Aging Technology Platform?
Man. That's harsh. I mean, I bust LL in the chops like everyone else for opt delayed features, but it's not 'aging', it's the first online environment that allows this kind of freedom.

Now, as for the buckling under of it's userbase, that's totally true.

I truly appreciate your opinion on this, I just happen to disagree. Note that 'aging' isn't the same as 'old' or even as 'outdated.' The platform was built at least several years ago, and while it offers its users more freedom than other virtual worlds, it's not on par with my expectations in terms of look, feel, function, and performance for a contemporary 3D environment. That being said, SL offers users the chance to do things they can't do anywhere else. As far as I know, SL is still running on Havok 1, and despite a number of welcome updates, it doesn't seem "fresh" to me. It needs a complete rebuild, in my opinion, not a shoring-up.

Like they always say, there's always another guy to buy the island -- even the 11 million islands LOL.

Very interesting that this injection of cash comes just when all the armchair game dev experts on the forums have been bleating hysterically that LL is "running in the red" or "we have it on good authority from their lawyers that they're going to close" or "they're boxing it up to sell to another game company" or whatever.

Since the servers only cost $1000 a pop, that's a lot of $55,000 a year salaried, benefited programmers they can buy.

Hey, I bet we see total elimination of all the stipends soon LOL. The value of the Linden against the dollar will also likely crash even further because there will two things to even further fuel the world's inflation: a) land glutting and b) MyTime unbilled lol.

I'm not getting the buckling part. No more than 5000 people are logged in at any time (that's some 25,000 a day, correct? The average log-in time is 4 hours is it?). To be sure, this village allegedly spend $250,000 USD a day, which means they are probably REALLY lagging servers doing all kinds of stuff.

Whatever LL does, it continues to fulfill its destiny as the richest source of online entertainment in the universe, bar none.

Prok, the concurrency rate is approaching 6,500 at this point. My definition of buckling includes not only the technical side of the platform but the administrative and operations sides--in my opinion, LL is struggling to keep up with the population growth. I can't remember which Linden blog I read it on, but they acknowledge they need to work on scaling the platform as a priority.

True. I've been waiting for Havok 2 (and we're at 4 now?) implementation since... ever.

It's nice they have some more cash, maybe they can use it for a complete teardown or the existing system and make something nicer.

Zero, I'm on at all hours of the night and day, eyeballing that log-on figure, it usually says 4500 or 5500 at the most. I've never seen 6500. I realize that figure may be generated in a press release. But it's not a reality.

yes, they can't keep up with the customer service, that's for sure!