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How many people use SL (as of October 2018)?


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On 11/23/2018 at 2:22 PM, Saravendi said:

Agree, agree. Only like to add this perspective... I seem to meet fewer and fewer new people, as I become more experienced in SL and as I refine my avatars image, mesh shapes, clothing etc... Maybe I’m more intimidating looking or seem  unapproachable??? I hope not, but people make assumptions that change their behavior just like  in rl.

i plan to come back to SL soon. anything new? might needed new friends. lol

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Hi

according to the Lindens the activ user base is something between 500.000 and 600.000 People from 200 different countries. Other statistics are often based on assumed US users or activ forum users. Both not a representativ base for statistics, no matter what method you use to upscale those.

Source:

https://ryanschultz.com/2018/04/23/second-life-infographic-some-statistics-from-15-years/

Have fun.

Edited by carolinestravels
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The best reality check is the Second Life world map.

sansarapop.thumb.png.099598519b7791b454801b41447ae252.png

Sansara, at noon Monday. Each green dot is an avatar. Whether there's a human behind it is another question.

A fun project would be to start up a viewer showing the map and run a very slow video capture, maybe 1 frame every 10 seconds, for a day or two. Watch the dots come and go. And occasionally move.

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On 11/22/2018 at 10:22 PM, Saravendi said:

... Maybe I’m more intimidating looking or seem  unapproachable??? I hope not, but people make assumptions that change their behavior just like  in rl.

Interesting observation. A number of beautiful celebrity people have made comments about it being difficult to meet 'dating' candidates as people felt they were unapproachable. I suppose SL is similar. I think the range of possible responses for 'approachable' is larger in SL. I suspect the percentages in the various groups (shy, timid, bold, brazen...) are similar.

On 11/23/2018 at 2:47 AM, Theresa Tennyson said:

The user numbers never were giant. At its absolute height the number of people in Second Life at any given time was less than the number of people at your average large-college football game.

True... I'm not into college ball. Sports stadiums in the US top out at about 80,000. The largest in the USA is MICHIGAN STADIUM — 113,065. American football had the largest audience draw for a couple of decades. 'Taking a knee' and increasing cost of parking and admission has decimated attendance. TV viewership has decreased 36% in prime time since 2014 per NFL press releases. Average pro game attendance is now in the 64k to 70k range. So, any way we go football is more popular than SL.

I track peak max & min concurrent users. In 2012 peak max was about 70k and min about 30k. The peak was falling about 5 or 6k per year. With mesh and other out-of-world building/modeling stuff done outside of the viewer it is impossible to know the actual level of participation SL. We can only measure 'attendance'.

The last couple of years the decrease per year has dropped to about 1,000 peak concurrent users. The minimum concurrent users in 2012 was 28k to 30k. The decrease there has been less with 2018 showing 22k to 23k minimums. So, we can say the minimum decreased 6k over 6-7 years. The trend is a flattening curve in both max & min.

19 hours ago, animats said:

The best reality check is the Second Life world map.

sansarapop.thumb.png.099598519b7791b454801b41447ae252.png

Sansara, at noon Monday. Each green dot is an avatar. Whether there's a human behind it is another question.

A fun project would be to start up a viewer showing the map and run a very slow video capture, maybe 1 frame every 10 seconds, for a day or two. Watch the dots come and go. And occasionally move.

Zooming out the mini-map gives a better realtime picture of what is going on. The mini size limit sucks... However, the World Map doesn't update in real time nor does it have a 'map refresh'. The web map has no dots... So, time-lapse imaging would be awkward. I'm not sure I could even capture the map with RLV scripting or combined RLV and Win-PowerShell. But a monthly snapshot done manually would be easily doable. OR weekly should could be made into a video...

Going back through my maps made in in various years... 2018 seems to have considerably more dots. While time of day is a big factor in the concurrent-user-count I don't have time-of-day info on when I made my maps. I guess mine are most likely early evening.

It is just difficult to get user data. 

