Open Forum: What Should I Ask M. and T. Linden About Second Life's Economy?

Linden Chief Product Officer T. Linden posted an exhaustive quarterly report on the state of Second Life's economy on the company blog, and most indicators look good. Check it out here. If all goes as planned, this afternoon I'll be conducting a follow-up interview on it with T. and CEO M. Linden. What questions about the economy were raised by that report, if only by their absence? Post suggestions here, and I'll try to include them in our conversation

Comments

[Ran Garrigus]

To settle a question Tateru Nino raised, more information on what "repeat logins" mean in the Monthly Unique Residents metric. Could the growth curve simply be reflecting people crashing or being disconnected due to region instability?

In regards to economic activity, is it possible that bot owners are setting bots to exchange money between themselves (or to purchase a handful of their own product) as a means of avoiding detection as bots? This ties into the 10-15% figure previously given for total bot presence in SL, as I've wondered if any economic activity automatically rules an account out as a bot (specifically, a "traffic" bot) according to LL's present definitions.

[Hamlet Au]

"Could the growth curve simply be reflecting people crashing or being disconnected due to region instability?"

That might make sense if viewer crashes and system downtimes were increasing, but the Linden stats claim both have been decreasing at the same time log-in totals have been rising.

[Alberik Rotaru]

Linden Lab seems to take an awfully long time to resolve relatively simple policy issues. Megaprims, the premium subscription improvement are two that spring to mind although a complete list would be much much longer. Michael Linden posted The Big Prim Problem on 12 October 2007 and that issue has still not been resolved. We do not haves scalable megaprims, but non-scalable megaprims can be found on almost every sim. Robin Linden was speaking about premium improvements at an office hours in 2007.

Does the company need to reset its internal decision-making to speed up the gap between identifying and resolving a problem? A company that sings the praises of connectedness and responsiveness perhaps needs to emblematise the benefits a little better.

[Ran Garrigus]

Hamlet,

I had the same thought, but as others raised some uncertainity it I thought I'd pitch it in there. :)

[Tateru Nino]

I've got some questions in with the Lab myself (I'm halfway through the repeat-logins issue myself). My queries all come back to the same things. Definitions. The data doesn't always mean what it appears to mean.

[Doubledown Tandino]

Please ask about productivityL
percentage of time spent working on SL's economic infastructure versus time spent making pretty graphs and charts.

[Doubledown Tandino]

Please ask about productivityL
percentage of time spent working on SL's economic infastructure versus time spent making pretty graphs and charts.

[Sioban McMahon]

"That might make sense if viewer crashes and system downtimes were increasing, but the Linden stats claim both have been decreasing at the same time log-in totals have been rising."

In my experience, crashes increase right after a new viewer is released and on the weekend. Look at:

- if there's a correlation between the # of logins and # of days since last viewer release. This would be confounded by the range of viewers used (main, release candidate, cool viewer, etc), but I suspect that most folks are using the main viewer.

- weight the login data by the number of avvie names that login. Comparing # of logins/# of names over time could separate out times in which many people are actually online and those crummy days in which we're all relogging 3-4 times.

[Koinup Burt]

James, maybe you should ask about the impact Linden Lab foresee for the acquisition of Xstreet SL

I mean, right now, as said by T Linden: "Xstreet is a very small portion of the overall Second Life economy", but I suspect they expect to impact significantly the whole second life economy with such acquisition

[Troy McConaghy]

I think the "pretty graphs and charts" are a highly productive way for Linden Lab to communicate SL statistics. It's all well and good for Linden Lab to work on infrastructure, but if they don't report the statistics, how will anyone know them? It's important to report statistics because they affect people's perception and planning for the future.

The idea that 10% of repeat logins are bots is total baloney and here's why:

Bots tend to be logged in 24/7 (camping, window-washing, busking, bar-tending, etc). When a rolling restart hits the sim where a bot is logged in, the bot gets logged out, just like everyone else (unless they teleport elsewhere, which I doubt). The bot will log back in once it can. Rolling restarts happened in March. Therefore bots will show up in the March "repeat logins" statistics, even if the bot's sim didn't crash (which is increasingly rare).

Some bots also automatically logout and relog on a regular schedule (to protect the computer running them against accumulating memory leaks causing system failure). Those bots would also show up in the monthly repeat logins.

The graph says there were 732,000 repeat logins in March. If 10% of the repeat logins are bots, then there were 73,200 bots logged in at any given time in March (since bots tend to be logged in all the time).

The number of current logins (concurrent residents, including bots) was between 55,000 and 88,000 (approximately), in March. This means that bots accounted for between and 83% and 133% of all concurrent residents in March.

Anyone who's spent any time inworld knows that the bot numbers are less than 83% of all currently-inworld residents.

Therefore the 10% number is baloney. QED

[Tateru Nino]

I don't think anyone said that 10% of the repeat-logins were bots. Actually, that wouldn't even make any sense anyway.

[Ann Otoole]

Ask M when will Linden Lab get tough on content rippers instead of turning a blind eye to the problem since the rippers pay LL a lot of dollars.

[Rifkin Habsburg]

This is probably too specific for T & M, but I would love to know more about how their revenue stream breaks down. In other words, roughly what percentage of Linden Lab's revenues come from: sales of new land, maintenance fees on existing land, transaction fees on the Lindex, sales of L$ from Supply Linden

[Adirc Antfarm]

Hamey;

Please see my blog item on the report, remove the bad language, anything negative I said about M Linden, and pass on the remaining three words left (the part about how not being able to own land is not, has never been, and will never an incentive for people to subscribe --- SO FIND THINGS THAT MAKE PEOPLE YEARN TO DROP AS LOW AS $6. You know, class warfare.

[Robustus Hax]

My question would be out of the people making a profit and taking money out of game, what percentage of the SL population holds how much percentage of wealth. Is SL top heavy or is it more spread out? Are there a small percentage of people making big money, or is there a larger portion of the population doing well...

[Adric Antfarm]

I hate the "me too" posters, but I'd like to echo Mr. Hax on his question.

You hear from people selling the 'business in a box' from the books 'how to get rich in SL' , etc, etc there is gold in them SL hills, but what if the truth is the majority of bank is made by a small number of land owners who made an initial investment most never could or (my theory) the larger operations getting others to sell their products and taking a big cut in return making you more an employee than business owner.

In English, how about "Mr. Linden, do you think the dream is still alive on SL? Can your average avatar build not an empire, but a decent "family" business or is that day gone with larger and larger giants impossible to compete with?"

[Henri Beauchamp]

Here are a few questions:

- How do you explain that after peaking at a little over 1 500 000 users in November 2007, the "Logged In Last 60 days" figure has since been below this record ?

- Don't you see a strong correlation between the obvious stagnation of the active users base with:
- The abandon of the legacy renderer branch of the viewer (end of 2007), which left 30% or so of the residents with "old" computers behind ?
- The outrageous raise of sim maintenance fees resulting from the cut down in Open Space sims capacities?
- The closing of OnRez and the monopoly resulting from the buy of XStreet by LL ?

- Don't you think the soon to happen segregation of "adult" material will further make your pretty figures plunge down towards the abyss ?

- Can't you see that the residents (your customers) are fed up with your corporate lies ?

- Why not being frank and stopping being hypocrite and rename your Motto ? What do you think of "Linden Lab's World, Your money", instead of the now unsuited "Your World, Your Imagination" ?

[ChabrellIgan]

God dag! Kan jag ladda ner en bild fran din blogg. Av sak med hanvisning till din webbplats!