From Avination to Second Life

In February 2011, I left Second Life, because of the lack of respect they showed the security and privacy of their customers, permitting the data-mining by the spyware zF RedZone for over a year, despite more and more alarming reports on how it was used to abuse Second Life customers. Linden Lab eventually banned the spyware and its controller, after it was revealed the controller was a convicted Internet fraudster who used the spyware to phish for Second Life passwords among other things, but they refused to take measures to prevent similar systems from continuing operating then or in the future.

I gave up Second Life then, abandoning two full sims, and moved to Avination, hoping it would be a safe haven from similar incidents. I had researched several alternative grids, but Avination seemed the most promising, from a technical perspective. Since it runs on the alpha-stage OpenSim server software, I was expecting technical glitches, and I got them, even a bit more than I had expected.

First it was the asset service disaster, probably resulting from a successful PR campaign bringing in so many new users the servers couldn't keep up, but lost, corrupted and threw especially textures any which way. After a month and a half, in late March, that was somewhat under control though, and life went on with just the occasional sim freezes and crashes, failed teleports and script failures. The latter was expected and quite manageable though.

Early April, the Redgrave / Mimi's Choice debacle struck, where two of the high-profile merchants left Avination over "differences" with the grid owner. Since I didn't know the full story, I gave Avination management the benefit of a doubt about what really happened, despite it didn't make them look good. I was more worried about the editing of the discussion "for legal reasons" and the gaming of it with alts of Avination management, and it did put a dent in my trust for them.

Mid April, Avination lost its PayPal services, and despite they were soon restored, the information about it to the customers left much to be desired.

Early May, the next glitch struck, when Avination management without notice tried to sneak in poorer rezzing performance to improve things for those few venue arrangers who attracted more than a few visitors to their venues. The result was a lot poorer rezzing performance and in-world experience to all the rest of their customers. After heavy criticism, management backed off from that "improvement".

Just a week later, the server upgrade with untested, bleeding edge code changes that sank logins and grid services for the two weeks to come were implemented. Logins were down repeatedly for up to 4 hour stretches, and meanwhile, teleporting, inter-sim messaging and often movement was poor or totally out in-world. That also marked the beginning of an accelerated decrease in region numbers lasting for almost two months.

Early June, Avination management decided to hire the infamous viewer developer JCool / Fractured Crystal to "fix" their viewer, despite him being known for developing copybot viewers and turning Second Life's then most popular viewer Emerald into spyware and a DDoS tool. Despite lasting only a few weeks before being fired again for continued violations of rules and after a public uproar, his appearance marked the beginning of a steep decline in user activity in Avination which is still ongoing.

In the aftermath of the JCool incident, I had a heated e-mail exchange with the Avination grid owner Melanie, where she falsely accused me of having made threats against Avination on my blog, and lied me straight in the face about things I had said according to her. I was prepared to let that pass with the half apology she made about it, even if it took away her last traces of credibility with me. However, four days later, my home sim, which was paid for another three weeks, "accidentally" got deleted from the grid, and my support ticket about it was ignored for 5 days, until I made the issue a public embarrassment for Avination management on their forum.

I got furious over the way Melanie got back at me, disregarding all the other shop owners in the deleted sim who got hit in the process, and Maggie broke down and cried over losing our home and security in Avination like that. We then decided to leave Avination, the weekend 2011-07-09 - 10, abandoning our own sim under construction, despite all the efforts and care we put into it together. Despite it made me feel sick to feed more money to Melanie, I made good on my promise to the others in the sim deleted and eventually restored, and another sim I had also "adopted" after its owner left Avination, probably because of "differences" with Melanie as well, and made a final payment to keep the sims up until late August, despite not having any real illusions about Melanie honoring the payment.

Right after the sim deletion, Melanie threw in another untested upgrade of the servers, wrecking about as much havoc on the grid as the mid-May upgrade did, and which Avination is still fighting to recover from. This time they claimed that much of it was owing to several disks happening to break simultaneous with the upgrade, and another server failing spontaneously at the same time. I'd give that as much credit as the sim deletion and support ticket ignoring just happened to coincide with my brawl with Melanie though.

We lost much in leaving Avination: Our home, our common labor of love in our own sim, Maggie's wonderfully artful and tipsy creations, and a friend who was very dear to us, who also decided to leave Avination after hearing about the way management had acted, but who for personal reasons refused to go back to Second Life. But we also learned a lot, about each other, about Maggie's abilities as a creator, and about what we can achieve when we work together, combining my straight-line perfectionism with her playful tipsiness. Hopefully, I also learned better not to be so naive about others. Where there's smoke, there's fire, and my decision to give Melanie the benefit of a doubt, despite what I already heard about her, was an obvious mistake.

I still dislike Linden Lab's way of managing Second Life, and their way of disregarding their customers, but my experiences in Avination makes going back to Second Life feel like the lesser of two evils, since the other OpenSim alternatives don't offer what I require yet. Fortunately, I still had a premium account and the "free" 512 sqm parcel to go with it in Second Life, so Maggie and me could start creating a new home there, first a simple, bought skybox, but after a couple of days a skybox we built ourselves, and keep improving. A 512 sqm parcel with 117 prims may seem poor after having owned 2 full sims before in Second Life, and a full sim in Avination, but we have the necessities there, and I don't feel like feeding Linden Lab money any more than I felt like keep feeding them to Melanie.