Simon Linden has posted to the Server topic area of the technology forum about a new SL server feature, “region idling” which commences today, Wednesday 16th May.
This will see those regions that do not have any avatars either in them or camming into them to lower their frame rates and script processing, thus reducing their load on their host CPU. This should in turn improve the performance of the other regions running on the same hardware.
The idling itself should be entirely transparent to users, with the region immediately returning to “full speed” should anyone enter the region or cam into it. However, Simon does warn of a possible caveat to the transparency:
We expect this feature to be totally transparent to users. Residents will not see or be on regions that are idling. Scripts, however, may observe the effect if they are using the llGetRegionTimeDilation() function, and may require fixing.
There are some additional points to note with this capability, which are addressed in an FAQ also posted to the forum. These include:
Regions are not turned off or shut down. They merely run at a slower frame rate when nobody is there. They will appear exactly the same way as before in search, the world map and other Second Life features
Region idling cannot be manually disabled for a region
Any scripts that use LSL network functions will suspend region idling for a short period of time to allow them to function normally. This will allow scripts that connect to outside services via email, http and xmlrpc to run as expected.
The roll-out of the function will commence with the Blue Steel release channel, and will then be progressively rolled-out to the rest of the grid in the coming weeks. Anyone suspecting region idling is having an adverse effect on their region is requested to file a JIRA (no specific project given), providing clear information on the problem and the exact times it happened.
Starting yesterday, Premium members began to receive a survey via e-mail from Linden Lab seeking ways to improve the Wilderness Regions. I’ve actually no objections to surveys to a point – they do tend to point to linden Lab trying to seek some input from users, even if the surveys are somewhat weighted in a certain direction.
The focus of the survey was to gain feedback on how to make the Wilderness Regions more popular, and included a range of suggestions, thus:
LL’s suggestions for improving the Wilderness Experience
I’m not going to go anywhere near the suggestions themselves, as tempting as some of them are for poking at (I appreciate that people do come to SL looking for “dates” etc., but speed dating? In a jungle?!).
I’m also not going to offer up any suggestions on “improving” the current Wilderness regions myself per se, because Alex Hayden has pretty much hit the nail squarely on the head on that subject of offering up improvement ideas.
My only real response to Linden Lab on the subject of providing anything like the Wilderness Experience on a permanent basis is: stop it. Period.
I’ve no problem with these ideas being rolled-out as a means of previewing new capabilities that are coming into Second Life (as was originally the focus of the Linden Realms game). I’ve no objection to such previews being offered-up to Premium members ahead of the rest of the SL populace. This is worthwhile as it gives people the opportunity to get a look and feel for things ahead of roll-out, see how they might be used, etc. Combined with test areas where people can fiddle and play with new tools as well (as with pathfinding), then the preview idea has a lot of merit. Indeed, it is because I thought the Wilderness Experience was a means to preview pathfinding, I avoided being overly critical when it was launched.
However, I’m firmly opposed to LL sprouting “attractions” of their own all over the grid. As I commented on Twitter last night:
Which I don’t think is an unreasonable stand-point, given it is precisely how Rod Humble has described what should be the case.
Yet the company keeps muddying the waters. On the one hands, they’re hands-off for SL9B to the point of refusing to even provide a modest number of sims, on the other they’re tipping the table somewhat to assist a major reseller while also offering-up environments that, quite frankly,while novel in their own right could be done a hell of a lot better by users.
Again, I’ve not going to delve into the broader argument on LL’s approach, as Alex really has said just about all that needs to be said on the matter – and I again strongly recommend you read his piece.
There is another aspect of this that does annoy me however, and this is however you look at the survey, it reads as an attempt to seek feedback from us in order to make the Wilderness Experience more attractive to new users. Indeed, when you look at the Premium package as a whole, there is very little, that has any practical appeal to the established SL user for reasons that have been covered ad infinitum elsewhere including this blog).
There is actually nothing wrong with this – up to a point – and there are certainly valid reasons for making the Premium package appeal to those coming in through the door (not the least of which is helping to relieve the burden placed on tier for revenue – tier still accounting for around 80% of LL’s revenue). The problem is in the way that everything is skewed towards the new user at the expense of the established user.
There’s actually nothing new in this per se. Linden Lab hasn’t been focused on the question of actual user retention for years; their focus has been solely on churn and maintaining equilibrium. Whether this is the right policy or not is itself a major point of debate; it is also one I’m deliberately not going to enter into here, simply because it is complex, controversial – and somewhat outside the focus of this article.
Suffice it to say that as it stands, there is little within the Premium package that would encourage the vast majority of established Basic Account users to upgrade. Sure, I did last year, after a long period as Basic. But I knew going in that I was taking a calculated gamble, and the attraction wasn’t the benefits; simply put, if LL were going to start previewing stuff to Premium users (as with linden Realms), I was prepared to take a punt in order to be able to blog on such things. Sure, I’ve been somewhat positive to some of the benefits since that time – but the benefits alone would not have caused me to re-up to Premium last November.
