What is Live Chat for?

[Medhue Simoni]

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Phil Deakins wrote:

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

I have used it to restart my region, and it has worked about 75% of the time. I guess I should be happy about that, but I'm not quite sure why they would deny a restart.

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I've had the region I'm in restarted too. At first the person said they wouldn't do it because there are too many people in it. So I removed my bots and it was restarted. That's one reason why they would deny a restart.

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Well, yeah, but being that I'm usually standing on my own land while I'm talking to Live Chat, and I can see who is on my land, I wouldn't ask if it was an issue. The last thing a sim owner wants to do is kick a bunch of people off their land for no reason. I think this is a pretty fair assumption any person can make if some1 owns the full sim.

Plus, I was actually testing things with my mesh animals and found a very weird mesh bug. I could only confirm the bug and resume testing if the region was restarted. So, when Live Chat refused my restart request, I basically gave up on tracking or documenting the bug. Doing so would mean I'd need a sim restart everytime I was successful in duplicating the bug. I had better things to do anyways, lol.

[Phil Deakins]

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Phil Deakins wrote:

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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:

In my opinion, if you are paying hundreds of dollars per month you should be entitled to call and receive immediate help like you used to receive back when they had full concierge service for estate owners.

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Absolutely! And not only for concierge members, but for ALL paying customers. All paying customers should

expect

reasonable customer service. Linden lab doesn't provide it, and I am pretty sure it will cost them another $75 a month as of Thursday.

Since I logged in on Friday morning (approximately midnight Thursday PST), I have had particles from Govenor Linden owned land floating across my quarter sim, so that the land is unusable at ground level. There are more particles, also on GovL owned land, that float into my store in the sky. I've been ARing them every day since then - 8 ARs so far - and I'll continue to do it every day. As well as that, I have written a notecard to Rod Humble, which I will send today when his working day has started. I have described the problem and what LL has not done about it in 3 full days, and I have asked him if he still wants me as a customer or not. I've told him that I expect reasonable customer service, and that I won't continue paying them for something they are not now providing - useable land. I've also informed him that my billing date is the 24th and, if nothing is done, the land will be abandoned.

$75 isn't much to them but,as a paying customer, I

expect

reasonable customer service and I will either have it or I will stop being a paying customer.

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Well, well, well. The power was turned off in the house for a couple of house, while some work was being done and, when I got back, the particles had all been dealt with. So Rod Humble won't be receiving my notecard after all.

[Pamela Galli]

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Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

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Ziggy21 Slade wrote:

 

Charolotte Caxton wrote:

Live chat's purpose is to direct you to file a support ticket, read the knowledge base, or anything other than use live chat.

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Lol so true,

I have always been intensely annoyed by the fact that LL tout this as some sort of advantage in having a premium account, every time I have contacted them I have been told to raise a ticket, it's unlikely I would even bother to use the service again, its a pointless waste of time. The only time you are likely to use Live Chat is to solve some frustrating problem, all Live Chat does is to slow down the resolution of that problem as you waste your time talking to them and further frustrate you.

The support ticket system isn't much better, I recently contacted them to get my cash out limit raised, you would think I had asked for Rodviks credit card details they were so difficult about it, they said I hadnt earned enough L$s to qualify for a higher limit and to try again the following month, I wrote back and pointed out that I have easily exceeded their limit, and the rseponse was exactly the same email back, I write again pointing out again that they had made a mistake and that it was very rude to keep sending the same email and in response - yes - you guessed it - the same email back again. I wrote again and asked for the CSRs boss, he forwarded the email to her, she said he hadnt made a mistake he just 'couldnt see' my account transactions, and she again told me they would review it the following month. I gave up at that stage and I just use Virwox now, I will never ever cash out on the lindex again.

So if any Lindens are reading this you should take heed, its all very well slapping banner ads all over the internet to gain new business, you already had my business and lost it because the people you employ to face customers are totally disprespectful and arrogant.  

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Same here, if you need that cash-out limit raised, it's always a stalling, run-around game. The wife and I have been through that as well as a few friends. Months of dodging, tickets and phone calls.

