Friday, June 29, 2012

Wheels within wheels

So I logged in just now... which is not news to most people, I'd admit.

However, I was pleasantly surprised, because, for the past couple of weeks, I've been having an annoying problem, whereby I would log in to SL and find myself in a sort of limbo state, apparently in a region but disconnected from it - unable to move, TP, or communicate, with myself and the area around me loaded to a greater or lesser degree of completeness, and with a ping time pegged at 10000 ms.  The only thing to do, it seemed, was log out, try to log in again, and hope that it worked.  Sometimes it took up to four tries, and I was starting to get quite cross about it.

And, since about the middle of this week... that hasn't happened to me.  I think it unlikely that this isn't connected to the server rollouts that always happen Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Whenever I am bitching about LL, I always try to remember how much the whole of SL is still a work in progress... they are meeting unique technical challenges, they are constantly expanding the capabilities of the system, they are operating, in many ways, at the cutting edge of virtual world technology.  (There are virtual worlds out there with more impressive features, but not with SL's high concurrency levels... there are others with many more concurrent users, but not with SL's level of individual user freedom.  SL operates in a niche which is far from completely explored.)

Of course, there are areas where LL deserves a thorough lambasting, and we can all think of six off the tops of our heads.  But, sometimes, I think it wise to bear in mind just how much the technology is changing behind the scenes, and how hard it can be to predict the effects of those changes on the user experience.  I would be very surprised if "Glorf's incomplete login problem" had appeared on a LL to-fix list at any time... but, something they've done seems to have fixed it.

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