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I use a lil script that provides an online users count. It drops out from time to time but is working currently until SL decide to break it once more. Anyway, typically there are 22K users online of a european morning, and 45K users online of a european evening. I read a report, dated 2017, that suggested there are still around 600,000 accounts still in use. The games not dead yet, although they go out of their way to put us off quite often  :P

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On 11/25/2018 at 11:30 PM, Destiny Mynx said:

im a lifer

We all can learn a thing or two from Lifer's Destiny!  The learning curve for new people is slower than other gaming experiences, in my humble opinion,  just wondering how the WI and Xbox interactive virtual worlds affected SL usage over the years?  There is a level of patience and lindens required to make SL enjoyable to the user.    Once you get oriented to it the possibilities are endless what you can do in SL,  but it definitely takes patience and money getting to that point.

 

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1 hour ago, Nalates Urriah said:

Zooming out the mini-map gives a better realtime picture of what is going on. The mini size limit sucks... However, the World Map doesn't update in real time nor does it have a 'map refresh'. The web map has no dots... So, time-lapse imaging would be awkward. I'm not sure I could even capture the map with RLV scripting or combined RLV and Win-PowerShell.

There are many "timelapse" video capture programs. If you have a spare machine and a spare SL alt, you can just log in, bring up the map, start the timelapse capture program taking screenshots, and leave it running.  Only one continent at a time, but that's enough for a start.

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3 hours ago, Jameson2001 said:

We all can learn a thing or two from Lifer's Destiny!  The learning curve for new people is slower than other gaming experiences, in my humble opinion,  just wondering how the WI and Xbox interactive virtual worlds affected SL usage over the years?  There is a level of patience and lindens required to make SL enjoyable to the user.    Once you get oriented to it the possibilities are endless what you can do in SL,  but it definitely takes patience and money getting to that point.

 

Totally agree

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Once you "get" SL... I don't believe that there is a better alternative. Plus i've spent a small fortune and not anywhere ready to jump ship. I hope LL can help new users get a feel for the experience, because few will spend the time and money if they can't see the possibilities. 

Edited by Saravendi
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On 11/27/2018 at 10:41 AM, animats said:

There are many "timelapse" video capture programs. If you have a spare machine and a spare SL alt, you can just log in, bring up the map, start the timelapse capture program taking screenshots, and leave it running.  Only one continent at a time, but that's enough for a start.

If I bring up the world map, I never see it change until I close it and reopen it. Are you seeing the World Map updating in real time?

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 11/26/2018 at 12:19 PM, animats said:

The best reality check is the Second Life world map.

sansarapop.thumb.png.099598519b7791b454801b41447ae252.png

Sansara, at noon Monday. Each green dot is an avatar. Whether there's a human behind it is another question.

A fun project would be to start up a viewer showing the map and run a very slow video capture, maybe 1 frame every 10 seconds, for a day or two. Watch the dots come and go. And occasionally move.

That's actually a very interesting idea. I have several servers in my house that are currently the ultimate dust collectors, so I could fire one up and let it record a large area like this. I have countless hard drives so I could record at higher than 1 frame 10 seconds, however 10 seconds is incredibly fair since we're measuring numbers, not how someone is moving.  I could record this for as long as the very random electricity in my house wants to run, darn 1950's neighborhood, always cars crashing into the neighborhood electricity...

 

Also, this is the most ridiculous thing to say, especially being an amateur software developer myself, but I do not see Second Life "dying". Not in 10 years, longer... Maybe. I can't tell yet. Some "games" As I will use as a word to describe intractable software with the inclusion of multiplayer, never, die. You still have people such as myself playing Half Life 1 all the time. I still use Windows XP, 98, etc... I may have a decent amount of information including software that lives forever, but I'm not sure what makes specific ones stick. Modability is a big one, updates, not necessarily, some software has those things but fail to take off in the first place regardless of how good they are. Also nothing could really replace Second Life. As primitive as some things in its engine are, it's fairly intuitive. I think that's because a lot of developers are afraid of controversy, since moderation on such a large, user-generated scale is almost insanity, and it's difficult to establish a userbase. SL is well established and swooped in at the right time, when most households were starting to invest in a computer of some sort, and others with older machines were upgrading.