That particular unethical practice needs to go. If you earned the money in "your world", they have no business dodging until you give up or they finally give in.

And it's incremental so each "income bracket" you hit, you have to go through it all over again. Not sure where else in the world this would possibly be legal from a business/account standpoint.

I can understand it once and exactly once in order to get the request on file to prevent fraud, if that process were as quick and easy as dealing with any other bank or business on the planet. It's a 48 hour process not a stall and hope you go away task.

That particular scenario doesn't work with any form of support.

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I ran into this a couple of years ago. I am sure things are different now, but I tried this: Went ballistic. Dropped all pretense of civility. Used all caps. May have used bad words.  They gave me a limit something like a million dollars. :matte-motes-big-grin:

 

[Dartagan Shepherd]

"I ran into this a couple of years ago. I am sure things are different now, but I tried this: Went ballistic. Dropped all pretense of civility. Used all caps. May have used bad words.  They gave me a limit something like a million dollars. **Only uploaded images may be used in postings**://secondlife.i.lithium.com/html/assets/emoticons/mattemotes/big_grin.png" border="0" alt=":matte-motes-big-grin:" title="" /> "

Glad you got it sorted, Pam ... we made it through round one after about 2 months of relentless "negotiations". It still happens and it's happening now for us on round two.

I don't care if that puts them in the position of having to give out 1099's and such, it's their business, they can manage it like every other company has to. If it weren't virtual money it'd be illegal.

Used to scoff at lawsuits in SL. Vowed I'd leave SL before I'd do something so silly as to bring a legal battle to the SL doorstep.

Then again I earned it, they agree to do it and it's real money at that point.

It's such an amateur handling of funds that it doesn't even resemble a mature company. It's also the straw that broke the advocates back.

Basically if you come close to anything resembling a RL income level, it's a crap shoot whether you can cash it out by LL's own mechanisms forcing you to look elsewhere rather than play by their own rules.

Some major cleanup needs doing with this fake money stuff. If they're really desperate they can take away the ability to cash out, of couse we know what'd happen to SL then.

[Qie Niangao]

My theory is that Live Chat is allowed to provide support for everything, until they do something that's actually damaging, at which point whatever they were trying to do requires escalation to an actual Linden.

Now, they're no longer permitted to do anything at all, but the Lab still pays them for the service because, hey, outsourcing cuts costs. 

[Pamela Galli]

And as usual they are only shooting themselves in the foot as well, because with the cashout fee they in effect earn a commission on ALL sales, not just Marketplace (marketplace gets double-taxed). It adds up to a lot at the end of a month. Why they would want to reduce that I could not imagine.

[Petronilla Whitfield]

Live Chat is useless.

I was a premium member for my first four years.  Then I had a problem with parcel listing fees.  You'd be amazed (or not) that the Live Chat folks have no idea what a parcel listing fee is.  I submitted a ticket, as instructed, and months later  the ticket was finally answered.  The answer was that they don't keep records for parcel listing fees for that long, so that they have no record of what caused the problem: I should have contacted someone right away. 

While waiting for that ticket to be answered, I had other reasons to contact Live Chat.  No episode resulted in a solution.  Mostly they were dismissive, occasionally rude.

I sold my mainland holdings.  When my yearly premium renewal came up, I did not renew.

I've been on an Estate for just over a year now.  Much as I love Second Life, I just can't see myself ever again making any payment to LL that involves my access to "premium" support.  I find it much less stressful to be without that access.

 

[Dartagan Shepherd]

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Pamela Galli wrote:

And as usual they are only shooting themselves in the foot as well, because with the cashout fee they in effect earn a commission on ALL sales, not just Marketplace (marketplace gets double-taxed). It adds up to a lot at the end of a month. Why they would want to reduce that I could not imagine.

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In larger amounts, it's less new fake money they have to print out of their own pockets rather than recycling L$ users have paid for and chipping away at that churn with the sinks and costs.

More long term income to play it straight and create those success stories, agreed.

I think it's always been a case of SL being a niche because it nickle and dimes rather than going for the real deal in funds, support, pricing, sales, etc.