Linden Homes: limited occupancy time?
Alex offers some very practical suggestions on Premium in his post; some simply – and sadly – won’t happen. Others – such as setting a time limit to how long people can occupy a Linden Home – are viable options, and entirely in keeping with the original intent of the scheme – although I would caveat the idea as Alex expresses it. As I said in reply to his piece:
While broadly agreeing on Linden Homes – there should be a time limit on occupancy in order for them to function as Jack Linden originally claimed, to get people started on the property ladder – I would caveat it on a couple of points:
Offering people a larger alternative prim-wise is not sound; it does tip the playing field and could have a further detrimental impact on private estates.
What do you offer users “in place” of the Home benefit at the end of the year? In order to encourage people to renew their Premium, something needs to be offered as an incentive.
Personally, I’d prefer to see Linden Homes made available for a period of 3 months & a mechanism put in place by which estates wishing to do so can advertise their offerings (through the “community hubs” within the various LH “estates”, for example), presenting those coming to the end of their time with the opportunity to browse and then go see what is on offer and make a choice. Three months strikes me as ideal, as it fits with encouraging people to take the quarterly membership package which LL is so keen to push, so it gives the option of downgrading at the end of the period & it is sufficient time for newcomers to get to grips with having a home in SL and familiarising themselves with concepts such as rentals as they prepare to make a move elsewhere.
This still leaves the question as to what to offer as an alternative incentive. A rise in the stipend back to the old L$500? probably not enough on its own, so something more substantial needs to be offered, or people will simply downgrade.
The key point in this idea is that by providing the space for private estates to advertise their offerings to those whose time in their Linden Home is about to expire, and leaving it up to estates as to whether or not they advertise / provide information, Linden Lab is continuing in its role as a provider while avoiding being seen as to be tipping the table in favour of one estate or another.
Another option LL should perhaps consider – and which was suggested a while back by Will Burns – strike deals with branded IPs to provide genuinely exclusive and desirable items for Premium members. Obviously, there are some sticking points in the idea (do any branded IPs see any remaining value in SL?), but these hardly negate exploring options.
The overall problem here, of course, is that we’ll all have our own views on how things can be improved in terms of Premium membership – and the majority of these views will differ. I’m actually prepared to be somewhat flexible on matters, but as I said, benefits weren’t what drew me into re-upping – although I’ll also say that unless something drastic happens elsewhere, they are not enough to keep me at Premium.
The Wilderness “staging” regions (now closed, as with the “public” Wilderness), alongside the pathfinding sims
As to the Wilderness Experience, I can only repeat what I said in the survey and at the top of this post: LL, do not make it a permanent feature, or try to expand it. You’ve closed it and the “staging” version off to public access. Keep it that way until you have something genuinely new and exciting you wish to showcase, then re-vamp and re-open the regions. Indeed, keep them available for precisely this purpose: showcasing new tools, new capabilities and the like – but limit their lifespan in each case. Don’t go trying to hang trinkets and baubles on them in an attempt to dress them up and make them attractive. It won’t work.
Frankly, you’re far better off doing what you purport you want to be doing: providing tools and a platform on which to use them. Leave the actual content creation to the experts.
On Friday, I drafted a piece on the lack of direct feedback from Linden Lab vis-a-vis the recent rounds of maintenance carried out on the 8th, 9th and 10th May. I held off publishing because I opted to wait until Close of Business in California to see if anything would be forthcoming. Then I got involved in other things, and completely pushed the post out of my head.
In the meantime, Tateru has, with her usual incisiveness asked the question I was planning to ask, but far more succinctly and directly. It’s a good read, and I suggest that if you haven’t you go read it – if only to save yourselves from hearing the same old, same old from me.
Elsewhere – well, Nalates Urriah’s blog to be precise – it may appear that the poor state of communications isn’t restricted to the amount of information flowing out of the company to the users, but many extend to internal communications within the Lab. In her piece, and in reference to the maintenance periods, she reports that Andrew Linden commented:
I think part of that is an operating system upgrade on some hosts, not network level maintenance, but I’m not sure. We’re definitely working on migrating to later versions of Debian, but there will be a few upgrades along the way before we arrive at Debian/Squeeze.
Andrew, together with many of the other Linden staff involved in User Group meetings usually try to be as informative as possible. Following the outage of the 26th April, for example Oskar attempted to provide some explanation via the forums, as Jack Abraham pointed out on this blog, and Daniel Voyager later reported via his.
So when you do see normally forthcoming staff using terms like “I think,” and “I’m not sure,” when describing a situation that impacts the entire SL service, it’s a little disconcerting, and might be seen as suggesting internal communications at LL may be lacking. After all, Andrew is a part of a group of LL staff who do face users, and who are likely to get asked the hard questions when something major is going on, so you’d perhaps expect the company to ensure they are furnished with sufficient information to be able to field such questions with a measure of clarity.
