What's with all the dissapearing sims lately?

[Chris Frentis]

 Just this last year so many sims I have frequented or a couple I used to rent land on not so long ago are gone and those had been around for ages. I can still see some of the names in the map search but its impossible to TP to them.  I typed in "Angel" and there used to be a plethora of sims containing that name you could visit and now there is a handful with all the rest greyed out but still showing the sims name. Does anyone know what happened? 

[Nova Convair]

Since a few years SL looses about 1000 private estate sims per year. Atm there are about 17500 left.

Source: http://gridsurvey.com/economy.php

[Christin73]

Amazing how much "abandond" land there is. 

[Chic Aeon]

Could it simply be your maturity settings? 

 

This is what "I" see when I type in Angel. None are grayed out.

 



[ChinRey]

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Nova Convair wrote:

Since a few years SL looses about 1000 private estate sims per year.

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Closer to 1500 actually, on average the number of sims decrease by a bit more than 100 sims a month. And it's been going on steadily since 2011 so it's certainly not "recently".

As to why, obviously part of the explanation is that sim owners like everybody else drift away from SL over time. They find new hobbies instead or they get to busy to maintain such a time consuming hobby as SL can be. Others start their sims with unrealistic expectations, they don't realize how much time and money they need to maintain them.

But Second Life is also too big - or too small, depending on how you see it. There are too many sims or too few users. Last June Ebbe Linden mentioned that the number of active users had dropped down below one million. That is the number of account that had logged on last 30 days, including alts and bots. How many actual people visit SL in a month is anybodys guess but I'd say somewhere between 300 000 and 500 000 sounds reasonable. It may be less. The concurrency, the number of avatars (including bots and alts) logged on at any given time, seems to be somewhere between 25 000 and 45 000 now. That's not really enough to support the 24529 sims we have today.

[Qie Niangao]

Also, though, the OP's situation is that specific sims have gone missing -- and that has always been many times as frequent as the actual decrease in sim count. New sims sprout up all the time (see Tyche Shepherd's superb posts, monthly, across the street). It's the difference between the huge number of new sims and the slightly huger number of removed sims that makes the decrease, but the probability of any particular sim lasting from year to year has never been very high.

I mention this now, specifically, because I expect this churn to increase dramatically as a result of this new grandfathered rate offer. I've heard from many folks who aren't continuing their longstanding rentals from Estates to instead open their own standalone sims at the new rate. That means a lot of new sims, but a lot of old ones having to shut down because the tenants now have their own sims.

(If they allowed standalone Homesteads at comparable prices, there'd be even more churn.)

[Theresa Tennyson]

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ChinRey wrote:

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Nova Convair wrote:

Since a few years SL looses about 1000 private estate sims per year.

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Closer to 1500 actually, on average the number of sims decrease by a bit more than 100 sims a month. And it's been going on steadily since 2011 so it's certainly not "recently".

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The actual net drop in private regions from November 2013 to March 2016 was 1875, or about 67 per month.

https://joyardley.wordpress.com/2016/03/26/private-estate-survey-by-tyche-shepherd/

 

Yes, the number of regions are still declining. Just pointing out that the numbers you're offering as fact are off by a pretty wide margin.

 

[Chris Frentis]

My maturity setting is on everything but I tried a couple of those and see what you do but on quite a few I get "it doesnt exist" or "You do not have access to that destination". Alts have the same issue too on different viewers.  I have never really had this issue before on so many sims. It would happen occasionally on dead ones. Can you get blacklisted by IP address?

 

 

Edit: I reset my IP address with my ISP to get a new one  and cleared browser cache, rebooted router and computer and it seems to have fixed it a bit allowing entry to the majority of sims I couldnt before. All the search results come up correct now. there must have been a bug a reset was needed for.

 

 

[ChinRey]

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

The actual net drop in private regions from November 2013 to March 2016 was 1875, or about 67 per month.

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Wooops, not as steady a decrease as I though then. I kept an eye on the development for about a year a while ago and when I asked at this forum I was told by somebody who ahd actually published a study about it (sorry, can't remember the name) the rate had been steady all the way since 2011.

However, according to the graphs at gridsurvey.com there were slightly more than 31,000 sims in autumn 2011 and there were 24529 yesterday. That's almost 1400 a year and well over 100 a month. The reason the article you linked to gets a different result using data from the same source, is that it only goes back to 2013 which means the plateau in the curve right after that time has a much bigger impact on the figures.

Looking closely at the figures I think both using 2011 and 2013 as reference points give misleading results. The best reference point for the recent trend might be about June 2014 and without examining the actual figures (just looking at the curve), the result seems to be somewhere in the middle.

That being said, I don't think sim death is always a bad thing. As Qie already said, sims come and sims go. Some projects simply don't last that long and there are always new people with new ideas they want to try. As for the overall decrease, well people also complain how empty Second Life is. I too wish SL was more popular but since that's not likely to happen, it's better to scale it down to a size more suitable for the actual population.

[Supersatan3]

Wait, so it 1500 the net loss of regions, or is it the number of sims abandoned within a year?

[ChinRey]

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Supersatan3 wrote:

Wait, so it 1500 the net loss of regions

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Oh, it's never been quite as high as 1500 except possibly in 2012 - have to take a closer look at the graphs for that.

But yes, it's net loss. Like: according to gridsurvey.com 298 sims closed down last 30 days and 212 new ones opened. Net loss: 86.

[ChinRey]

I have to post a reply to one of my own posts because it occured to me that something in it can be misunderstood in a very bad way:

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ChinRey wrote:

>The reason the article you linked to gets a different result using data from the same source, is that it only goes back to 2013 which means the plateau in the curve right after that time has a much bigger impact on the figures.

Looking closely at the figures I think both using 2011 and 2013 as reference points give misleading results.

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This may be seen as an indication that that article mentioned is deliberately trying to mislead. That is not the case. The article, written by Tyche Shepherd and reposted by Jo Yardley, is simply a summary of what had happened since last time Tyche Shepherd found time to make a summary which just happened to be back in 2013. The article does not present and does not in any way claim to present a picture of grid shrinkage as a whole.