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Wednesday, May 16, 2018

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Clara Seller

This is a shame because there's a ton of good ideas and a willing crowd to help change this trajectory, even within the walls of LL itself.

It may never stroke the egos of those at the top, but driving it off a cliff blindfolded is just mind-boggling.

Carlos Loff

Where are the good news ?

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Adeon Writer

Always prefer to see these with mainland included. LL is really pushing mainland lately, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the losses are just shifting there since it can be a better/cheaper deal for non-full sim owners.

Lestat

sims are just to expensive a full sim depending who you rent from by the end of the month will almost run full real life rent in some places


E

Full regions are $295 USD a month. That means you either have a lot of disposable income on you, or you are one of the rarer ones who manages to make it up with group joins or stores.

The one thing I'll never understand, however, is the lack of support for educational institutions within second life.

Kouki Elska

My last home cost USD$250/mo, making the monthly cost of a sim more expensive than my monthly essential living cost and food stamps combined.
Even with my current home rent being higher $330, it's way too crazy for me to even imagine paying for a sim.

I remember years ago I met a disabled guy who lived in a trailer because he was apparently using his social security monthly living cost on his sim. So sad.

Social security gave him only about 1000 monthly.
I'm getting $735 monthly, and already can't afford much non-essential things... so I can imagine he must have given up a ton irl for a sim.

For myself I am satisfied with just my $5 parcel on mainland.

Ricco Saenz

Are you serious that you didn't know about NY 1920s? If not, I'd recommend you to search for pictures of it - there are many in Flickr.

Granger

Optimism is useful when warranted... misleading when it's not based on reality. It is difficult to look at the trendline of that graph and find anything of positive validity. SL dropping "only" 2% as compared with a prior 4+% is putting icing on a mud cake. The reality is it is still dropping.

When we drop the optimism, a more productive and realistic route is to try to figure out WHY it is still dropping. That trendline is still significantly downward and all the optimism in the world isn't going to change that. So we do well to address the issues rather than say, "Well, it's not as bad as it could be..."

Staring the problems in the face:
* People are realizing it's some kind of idiotic to pay such excessive fees for virtual ground. Are they excessive? Yes... absurdly so. LL net profits measure in the $millions per month.)

* The system has an extremely high learning curve on viewers that are poorly designed, difficult to use and regularly malfunction.

* Despite a decade and a half of operation the reality still exists that even simple things still malfunction: simple text-based group chat still doesn't work properly, group notices don't get to everyone, 2D textures still don't load correctly, mesh malfunctions regularly, etc etc.

* SL still has arbitrary limitations on prim count, link limits and region backup that does not exist on other grids. They still have not enabled regions larger than 256m. The lag of region crossing is still unbelievable. People still crash regularly.

This is the extremely short list of extremely major issues with SL. Maybe the reason private regions have dropped below 16,000 is the simple fact that SL users are getting smarter-- and realizing that a piece of pixelized ground isn't worth the price of leasing a new car. Maybe they're getting tired of LL putting a new coat of paint on a rustbucket that misses on half its cylinders.

The above is by no means pessimistic or negative. It is a *realistic* statement of grid affairs. After all this time it would seem the only thing Linden Lab has learned from its many experiences... is how to deposit money in the bank. As long as they continue to do so these problems will still exist... and we can expect region counts to keep dropping. Not that it matters to the company; how long can they exist on a 2% drop and still be happily profitable? At $300 a sim... I'm guessing quite a while. As far as LL is concerned, they're making ungodly amounts of money. 40 regions is a drop in the bucket. Why be concerned about user experience? "So long as the dummies keep paying us, we'll keep taking their money."

The reason for the declining trendline seem pretty obvious.

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