[Deej Kasshiki]

I agree with others that Live Chat is useless. I only keep a premium account because when I signed up the amount of weekly bribe money (stipend) paid by LL amounts to giving me enough L$ that it makes the account essentially free. Of course, they've dropped that amount significantly so that now it's really not worth it.

I always laugh when I see them promote "expanded support, including Live Chat" as a premium benefit.

 

P.S. Dartagan what the heck happened to make you change your attitude toward LL? I remember when you were one of the Merchant forums' most vocal and aggressive defenders.

[Rene Erlanger]

Why do you think so much of the Lindex has gone to the likes of  VirWox and other 3rd party exchanges. The funds also gets instantly transferred to Paypal.....none of this waiting 5 or 10 days lark before it arrives to PP.

[Rene Erlanger]

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Deej Kasshiki wrote:

P.S. Dartagan what the heck happened to make you change your attitude toward LL? I remember when you were one of the Merchant forums' most vocal and aggressive defenders.

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He saw the light! :matte-motes-wink:

 

 

[Dartagan Shepherd]

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Deej Kasshiki wrote:

P.S. Dartagan what the heck happened to make you change your attitude toward LL? I remember when you were one of the Merchant forums' most vocal and aggressive defenders.

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Too much to put into a post. Regarding Merchant issues, the Marketplace got consistently worse until we reached the place we are now where deliveries are often delayed, breaks on a major holiday, transactions don't reconcile, basic features like sales graphs from the old XStreet intentionally left out, office hours were closed, communication dried up, dev team is unable to produce a fully working mostly bug free product after acquisition, 2 years and a from-scratch re-write.

Always and still believe in the enormous potential of SL to improve lives and create jobs.

However, we're stuck with predatory pricing, a system designed to siphon off the lions share of user money, policies and features designed to benefit LL and not the user.

After some discussions with those running businesses, decided to not shout from the sidelines but start a business so that I could experience what they go through first-hand rather than spouting years of RL business experience.

Did that successfully, LL made me jump through hoops to get money we earned. They still never approved it an open limit.

No answers in a year for what my customers get support on. Coalesced objects is my biggest peeve here. Can't give support answers to my customers when I can't get simple answers from LL on these issues. Said earlier in another post that it costs me L$60,000/week to pay a support staff in-world to do nothing but answer questions that are LL related problems and not problems related to our product. It's more like L$80,000, the rest of the costs being our own product support issues. Got thousands of our own support tickets from customers to back this up.

Support staff on a daily basis as well as customers can't get into chat groups frequently. How long does it take to get chat working again? 10 years? 15?

After nearly 10 years, inventory and basic LL functionality is still not stable, at a level of polish that it should be. Amateur hour as far as product sophistication.

Even things I'd like to be excited about like Mesh, when they finally introduce it, it's the most convoluted system I've ever seen in any 3D dev platform. The bottom line for me is that it's a cheat. Let's take sculpties for triangle count in a mesh for instance (we'll leave the evil torus alone, and not focus on the lowly cube).

Bottom line is that if I take the equivalent of 5 sculpties for triangle count, it costs me more than 5 sculpties worth of "land impact". I'm now getting less triangles for my money on outdated hardware, not more over the years. Prices don't come down, hardware doesn't get upgraded. Instead I'm more limited triangle-wise than when I started.

Yes I know there are benefits to mesh, that I can spend endless hours optimizing and get gains over prims and sculpties. But the fact remains, less triangles for my money than before. And I get to pay more in sinks for the priviledge.

At the height of my advocacy I was being spoon fed the corporate vision and the wonders of Viewer 2. None of these were followed through with as promised. In a childish display, M gets fired and 1/3 of the company gets the boot as Phil comes in at SLBB and pulls the white knight act ushering in an era of bug fixes and Fast, Easy and Fun. Where did that go exactly, into Land Impact calculations?

Already too long here and it's not very balanced or detailed, but now that I'm just a tier paying cash cow for more ventures like LittleTextPeople built on pimping virtual goods that earn people pennies on the dollar, while playing virtual currency games, there's not much point.

