user has upwards of 50,000 standing items in their personal inventory. (I'd recommend a UUID based on creator, date-time, and sim--including grid--where the creator was logged in, and adding serial numbers using a similar skeleton for copies. No chance of conflicting IDs, then.) Then, your assets could be DISTRIBUTED amongst mirrored asset-servers based on a variety of factors, such as how many items each creator has made, and how many copies of these items are in other avatars' inventories or rezzed in-world. Another challenge is networking. Servers are too centralized, apparently, and there are terrible bottlenecks. The technology exists to cure that: P2P systems provide a clue. I'm not saying the users' PCs should be turned into servers, although that's something that LL should consider--and even consider giving certain high-powered users discounts for--but distributing copies of textures, for example, would most certainly ease one obvious bottleneck. I designed a hierarchical, user-balanced, shared data structure for a MMO that has never seen the light of the Internet, that would be capable of eliminating almost all of the server-side lag we see today. (Yes, I'm quite aware that most lag is client-side, and I have solutions for much of that, as well.) In essence, I'm saying that corporate bloat has blinded project management--or disabled it--to the extent that they are only allowing themselves to put out fires. With this kind of management, SL2 will not manifest; its market will be taken by some game--accidentally, most likely--such as Elite: Dangerous or Star Citizen, when they allow users to build their own space ports, or ArcheAge or some similar game that allows users to have their own homes and farms in the game world. Enhancing such a product to create "rooms" that are non-combat, and thus isolated from the active gaming aspects so as to prevent lagging them, is trivial, and would only require someone in the corporate chain to say, "make it so." LL could lose its shirt in months, and those of us who LIVE in SL would find ourselves in a collapsing post-apocalyptic environment with NO support and NO reliability.