Pyramid Dancing

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I was working on a project for SimKast and wanted to demo it for Deli. So I teleported into this pyramid in Winyah and I started to dance

Of course, I just had to request “Walk Like an Egyptian” by The Bangles. I just had to!

Interesting coincidence…

So a day after I made my previous rant, Linden made this post to their blog. Now I’m sure it was just a coincidence, but just in case there are naysayers out there might think that perhaps this was the reason for my issues, rest assured that my account contact information was valid and up to date. They had no reason not to contact me. I should also note, that they specifically mention alts. While it’s true my alts were blocked from logging in as well, the fact remains that the worst hit was my main (paid) account. If this *is* a problem, Linden Labs, why not change the login message to say something like “Account Disabled. Please provide valid contact information on our website” or something to that effect. You know, something helpful!

In less ranty news… I’ve been doing some fishing at Neo Realms fishing camps. Not sure why, but there’s something kinda rewarding about catching a virtual fish. Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s just a thinly veiled excuse to hang out with friends without resorting to ‘god I’m bored’ as smalltalk. Maybe it’s listening to Shoutcast which keeps it interesting. Either way, it’s a great way to get out and meet new people as well as hang out with friends, which just fine in my book.

In case you happened to have taken my classes in the past and want to take some more, I do plan to schedule more in the future. The problem is, it’s the time of the year when I wanna get out and do stuff while the weather is nice. That means less time around the computer (which I already spend too much time around at work). It’s also sweeps month currently, so yes, I’m spending a fair bit of time in front of the idiot box as well. I can multi-task and indeed I do login to Second Life while watching tv. However, I’m not going to teach when I can’t devote my attention to it. It’s not fair to the students as it takes enough concentration just to keep up with the class, keep an eye on students to make sure they’re keeping up, and of course answer question both in chat and in IMs. So keep an eye out… I like to try and schedule classes at least 24 hours in advance, though sometimes I don’t know what my evening is looking like until that afternoon, so I can place them as late as four hours in advance.

Linden labs support sucks

There, I said it. Though, for those of you who don’t know me well or what I went through a couple weeks ago, perhaps I should start a the beginning. I wasn’t going to detail this in the blog, but to be honest, it’s been eating at me so I need to vent to a larger audience. If you’re not in the mood for a little bit of bad language and an overall rant please hop on over to Cute Overload, where everything is warm and fuzzy and right with the world (and suddenly ” … the happy home with trees and flowers and chirping birds” popped into my head). Otherwise, read on… maybe if someone who has any sort of say over at Linden support sees this it might make a difference. At any rate, I think it might make me feel better (or make someone else feel worse).

It was a dark and stormy night… no actually, if I recall, it was a fairly decent early Friday evening a couple of weeks ago. I get back to my apartment after work and settle down to relax for the weekend. I go to log into Second Life and say hello to my sweetheart Asaria. I first tried from my Macbook, and got “Second Life cannot be accessed from this computer.” Uh?? So I try from my desktop Linux box, same message. I tried logging in using my alts, same message. What the fuck is going on here? Admittedly, if I’d actually checked the knowledgebase I’d have at least gotten a somewhat non-helpful explanation of what the message means. However, that still didn’t explain why.

I should add… Linden keeps making references to not giving out your password and securing your computer so that other people in your household can’t login to your account. Ok…

1. I’d like to think my password is relatively secure
2. I live alone
3. When I’m not around I either shut down my computer or lock it… both actions would require a password to unlock (and let’s be honest, if someone has physical access to my machine at home, I have bigger problems any way).
4. So far as I can tell, no unauthorized persons logged into my accounts

I talked with Asaria via Yahoo Messenger and was able to ascertain that the grid was indeed up, and there was no mention of any problems on the blog, so I go to login to my account on the website and discover that while it seems to accept my username and password, it tells me it can’t retrieve my information currently. Asaria, in-world, tells me that I don’t even show up in search. WTF?!

I find Linden’s 800 number and give them a call. I get a prerecorded message saying that the wait time would be around 12 minutes. Ok fine, I’ve waited longer than that to talk to support with other companies. Another pre-recorded message says that there is known issues with logins currently and to try again in 30 minutes. This was around 4pm or so Pacific time and they close at 6, so I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and hung up. After working on dinner and sitting back down to relax and find I still can’t login an hour and a half later, I give them another call (and get the same wait time and message about login issues). This time I wait. After getting all kinds of friendly advice from some prerecorded Linden messages… interrupting my train of thought at the moment to mention that Jeska’s message was extolling the virtues of using Live Help. While this was all well and good a few weeks before… Live Help no longer existed at the time they were still playing that message in their hold queue. Ok, back on hold… I sat on hold to listen to some god-awful and very repetitive computer-generated music (way to go Linden, if it was designed to calm people down, it didn’t work). After waiting around 12 minutes or so, I got a message saying all reps are busy and that I would be guided through opening a voice ticket. I answered the prompts with my information and pretty much gave up hope that I’d actually hear back from anyone before Monday. As it turned out, Monday would have been optimistic.

Fast-forward to Monday… I still can’t login. I call again, wait on hold again (and get told about login issues, again). Again (sensing a theme?) I get asked to leave a voice ticket. This time I hang up and fire off an e-mail from their website thinking perhaps I might get a quicker response that way. Twas not to be. On Tuesday I finally tried a different tactic. When I called Linden this time, I tried their “billing issues” option figuring that this really is a billing issue (or would be come one soon as my Premium membership was coming up for renewal). After waiting on hold for around 10 minutes this time I was greeted by an actual human being! Hurrah!

