Data shows growing divide between casual and heavy SL users
By Eric Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Over 62,000 avatars were online in Second Life at the same time last weekend, another new record in a recent series of boosts to the concurrent population of Linden Lab’s virtual world.
But the rise in concurrency — the technical term for simultaneous online users — hasn’t left Second Life’s statisticians cheering. Statistics available from Linden Lab show total hours spent in Second Life are flat, while the count of distinct active users has dropped sharply in recent months. The numbers suggest that Second Life is more appealing, and time-consuming, than ever for its most dedicated users even as its attraction fades for a general audience.
Sunday’s record concurrency of 62,263 avatars represents a jump of over 20 percent in less than four months since Second Life cleared the 50,000 milestone in September. But the active user count has been in free fall, plummeting from almost 1.7 million users last summer to under 1.2 million now, according to Linden Lab datastreams collated by Tateru Nino of Massively.com. “As we understand it, it is the number of users who accrued 60 minutes or more of usage in the last 60 days,” Nino said.
The smaller user base has been spending approximately the same total time inside Second Life that a larger population spent last summer. Residents spent 25.6 million hours in Second Life in December, down from October’s peak and modestly up from July’s 23.6 million.
“Presumably the mayflies have a shorter life-span than ever, and that’s being partially offset by users who make it past their first hour who are spending more time overall,” Nino said.
Concurrency, Nino argues, is essentially a question of whether the Linden grid can handle the load of users logging in and trading inventory at the same time. As evidence, she points to a graph of Second Life’s concurrency, which she said shows a series of plateaus followed by jumps as something changes behind the scenes.
The boost in concurrency, according to Nino, reflects improvements by Linden to Second Life’s servers. And she said there’s still latent demand, and if the login servers could handle the load concurrency would be even higher. “For certain time periods during the week demand is exceeding supply.”
Jeroen Frans (Second Life: Frans Charming) of the Vesuvius Group, a virtual worlds consulting firm, also tracks concurrency figures closely. He agrees that concurrency is partially a function of capacity, but is more optimistic about Second Life’s appeal to new users.
“When you talk with new people you always hear about the tech being slow, and it definitely gets worse as more are online,” Frans said. But the new users are there, he insists. “After January, there seemed to be some new interest.”
“You see it outside of Second Life too,” he added. “Groups about Second Life and meetups all have more people than ever.”
Thanks Eric good write.
I’ve not noticed any change in what is being spent in second life either. If anything, it has increased the flow of transactions in SL recently which is a good indicator that the recent bans in various areas are not producing negative results.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the daily more than anything and it’s certainly a good sign with numbers like today.
US Dollars spent in Second Life
over last 24 hours
$1,363,136 as of 6:59pm PST
This has been increasing slowly as well which
I see as a good sign.
–rjs
Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:01pm PSTPeople with businesses have to work longer hours to make the same amount of income because there are less new users.
Fri Feb 1, 2008 8:02am PSTSecond Life’s stability problems aren’t helping things. When a new user logs on they aren’t likely to stay long if they can’t TP, can’t search, can’t buy, can’t trade items etc etc etc. I personally think LL should devote every bit of their resources to making SL stable. Forget Windlight etc etc. MAKE THE GRID WORK. EVERYTHING ELSE IS SECONDARY TO A STABLE GRID!! I’m frankly getting very sick of all the issues lately. It is bad for business and its bad for SL in general. One would think they’d have more of a sense of urgency.
LL has never seemed to understand that if the grid doesn’t work everything else is for nothing. They have put a priority on everything but stability. I know they claim otherwise but its obvious thats not the case. All one needs to do is log on for awhile. Perhaps the Lindens should try logging on once in awhile for a change.
Get a clue LL and GIVE US A STABLE GRID. Without it SL will die. I’m a long time user of SL who is ready to give up soon if things don’t improve. I’m sick of 3 FPS, crashes over and over, glitches and the like. Its amazing to me the problems get worse rather than better despite their promises. I guess SL may have to die before they will get a clue. Sorry to be so pessimistic but in the last year its only gotten worse and worse. Very disheartening.
