Well.Seeing how secondlife.com has been dishing out those god forsaken error 503’s for the last week and a half, I figure this is a good time to do the first “Grid Weekly” column.So, just to recap, this weekly column will cover the week’s economic news, social news, and other miscellaneous news stories or opinions/rants.
So, this week it’s time for a good rant, so starting off with the economy:A fairly uneventful week for the Linden Dollar, the average rate holding at about 266 Lindens to the Dollar. It’s amazing how far down the exchange rate has come since it opened in September of 2005, when the rate was somewhere around L$300-400 to the Dollar.
In other news, Global Kids held a special event where members of the press where allowed onto the GK Islands, to learn about the D.I.D.I Initiative and meet the D.I.D.I pioneers. For those who don’t know, D.I.D.I is a partnership between GK and Youth Venture. The Initiative provides funding and resources to teens who want to create a social venture within TSL, and the real world.
Okay, so no one who plays SL regularly has not noticed the events of the last week and a half. It all started when something on secondlife.com got fairly broken, and suddenly the site is unavailable ½ the time. I don’t know about the Main Grid, (where the forums really don’t exist) but here on the TG, we enjoy our forums. At any rate, that was acceptable, until a few days ago, that was fine. Then, during an attempted server code deploy, which was “not expected to require a service outage”, everything went down the pipe, no pun intended. What started with a load balancer turned into a defective code deploy, logins failing, 25,000 people logging off in 4 minutes, asset servers failing, and other bad things. Second Life is getting screwed up. Now, it is very hard to predict what will happen when something is deployed to 4,000 servers, however, I do have a theory that this is related somehow to the deployment of the Havok4 beta regions.
February 5, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Just wondering,where are you getting the LindeX exchange rate statistics? It’s been about 266 for the last year. o.o I remember it being somewhere between 250-280 back in 05. In late 06, it skyrocketed to over 300. Then stipend/etc was taken away and the rate went back down.
If you guys don’t know about the main grid forums, they are massive and far more widely used than the TG forums. There’s tons and tons of categories. (my account was stuck on them for a while.)
I’ll agree those 503 errors have been pretty annoying lately.
February 6, 2008 at 7:43 am
Erm, my bad on 2 fronts.
I had heard somewhere that the MG forums basically did not exist.
Also, i heard in a CNET report on SL a while ago that it was about 300, but i might have been referring to the time before the stipends died. W00t for oldbies who still get a huge stipend, eh?
February 6, 2008 at 8:17 pm
On the account page, when you go to the LindeX link there is a graph, on the bottom display options click “all”and of should show the economy from 05 to now. The exchange rate is now in the 180’s
February 6, 2008 at 8:20 pm
And stipend still exists. O.O
February 7, 2008 at 7:12 am
Stipend exists for people with premiums or people with payment info I’m pretty sure.
LindeX Data: http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy-market.php
The close rate is the rate I sell my Ls at every month.
February 7, 2008 at 7:29 am
Ah found the stipend info on the “Basic accounts registered before 29 May 2006 receive a stipend of L$50 for every week in which they log into Second Life, but no stipend is provided to basic accounts registered after that time.”
February 8, 2008 at 12:51 am
Ya I can confirm that tidbit of information about stipends and old basic accounts. As I have a basic account and still receive a stipend of L$50 every Tuesday.