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Friday, May 04, 2007 Unrest in CyberspaceResidents of the virtual world Second Life rise up to protest technical troubles brought on by a burgeoning population. By Wade Roush
The overseers of Second Life, a complex and booming virtual world hailed by many as the first step toward an immersive 3-D Internet, attempted yesterday to calm angry cyber-citizens who have petitioned for fixes to technical bugs recently plaguing the world. The main problem, in members' eyes: Second Life is growing so fast that it's straining Linden Lab's resources to the limit, including its developers' ability to fix old bugs and roll out new software versions that don't introduce new problems. In a town-hall meeting yesterday inside Second Life, the company appealed for patience. "We are working to fix bugs and enable incremental improvement," said Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer at Linden Lab, the venture-funded San Francisco startup that launched Second Life in 2003. The town-hall meeting was hastily arranged in response to a damning open letter published by irritated Second Life residents on April 30. "At the same time, we are building the foundations for the next-gen architecture that will radically improve our ability to scale," Ondrejka said. Every day, some 25,000 computer owners, plus teams from dozens of major corporations, are rushing to join Second Life. But as these new members buy virtual land, set up house for their avatars, and start in-world businesses, the strain on the Second Life "grid" is increasing. Linden Lab is adding more than 120 new servers every week, according to Ondrejka, but users say that the company still isn't keeping up. Complaints have piled up in Second Life forums and blogs from longtime users impatient over frequent slowdowns and crashes, property that goes missing, messages that aren't delivered, search and friend-finder functions that don't work, purchases that aren't completed, and poor to nonexistent customer service and technical support. The dissatisfaction culminated this week in the open letter, which demands that Linden Lab address the bugs "immediately," before rolling out planned features such as voice chat. More than 3,000 Second Life users have signed the letter so far. "People feel that Linden Lab is failing them because they are paying a great deal, in some cases, for a product that is failing to work acceptably, from a company that will no longer communicate with its customers," says one signer, a United Kingdom-based IT manager known within Second Life as Inigo Chamerberlin. Ondrejka spent most of the hour-long meeting answering residents' questions about the origins of the problems and explaining the steps his team of programmers plans to take to improve performance. As Ondrejka explained at the meeting and in an entry on the company's blog, many of the problems resulted from unnoticed errors in the most recent release of the simulation software and the viewer software that users must download to their PCs. Those errors are quickly being fixed, Ondrejka said. But the company faces a far deeper challenge, in the form of an overall software architecture that wasn't designed to support as many people and transactions as Second Life now hosts. |
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A New Vision for Second Life
04/25/2008
Comments
Buckwheat469 on 05/04/2007 at 12:55 AM
33
asdar on 05/04/2007 at 9:11 AM
62
It's just another way to have fun, and most people can keep it in balance.
As far as being unhappy with the game, well who wouldn't be unhappy if any computer app wasn't working that you paid for.
If I bought a deck of cards with a missing Ace of Spades I'd be unhappy about it and that's only a buck.
zig158 on 05/04/2007 at 5:55 AM
56
MrWireless on 05/04/2007 at 7:49 AM
2
Stop waiting for Second Life to be fixed when what you need has already been built and waiting for you too move on in.
LAH on 05/04/2007 at 9:28 AM
1
MrWireless on 05/04/2007 at 11:17 AM
2
If you looking to create your own virtual house, city, or mountain to ski down, all the tools are there to build whatever you imagination can come up with.
jwlang2001 on 05/07/2007 at 1:53 AM
1
MITBeta on 05/07/2007 at 10:12 AM
21
fabiobasile on 08/19/2007 at 9:44 PM
1
AW is geared towards people who are more interested in the technology and in creating something truly original. Needless to remind you how long AW has been around...
SL is practically a big Casino. Black Jack, Hookers, you got it all there. It's a pre-packaged environment where virtual lifestyle costs real money which makes the whole concept even more embarrassing for the non-corporate folks (the consumers), who decided to throw money in the Second Life's black hole.
I'm a 3D animator and i always wanted to have my portfolio displayed in virtual reality, but NOT in SL. I prefer to budget my money into something that i can truly call mine. Something that i can truly control and manage in a way that i don't even need to create boundaries or having people bounced off because they stepped on the wrong tile.
And if someone wants to buy my services they can click on an object and open a WEBPAGE. Yes, a good old HTML webpage, stable, reliable and lag-free.
I'm not surprised people began to get pissed about SL, it was just a matter of time.
Silacon on 05/04/2007 at 1:37 PM
37
Charles G. Nutter, CEO Silacon charles@silacon.com