The Birthday event disaster

Today was the planned 4th birthday event with Philip Linden as key note speaker at a new made sim named SL4B. The event was supposed to start at 12:30 pm SLT with the sim going public for arrivals at around 12.00 pm SLT.

Well, guess what happened? It turned out into a big disaster. The event did not happen at all. From all four adjacent sims avatars tried to enter the main sim – makes you wonder why they didn’t make a design like Pooley stage and used repeaters. The supplied video stream was often not working because of not enough listener slots in the video server. There have been several griefer attacks at the main sim SL4B, mostly poofs, too.

And the best of all – Philip Linden was not able to enter the sim at all, so after around two hours of desperate tries they scratched the keynote and event at all of the agenda. Makes me wonder if they are now going to learn about it and going to implement some kind of bandwidth allocation for entering a sim in kind of a VIP list, meaning: if you got a 40 avatar sim you can say: 35 normal avatars are able to enter the sim and 5 predefined VIPs. When 35 normal avatars are in the sim, it’s full for all normal avatars of us, but the VIPs can still enter the sim. This would be handy…

The avatar peak at the main sim was first around 90, later the maximum seems to have been around 40.

And to quote some Lindens:

[13:41] Video Linden shouts: Philip can’t get back in
[13:42] Iridium Linden: Folks, Philip can’t get back into the clinet.

I guess it’s kind of comforting for many SL residents that even the mighty Lindens have problems with Second Life and I think some have been really spiteful about the turnout of those events, too.

Perhaps it is still going to happen somewhat later, but this event has been truly a victim of the success of Second Life. You simply need much better avatar counts per sim for such kind of events at all.