Tier Support Forum Transcript

Summary of Developer Forum on For-fee Tiered Support
Hosts: Jack Linden & Glenn Linden
Date: Thursday, 28 June 2007
SUMMARY OF DISCUSSION
*We ended up with about 12 developers attending, but some came late and others left early, so not all were present for the entire discussion. Many of the participants were from small development companies; of the larger ones, only ClearInk was represented, so this was not well matched to the target group for tier.
*The developers generally were interested in a per-use or per-land fee, perhaps with a low yearly fee. (FEE)
*Since Developers generally work on land they don't own for their clients, there needs to be a simple way for the client to identify the developer as the recipient of support - groups might work, or some sort of 'payor/owner' designation. (IDENTIFYING DEVELOPER LAND)
*Services: Backups were highly desired, but scheduled sim saves were more important than actual backup or cloning. (SCHEDULED SAVES, BACKUPS & ROLLBACKS) 
*LAND DELIVERY (scheduled), GRID MOVES, ISLAND RENAMING and 24/7 SUPPORTwere all desired attributes of the program, as was access to copies to Beta grid.
*Some additional suggestions were for better estate management and object linking (to better copy, move and deploy large builds to other sims)
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* Here's an edited and organized transcript of the discussion.
==INTRO & DESCRIPTION==
Glenn: I have Jack Linden, who's the leader of our Concierge Team here today to talk with use about Tiered Support Plans. We'd like your input and feedback as we move to the next level with support. So with that, Jack, you're on!
Jack Linden: As many of the developers have mentioned to us, we could do it bit better at supporting developer groups, especially in terms of turnaround times..
So we are discussing the idea of a new level of support, effectively above concierge level whereby membership would be based upon paying a fee, in return for which we will offer much tighter service levels and a range of other perks.
The service levels might be, for example, guaranteed response to a ticket within 6 hours, and resolve within 12 hours.. or renames/moves for regions within 12 hour period guaranteed
The developer would also be able to use a partner/developer graphic on their websites, to show their membership.. and would get reg.api access, a free corporate surname potentially, and perhaps a number of vanity account names too
Jack Linden: allowing the dev group to have one of its islands on the beta grid at all times.
Kiwini Oe: that's good: beta grid
==Questions==
===MEMBERSHIP AND ACCESS TO SERVICES===
Jack Linden: They way we think this will have to work.. is that the developer gorup pays the fee to become a dev/partner with us. They will then nominate an inworld Group.. and any Officers in that group will be able to make support requests on behalf of the developer
===FEE ===
The first question I have, is whether you guys feel that developer groups would pay for much faster response times, and if so how much would be fair for an annual membership fee?
Kiwini Oe: that's where a lot of developer programs get to as a company matures
Tao Takashi: I don't need the name stuff but beside that I think it's a good idea, depending on the price maybe
Banana Stein: lol - great question - yes I would pay ( but not an arm and a leg)
Kiwini Oe: well, I'll check into the other developer programs we belong to vs. benefits and see what's reasonable and customary, as the insurance people say
Hackshaven Harford: to be honest I'd be more interested in uptime than response time :)
Banana Stein: i would like to see the amount based upon number of times you contact the concierge -
Tao Takashi: it might also be that not all developers might have the same requirements.. like if I do BIG events regularly I might have more urgent requests than with an ongoing effort
Banana Stein: maybe a small flat fee per year, then a charge per request
Kiwini Oe: yeah.. that's good Banana
Tao Takashi: and maybe for BIG events it would be cool to have some Linden at hand for a specific time but not sure about that as I don't do that many big events ;-)
Kiwini Oe: the reg fee gets you in the door, then an expedite charge schedule
Tao Takashi: rent-a-linden ;-)
Banana Stein: nice Kiwini
Jack Linden: i think one of the issues with a fee-per-ticket approach, is that you and we would have to agree on what constitutes a ticket, and what 'finished' means, which is actually hard to do.
Kiwini Oe: though a flat fee would more likely be simpler to administer
Tao Takashi: some of course might file ticket after ticket for everything
Glenn: Yes, that's why we were considering a flat fee.
Jack Linden: flat fee is much cleaner all round
Banana Stein: some development houses may need more support than others - how do you handle those?
Jack Linden: so ballpark figures, what would you pay for 1 year of priority support for your developer group?
Tao Takashi: no idea honestly as I rarely used support ;-)
Tao Takashi: only one rollback so far
Hackshaven Harford: yeah... I dont use support either
Tao Takashi: and I wonder what typical support requests are actually
Tao Takashi: something where somebody just needs help or something where something is broken?
