Second Life: Reliable, it Isn't

Normally if you have a female char it means that you're not loading right which probably means that you had some pretty bad lag. You should try out voice again when you're having a better SL experience I haven't had any issues lately and when I've used voice it's been great!

You're right about the "bad load" part. When I tried logging in again from the desktop my avatar was male again and appearance editing also worked.

"Bad lag": that wasn't a problem at my end, anyway. I have a decent (business-class cable) Internet connection that was behaving itself.

What you were experiencing appears to be the "return to default" error. When this happens, the avatar has severe problems. It happens in roughly one out of every 1,000 avatars usually after teleporting or logging in. (Especially common when logging on for the first time). During this problem, the interface also suffers, as does audio so these could have been part of the problem. (But the sound quality is certainly not the 5x skype quality they were originally claiming, so don't feel too bad your points are all very valid.)

The default avatar shape in SL is a female called Ruth. If your shape modifications don't download when you log for some reason then you get stuck with the default shape - an occurrence sufficiently common the it's used as a verb - i.e. 'you are Ruthed'.

Based on two observations, the new voice client has a "bad load" the first time it runs.

The fact that these problems are so widespread and longstanding that they have names kind of proves my point...

Many SL users, myself included, have no interest in using the voice capability. From what I've read about the new client, it is a big step backward in terms of usability. But apparently from now on, I'm going to see a nag screen every time I login, asking if I want to download the new client, and the default answer is yes. I'm backing up my current client against the inevitable day when I accidentally hit the enter key instead of clicking the Cancel button. What would be so hard about a little checkbox with a "Don't ask me again" choice?

They fixed it :P

I personally think people are too hard on Linden Labs. They're pushing the envelope and features that might have bugged out two years ago are now quite stable and integrated.

Now that they've got it working again (it was stable all through beta and first look, they just apparently needed to help it handle the load) voice is super fun, primarily in small groups of friends.

Come October they've got a script fix planned that will reduce lag by 80-90%, eliminating ruths in all but the worst areas like ahern and other newbie heavy spots.

wow emp, kiss more linden ass why don't you? Thank GOD for this article finally somebody in the media takes more than 10 seconds and says - hey wait a minute - these fools dont have good programing! I've been a SL resident (own land spend loads of RL$) since 2005, and SL continuously gets less and less reliable ! gotta go (at work hehehe)

IM me inworld ^^