Concierge Party Disaster
So on saturday there was a pseudo-secret party for LL’s FIC, better known as anyone who puts down enough money each month to pay for a private island or half a mainland sim (assuming LL’s billing division can figure out how to charge your account of course).
You had to apply for tickets by submitting a help request, which seems to be a somewhat peculiar use of that channel, seeing as how it was specifically designed and created because the official help channels were being clogged up with non-help issues.
Come the big event, and a notice is sent out with an attachment containing landmarks to the 8 sims that hosted the event. The first landmark I clicks on spent 3 minutes locked in the teleport screen before failing. The second one succeeded, but may as well have failed, because the sim I arrived on was suffering from massive time dilation, and was effectively unusable.
So I teleported to another sim in the event. I arrived, then seconds later, SL had a hard crash to the blue screen of death. I was still pretty enthused about this event, so I rebooted as fast as I could. I promptly crashed into the blue screen seconds after relogging back into SL.
Fortunately, over the entire session at the party, those were the only blue screen crashes I experienced. I had two more crashes, which were fortunately restricted to SL only, and not the entire system. Nonetheless, four crashes in under ten minutes made me think that I probably wasn’t destined to be at that event.
Linden Lab, you know, SL is wonderful in many ways. But inviting several hundred people to an event held in a small area, and yes 8 sims is a small area for that many people, and asking them to come all at once, and not suggesting that they take any of the usual precautions to reduce lag, such as removing prim attachments and scripted attachments, all that is a grewat way to showcase SL at its worst. I can only imagne that because the company policy is that employees must have “drunk the kool-aid” and not criticise the product, no one suggested this event was being set up in a less than sterling fashion, and to ask any guests to do any of the things I mentioned would be heretica and be tantamount to admitting the product is les than perfect.
Shame.
SL is a great platform. It has its flaws, as does any program. There is no shame in a company admitting to having a flawed product as long as it knows how to work around those flaws and has a team dedicated to defeating those flaws. But to act as if those flaws don’t even exist is uninspiring.