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Secondlife declining player base


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Secondlife has been at a decline its player base for sometime. It also appears that they seem to be very secretive about the numbers of players. When researched the only information is from an article back in 2017. Also do you think Linden Labs should be held responsible for other residents scamming and committing fraud on their platform?

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Cheza,

The number of REGIONs in SL has been in a slow decline for several years.  This is not necessarily a problem...there is still more than enough land to support the concurrency numbers, and fewer regions means lower server costs for LL.

I have no hard data to show that the average concurrency is declining.  My impression is that it is holding pretty steady.

There are no data I know of on total accounts, or total accounts that are "active"...that is, they have logged in at least once in the last X days.  So, on what are you basing your statement that "SL has been at a decline its player base for sometime"?

As for your question:  No, I don't.  We don't hold the phone company responsible for phone scams, or the Post Office for mail scams.  We do seem to be wanting to hold Facebook and Twitter responsible for Russian meddling in our elections, though.  Which I think is stupid.  Blame the Russians.

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1 hour ago, Cheza Tearfall said:

Secondlife has been at a decline its player base for sometime. It also appears that they seem to be very secretive about the numbers of players. When researched the only information is from an article back in 2017. Also do you think Linden Labs should be held responsible for other residents scamming and committing fraud on their platform?

Pretty much since the "Anshe Chung made a Million RL $ (Nonsense, it was creative "financing") hoopla died down around the end of 2007 pretty much.

16 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

I am not seeing how one comment has anything to do with another. Did you leave out your segue?

Ditto.

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Let's pretend someone is renting from another person, let us also pretend person somehow scams, defrauds, whatever, another person online. Are you holding the actual property owner responsible for the actions of the renter?

The person committing the act, is, after all, utilizing a space, property, that this person does not own-but is owned by another, to defraud/scam/whatever you want to call it. The landlord/property owner, is providing a space, in which this person is committing these acts. 

Or do you hold the person actually committing the act responsible for his/her actions?

How about the ISP of the person committing the act(s), is the ISP responsible? The ISP is giving this person an access point by which the acts are able to happen in the first place.

The same applies here. 

I'm willing to bet this is either coming from someone who feels they have been wronged by another...or someone who is coming to the textual rescue of another to whom this has happened. In either case, you're barking up the wrong tree. 

The beginning of your comment has no relevance to the end of your comment, so I'm not going to comment much on the beginning part-since it lacks a great deal of information, is unrelated, and screams out as though it comes from a "the sky is falling" mentality that lacks in substance. 

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I’d say it’s because SL has a serious lag problem and not everyone can afford high-end PCs to play a chatroom type game. Not to mention, there’s hardly anything to do in the game itself, sadly.

 

 

Edited by Ashlyn Voir
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9 minutes ago, Ashlyn Voir said:

Not to mention, there’s hardly anything to do in the game itself, sadly.

Even after all these years, I can hear my mother: "Nothing to do?  For heaven's sake, girl.  Use your imagination.  It's not the world's job to entertain  you." 9_9

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3 hours ago, Cheza Tearfall said:

Secondlife has been at a decline its player base for sometime. It also appears that they seem to be very secretive about the numbers of players.

We've been in a long tail since 2010 at least. That will never change. My estimate is around 30K players maximum per day, but as not everyone logs in ever day, this will only be a fraction of the 30 day player-base.

It really serves no purpose knowing how many active people. Most importantly, it will - by the nature of long tail - reduce every single day until LL shutter the game.

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3 hours ago, Cheza Tearfall said:

. Also do you think Linden Labs should be held responsible for other residents scamming and committing fraud on their platform?

That's a bit like saying "Do you think the city council should be help responsible for people who run red lights?"

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3 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

There are no data I know of on total accounts, or total accounts that are "active"...that is, they have logged in at least once in the last X days.

There is actually. Representants of Linden Lab has occasionally mentioned the number of active users in various contexts and the number have been decreasing slowly but steadily. No fast enough to cause any immediate concern but, as Callum says, it's been on the long tail for almost a decade.

