Plenty has been said, and plenty continues to be said, about the upcoming voice feature to Second Life. Now that the beta has gone live, there's a lot of comments about it on the blog, but I shall not be using it for a wholly different reason than any of the ones given there.
When I was with Telewest in the UK I got a speed of 3Mb/512k and the latter is the important number - it's the upstream value, the amount of data per second that your computer can send back to your ISP.
When I first came to Canada, that changed to 5Mb/384k which was faster at receiving but slower at sending. This was still okay for what I wanted; SL worked fine, and so did WoW.
Now I've moved ISPs again to Sympatico, and quite frankly they're not very good, but at the present time they're all I can get onto. Their speed is 3Mb/256k which again is fine for receiving, but now on the threshold for transmitting. World of Warcraft now has severe latency problems, and Second Life - without voice - is also somewhat laggy. Add the strain of having to deal with voice streams coming in and going out, and the whole thing will collapse into lag hell. I already can't use Skype or Ventrillo with either Second Life or World of Warcraft without getting such severe breaking that people can't understand what I'm saying.
I reserve judgement on whether it's a good or a bad idea to add voice to Second Life. I do agree that many "girls" out there will end up being proved to be men, and I do think a lot of escorts may lose their jobs when the clientèle discover they've actually been engaging in gay cybersex. But all this doesn't matter to me... Second Life is, after all, a game, and if guys want to play girls, or girls want to play guys, that's fine with me. But those who are on slow upstreams like I currently am won't have a choice about voice, because they simply won't have the bandwidth for the extra functions. Perhaps Linden Labs' time would be better spent fixing bugs and improving compression (and particularly trying to do something about packet loss, which is one of Second Life's particular bugbears) than introducing new slowdowns to the grid.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Monday, March 26, 2007
I called you... but you weren't there...
I've had some pretty appalling waits for customer service departments in the past, but Linden Labs - you just outdid them all:
My Skype log for today, at the time of writing, has 6 entries for the Linden Labs number. The first four I tried to get through to the general enquiries department. I was told "The average wait today is five to six minutes." After 14 minutes on hold EACH time I was asked to create voice ticket, the automated version of "You can rant here but we just erase the tapes every day so don't hold your breath for a call back."
I decided to put my priority up, by instead selecting billing services (indicating that I was a paying customer) - Strangely enough, the average wait time there was "five to six minutes", although the music on hold was better and interspersed with "Thank you for holding, your call is important to us, we'll be with you shortly." messages.
20 minutes later, with still no answer, the system transferred me back to the queue for the general enquiries (with it's absolutely AWFUL music - if you can call it that - on hold, interspersed with random Linden wisdom all about how to spend money and view forums and stuff like that.) As if a 20 minute wait on hold wasn't bad enough, it then left me on hold a further 14 minutes for the general department - and then, guess what?
I was asked to create voice ticket, the automated version of "You can rant here but we just erase the tapes every day so don't hold your breath for a call back."
So let me see, that's ONE AND A HALF HOURS waiting on hold and still I never got to speak to anyone. Remember, this is also at a toll free number, so once the call was answered, Linden Labs were being billed (thank goodness) for each minute I was on hold. If I'd had to pay for the one and a half hours on hold as well, I'd NOT have been a happy customer. How much, I wonder, did my unanswered calls cost Linden Labs, and how many other people cost them that much, given that I obviously didn't speak to anyone because the lines were to busy?
While I appreciate that some technical support lines might feel a bit like the three dead trolls in a baggie internet helpdesk sketch there can be no excuse for making paying customers wait 90 minutes on hold and STILL not have anyone answer the phone.
Come on, Linden Labs, lets have some service around here!
My Skype log for today, at the time of writing, has 6 entries for the Linden Labs number. The first four I tried to get through to the general enquiries department. I was told "The average wait today is five to six minutes." After 14 minutes on hold EACH time I was asked to create voice ticket, the automated version of "You can rant here but we just erase the tapes every day so don't hold your breath for a call back."
I decided to put my priority up, by instead selecting billing services (indicating that I was a paying customer) - Strangely enough, the average wait time there was "five to six minutes", although the music on hold was better and interspersed with "Thank you for holding, your call is important to us, we'll be with you shortly." messages.
20 minutes later, with still no answer, the system transferred me back to the queue for the general enquiries (with it's absolutely AWFUL music - if you can call it that - on hold, interspersed with random Linden wisdom all about how to spend money and view forums and stuff like that.) As if a 20 minute wait on hold wasn't bad enough, it then left me on hold a further 14 minutes for the general department - and then, guess what?
I was asked to create voice ticket, the automated version of "You can rant here but we just erase the tapes every day so don't hold your breath for a call back."
So let me see, that's ONE AND A HALF HOURS waiting on hold and still I never got to speak to anyone. Remember, this is also at a toll free number, so once the call was answered, Linden Labs were being billed (thank goodness) for each minute I was on hold. If I'd had to pay for the one and a half hours on hold as well, I'd NOT have been a happy customer. How much, I wonder, did my unanswered calls cost Linden Labs, and how many other people cost them that much, given that I obviously didn't speak to anyone because the lines were to busy?
While I appreciate that some technical support lines might feel a bit like the three dead trolls in a baggie internet helpdesk sketch there can be no excuse for making paying customers wait 90 minutes on hold and STILL not have anyone answer the phone.
Come on, Linden Labs, lets have some service around here!
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