SL Bots or Linden Issues?
I hate to become yet another Second Life basher, because it’s really the only MMORPG I do, but it’s been feeling like the bad old days lately … crashing, laglaglag, grey goo everywhere … but the capper came when I couldn’t log in any of my alts for several hours. Finally, I got a new “Login Failure” message blaming higher-than-usual loads.” And, once I logged in, things took forever to rez. Should I blame SL? My Leopard operating system? Is it finally time to boot up the XP side of my MacBook Pro and go back to the PC version?
I didn’t see any mention of this on the SL blog, and I didn’t submit a support ticket, so I don’t know what the problem was. But Alice Klinger, who writes the excellent Beatenetworks blog, suggests it could be a concurrency problem (too many avatars on at once) and if it is, bots could be to blame. Bots, as in the phony avies sim owners use to populate their islands and increase their search rankings, or bots that people create to make money.
She also mentioned a promise by the Lindens that paying members would get log-in priority over free members. I’d be on board with that for sure.
Alice also suggests that because the login-failure message is new, the Lindens might be experimenting with some changes and preparing for a concurrency problem. Like I said, back to the bad old days. It would be nice to know. I mean, Mono is great but I just want the program to run correctly. Am I expecting too much?
August 22nd, 2008 • 
Evansmom Goodspeed • 
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comment | August 22, 2008 at 13:12 | individual comment-link
“a promise by the Lindens that paying members would get log-in priority over free members. ” - They only ever did that once (for seven minutes) and then promised to never do it again.
comment | August 22, 2008 at 14:17 | individual comment-link
I’ve had some real problems over the last few days as well - much less stable and far more inventory issues then the new “normal” with the latest viewer which I find substantially more stable than the last few viewers. My best guess tho, is that it’s the rolling restarts, and the new code sitting on servers waiting to be awakened that’s been causing the issues. I noticed this first on Monday I think, before the restarts were announced, but I knew it was due this week and mentioned to a friend might be the cause. Seemed to have similar issues the fortnight of the last batch of server upgrades, which if you recall, required several attempts. It’s super frustrating, I agree, but I gotta give the lab kudos, they seem to be doing astounding work on stability at the moment in the mid-term.
comment | August 23, 2008 at 02:12 | individual comment-link
but for the BOTS: we did a head count, back in june/july - - - jumped from SIM to SIM, from far west to far east on 5 different “meridians” and checked what kind of avatars were there.
you can judge whether you see a botfarm, normal camping or busy avatars.
we counted about 600 avas - of which WERE 150 BOTS!!!
25%!
(and another 20% campers)
if this is the reason why your game is spoilt, LL should do something. we started a new SLport: BOTSPOTTING: we publish photos of botfarms in blogs and forums. this may raise consciousness about the bot-problem at least.
in the german SLinfo-forum this was one of the hottest topics this summer.
would love to contribute to any international initiative!
http://2ndtravel.blogspot.com/2008/07/das-falsche-viertel.html
greetings from the bus, nuschi
comment | August 23, 2008 at 08:00 | individual comment-link
Reuters/Second Life - Linden confirms login restrictions
Here’s a link to a Reuters post supporting what Tateru shared with you
Also, it’s not Leopard. I’ve had similar issues on Leopard here but it’s on and off as the grid waxes and wanes under load. Winblows users I’m in touch with via skype have experienced the same login/stability issues as I have this past week or so.