 

3 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

the player base, I've been here 11 years and I still have the same active friends

I think that explains why the decline is so slow: the people who are already hooked on SL, try to hang onto it for as long as they can, especially if they have a lot of good friends here. But some do leave and with no realistic prospect of significant influx of new users, the bottom line is simple and inevitable:

If you want to know how long Second Life is going to last, find the RL age and life execptancy of the average SL user. There's your answer.

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Does anyone currently keep the data on number of concurrent users? This is out of date:

median_conc_by_day400.jpg

Note that this ends in 2017.

historicalconcurrency.png?w=625

So does this.

There's "Second Life Grid Survey", but it doesn't have usage stats.

The number of users currently logged in is the only hard number available. Does someone have current data?   

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27 minutes ago, animats said:

Does anyone currently keep the data on number of concurrent users? This is out of date:

Mmm, Tateru seems to have stopped.

The concurrency/signups data comes from https://secondlife.com/xmlhttp/homepage.php

 

There is also an XML version at https://secondlife.com/xmlhttp/secondlife.php but it's missing data and doesn't show the epoch times

 

And the text version at https://secondlife.com/httprequest/homepage.php contains the current exchange rate.

Edited by Callum Meriman
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1 hour ago, Callum Meriman said:

Mmm, Tateru seems to have stopped.

The concurrency/signups data comes from https://secondlife.com/xmlhttp/homepage.php

I really should get that happening into a database.

Yes, somebody should be logging that. We need like a 28-day moving average to see the trend.

If LL got the trend line moving up, even slightly, the whole mindset of SL would start to turn around.

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I don't see how having the figures could do anything more than just reinforce a doom and gloom attitude. You can focus on a (supposedly) declining population and all it's going to do is give you yourself nagging doubts as to whether you should stay or start looking for where all the others have gone. Forgetting about reversing (supposed) trends for a moment, the people who could do the most to keep people in the worlds are - the people themselves. Create places where people can do more than just bop, shop or gawk at buildings. LL with their experience additions have done more than enough to support creators making exiting adventures, the challenge now is to get the newcomers going into them and remaining. I think billboarding doesn't really work for enough of them, perhaps billboards showing video clips of actual parts of the experiences might do better.

 

I stopped worrying about the figures a long time ago, I use the numbers of people who stop by the places I'm working on to judge SL's state, and I'm seeing a small rise in the numbers popping in to see what's there. Now all I have to do is find a way to make them actually walk around.

 

(I liked Rolig's comment, I think mothers have that phrase installed somewhere within their genes because they all have it.)

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3 hours ago, animats said:

Yes, somebody should be logging that. We need like a 28-day moving average to see the trend.

If you say so.

Mean daily concurrency according to gridsurvey.com. Each column represents a 28 day period, starting 5th December 2009 and ending 31st July 2018

5b62c8f08db88_Skjermbilde(1320).png.1cb976e8d3c5e46456516e3267036459.png

 

56 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

I don't see how having the figures could do anything more than just reinforce a doom and gloom attitude.

I see your point but turning a blind eye to the facts is rarely a good long term strategy. The facts are, there if no significant influx of new users and there will never ever be. But nor are people leaving in flocks so there's no need to worry too much. SL is on the long tail yes, but unless there are some other factors we haven't looked at yet, it's a very long tail still.

 

8 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

Even after all these years, I can hear my mother: "Nothing to do?  For heaven's sake, girl.  Use your imagination.  It's not the world's job to entertain  you." 9_9

Always good advice. :)

But... did she say it had to involve Second Life? In my experience, when mothers say things like that, they usually mean some entertainment that involves physical activities in RL and certainly not sitting staring at a computer screen.

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The shift towards phones and tablets probably affects the new user base. As fast as the technology is hurtling on, I wouldn't be surprised if SL is available on them (and in a way attractive to new users) before us old farts give up the ghost. That could lead to some leveling out of the decline. Or maybe computers will become the new vinyl :)

Also, I'm more interested in decline over recent years. The massive peak was never going to be sustainable.

