Montana Corleone

Adding VAT, a European tax, they had no obligation to collect pushed out European land lords to start with Actually they did, the instant LL opened up an office in Brighton UK, and opened themselves up to EU jurisdiction on bank accounts, computers, furniture, buildings, staff etc.

Ow gawd, "winter" again. Not in the southern hemisphere it ain't, which a truly global game ought to consider. Not that many equatorial regions, or even European regions actually get snow.

I do miss all the old numbers though. It might be nice to see how these things have changed say over a year, or two years, rather than just the quarter. I used to graph the excel data, but since all the numbers have changed, you can't relate the data then to that given now. Numbers are always easy to fiddle, and I remember back on the old blog that LL kept changing the numbers and definitions every time things looked bad, and then suddenly wow, things were hunky dory. Just like companies and countries, and we sort of know the lies behind the "boom" years over the last decade: fed by increased credit spending and immigration rather than proper growth. My memory may be failing me, but around 480,000 users per month seems to me about what it was two years ago, in other words SL has been flat lining all that time. Maybe that's the level of interest there is in the world. Maybe they don't like non-goal orientated games. Maybe they get cheesed off with rolling restarts, crashes, problems, search, and constant updates of "cool" features they don't really need. Maybe they get cheesed off with virtually having to upgrade their computer each time a new feature comes out. These arguments have gone on long before. The glossy pics and marketing show an exciting world, but the reality is freebie resellers, garish junk, and wall to wall empty sims. I just looked where my main store used to be. Only one guy is still there, the rest of it, and the neighbouring sims, which were full of shops and houses, are completely empty. Although there is one bonus point: LL finally built the road, at least on that old sim, but not the neighbouring. That's over 3 years to put a road in LOL. LL went way to mad on land sales, when it was obvious it was going to speculatoirs rather than creatives, and they kept selling more even when sims became empty. I'm from the days when 3,000 concurrent users was the norm, but you used to meet people. There's perhaps a 10 fold times that in people, but you can roam sims for hours without meeting people. The land must have expanded way much more. So that's not great for new users. And again, it was never going to grow and go global like Facebook or any other site as long as LL insisted on new feature after new feature requiring top of the line computers. LL seems to not only misunderstand its users, but doesn't listen to them either. Same old story, same old CEO. In case Philip hasn't noticed, the world has gone mobile: laptops, smartphones and iPads. They do not want to be chained to a high end desktop. SL is really all about interaction and creating, not pretty sunsets and the like. Sure, technology evolves, but SL should not be at the cutting edge level if it's to be a global thing. Just think of the average world wage. I no longer seem to be able to use a PPC Mac now, so am using a Linux box, but I don't know if it's the machine, the 2.2 beta (but all release viewers have been more like alphas lol) or OpenGL drivers or what, but it's slooow, and everything draws okay apart from my body mesh, which looks like horizontal slices have been taken out of me. Sort of makes it pretty useless being in-world if you're a clothing designer. So we know what the problems are. The old data figures, such as splits by country, and new unique users versus older ones that we used to get showed a churn rate of about 10% a month, ie the entire SL population lasted less than a year on average. And peaks and tail offs could be associated with advertising, reviews, and damaging stuff such as the VAT fiasco. The rest was down to what a lot of people have been saying for a long time. Only LL know the true position of things, but they have an established track record over the last 4.5 years (my experience of SL) of raving over new numbers, then going quiet and changing them when things start going bad. The user numbers along with current online used to be on the front login page, but no more. Did the numbers get so bad they had to get rid of them? Well, the same old stories, the same old flatlining. Despite all LL has said and done, so maybe after 4 years it's time to start listening to older users if LL want SL to grow any further in the future. Pigs might fly I suppose.

I've been away for two years, and seems the old, old story lol. Too much empty land (because LL sold too many sims to speculators rather than users), static or decreasing users, money spent etc, all now hidden because the old data that gave you real numbers and country breakdowns is no longer available, copyright problems, yet another "fabulous new search" which has destroyed ordinary merchants, never ending rolling restarts. One wonders with the mergers of the old SLX and OnRez whether things will get worse. Clearly places like SLX had fairly good points: people could buy and manage at work when they couldn't log in to SL itself, the search was still way much better than in SL, the forums and communities there were great and open to all, and you could say what you like about LL If the current SL search is still that bad, then when Marketplace goes live, why would there really be any need for in-world stores? That surely is not a good outlook for estate owners. Even more empty sims. Finding stuff has always been difficult, because paradoxically, although all RL media is digital and computerised, in the virtual world there are no TV or magazine channels that work effectively. Word of mouth used to be okay when the world was smaller, and wasn't so full of empty sims and you actually met other people... At least one good things out of all these "super cool new features" LL insists on pushing out rather than addressing bugs and core functionality of the world, seems to be including free accounts in the blogs, forums and discussions - FINALLY! Now we just have to wait and see if LL have changed enough to actually listen to, and act on some of the ideas of a lot of the older hands, who have a great track record in predicting what will happen with every "new" change LL insists on. Until then, it seems after almost two and a half years away from SL, it's biz as usual, and Crisis? What crisis? How do I contact Ostrich Linden?