Thursday, April 26, 2012

Grid Yuck & Insurance

Today's prolonged Grid Yuck (of which I fortunately missed the bulk of the "fun" as indicated in my previous post) generated quite a few blog posts (like from Snickers Snook and Glorf Bulmer) and a discussion in the Second Life Bloggers group, including a mention by me of my occasional campaign to have property insurance for when the Grid's problems cause an Inventory loss. I've written a couple times about this idea (see here) and it's time I make the call again ...

Nocciola the dragon, resting on my shoulder at the Lydia Rose Memorial Park (SLurl). I haven't replaced all the dragons I lost to Grid Yuck years ago, but I do have a few and I still think they are some of SL greatest pets.
The Lab should make available property insurance, perhaps as a Premium account benefit. Read anyone's Terms of Service and you'll see that no provider — be it a cloud storage company, a game publisher, or whatever — can guarantee 100% safety for a user's data (and our Inventories are just that: data). But if I'm willing to pay more than a base user pays, why shouldn't better data integrity be a benefit? Regular backups on Linden Servers could even be a revenue stream.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I disagree absolutely. Data integrity is critical to any and all businesses, the lab is no different in that respect.

Analogies that compare the loss of virtual possessions to real world physical possessions are flawed and fundamentally do nothing to address the problem.

You either have redundancy and reliability for your businesses data, or you don't.

I do not pay Gmail extra not to loose my email, nor do I ever expect them to ask.

Uccie Poultry said...

@Trinity You are right in that the main problem is the lack of data integrity at The Lab, but I was just tossing the idea out to see if it might stick somewhere. Right now The Lab doesn't have a special backup/restore service and making that a Premium benefit might be a good idea, especially to encourage the free accounts to upgrade.

Glorf Bulmer said...

I went nuts and did a whole long post about why this is a good idea but would be too much of a can of worms to implement... Here we go! (Because I'm not typing all that rubbish out again, that's for sure.)

Uccie Poultry said...

@Glorf I would hope that The Lab would be able to distinguish No Copy items from Copy items, but then there was that breedable bunny fiasco last year where Inventory issues and frequent rolling restarts/roll backs created duplicate pets, cause a whole buncha people to be accused of theft, gaming "the game," and worse, sullying the reputations of some perfectly innocent people. To be sure, some technical issues would need to be worked out, but I'm sure it could be done.