Can you believe this? And for once it’s not fully the Lindens fault that everything is fucked up. However it wasn’t too long ago when they upgraded the grid to the new 1.20.x (havok4) build, as well as forcing an upgrade to a new client that contains the Windlight client.
Everyone is up in arms about everything going on. Half the people can’t use the new client, which is moot now since no one can login. I’ve had zero problems with the new client, it even works fine in ubuntu, except it seems to be missing the second life icon file. The nice thing about this new version is that it does a very good job at detecting what sort of hardware you have, and adjusts the quality of it accordingly, AND it supports more lower-end hardware than it did before. If you don’t like the windlight special effects, you can turn it off, and it renders like the viewer.
People who are having problems with this probably have some issues with thier PCs anyway. I mean seriously, these people will claim other games have no problems on their PCs yet the new SL viewer crashes thier machine all the time. Yet these are problably the same people who’ve had the same install of Windows XP for the past 5 years, and god knows what kind of bit-rot and malware might be lingering on thier old PCs.
So apparently who ever Linden’s ISP is at the root of this problem, from the sounds of that blog post, could you say that perhaps this has been the cause of the daily asset server issues we’ve had all year? Especially now after a grid wide update, and viewer update, the ISP’s internal networking “bundle” just couldn’t handle it every day, and last night was the final straw?
Perhaps Lindens should consider getting a new ISP? The can’t really, they have so much riding on their current ISP it would take days to move things to a new ISP. Maybe they should consider simply running servers in-house, instead of using a hosting service? Hell maybe they should become their own ISP, with multiple peer connections to the backbone of the internet? Then they won’t have to worry about some sort of weird priority internal networking setup that seems to be incompatible with how Second Life grid operates. Especially when it comes to database/asset server actually working properly.
For a unique service like Second Life, you can just call up any common ISP/hosting service to run your business. I don’t think GoDaddy.com has a MMO hosting service that anyone can use. I really do think the Lindens need to take this into their own hands and not rely on a 3rd party hosting service which I’m starting to believe is the reason for the asset problems we’ve been having the several months now. And I think with the new 1.20.x sim updates, and new viewer updates were simply the final straw on this ISP’s back that broke everything.