Jack Linden: if you guys have any thoughts about what a reasonable fee would be, to join a dev/partner program like this for 1 year.. we'd love to hear a number
Banana Stein: $500
Jack Linden: it would be tough for us to make work, a 24/7 priority support service on fees that low I suspect banana
Banana Stein: Jack - back to the price point - what I am concerned that if the flat fee gets to high, then it becomes a competive disadvantage for the smaller develop houses - so I like the idea of a smaller flat fee to enroll then a cost per sim that keeps it competive and cash flow positive for Lindes
Tao Takashi: cost per region is probably best
Cracker Hax: I wouldnt mind paying a special monthly membership for sl dev, especially if it includes special sl dev support
===IDENTIFYING DEVELOPER LAND===
Banana Stein: how about this, developers have to register sims eleigible for support - so we could look at cost per sims
Jack Linden: i think some form of fee-per-region owned is likely as part of this. we have to be able to support this if a big landowner with 100s of regions wants to join. some developer groups use us a lot.. for renames, grid moves, rollbacks, and there are other services we can look at providing such as discounted bulk island leases for really large events or maybe region cloning
Banana Stein: if it is a sim cost that is standard - then we could as developers do an upsell to our clients. Is there a way to have a developer register as "the manager" of a sim , so concierge knows that they are speaking for the client - or maybe this issue gets rolled into this program
Jack Linden: yes, we would respect group officers as having the power to speak on behalf of the developer groups
Tao Takashi: I wonder if all the owners could somehow give their ok to a backup
Jack Linden: so it comes down to you guys managing that membership safely
Banana Stein: my concern for eaxample - if client A has problems, how does conceige group know that I am allowed to speak for client A since client A owns the sim
Tao Takashi: if we do not manage it safely it might come down to some little travelling with your sim.. which might also be nice.. new neighbourhoods, new friends... :)
Jack Linden: if client A has created a group.. and set you as officer and told us that is the group that controls their land.. then we can work that way
Jack Linden: currently developer groups generally own all their land under one account
Gwyneth Llewelyn: In our case, the end customer always owns the sim at the end...
Banana Stein: not owned - but the region need to be registed to get the faster service
Gwyneth Llewelyn: "registered" is ok.
Banana Stein: we have to pay the fee to for the region
Tao Takashi: I guess it should be dependant not on the owner but on who registered it
Tao Takashi: and that one gets the better support
Gwyneth Llewelyn: that makes a lot of sense, yes
Jack Linden: at the end, yes gwyneth. if needed, the dev group may need to use the alternate payor and owner division to make sure the region and project are covered
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Hmm as long as the process doesn't get way bureaucratic...
Jack Linden: but if they don't own the land, they could still be listed as Owner with their client as Payor
Gwyneth Llewelyn: this starts sounding more and more like DNS registration :) hehe
Jack Linden: ha there are parallels
Jack Linden: it does need to be simple, and we do need a fair number of developer groups to potentially want to sign up
(Glenn note: there's also an issue of how long a developer works on a sim and how to avoid developers 'swapping' land in and out of ownership to minimize cost of support)
===BACKUP & ROLLBACKS===
Hackshaven Harford: any chance of specifying when our grid downtime occurs? :)
Tao Takashi: what about rollbacks?
Jack Linden: similar for rollbacks, we would make a commitment to provide rapid turnaround on any tickets you create
Tao Takashi: what about having some sort of sim backup
Tao Takashi: persistant
Jack Linden: sim backups have been requested before.. there are some real issues there.. for example whether it is reasonable to store indefinitely content without the creator or owners permission
Tao Takashi: ok, I understand the issues with the backup
Tao Takashi: nevertheless it's one of the big issues I think
Tao Takashi: at the SL events I attended it was always a topic
Jack Linden: we also don't have long term sim storage facilities in place for archiving, it would only make sense if we could guarantee that backup process was robust
Tao Takashi: well, backup might come anyway as 3rd party application
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Tao mentioned "backups"
Tao Takashi: no backups, Gwyn
Gwyneth Llewelyn: how would these work? And are we talking about sim backups, or avatar/inventory backups as well?
Jack Linden: yes.. the idea of saving away a region for restoration later. there are lots of issues with that idea
Gwyneth Llewelyn: No backups.... riiiight :)
Tao Takashi: what were your hopes? ;-)
Jack Linden: if we can find a way to make backups make sense.. who knows. but it is a long way down the list i think
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Well... I ashamedly admit that I've managed to get LL to "backup and restore" a sim once, effectively duplicating its content on a new sim ;)
Gwyneth Llewelyn: So, technically, it's possible ;)
Tao Takashi: but that's cloning
Cracker Hax: in fact i am wondering why it is free
Jack Linden: it does happen gwyneth, and part of this program may be to allow the member groups to pay for cloning
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Cloning is a big start.
Jack Linden: but cloning is different to archiving
Tao Takashi: so one can buy a spare sim as backup :)
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Exactly
charlamagne Carmichael: how soon would the proposed support go into effect?
Jack Linden: not sure charlamagne, we're in the planning stage
===SCHEDULED SAVES===
Glenn: Quick Q - would ability to schedule sim saves be a replacement fro backup?
Glenn: Like, if you could save simstate every 5 minutes?
Tao Takashi: with a button?