(Chin Rey's just posted something which might be relevant to that. The close striping of the graph doesn't play well with my brain so someone else will have to examine it. But it looks to me like there's a leveling of the tail over recent years, with a pretty predictable swing through the seasons. Is it just the last two years though? That wouldn't be enough to bank on but perhaps it's the start of a new tendency towards holding relatively steady.)

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6 hours ago, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

The shift towards phones and tablets probably affects the new user base. As fast as the technology is hurtling on, I wouldn't be surprised if SL is available on them (and in a way attractive to new users) before us old farts give up the ghost.

I honestly can't see how it is possible to make SL attractive to new users nor have I heard anybody else come up with good ideas. There will always be some of course, but not enough to compensate fort he natural loss of old-timers.

I do believe it's possible to create a virtual world with a broader appeal but it would have to be so radically different from SL ( and in the opposite direction of where Sansar seems to be heading), it woukld be easier and better for everybody to leave SL as it is and build a new one from scratch somewhere else. One of the great things about virtual space is that you never have to tear down a charming old neighborhood to make room for a new one.

 

6 hours ago, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

Chin Rey's just posted something which might be relevant to that. The close striping of the graph doesn't play well with my brain so someone else will have to examine it. But it looks to me like there's a leveling of the tail over recent years, with a pretty predictable swing through the seasons. Is it just the last two years though?

Those stripes aren't easy to read for anybody. It's the overall trend that really matters, so I didn't put too much work into that detail - I just put the numbers into a spreadhseet and posted the first graph OpenOffice came up with.

But yes, the last two years concurrency have been fairly stable and so has the grid size. It may be a coincidence of course. But I suspect it means we are down to the hard core now and if I'm right, we'll either see a much slower decline for years to come or some very sudden big drops if something happens (in SL or RL) that causes large segments of the userbase to vanish.

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2 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

I honestly can't see how it is possible to make SL attractive to new users nor have I heard anybody else come up with good ideas. There will always be some of course, but not enough to compensate fort he natural loss of old-timers.

If Experiences caught on, it could help gamify SL more, and people may get friends to check it out so they can see/experience it too.

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8 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Mean daily concurrency according to gridsurvey.com. Each column represents a 28 day period, starting 5th December 2009 and ending 31st July 2018

5b62c8f08db88_Skjermbilde(1320).png.1cb976e8d3c5e46456516e3267036459.png

 

I see your point but turning a blind eye to the facts is rarely a good long term strategy.

Thanks. That's a useful form of the data, with most of the noise filtered out.

Getting that graph moving up is the responsibility of Linden Labs marketing. It shouldn't be impossible. It's kind of depressing to see LL's CEO not making this a priority. When you listen to Ebbe Altberg talk, he sounds like he sees his job as keeping the ship on an even keel while sinking.

LL still claims there are 11,000 new signups a day on the SL web site. Many of those may be signup bots. Some are alts. (But who needs that many alts?) LL won't say how many show up in world. We know some of them are real. Improving new customer retention is probably enough to reverse that slow decline.

It would be far easier to get that graph moving up than getting Sansar from 50 concurrent users to 50,000. LL has put substantial marketing effort into Sansar with zero result. If the number of SL users was increasing, it would turn around the whole mindset at LL.

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22 minutes ago, Pamela Galli said:

Just imagine if they had taken all that Sansar money and spent it on promotion and new user retention. 

Just imagine what would have happened if they had been pouring 1/10th of Sansar's money into a mobile viewer for Android...

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11 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

Just imagine what would have happened if they had been pouring 1/10th of Sansar's money into a mobile viewer for Android...

Years ago they had a great web based version just for beginners, that had built in tutorials. I thought it was just what was needed as an introduction to SL. It just disappeared. 

 

Edited by Pamela Galli
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