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Budget Friendlier Home MILL-K RENTAL - NEW YORK ECONOMY LOFT Stay in the MK NY Eco-Loft for our shared values on: 1) OWN SECURITY CONTROL - Have your own access to the security system from CasperSafe. - Add your friends or prevent unwanted guests 2) THE HIGH-QUALITY ADULT FURNITURE - Each of the MK NY Eco-Loft is furnished with high quality adult poses/animations and from awesome brands, such as: Ruckus, Debauchery, Rawage, TIS bento dances, etc. We pick the quality furniture for your needs, allowing you to save your cost and reduce your hustles. - We value your needs for quality adult-animations/poses. Hot animations are to try to believe. 3) THE EXTRA PRIMS - Extra 30 prims are provided to give you the discretion to add personal touches. - Please contact millenakera to join MK rental group and start using the extra prims. 4) 3 TYPES OF LOFT YOU CAN CHOOSE - Just click the wall panel behind the bed, and pick your choice of loft, anytime. MK NEW YORK ECO-LOFT a very reasonable rent as low as L$ 99/week + extra 30 prims ! MK RENTAL OFFICE visit our rental office at: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cyldane Mall/105/215/22 or contact MillenaKera inworld (give me max 24 hours to respond) or SELF HOUSE TOUR teleport from Available Rental board at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cyldane Mall/105/215/22 you are given 10 minutes house tour in the MK NY Eco-Loft, the Security System will remind you the 10 minutes maximum of visit (self house tour)

For those who don't know, Linden Realms is an old-school adventure game the Lindens built within SL, and is accessed via Portal Park. Completion of the game rewards the SL resident with L$50, and this reward can be received once per week. Over a year this amounts to L$2600 that residents can spend on clothing, tier fees, whatever they like. This has been particularly handy for new residents, and for anyone with no payment info on file. Recently LL changed Linden Realms rules to now require that residents who play the game have payment info on file, and must use that to buy L$, before the game will provide that L$50 reward. This cut the number of players significantly - and presumably then the amount of funds spent by the impacted residents. Now another change. Several days ago LL halved the game completion reward from L$50 to just L$25. The effect on Linden Realms has been chilling: the place is now essentially a ghost town, as lonely as most of the rest of SL. I suspect that LL may have changed these rules for three reasons: 1) to cut losses created by the massive number of game exploiters / cheaters; to force an increase of the Tilia user base, and 3) to increase the amount of funds being handled by Tilia. Maybe this fiscal clean-up operation will allow SL's new owner to reinvest, and we'll see improvements inworld. My fear though is the other impacts: residents with no credit card who are now shut out of a way to make L$, residents with payment info on file but who cannot buy Linden Dollars during the pandemic economy, and the negative impact this indirectly creates for those who normally would have received those funds: the makers, sellers, landlords, etc. SL's new owner already increased the SL MP commission charged to retailers, forcing increased prices. Some shops have closed; others advertise reduced prices at their inworld stores. I hope this all works out for SL in the long run. But in the short term providing residents less money to spend, and squeezing more out of makers/sellers, may make SL less attractive to residents, makers, and property investors. So much of SL is already a ghost town; I hope that turning Linden Realms into a ghost town too will be the end of their cull. The impacts of these steps taken by SL's new owner will likely be felt widely by the inworld economy, and I have to wonder what's next? With any kind of luck these efforts to increase SL profitability don't end up killing it.