Glenn: Tao - yes, either by click or by schedule, like many applications
Tao Takashi: well, for me it would be mainly important to save my work for later
Tao Takashi: like I created something great (whicih I do all the time, you know) but I cannot save it
charlamagne Carmichael: you could take saved items into the inventory and rerez them?
Cracker Hax: Like saving your sim and recreating it in another sim?
Glenn: Yes - the difference is save protects you from your sim blowing up, but it doesn't give you access to your inventory for later.
Tao Takashi: yes, for archiving
Glenn: Cracker - no, you could only replace your existing sim, otherwise we have the same problem of object copy that backup creates.
Cracker Hax: Yeah reverting to a backup would be quite handy, I dont know how many times I pulled out the wrong inventory and had to spend hours cleaning up 100s of tiny pieces
Tao Takashi: could the backup/rollback be automated actually?
Tao Takashi: like click a button and a state is saved and hit another one and select something from a list to get it back?
Tao Takashi: I guess the rollback Linden does nothing that much different
Cracker Hax: I think intentional saves would be better for sim owners, since they themselves know when their sim is how they want it
Cracker Hax: autosaves could mess things up
Tao Takashi: there should be permissions for that of course and a better estate manager/owner management might be helpful, too
===24/7 SUPPORT===
Jack Linden: for now, it will sit under the concierge banner as we're the closest to true 24/7 and are probably best suited to the task of developer support
Gwyneth Llewelyn *nods*
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Ah, that's also good news — 24/7 support hehe
Jack Linden: yes, we want to open phones and livechat to 24/7 as soon as we can
Gwyneth Llewelyn: yay :)
charlamagne Carmichael: I'm just following the transcript....6-12 hours, would you consider more?
Jack Linden: phones are 17/5 at the moment
Jack Linden: but that will be extending to 24/5 soon
Jack Linden: then we'll tackle weekends
Tao Takashi: great :)
Gwyneth Llewelyn: not 17/7 first? ;)
Jack Linden: weekends are tough, especially with a team that is entirely remote working
Gwyneth Llewelyn remembers how hard it was to man 24/7 during the Millennium celebrations hehe
===GRID UPTIME===
Gwyneth Llewelyn: oh btw Glenn & Jack — this would be a useful metric to have, SL Grid uptime
Tao Takashi: yep
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Although I'd certainly wouldn't like to see figures like "75%" :)
Cracker Hax: if its that expensive maybe I wouldn't mind doing some support work myself :P
===ISLAND RENAMING===
charlamagne Carmichael: so 6 hrs is defined as changing a sim name f'r instance?
Jack Linden: if we automated renames, we would have regions with naughty names in seconds
Tao Takashi: what about precleared renames and you just press the button?
Gwyneth Llewelyn: you can use them in languages that nobody at LL speaks, like Swahili :)
Jack Linden: that is more possible tao
Jack Linden: which is one concern
===GRID MOVES===
Tao Takashi: so I can plan ahead and change the name when I think it's time to do so
Jack Linden: we could potentially automate grid moves but that has some gotchas too
Glenn: - yes, unfortunately, thats a dev problem not something support can directly fix
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Well, Tao, if you know that it will take 6-12 hours maximum... you can plan ahead
Gwyneth Llewelyn: The problem is with things like: "a sim is delivered in 3-30 days". Many of our projects, for instance, take less than 30 days to develop
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Also, will sim delivery times be included in "support requests"?
===LAND DELIVERY===
Jack Linden: that's exactly the sort of uncertainly we want to remove, though all deliveries are now under 5 days. We deliver twice per week
Banana Stein: what days are those Jack?
Jack Linden: most often it is a Monday and a Thursday
Tao Takashi: but 5 days sounds good
===USE of SLDEV GROUP IM===
Cracker Hax: I would like to bring up the issue of SL DEVS trying to use our SV DEV group for support
Cracker Hax: Yes, it's a little annoying when people spam the group asking for support help, I wanted to know if that is what the group was intended for
===OBJECT LINKING===
Tao Takashi: or make linking better so I can put it into my inventory as a whole
Tao Takashi: like a group of linked objects
Glenn: Interesting alternative - better object linking.
Cracker Hax: the last time I moved I found tons of small prims I had lost
Tao Takashi: well better object linking is needed anyway
Tao Takashi: like bigger linksets
Tao Takashi: moving stuff around esp. on sim borders is a pain as you know
Tao Takashi: and bigger linksets might help with that
Glenn: SVC-143 - liking limited to 512 objects
Cracker Hax: are we only talking about private sims here, or mainland too?
Glenn: Theres' no reason it couldn't be any sim you own.
===ESTATE MANAGEMENT===
Tao Takashi: and as said better estate manager/owner rights might be nice.. maybe add this to groups or so
Tao Takashi: like I want to change everything as manager, too
Tao Takashi: like terrain
Glenn: Our time is up today - thank you very much for taking the time to give us your input. We'll summarize this, and send it around for more feedback - thanks Tao!