Sat Feb 2, 2008 2:02pm PSTWhat they’re not admitting is that without gambling or banking, theres fewer options for people to invest and save or risk for entertainment sake. Whats more, the lack of faith by LL in the future creativity of its userbase is driving, or is driven by, a noticable brain drain of people leaving SL for the independent grids. LL has destroyed the trust the creative productive individuals had in it (as “Sire Philip” said in the Crystal Studios spoof, “All the cool, intelligent, brilliant people, leave the room.”) LL wont protect their content against thieves, LL wont allow them to reinvest their profits at reliable rates of return, and LL wont protect employers against the predations of unethical content creators. Without some meaningful, comprehensive, regularly *enforced* rules protecting property in SL, the SL economy is doomed.
Sun Feb 3, 2008 10:02pm PSTMost know that I do not agree with the people whom believe SL needs legal financial institutions, let alone one man put your “L” in my account.
However, in terms of stability, I do agree. Just recently I found some of my products not working and people asking for a fix or refund. Not an error on my part, as the products had worked fine for some time, but rather another LL bug that continues to recur with llTargetOmega or just a simple rotate.
No reason whatsoever for content creators to have to refund their clients, yet we do to keep the peace. The fact is, if Linden refunded for every problem they had, they would be paying us to alpha test their company software platform. That is how bad it has been for two years.
Just the headaches of having to deal with being contacted over issues you have no control over is less than appealing to content creators, let alone having to refund when Linden does little to appease the issues
or make immediate fixes available.
I’ve considered leaving SL myself the last month after two accounts and going on three years. It’s a shame, but there is a point and time where it becomes not worth the hassle.
–rjs
Mon Feb 4, 2008 9:02am PSTI recently had to do a rush fix because LL changed the behavior of several functions that caused my product to go into an infinit loop (abeit a VERY slow loop).
llTargetOmega() is a very serious problem and I have a few things affected by it such that they are pretty much unusable. Then I found llSetScale() was not working when an avatar sits on an object (works in Havok4 and used to work), so my guess is even more people are screwed.
Combine all the unannounced changes with the instability of the grid and client and creators have to spend hours extra each week working around bugs that LL should have squashed YEARS ago. I really think LL needs to be held responsible for their actions, and lack of action concerning their customers.
Mon Feb 4, 2008 11:02am PSTI’ve been noticing the kind of people that are in SL have changed since I started. It used to be that there were a lot of casual users who just liked to hang out, shoot things and buy clothes and accessories without putting much effort into it. Maybe a couple hours here and there.
Now most of the people I meet are die hard users with their own “companies” and other vested interests that would define someone as “hardcore”.
It’s kind of cool but also kind of sad because I find it harder to talk to the “hardcore” users than the casual users with other things to do.
It will be interesting to see how the next step in the “virtual world evolution” will look!
Wed Feb 6, 2008 5:02pm PSTThis article doesn’t even take a shot at accounting for the increase in the use of bots - for camping, information gathering, falsely increasing traffic numbers, etc. It’s been postulated by some residents that 20-30% of the active users on at any time could be bots. Go to the island of Skin Oasis. Somewhere on it is a pool holding 50-70 avatars just standing around. Where are all the actual people?
Tue Feb 19, 2008 8:02pm PSTHas anyone looked at the impact on casual use of the gambling ban last July? I reported on that story for in-world media. There was a large exodus after the ban.
Look at the premium account growth at http://taterunino.net/statistical%20graphs.html for a clue. See that plummet? That’s the aftermath of the gambling ban.
Linden Lab has marred the trust of the community too many times in the last year. From their original policy that SL was a platform, and they had no control or responsibility for content (invoking US law that protects ISPs from liability for client content) they have repeatedly made it clear that they will not hold neutral. They are caught between pincers — users who demand intervention in griefing and crime waves, and people who insist in an anarchocapitalist utopia.
It’s not clear that Linden Lab planned for, or can afford to police SL. It’s clear they feel they can not afford to be seen to flaut local laws in the US or even in Germany.
I predicted this in June 2007 http://tinyurl.com/3d7cs8
As options grow, LL may continue to become “just one player” rather than the star of virtual worlds. That’s probably a natural trend.
Wed Feb 27, 2008 5:02am PST