Limited Availability of New Second Life Regions

[Linden Lab]

Due to the ongoing public health crisis, we’ve experienced an unprecedented surge in demand for new Second Life regions. While we are thrilled by the heightened interest, the increased demand has consumed our available inventory of full regions. Read the details in the following post: 

Have any questions or comments? Please share them in this thread. 
 

[Mollymews]

woo!

[Beth Macbain]

That is absolutely awesome! 

I don't mean I don't feel bad for people who are waiting for regions, but how amazing is this?? 

Congratulations, LL!!

[asteriddle]

there goes my plans for opening a region in june... i can wait though! let's hope the migration goes smoothly :0

[Parhelion Palou]

There hasn't been a large growth in region demand up until recently, so this is likely due to newbies and returning oldbies. I wonder why so many of them want to buy full regions. Are they hoping to make significant money from SL? At least it will boost the prospects for the people who have landscaping businesses.

[Zac UwU]

Wow, this is really amazing to hear. Some people might need to wait a while to get a region, but this is really great to hear. Way to go! 

Also, please stay safe and as healthy as possible everyone involved with Second Life, Linden Lab and our lovely diggin' Moles! ♥

[steeljane42]

I'm pretty sure Belliseria's growth affected it as well. It's still the same regions on the very same hardware and I believe all (most?) of them are full regions, not homesteads. And while I don't really monitor news about mainland or LL homes too much, I didn't hear anything about them closing/moving/repurposing old LL homes' regions yet. Which, I imagine, are now mostly abandoned, because compared to new LL homes they really do look like relics of the past, and only 512sqm vs 1024 for new ones. So also pretty much wasting server space.

Either way it's nice to see such news. I'm sure most people here enjoy SL, for one reason or another, and want LL to succeed in order to keep SL alive for another decade or two (or even more, who knows), so while it might be not so fun for people who might want to grab a new region right now, it's still very good news.

Edited May 14, 2020 by steeljane42

[Ardy Lay]

Hey, what happened to the six running threads proclaiming the death of Second Life?

[NeoBokrug Elytis]

2 minutes ago, Ardy Lay said:

Hey, what happened to the six running threads proclaiming the death of Second Life?

Only six?  😄

[Ardy Lay]

Just now, NeoBokrug Elytis said:

Only six?  😄

Well, six I knew of.  I am sure there are more that are old and maybe locked.  But seriously,  where did they go?

[LittleMe Jewell]

25 minutes ago, steeljane42 said:

I didn't hear anything about them closing/moving/repurposing old LL homes' regions yet. Which, I imagine, are now mostly abandoned

Interestingly enough, there are still quite a few people living in the older homes.  Some because they are using 512 sqm tier elsewhere and don't want a Camper, which is the only current option for a new Linden Home using only 512 sqm tier.  Others because they like those homes better and still others because there are actually folks that still have heard nothing about the new homes.  Lots of green dots still on the map.  Here are 4 of the groups of old regions.

[Beth Macbain]

3 minutes ago, Ardy Lay said:

Hey, what happened to the six running threads proclaiming the death of Second Life?

I'm just going to keep posting this every time the subject comes up.

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, steeljane42 said:

I didn't hear anything about them closing/moving/repurposing old LL homes' regions yet. Which, I imagine, are now mostly abandoned,

Oh no. There are surprisingly many vacancies in the old Linden Homes now but the regions aren't anywhere near empty and unless LL starts actively evicting people, there's no reason to beleive they will be in the foreseeable future.

  

43 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

...

and still others because there are actually folks that still have heard nothing about the new homes.

I would be very suprised if that doesn't include most SL users. I mean, where is the average SL'er supposed to hear about those new homes? The ones who read the official bloghs and log on to the forums is a very tiny minority after all.

This is especially true for the Linden Homes owners since most of them doesn't seem to be active in SL at all anymore - they're "Rip van Winkles" who keep their SL homes for old time's sake but hardly ever log in and certainly don't keep track on what's happening in SL.

Edited May 14, 2020 by ChinRey

[Ardy Lay]

Hmm, if the FCC can force a spectrum 'repack'...

[bigmoe Whitfield]

So @Linden Lab does that mean the hardware is all being used?

[Oz Linden]

11 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

So @Linden Lab does that mean the hardware is all being used?

We have enough to have spares to replace any that develop problems. With as many systems as we use, that’s sure to happen from time to time. 

[Ardy Lay]

@Oz Linden,

Wouldn't it be grand if the mainland could be defragmented?

[Asadora Summers]

4 hours ago, Parhelion Palou said:

There hasn't been a large growth in region demand up until recently, so this is likely due to newbies and returning oldbies. I wonder why so many of them want to buy full regions. Are they hoping to make significant money from SL? At least it will boost the prospects for the people who have landscaping businesses.