 

 

Edited by facotaco
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10 hours ago, facotaco said:

Also, this is the most ridiculous thing to say, especially being an amateur software developer myself, but I do not see Second Life "dying". Not in 10 years, longer... Maybe. I can't tell yet. Some "games" As I will use as a word to describe intractable software with the inclusion of multiplayer, never, die. You still have people such as myself playing Half Life 1 all the time. I still use Windows XP, 98, etc

People still play and create content for The Sims, The Sims 3, and The Sims 3. Active Worlds (what I consider to be SL's predecessor) is 23 years old and still going.

I'm not even an amateur software developer. ;)

Edited by Selene Gregoire
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  • 3 weeks later...

I joined SL a little less than a year ago, (will have my first sl b-day in march) and I have to agree that it honestly took me a week to actually get the hang of it. (not to mention a whole two days to actually learn how to dress my avatar) and it took me about 3 months until i actually could say I was proud of my avatar since i didn't have any lindens to buy anything before then. but I will say it was all worth it. Secondlife has been a ton of fun and it honestly filled the gap that i was missing while I was on IMVU. I feel like if LL simply made the beginning stages easier to grasp, they will have a spite in numbers. I know a lot of RL friends and friends from IMVU that said they liked the idea of SL but they were just having such a hard time with getting started that they gave up which sucks honestly :/

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 11/26/2018 at 8:19 PM, animats said:

The best reality check is the Second Life world map.

sansarapop.thumb.png.099598519b7791b454801b41447ae252.png

Sansara, at noon Monday. Each green dot is an avatar. Whether there's a human behind it is another question.

A fun project would be to start up a viewer showing the map and run a very slow video capture, maybe 1 frame every 10 seconds, for a day or two. Watch the dots come and go. And occasionally move.

I think I can see myself on my parcel at east coast :)

Just passing by so I can have any update on this cool project

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My estimate is 10.  I figure at any one moment in time, an average of 10 people are playing.  That's for all the sims, across the grid.  OH!?  You folks thought all those little green dots are human users?  Have any of you popped around and walked up to those little green dots?  Yeah... lots of bots, lots of parkers, lots of whatever the hell thingie those are because all they do is use treadmills, dance balls, bicycles, spin on turntables, and drink.  That heyday people remember was before SL decided to commit suicide... before they evicted all the companies, special interest groups, universities, clubs, and before they ALLOWED themselves to be painted as a sexually perverted pedophile festival, without a fight.  Instead of stabilizing the irritating details, they tried to shove a bunch of innovations on us, untested, unverified, bomb ridden 'improvements'.  People got tired of falling into the ground, appearing with their shoes up their butts, freezing, sitting underwater at the edge of sims, losing inventory and frankly considered that Linden was the real griefers.   I just visited a vehicle test sandbox, and a Linden builder put the car ramp right across a sim line... yes, right on it, so when you use it, you fly out to oblivion and have to restart... what kind of quality control is that??  But I think when they took away the school discount program and stopped trying to get people to log in... it was over.  The fact that it's taking YEARS to die demonstrates the profit margin... the HUGE prices they charge for land tier is SO OUTRAGEOUS!!!... that Linden can afford to keep SL running with only a 1/200th of its peak membership.

Edited by DoctorEigen Flow
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I have a script that has been continuously running since some time in 2010 or so. It shows the current population along with the highest and lowest that has ever been seen.

Most of the time, it shows a number that is about no more than 10% off for that time of day, plus or minus, from what that number has been the entire time, for that time of day (as in, the value at 3am can be a tiny amount of the value at noon, but the value at 3am in 2019 is about 90-110% of the value at 3am in 2013...)

It then gets low when folks here in the USA go to bed, and gets high when we're awake but not at work...