Not a lick of consumer protection or real world accountability with this company to be found. Because of virtual currency you have no consumer protection. Business and financial laws do not apply with LL. I do however keep one foot in the real world, and the contrast between your average company and LL is astounding.

Been waiting for a virtual world to come along and do it justice since the 70's and seeing the first 3D (a spinning wire-frame hand) in a film called Westworld. Followed virtual world-ish development ever since.

I'm left with a world that if I bring a huge idea into, it'll get acquired. If I refuse, it'll get built around me (such as Gaming Open Market, XStreet, etc.). Got to love opportunity in "my world".

Considered blogging to be able to give these issues more thoughtful treatment. But that'd require it resulting in some sort of change by LL, but does the farmer really listen to the cow? I'm just here to be milked.

Still blown away by the possibility. Less enchanted with the company that can't seem to make it stable at a reasonable price with solid business ethics.

[Deej Kasshiki]

Very well stated. I heartily agree with the various issues you've pointed out.  It's a damned shame that after a decade LL isn't even able to get the most basic things, like text chat, working reliably. One day I think some business school will use LL as the prime example of how not to run a tech company or any company for that matter.

 

[Porky Gorky]

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Deej Kasshiki wrote:

Very well stated. I heartily agree with the various issues you've pointed out.  It's a damned shame that after a decade LL isn't even able to get the most basic things, like text chat, working reliably. One day I think some business school will use LL as the prime example of how not to run a tech company or any company for that matter.

 

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Agreed the company does have some gaping holes and flaws in it's business model. When you said  that after 10 years LL still can't get the most basic things working, it  reminded me of the speech that Phil made at SLB7 when he listed some of the components that make up the backbone of SL and keep it running.

 

Philip Rosedale - 2010 - 21 - 06

"was thinking about this — what to say today and what to talk about — and I had a thought. I wanna try something. I wanna read you guys just a quick list that I made this morning, so bear with me and let me read you a list of stuff here:

Our financial fraud detection systems; the systems we use to transfer assets from the Teen Grid; the central databases; our dark fiber backbone; our asset servers which have about 450 terabytes of data; the 40,000 simulator cores in the system; the group chat system; the LindeX Market placement and fulfillment systems; the physics core; the visual rendering system; the scripting engines; the ability to transfer and move land; the region conductor that manages all the sims coming online; the map servers; the inventory servers; the client UI; the content takedown tools; the monetary policy, processes and systems we use; the customer support tools; the Department of Public Works; our international payment systems; our backup systems; Linden Homes; the Welcome Islands; the Infohubs; the grid monitoring tools; the localization systems; the private regions; our land auction systems; forums; search appliances; the Support Portal; metrics dashboards; our Phoenix, Dallas, and Washington, D.C. data centers; our 3rd-party Viewer directory, open source repositories and programs, and our internal build systems.

(Laughs.)

So I'm just gonna pause there. That is an incomplete list of major components that make up Second Life that I was able to just sit and kind of bring up from memory this morning while I was thinking about us. Now, the reason that I read off a list like that is to kind of — looking back — to sort of beg everyone's forgiveness and explain that this is an incredibly complicated system. And we have been building all of these different systems, these core components — they're all part of the Second Life experience, they all hold it up — together."

 

Back to me -

So lets give credit where credit is due. LL has achieved allot in the last ten years. They achieve allot on a day to day basis just by keeping most of these systems functional and operational 24/7. They may fail in certain areas like customer service and support to name a few, but they are #winning in many other areas that rarely give us cause for complaint. 

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Of those #wins ...

Financial fraud detection systems. If they'd gone with a 3rd party (like currency system or better yet real currency, they'd get fraud detection for free as part of the service. It wouldn't allow them such an extensive system of sinks to siphon off user money though. These days there are real world micropayment systems to be had.

Dark fiber backbone. Kind of necessary in a company that needs to pump lots of data. Some of this is outsourced to Amazon. Part of the design flaw is contiguous space, not just user generated content that isn't pre-rendered.

Group chat system. Yes, it doesn't work properly.