A thing I have been seeing for quite a while now is the question of "Is Second Life dying?", or statements that outright state it is. I am a researcher into a lot of Second Life related things. Be it from studying the protocol to better document it, to archiving historical content, to looking deeper into the Grid status to see what is normally unseen. Today, I bring my research to the public for a informative look into the question "Is Second Life dying?". I'm going to divide this research into three key parts: Concurrent residents Region/Grid growth New resident sign-up rate My poor understanding economy Summary 1. Concurrent residents Firstly, the statement that Second Life doesn't have as many people as it used to. After scraping historical data from web.archive.org, as well as my personal database: Apr 2007 19,005 Apr 2008 34,685 Mar 2009 68,710 Jul 2010 42,990 Aug 2011 33,628 May 2012 36,854 Aug 2013 32,974 May 2014 38,056 May 2015 39,336 Jul 2016 39,031 Jul 2017 31,930 Nov 2018 45,301 Mar 2019 44,854 Jan 2020 34,133 Feb 2020 50,936 Just yesterday we had 50,936(Feb 2020) concurrent residents! Within the past year, the max concurrent residents we have seen is 54,336, which is nearly comparable to March 2009's 68,700 residents. This isn't counting individual logins, which is likely a lot higher. I say we have had around the same amount of people as we have always had. NOTE: Data from <2017 are before I was recording it myself, and was gathered from web.archive.org. As such, this isn't the peak data, but data gathered from when their web crawlers ran. Second Life sees less people during EU/Asia hours, and more people during American hours. 2. Region/Grid growth Now let's take a look at the Grid, which I think serves as a great look into the health of Second Life. The grid is indeed growing, which I feel means resident's are trusting in Second Life enough to invest into private regions. This means the region appearance to disappearance ratio is in favour of appearance. Don't just take my word for it, here is a (big and poorly made(I am a computer scientist, not layout artist)) gif of the public region zone of the grid(You can even see the addition of Bellisseria!): Full images are here (CAUTION: These images are 2048x2048 in size): https://agni.softhyena.com/static/agni-2020-03-01.png https://agni.softhyena.com/static/agni-2018-09-07.png https://agni.softhyena.com/static/agni-2018-09-07-to-2020-03-01.gif Color key: Region Restricted Available Bordered Cart Bulk Reservation Missing Data Please note this data is gathered using a very rudimentary and unintended way. Color key may be incorrect for some or a lot of regions. (EG: Regions showing as cart entries, or missing data appearing in some grid tiles). A region doesn't guarantee it to be online, it simply means "A region exists here and hasn't been deleted"(Deleted meaning, someone stopped paying for it and LL has no reason to keep it around in the dataserver). Typically they exist and are set to be online, but some regions(EG: Ajax Arena) are set to not come online. This also shows regions that are not publicly accessible. This also only has from 0, 0 to 2048, 2048 in region coordinates(The grid is 65535 by 65535 in region coordinates!), which appears to be the area of the grid that is used. Unless LL is willing to give me a copy of the data, researching past there will take a whole day of data mining and strain on the servers. 3. New resident sign-up rate As for new resident sign-up rate. It is still quite high! Just within the past 24 hours of making this post, the average sign-ups per hour is 544 (Rounded). While yes, some of these are probably bots, I still see tons of people in new resident landing spots who actually go through the tutorial instead of teleporting out, which tells me there is still a lot of interest in Second Life! My reasoning behind this is: New residents will actually go through the tutorial, where as people registering alts or bots will simply teleport out to skip the tutorial. 4. My poor understanding economy Finally, I would go into economy, but I am not a economist, I am a computer scientist. I don't have enough knowledge on economy to make a decision on whether or not Second Life's economy is doing good. With that said, read the next line under the assumption I have no clue what I am talking about. If I had to take a guess, I'd say MAYBE it could be doing better. I've seen L$ to USD ratio going up, but I've also seen times where it goes down. I'd suspect the economy will correct it's self and prices for stuff will go up in L$, but will remain the same for USD. 5. In summary Second Life most isn't dead, and it most certainly isn't dying. If anything, I'd say it is thriving. We are seeing new regions and residents, as well as plentiful concurrent users. I hope this clears any concerns that "Second Life is dying". It may not have as much media coverage as it did back during the times of IBM, CNET, The Office, or CSI, but the resident base is still here and is growing. Footnotes All my statistics are publicly available. If someone wishes to have a copy of this, please let me know in-world and I'll give you a copy of the raw data. As for those asking why I obsess over data collection, autism/aspergers lol. You can view my recorded/public statistics at https://agni.softhyena.com/stats. View the page source for API information. Region statistics is very very big, and because of this, it will kill my measly 100KiB/s upload rate. Please ask for a link and I'll give it to you. The data, while gathered by me for research purposes, is copyright to Linden Lab. Please properly attribute them when using it.

Gachas seem to be popular items, but I see a lot of sellers on Marketplace marking gachas with huge, sometimes surly disclaimers. Most are along the lines of "buy at your own risk, zero refunds, zero redeliveries." That doesn't sound legit, and I avoided gachas... until tonight. I was in a friendly sim, saw an interesting gacha item for just L30, and took a gamble. Nothing was delivered. I wasn't surprised. I sent a friendly IM to the seller (there were numerous copies of this item available) and asked when delivery would be fixed. Before a reply came, SL sent an automated message: "Your object has been returned to your inventory Lost and Found folder by <sim> due to parcel auto return." Strange, I had never received the item so could not have lost it. This made me wonder - when buying a gacha inworld should I right-click > take it? Maybe so. In any case, I opened Inventory, went to my Lost And Found, and the gacha item was... not there. I sent back to the sim where I purchased the gacha, right-clicked on each identical item in the seller's collection, but none indicated "take." Maybe the system returned it to a different folder, or the object was titled something unusual. So I searched my inventory for keywords, parts of the object's name, and other "close" words. No match. I then re-sorted my inventory by "Most Recent," but still no luck. The object in question was a Japanese fan with an floral design to hang on the wall, so wouldn't have been blocked by a G/M/A content filter along the way. Maybe the SL Lost And Found process copies the item, deletes what was found, and sends the copy to the owner. If so, maybe this "copy and paste" process wouldn't work for gachas (nor for any other "no copy" items. Long story short, this made me sympathize with residents who have complained of not receiving gachas. I also had to sympathize with the gacha sellers, because the system itself did not send the item to my Lost And Found folder as it had indicated. I understand that gachas may be a big part of SL economy, but if these items continue to cause problems for residents, sellers, and likely for SL then that part of the economy is making SL sick. I'm glad that some people have a good time with gachas, but given how many feel ripped off by them I'm surprised that SL allows the problem to continue. Maybe there's no need to get rid of gachas, just to change them. Could the permissions be modified by the original gacha builder so that they are sold with C/M/T options? This or other alterations might interfere with the resale trade, which it seems is the root of the problem - not the gacha, but some of the many hands they pass through as they are sold and resold. Too many dealers taking a cut, until finally the buyer gets nothing... Lesson learned: no more gachas for me. And because gachas in Marketplace aren't always labeled as such, from now on I'll be buying only items with "copy" permission. Mahalo / thanks for listening to me vent.