Ricky40 Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 I have been wondering something. A few years ago whenever I would log in to second life, there would be anywhere from seventy to sometimes eighty thousand people online. Now when I get on I see the numbers hovering around thirty to thirty five thousand. Where did everyone go? What on earth is going on? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curious Hazelnut Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 I'm really only guessing but... A number of largeish communities have moved to various opensimulator projects and probably taken a significant portion of their membership with them. Since the Opensimulator server code is about as stable and robust as SL was 3 or 4 years ago, it's become a vialble option for many seeking less expensive tier costs. In the last few years, costs have become a very significant issue for most people. While $10 a month for a premium account is (to me) quite reasonable, $200 or $300 for a full region is a significant outlay that many can no longer afford. Also, Second Life is now over 6 years old. This shows in the graphics and I'm sure many people who were more gamers than emersive world types have probably moved on to the next cool thing. Linden Lab is clearly trying to fix this but they might be at the point where it would be faster to make a full re-write than to update existing code. I have to say that I'm really impressed with the improvements and stability that Linden Lab has achived for Second Life (other's can disagree, but I've worked in software development and what they've done is not at all easy). Second Life isn't making the news like it was when we saw 80,000 concurrent users. I'm sure this is one of the reasons for the Steam integration. If you think new people aren't important, you really didn't watch the concurrency and new-user graphs back when SL was hitting 80,000 concurrent users. There was easily 25% concurrency spikes after each news article and even more when it hit mainstream (not just tech) news. I'm sure there are other reasons and the reality the drop in concurrent users you are seeing is not one (or even 3) factors but a whole lot of different reasons that all add up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Porky Gorky Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 Read the forum archives, there's are a few years worth of resident complaints all of which played a contributing factor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marcus Hancroft Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 What time of day are you logging in, Ricky? Whenever *I* log in there's between fifty-six and a half thousand to sixty two thousand people inworld. I'm sure it's a lot less during the overnight hours USA time. However, concurrency is less than it was 4 years ago. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Parrish Ashbourne Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 There never was 80,000 real people online at one time, a lot of them were traffic bots, when LL banned traffic bots the numbers dropped by 10,000 to 15,000. Then there has been a gradual decline to where we are today. Lots of BIG improvements in SL while you were gone, some even work , but none of which involve competitive pricing or good customer service policies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jenni Darkwatch Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 People move on. SL isn't stable enough nor usable enough to appeal to many people. It doesn't run well even on high end gaming machines ("well" as in "as well as a locally installed game or application") and it likely never will. Now with smartphones and tablets SL is on the way to irrelevance. It'll hang on because of its still fairly large user base, but in the end, people just move on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ricky40 Posted November 12, 2012 Author Share Posted November 12, 2012 It's just sad to see, think SL is suc a great oppurtunuty for meeting people and forming relationships and learning. It is a shame to see it dropping down like everynone on this thread seems to be suggesting. Is there no hope? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Melita Magic Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 There is always hope. More transparency would be good. Better IP protection would be good. As Porky said, it's already all been said but not a lot has seemed to change. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Coby Foden Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 Ricky40 wrote: I have been wondering something. A few years ago whenever I would log in to second life, there would be anywhere from seventy to sometimes eighty thousand people online. Now when I get on I see the numbers hovering around thirty to thirty five thousand. Where did everyone go? What on earth is going on? Monday, 12 November 2012, at 4:40 pm SLT, avatars logged inworld 53934. I've seen it going above 60000 during weekends at certain hours. Sure, there has been decline in concurrent logins. Sometimes the concurrency will drop down to somewhere around 30000. Funny thing is that even if there are over 60000 avatars online, when one looks at the world map, or goes exploring the grid, SL looks amazingly empty of people. Is there too much land in SL so that everybody can hide into their preferred spot? Well, there are also gazillion of houses in the grid. Most of the time, most of them are empty, no people at home. Where are the people I often wonder? I guess there is just too much waste land in the grid. [EDIT] Checking the online concurrency: Tuesday, 13 November 2012, at 30 minutes past midnight SLT, avatars logged inworld 31847. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jwenting Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 People have been complaining about SL being near death for as long as the grid has been alive, including beta. In time, such complaints may become a self-fulfilling prophecy as there are always people who don't know that any successful online community is awash with such complaints, sometimes made by idiots who don't know better, sometimes made maliciously by people who have a grudge against the community for whatever imagined slights, sometimes (and ever more often) made by competitors in order to drive business away from the community and hopefully to their own. It's not unique to SL, it happens in every single online community I've been a part of or monitored over the last 15+ years. The main reason, IMO, if there is indeed a marked drop in online residents (rather than, as pointed out, traffic bots now being better filtered and no longer counted as online users), is the current economic situation in the world which causes people to spend less money, including on internet access. In a large part of the world people still pay by the megabyte, if not the minute, for internet access, so they spend less time online and most of that searching for jobs. Last year for example there was on average a 10% drop in customers across the board to multiplayer games. Even knowing this there was a constant flood of doom and gloom posts from the usual suspects on the WoW message boards when Blizzard announced a drop of 5% in their customers (which, compared to the competition, was actually a very good performance)... