Voice was inevitable regardless of the majority’s wishes, because RL corporations want it and their needs are paramount. I get that. What’s the loss of a couple of resident dollars on the exchange, compared to what they’ll be bringing in? I also get that the world can’t cope with the traffic it already has, and so it’s not in your interests to make things easy or welcoming for newcomers. I just wish I’d been around in the beginning, rather than a couple of months towards the end.

To those that believe it’s just another option that we can choose to disable… don’t kid yourself: this will cause more lag (and yes, I’ve read all the stuff LL promises)

In all, its a Good Idea. This is just a very bad time to introduce it. If, and I stress “if”, I decide to download this optional viewer, I will most likely not enable Voice except under very special circumstances. What I wish LL had done was to release two optional viewers — both with all the bug fixes and one of those with Voice.

Face it, Second Life is an awful resource hog as it is. Why should my computer have to waste precious CPU cycles on a feature I’m not using? I remember some of the previous viewers were lean and snappy. I *never* experienced local lag when I was in a well-performing sim. Now things are almost totally lagged much of the time, even when I’m the only one in a region. And this isn’t just one computer. It’s three completely different ones, so don’t blame it on my machine. The lag has increased steadily since release 1.13, even when the sims are not, themselves, lagged. The only logical place to point the finger is right at the viewer, and adding feature bloat to an already unstable viewer (1.18 is the most crash-prone in recent history), is not going to help things.

Worse, releasing it near the weekend (didn’t you guys learn your lesson the last time?) is a Very Bad Thing. Let me repeat that. Very Bad Thing. Did that sink in that time? All new releases should be on Monday, so you have the whole week to either work out the inevitable bugs or roll it back. Wednesday releases don’t work either, as we’ve seen the Grid thoroughly borked over busy weekends after Wednesday releases, before. Get a clue, people. There’s a reason we complain about these things. There’s a reason we keeping saying to not release new versions near weekends. Just what part of that do you not understand?

Now, if only there was a Linden who actually reads this stuff. Support tickets go unanswered. Bugs reported in the jira get “resolved” without being resolved. Sweep this stuff under the rug and it just goes away. Right? Wrong, guys. It persists. It adds up. Fix the things that are broken and *then* give us shineys to play with.

*sigh* Really, though. Why do I even bother, since I know my voice (isn’t that ironic?) will go “unheard”? I don’t even feel better after writing this.

With so many bugfixes, and the grid in such poor shape already … why toss another new feature into the mess?