It's a pretty simple script so it doesn't show detailed data, or even an average.

If I had thought in 2010 that I would manage to still have un-reset copies of it 9 years later, I would have written in an averaging function...

But the highest ever is currently 73,721 - I think that number is less than 3 years old, but exactly how recent I don't know.

The lowest ever was 5762. That is also less than 3 years old, but for years the lowest was about 5800 or so... since 2010. I believe the low just means that SL did a 'check' right after some major crash took down most of the grid... which is an uncommon event, but something that seems to happen about twice a year, give or take.

It's 12:37am PST as I type this - right now it says: 29,581 - about typical for this time of day, back in 2010 I often saw values like that in the late evening. In the day it might hit up to 57,000 on a weekend, maybe 45,000 on a weekday peak time. And that's kinda the same thing I've been seeing all these years...

Of course it would be nice if I had thought to track an average...

You can get a copy of the thing I put the script in, all those years ago, here:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Strugatsky/179/46/4087
- It's a sculpty vase... because we didn't have mesh back then. It's there right now, and as long as you don't reset the script, it'll keep on going for you. I can't say it will always be in that spot though, I have a habit of tearing my builds down and making new ones. That script did at one point spend about 6 months in inventory, but since it doesn't record an average, that's not a major loss - there is a small chance that at some point in 2017 the low got lower or the high got higher and I missed it... but the real value is just seeing the current and realizing that it looks like a familiar number.

My larger purpose in this post is that... I have been hearing SL was dying since the first time I logged in, on my first account, in 2006. Yet from my experience, the needle has only moved the tiniest amount. A lot of people have left, almost every venue I knew when I started is long gone. But a whole lot of new stuff replaced it.

But the one constant... is that there is always a set of people telling me SL is already dead...

 

Edited by Pussycat Catnap
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  • 2 weeks later...

Been here since July 2009. I'm telling you right now that SL was way active in 2009...... It explosive, and so much fun. Maybe that's cause I was taken in awe by everything, and was more energetic than I am now? Maybe I been here too long and just don't find everything as appealing anymore, but in 2009 there was a lot of fun for me in SL. It was way easier to make friends, and I still talk to some friends from 09. I mean hell, I just graduated from school back then, now here I am with a job at 29, planning to have my own place soon.

 

Also, you mentioned 2013. Yes it was a huge year for SL too, but I'd say 2014 was big as well. Both weren't big like in 2009, but during 2013/2014 you had some big night clubs that were really active. 

 

It's actually amazing how much SL has declined in users logging in considering mesh, and all the good changes since way back when. 

 

I think SL will decline a lot more, cause back then it was way too active right, but those users from back then are probably in their late 50's, 60's by now, the young guys like me who started at 19 are hitting middle age and have gotten jobs, and stuff. So since we are fading out like those before us, it's more difficult for newer players coming into SL cause the big places don't exist anymore or are a shell of their former selfs. 

 

So basically everyone kinda became less active since 2009.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I think @WinTrain hit it pretty close.  SL used to be much more active, more social, and more crowded back in the old days.  I believe one of the reasons that it felt even more crowded was because it was much smaller.  Most of the big stores, clubs, and attractions were on the mainland and most private islands were just broken down into parcels for private housing.

One of the other factors that really hurt was banning gambling.  Poker and slots used to be absolutely huge and was even more popular than sex.  I personally knew a ton of people that left during that time.

There were always some traffic driving bots or alts, but it was limited.  I left for a few years and came back to AFK places being at the top of all traffic lists.  It took me a while to figure out what their purpose even was.

I'd say that even though the stats show a relatively slow decline in numbers, the actual figures are much more drastic.

The number of actual, participating, unique accounts logged in at any one time is nowhere close to where it used to be.

On a side note, has anyone actually seen any kind of advertisement for SL, at all?  I spend most of my day and night on the web and don't recall seeing anything about SL for years.  It's really hard to get people to join if nobody even knows it exists.

 

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