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wrable Amat Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 I ATES THEMMMMM!!! YEAH!!! I PUT SALT AND PEPPERS ON THEM LIKE SCETTIE AN BUTTERS AND ATES THEM ALL!! /me burps up a Asain...GET BACK IN MEH BELLY!!! All joking aside,the fact is things come and go. People tend to move in a direction due to marketing and other new toys out there. SL is some what addictive and I meet many who claim it has even ruin their life!! But the fact is not every one is into a digi life , many enjoy life out side the box. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Conaletta Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 I have logged on during several different times (I mean like morning, evening and such) and Firestorm gives the people online as between 30- and 55000. Ofcourse some people left SL because it didn't have their interest anymore for whatever reason. Or people stopped because their friends stopped. There's one thing however which I notice looking at the decline, maybe I'm mistaken, but to me it seems that the biggest drop started when the Zinga continent was introduced and most adult sims moved to there. Oh, I tried an opensource "SL" once, gave me an absolute crap avatar and not a single result in the search. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madman626 Fall Posted November 14, 2012 Share Posted November 14, 2012 Facebook and tweeter happen ,, I`am surprise no one said it yet Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ray Lonergan Posted November 14, 2012 Share Posted November 14, 2012 I have had friends vanish. In my years online, playing games (Sims Online,Star Wars Galaxies etc) people get bored and leave. There is also the fact you need rl money to shop and buy things, and many people have cut out a lot of non essential expenses SL being one of them more than likely. My friend who talked me into trying SL again in 2007 we knew each other from Sims Online was hugely addicted to Second Life and had a live music venue for years, due to economic factors she had to shut it down, now she hardly logs on anymore, same goes for me. I think also as friends leave people just get tired of having to start over finding new friends, so they eventually log in less or leave.And as others have said there is always something new coming out to catch peoples attention. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jwenting Posted November 14, 2012 Share Posted November 14, 2012 that would be Zindra, not Zinga. I doubt its creation had anything to do with any possible drop in logins (see my prior post about what probably caused that). It will have had its effect on land prices of course, especially on the mainland where there's now in the M rated zones a surplus, which has killed predatory land pricing anywhere except on Zindra (where land prices are still often rather high, with a single company having all but a monopoly on land sales). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ingrim Posted November 25, 2012 Share Posted November 25, 2012 this "game" sucks, simple as that, thats why they all left. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perrie Juran Posted November 25, 2012 Share Posted November 25, 2012 Ingrim wrote: this "game" sucks, simple as that, thats why they all left. What game? It's "Your World, Your Imagination." But if someone lacks imagination, it probably will suck. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jadeclaw Denfu Posted November 25, 2012 Share Posted November 25, 2012 There has been a steady loss in numbers of user online over the years:http://gridsurvey.com/charts/historicalconcurrency.png However this is synchronous with the politician induced economical crisis going on the last 2, 3 years in the US (exploding housing market bubble.) The increased loss of regions runs parallel with the politician induced Euro-crisis:http://gridsurvey.com/charts/gridsize.png It was practically this year, when financially the s**t hit the fan in Greece. (The austerity measures drove Greece, Spain and Portugal right into the recession. the right way would have been making the people finally pay their taxes, especially in Greece, where tax evasion was the natural thing to do.) I'd say, SL is far from dying, it is maturing and it would be foolish to think, that a virtual world is completely immune from RL economical factors. What Linden Lab now needs is a long term strategy to keep a solid userbase, it can rely on. And then this: http://gridsurvey.com/charts/econ74.png Occupied Linden homes. Too bad, there is no data from 2012, it would have been interesting, how that had developed further. (No. I will not sit down with the map and start counting houses on the Linden-home-continents.) If that number is still on the rise, then putting Linden homes on the mainland would be a good idea, as that would reduce the amount of land available and it would increase traffic on the mainland as well. (OT: Germany has a reason to celebrate: Sebastian Vettel is the new 2012 Formula One World champion) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Melita Magic Posted November 29, 2012 Share Posted November 29, 2012 Lower prices and you get more customers. Simple concept and it always works. Instead of having all of these free non PIOF customers, charge people $5 a month for basic instead of $10. Make Premium membership really FEEL premium and not with an occasional airplane. Don't get me wrong I love my Premium membership but it feels about as Premium as a Members Only jacket. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
161488303349 Posted November 29, 2012 Share Posted November 29, 2012 Melita Magic wrote: it feels about as Premium as a Members Only jacket. i am so jealous. some people get all the good stuff (: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perrie Juran Posted November 29, 2012 Share Posted November 29, 2012 16 wrote: Melita Magic wrote: it feels about as Premium as a Members Only jacket. i am so jealous. some people get all the good stuff (: I seriously hope no one at Linden Lab picks up on that idea for the next Premium Gift. Scary, scary, scary! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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