There was a time when we would see blog reports related to upcoming service improvements, and posts on outage postmortems. But no more. Instead, we’re left hanging or having to resort to scrabbling around the forums in the hope that someone has had the foresight to say something. And while it is great that news is frequently passed out at User Group meetings, not everyone attends these, so the message tends to go more unheard than heard.
Simply put: there is no substitute for clear, open communications – and however you look at it, the SL blogs are the best place to communicate when it comes to major announcements and service issues. In these cases, all other channels should point back to the blog, not used in place of the blog. As Tateru points out, the Grid still isn’t the most stable of environments following the recent work; we have no idea as to what the general status of the grid is or what is going on – and that leaves us guessing.
Going on Andrew’s comments, we may not be the only ones. Either way, it would be nice if someone at Linden Lab stepped up to the keyboard and took a little time to let their users and customers know exactly what is / has been going on, and how things stand.
On May 4th, there was a lively Twitter discussion about many things SL, during which, Tateru Nino asked the following question:
@InaraPey @isfullofcrap Question. Should Linden Lab Rule, or should it Protect and Serve? Where do you see it on that continuum now?
This lead to a further discussion on just what people felt LL’s role should be. Given that the company itself has seemingly been trying to move itself more into the realm of service provider more than anything else, I suggested that Provide and Inform might be a better means of describing LL’s role.
I’m uncomfortable with the idea of “ruling” – although that is at times how LL appears to be operating (and outside of questions of ToS and arbitration*) – as that implies an autocratic approach completely devoid of any form of interaction with the user community, and if we’re honest, that’s actually far from the case. Yes, LL frequently suck in the manner in which they go about things, and they may not do things quite as we would like; but they are not entirely autocratic in nature. Were this otherwise, it’s doubtful we’d have the likes of third-party Viewers, nor would we have the likes of sim “donations” to the likes of the Linden Endowment of the Arts.
Similarly, I don’t think Protect and Serve entirely fits the bill because “protection” is something Linden Lab should be doing (and is, for the most part) as part and parcel of providing the Second Life platform, while “serve”, while warranted in terms of customer service potentially puts the shoe a little too much on the other foot when compared to Rule. Again, I’m not saying that Linden Lab has got either “protection” or “service” right, rather that both should be intrinsic to how they go about running Second Life.
Which brings me to Provide and Inform. I settled on these because to me, they are pretty much the two foundations upon which and service-oriented company should establish itself. “Provide” in this regards is pretty much self-explanatory; “Inform” brings us back to the issue of communications, which as we’ve again see this week is an area where Linden Lab pretty much sinks itself once again.
Much has been said in the intervening time between Tateru posed her question and I gave my initial response; some of it – such as today’s Metareality podcast for example, covers much of what I’ve been slowly cogitating over the last week and slowly forming into words for this post (so much so that I’ve actually thrown a large part of this post into the bin).
However, I’m not intending to turn this into another post on LL’s failure in communications (that may well come later, depending on what happens through today). What I am aware of is that even provide and inform is not entirely sufficient in defining what the Lab should be about, as both tend to perhaps point to an outward flow, rather than something more bi-directional in nature.
So, at the risk of appearing to be jumping on Tateru’s bandwagon with her recent, and excellent post / question relating to Linden’s Lab’s message, I’m going to throw this question out to the wind and see what comes back:
How do you – as succinctly as possible – see the Lab’s role, and how would you sum it up into a suitable expression?
*ETA as I totally forgot to ensure that remained after editing this piece. Mea culpa.
[Posted 9:45am PDT, 8 May 2012] We will be performing scheduled maintenance today, Wednesday and Thursday of this week (May 8, May 9, May 10), beginning at 6:00pm PDT each day. Each maintenance is scheduled to last around 8 hours. Please save all builds and refrain from rezzing no copy objects, as some regions may be taken offline and remain offline for extended periods of time. Please follow this blog for any updated information. [emphasis mine]
So for today, Wednesday and Thursday, expect severe disruption to SL.
Whether or not this maintenance is related to recent service outages / issues, the most recent of which occurred some 24 hours ago, is unclear. However, the forewarning is appreciated.
While I have been prone to avoid personal opinion in “news” items, that there is upcoming maintenance does prompt me to ask Linden Lab as to whether they could also broadcast a reminder in-world prior to the work commencing, for the benefit of those who may not routinely read the Status Page or who are not engaged on Twitter?
Update: Latif Khalifa reports encountering the problem on Singularity, so the issue is likely to affect V1-style Viewers as well, and provides a potential workaround for those encountering the issue (see comments, below).
There have been a number of reports of mysterious Viewer crashes of late, specifically in relation to file operations (saving a texture or snapshot to disk, attempting to upload, setting your cache location, etc.).
The problem appears to be manifesting itself in V3-based Viewers, and the culprit appears to be Microsoft Skydrive.
A JIRA has been raised on the issue in general (VWR-28843), with reports that uninstalling Microsoft Skydrive eliminates the issue. This is obvious not the best solution for the situation, but those experiencing the issue may wish to check the JIRA and consider WATCHing it.