I suppose the old residents that are coming back, does not want to contend with banlines and moochers in their house, thus reason for a region. Or some people who are already in-world have issues in their RL that is allowing them to spend more time from home and they have unexpected money so they want to increase their SL empire. Or new resident noobs that have all these wonderful beautiful plans on what to do with a region, and then in a couple of months realise that it's too much effort and money to keep up so they'll stop owning. 

But regardless of reasons, it's good to see more people having attention again in SL, but don't be surprised if more than half of them end up considering SL the 'new' Adult Friend Finder. 

🤣

[Alwin Alcott]

/me adds
"no regions"  ... to the growing list of SL issues, while 10 years of no development/rebuilding/stase stage of mainland nów would be the resque to let people live there in peace.
90% of returners will rather logg off than get land there, they know what it was, and will be without resolving of the old issues there.

[Patch Linden]

We have put a lot of thought in to the various things we can do with the mainland.  That included consideration for moving parcel owners around.  We decided that right now, with the pandemic and people turning to Second Life for some stability and comfort in their lives, that the upset of having to go through a some sort of mass-move effort was too negative of an experience.  Instead, we're going to put our efforts into enforcement, clean-up, and loosen restrictions on mainland purchase qualifications where we can.  We do have a healthy supply of mainland, up to and including some entire full mainland regions that we can make available via auction.

[Mollymews]

40 minutes ago, Patch Linden said:

We have put a lot of thought in to the various things we can do with the mainland.  That included consideration for moving parcel owners around.  We decided that right now, with the pandemic and people turning to Second Life for some stability and comfort in their lives, that the upset of having to go through a some sort of mass-move effort was too negative of an experience.  Instead, we're going to put our efforts into enforcement, clean-up, and loosen restrictions on mainland purchase qualifications where we can.  We do have a healthy supply of mainland, up to and including some entire full mainland regions that we can make available via auction.

i like all of this

i would tho add a thing about tidying up mainland for sale.  It seems that the policy is that abandoned mainland terrain is Reverted before being put to sale. I get why this is done, so that the prospective buyer can see the terrain in its natural state.  However this not always good for the neighbours, including the LPDW right-of-ways, where the adjoining parcels have been terraformed.  I just wonder whether rather than Reverting the terrain it could be Smoothed in some cases, if not most cases

as an example, on my home region of Fyre Maven there are parcels owned by Linden for pending future sale which have been reverted and are a bit quarry-like looking. And I sometimes wonder how more attractive they might be to prospective buyers should they be smoothed to fit in with the adjacent parcels 

[ChinRey]

11 hours ago, Oz Linden said:

We have enough to have spares to replace any that develop problems. With as many systems as we use, that’s sure to happen from time to time. 

If server capacity is the issue, have you considered reconfiguring some of the mostly empty mainland region to hmesteads with a 4.8 prim limit multiplier? That way the region should only require a quarter of the server capacity but the few residents there shuold still get exactly the same. In theory that is - I don't know if a homestead really only takes up a quarter of the server capacity of a full sim.

Of course, you could also do something similar if you are planning to create new Linden Home themes: A homestead with ten 1024 m2 parcels and 4.8 prim limit multipllirer. That still leaves 1300 prims for the base build - more than enough to fill up a region with houses, plants, roads, fences etc. Still assuming that a homestead really only takes up a quarter of a full sim's server capacaity, that would give you 40 housing units for the same server load that only gives you 24 now.

[Coffee Pancake]

It this limit based on space for physical infrastructure (and Linden's not wanting servers in corridors, under desks ..) or is there simply a point at which SL scales no further and the software side wont be in place till later this year ?

Edited May 15, 2020 by CoffeeDujour

[Oz Linden]

4 minutes ago, CoffeeDujour said:

It this limit based on space for physical infrastructure (and Linden's not wanting servers in corridors, under desks ..) or is there simply a point at which SL scales no further and the software side wont be in place till later this year ?

The problem has nothing to do with how SL scales; it's that we have only so many server boxes and so much space in our datacenter to put them in (our servers are located in a facility in Phoenix; none of them are in corridors or under desks 🙂. In theory, we could buy or lease more, but we'd have to find new space to put them in (our current space is full), get the network set up to that space, etc. Since we expect to complete our migration off of our own servers onto cloud systems in a relatively short time, it just doesn't make sense. The sharp rise in demand for regions we've seen recently wasn't something we could have reasonably anticipated.

Moving to cloud servers will, among other benefits, mean that should we have similar fast increases in demand in the future we'll be able to just sign up for more systems and we'll have them almost immediately.

[fernynook]

Wonderful news that Second Life is so popular and I feel so sorry for Linden Lab regarding the timing! 

There is another possibility for more regions; on the dashboard if you look under Land Manager / Mainland (which comes up as a Land tab) it shows the details of all land parcels owned by you alone (not owned by a group you may own) so if you previously owned a full region or homestead which went offline and when it went offline you had land parcels on it in only your avatar's name you may still see those land parcels listed.  If those land parcels are still listed then it might be possible for the region to be reactivated, even after a couple of years 😊