Location: Governor Linden’s Mansion

It must have been some type of macabre send-off for Ruth.  Today, trying to meet Tenchi for our road-race, I had as bad an experience as I’ve ever had here, canceling out the great road-trip completely.  Hordes of us materialized not at our last locations or our homes, but at none other than a region dedicated to the history of Second Life®.  I suppose it will be used for the upcoming fifth birthday celebration. 

All of us were, at first and for quite a while, nude, gray, and Ruth.

This morning Linden Lab® lost the connection to its internet service provider.  Lovely.  Once again the entire Metaverse, with its virtual economy and culture, collapses over an error that never seems to happen to more established companies.  Or not longer happens…recall how, in the mid 90s, these sorts of snafus occurred on regular basis?

I’m not a betting man, but the new CEO had best stabilize this mess. The last several days have been horrendous for connectivity to the company’s servers.

Tell me, MMORPG players, how often doe this sort of stupidity happen at World of Warcraft? Not often, I’d wager…

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Just as a follow-up, I thought you might like to know that Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, a new MMORPG recently released, just encountered a very comical glitch. According to the Game Theory podcast, AoC’s producers reported an error in the latest patch that resulted in the inadvertent increase of breast size for female avatars and that they would correct the error as soon as possible. While hysterical, I also thought it highlighted how Linden Labs isn’t the only MMO producer facing coding and network problems.

Actually, WoW used to have very significant server issues. In the older, more populated servers, a queue for log-in would form during peak hours b/c too many people were on, leaving you to sit on an electronic line for 5-15 minutes as you watch your queue number as if it were the New Year’s ball at Times Square. Other times, entire servers or server clusters would go down for maintenance or due to an error, causing mass exoduses to newer, less populated servers. At these times, the starting areas (especially Teldrassil, the Night Elf staring area) would fill with exiled lvl 1 avatars just like Second Life’s Help Islands whenever there’s a glitch, except that we never had the same loading lag since not all players are on the same network at the same time. Indeed, some servers got such bad reputations for going down that players started adopting rather lewd mottos referencing their server’s poor luck. I don’t know how it is now. Blizzard’s had years to perfect their system, especially under the pressure of players paying $15/mo for their service, and I even remember seeing notable improvements during my time on Greymane. I guess Linden Labs is undergoing a similar dark age, with the added pressure of having all their users on a single, massive world.

Oh, and to be fair to Linden Labs, I feel that they have a much more daunting task at optimizing server stability than Blizzard does. Unlike World of Warcraft, Second Life’s content is all user-added, which means that any and all changes to the world are unregulated and effectively spontaneous. Blizzard, on the other hand, controls any and all changes to the world, and implement said changes during their weekly server updates. So while I do agree that SL is ways away from reaching the stability of WoW and other MMOs, I also find myself having more patience with Linden Labs.

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