I give her my vital statistics and details of my problem and she places me on hold to look into the problem. After a couple of minutes she comes back and tells me the problem as been cleared. Now, being both worried that someone had broke into my account and being a sysadmin by profession, I was curious as to what the problem actually was. She evaded the question, said it’s all fixed and I can login again. I again asked what was wrong and she gave the cryptic answer that my account was suspended because it was suspected of fraud, but there wasn’t enough evidence to keep it deactivated.

Excuse me?

I prodded her for details… what was done on the account which made them suspect I was involved in any sort of fraudulent activity? I had paid for a year of premium almost a year ago after quickly making friends in the game. I also made small purchases of Lindens on the LindenX a few times during the year. However, the last purchase I made was well over a month or so ago (might have even been longer than that, don’t recall offhand when exactly). Of course, the response was cryptic… they can’t give out details on how they determine ‘fraud’ because it’d compromise their ability to track it.

I then hammered her on their communication issues regarding this. By communication I mean the lack thereof. They sent no e-mails, made no phone calls. If I hadn’t taken the initiative persisted on pestering them about it, I would have heard nothing. She sort of shrugged it off. I then asked what Linden Labs was going to do to compensate me for the 4 days of paid time lost because of their ’suspicions’ and the reply was that they (Linden) can suspend any account for any reason at any time. I mean come on, you suspend my account (might have even been an automated system), give absolutely no notice, and you’re going to try and act like the problem is mine? All I was asking for was for Linden to make up for the 4 lost days I had paid for, how much effort would it have been for them to extend my premium account 4 fucking days? If anything, they should see that my account was due for renewal that week and perhaps show some good faith and make a customer happy? No, I suppose why should we care about one lousy customer. After all, all we want is big businesses to spend thousands and thousands per month on virtual real estate. Fuck the little guy.

I lost it… I exploded… however I was also careful never to actually curse at her. I told her I was ‘pissed off’ at their lack of communication and proceeded to rant that this is a systemic problem with Linden labs. While most other companies are working hard these days to become more transparent, the wall of secrecy is still going strong at Linden. I’m a sysadmin, I can understand issues with scaling systems and dealing with an unexpected load. But in my career I’ve also been on both sides of the support table and this was totally unacceptable.

I asked to speak to a supervisor… expressly for the reasons that I want *someone* to know just how bad I think their support is in the hopes that someone at the top (ARE YOU LISTENING PHILIP ROSEDALE??) would take notice and perhaps rethink their support policies. No such luck. I got “I am a supervisor and there is no one I can transfer you to.”

At this point I realized I was talking to a brick wall. I gave up, decided to be happy that she graced me with her presence and was grateful I could login again. I thanked her and hung up. I also made the decision at that point that Linden Labs deserved from me an amount of money proportional to the level of communication and support they provided me, which worked out to $0. Big fat goose egg, I waited out the end of my year and canceled my premium membership. I also swore an oath to myself not to buy any more Lindens either. I’m a customer, and as such, withholding money is the only thing I can do to protest. I mean, I could have canceled my account outright, but I’ve made too many friendships in SL to do that. So Linden Labs turned me into a leech. I’ll be more than happy to earn money in the game teaching classes and perhaps using camping chairs. However, I refuse to invest any more money into their system until they make some fundamental changes to the way they do business.

So that’s the end of the story… so I thought.

When I called Linden that night I was able to login from my laptop after I hung up. What I’d neglected to try was logging in from my desktop. I discovered I couldn’t… same message. *Sigh* I tried calling again, and after waiting on hold and getting asked to leave a voice ticket I gave up. You win Linden Labs. You broke my spirit, you made me not care enough to bug you any more. After some trial and error I finally discovered a way around the block on that computer (and if you ask, I won’t tell you how, I’m sure if anyone there reads this much I’ll be banned anyway).

Oh, and that e-mail I sent? Two days later I finally got a totally generic and unhelpful response from Pierre-Luc Linden with pointers to the KB. By the way, I’m convinced Pierre-Luc is the only person that Linden has responding to e-mail… I had e-mailed them a couple of months ago related to not being able to login (this time login server issues) and again, a few days later a totally non-helpful “hey, you can login now” message from him. Well, no shit.

You might also be curious who I actually talked to when I called. I wish I knew, that was the one thing I neglected to ask. If I had, I’d have included that in this post as well (assuming it was just a first name or a Linden). By the way, this is an open invitation to anyone from Linden Labs to talk to me. I’d like to think I’m fair and willing to listen. If you have any questions about what went down and what I think was wrong, you have my contact information, drop me an e-mail or give me a call. Communication is key, and I think first and foremost is what I was most upset and frustrated about in this whole experience. I don’t care about the lost days so much. I do care about the fact that no attempt was made to inform me on what was going on and the fact that your support system sucks ass and needs to be trashed and rebuilt from the ground up. If you keep pulling this shit, users whose contributions and hard work have made Second Life what it is today will vanish and you’ll end up with the equivalent of Second Life downtown Baghdad (or perhaps SL Times Square before it was mostly cleaned up).

Did I actually try and communicate any of this with Linden Labs? Well, I did to some extent. When I dropped down to a basic account, I was given a short survey why I canceled premium and a nice comments field. I filled it and then some recounting the story of what happened (of course I started it out with “I’m not sure if anybody reads this, but…”). I hope someone does. If anyone else knows of ears I can bend a little, perhaps someone who would have the power to listen and take action to improve the system as a whole, I’m all ears.

Thank you for your time,

-Compulov Weeks