Not quite seaworthy yet…

So thanks to the millions f***ton thousands of you who’ve tried to log into world, some of you a million f***ton thousand times.

Let’s review:

• We’re limiting the population of the world to ~50 avatars, or, more precisely, 50 divided by the number of AvMan servers we have per Avman server. So, if your AvMan happens to be full, and the others aren’t, you’ll see the “full” message. Since Avatars are distributed pretty randomly across Avmans, this should statistically be “50”.
• We’re doing this not because the world is too small, and not because we don’t have enough servers, but so we can control the chaos. More chaos == harder problem solving. Less chaos == easier problem solving.
• There have been rumors that there is a special group which is always allowed in. They are true. The “Special Group” is called … “Staff”, and consists of SamSyn, Bruce, Mackie, and myself.
• The only thing less useful at this point than mashing on the login button 12,000 times a minute is complaining about it. Seriously folks, we’re trying to take this slowly — you’ll thank us in the end.
• We’ve had some reports of underage people in the world. If you think someone underage is in world, let us know. We’ll take care of them, or ask them to prove their age. Seriously.

Ok, now that that’s over with, here are the things we’re working on:

• Unlike the Old There, the New There has new members entering it with full inventories – in some cases thousands of items full. Combined with this, our new servers are able to “process” this inventory much faster (probably because they’re faster, and the system’s not full of 9 years of accumulated inventories). This has caused some bugs to emerge which we’re trying to understand, and can unfortunately bog down a whole server when it happens.
• We know about the “Big Memory Leak every time I press the login button” bug (as in, we’ve got lots of reports). One might suspect we did that on purpose, even so you stop pushing the button (kidding).
• We have lots of reports of SegVios in DX8 and DX9. We’ll be working on them.
• We’re aware of various “XXX window does not appear”, and are trying to parse those out. These seem to affect a few people lots, which often makes us suspect network/connectivity/firewall/router settings issues.
• We had to increase the capacity of the Webapps to handle you all mashing that button. Seriously, it was causing “Service Not Available” and all kinds of other little problems.

Those are the biggies. If I’ve left something off, it’s just that I didn’t put it in this list. SamSyn and Bruce and I are keeping track of all the reports and parsing them out the best we can.

We’re not going to increase that number until we have some of these issues under control. We know you’re all impatient, but we know you wouldn’t want some of these problems to be there when you all get in.

If you’re under age, seriously, give it up. I’m always struck by the stories of Steve Jobs as a teenager when he made Hewlett Packard “give” him computer chips for his hobby/whatever, and what came of that. How are you going to feel when people repeat that story, and say “so, what did you do as a teenager?”, and you reply “Well, mostly I spent trying to sneak into There.com because I wasn’t 18 yet..”.

A note on the picture: Unfortunately, that’s someone’s home in Cambodia. The particular place we went was a “Floating Village” and the poverty is so bad it literally hurt me to see it. We should all keep these people in mind when we consider how fortunate we are, in comparison.