Lindex market placement and fulfillment systems. Again, if they'd gone with real currency, you'd have consumer and legal protection. Of course then you'd see sinks as real fees, and the only downside is that you couldn't have values of less than one cent USD, everything else would work exactly the same. Except for the double and triple charging that you can't do with RL funds. Lindex is for LL's benefit ... it opens up a world of sinks and no legal liability.

Teen grid assets. Ok.

Dark fiber backbone, let's hope so.

40,000 simulator cores. Not 40,000 now. And Phil kept asking "what could you do with 30,000 cores ..." to the outside world. Gee, Phil don't know ... let the customers who paid for them use them? Better yet for $300/month I want to know how many cores MY machine has, not how many cores a machine has and how many regions are stuffed on a single multi-core machine.

Visual rendering system. Rendering pipeline? Ok, always good to have in a 3D world.

Scripting engines. Corey used to boast millions of lines of hand-rolled code. The shortcut would have been to drop in an existing scripting engine, which would have led to a far richer language in SL.

The ability to transfer and move land. Always helpful when land is your primary product. Ok.

The physics core. Thanks Havok.

The region conductor that manages all the sims coming online; the map servers; the inventory servers; Always helpful, of course, and great that they work. Most of the time, not stable though.

Department of public works. Thank god RL garbage trucks don't have sim crossing issues.

Linden Homes. We had private land and landlords already. Some of them claim it affected their businesses. It adds to LL operating costs.

Support portal. Kind of what this thread is about.

Welcome islands. Are these still up?

Private regions. Ah, that $300/month thing.

Backup systems. What a novel concept!

The client UI. I think he means, or meant Viewer 2. This was outsourced to Greece which is now nearly bankrupt! Joking, obviously but right, this was outsourced to some obscure company and we know how well that went over, still trying to fix that one.

Land auctions. Another design flaw/LL cost. Auctions aren't needed, when flat rate is easier and cheaper to maintain.

Search appliances. Heh.

3rd party viewer directory, open source repositories, etc. The reason it takes an LL feature like mesh almost a  year to full adoption. Also known as the free labor department.

450 terabytes of data. Originally Phil said it'll scale and storage is cheap. Turns out it's not so cheap and that they should have built a better system of purging goods. Contributes to the instability of the inventory systems and costs me money every week when it screws up.

Forums. These forums are developed and run by a 3rd party company.

The appreciation and "love" I used to have for my $300/month service now goes to my utility companies. Do you have any idea how "hard" it is to bring me cable? To bring food to my supermarket? Do you know some things have to be shipped across the country in 24 hours? To deliver my mail? To bring me phone service, to bring me search results online? It takes systems within systems within systems.

While my sympathy and appreciation is larger than my wallet, I only have so much to go around and others do so much better and don't need to beg my forgiveness. With a phone call or two and an hour of my time at most I get a refund or a credit when something goes wrong.

I have an awe and wonder deficit on companies that have complexity in their production and operation pipelines. And silly me, I expect things I pay for to work as advertised or to be refunded or credited when they don't.

I may downsize and get rid of my region this month, then I can go back to appreciating what I get for free, rather than expecting a product worth $300/month.

I have no doubt that they have complex systems, that LL is full of bright people and that some of them are good hearted and actually believe in the concept rather than a paycheck. However, it's no more an excuse than any other company on the planet that sells me a service.

Can I cash in sympathy points for L$?

[Loki Kahanamoku]

The live chat is useless.  I have been trying to get an answer from Linden Labs for 7 days now on a question.  Live support can't tell me.   They won't respond to a ticket.  I have sent a message to Rodvik Linden both here and inworld.  He won't respond.   The whole support system is useless.   The only time I have gotten anything out of them is when I restart my sim and it doesn't come up all the way and I can't get back onto it to restart it.  I even stupidly signed up for a premium account thinking maybe they would respond to me quicker.   The funny thing is I was able to use the live chat when I was a basic member.   So, what am I really paying for the premium for?  Sure, they give me $300L a week which doesn't even make up for the $9.95.  They give me a very cheaply made linden house.  They give me gifts that I will never use.

 

Sorry. I hate to complain.  But, I work in customer service and Linden Labs has the worst customer service I have seen.   It was so much better when I started in SL back in 2009.   At lesat then they were willing to help.