Tychariffic – Ciaran Laval

November 10, 2015

Second Life May Be Losing Regions But It’s Not In Betamax Territory Yet

“Betamax? Is that still around?” I pondered today as I read news on The Guardian that Sony are going to stop creating Betamax cassettes in March 2016. The main reason that Betamax appears have continued long after many felt it had departed is due to the use of Micro MV cameras, which use Micro MV cassettes in Betamax format. However all good things come to an end and over 40 years after its release and almost thirty years since Betamax lost the video format wars, Betamax finally seems to be going beneath the technical waters.

Which brings us on to Second Life. Daniel Voyager recently reported; Second Life regions drop under the 25, 000 mark. Daniel’s blog post was based on a report by Tyche “Statto” Shepherd over at SLUniverse, where Tyche announced :

Well as I predicted , a milestone of sorts was passed this week as the Grid dipped below 25,000 regions for the first time since June 2008.

The scores on the doors on November 8th were :

24,985 Regions
17,888 private estates
7097 Linden owned

The net loss of private regions for this year stood at 712 on November 8th. However let’s compare this to some previous years to try and get a picture of what’s going on.

11/11/2012 – Total Private Regions 21,334. Year to date loss of 2,523 private regions (-10.58%)
10/11/2013 – Total Private Regions 19,462 . Year to date loss of 1,530 private regions (-7.29%)
09/11/2014 – Total Private Regions 18,735. Year to date loss of 538 private regions (-2.8%)
08/11/2015 – Total Private Regions 17,888. Year to date loss of 712 private regions (-3.8%)

Therefore we can see that this year we’re seeing an increase in the rate of net losses of private regions compared to last year, but the rate of losses is still a lot lower than in 2012 and 2013. Let’s play about with some more figures.

Continue reading “Second Life May Be Losing Regions But It’s Not In Betamax Territory Yet”

March 25, 2014

The Slow Down In Region Losses … With Charts!

To fully appreciate the full extent of the slow down in region losses it’s best to turn to an expert. Unfortunately Tyche Shepherd doesn’t blog here, so you’ll have to read me instead. However the good news, I’m basing this post on the expert work of Tyche Shepherd and Tyche has kindly agreed to let me use her charts. Now please remember, these charts are Tyche’s work and copyrighted by Tyche, in other words, they shouldn’t be used without permission.

Ok on with the show.

Private Region Changes 2012 – 2014 (2 years)

Chart Of Private Region Changes 2012 - 2014 — Private Region Changes 2012 – 2014

Unfortunately this chart doesn’t display well on a blog this small, you can get a much better view of it on SLUniverse because there when you click the link, it enlarges. This chart shows the change in private regions between 1st Jan 2012 and 29th December 2013, so that’s around 2 years, give or take a few days. Private regions shrunk from 23,857 down to 19,273. A loss of 4,584 regions or 19.2%. That’s an alarming figure but hopefully you can see the slow down. The second half of the chart shows very few weeks where the third line down was reached.

Private Region Changes 1st January 2012 – 23rd December 2012

Chart Of Grid Size Image — Private region changes during 2012

This chart shows the private region changes during most of 2012, 51 weeks of it. Two things to note, the losses during 2012 came in at 2,863, this means the majority of the two year losses came during 2012, it works out at around 62.46% of the two year losses coming during 2012, which of course means, the slow down in private region losses did not get well under way until we hit 2013.

Private Region Changes 30th December 2012 – 29th December 2013

Private Region Changes 2013 Chart — Private Region Changes 2013

Above is the chart for those losses in 2013 and what we can see is that there was a total net loss of 1,719 regions or 8.2% for the year. As I said, this is considerably lower than during 2012 but still probably a little high. The losses are heavily loaded towards the first half of the year, the slow down really starts to become apparent around July and August but as we head into the Autumn we do some weeks where the losses picked up again. None of this really indicated what was to come during the first few weeks of 2014, but the slow down is most definitely apparent.

Continue reading “The Slow Down In Region Losses … With Charts!”

March 23, 2014

Second Life Grid Size – Steady As She Goes

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd’s weekly grid report breaks the news this week that the Second Life grid size has remained static for a second week in a row, although the net number of private regions grew by one sim, this was cancelled out by one Linden owned region disappearing.

The current scores on the doors are a total number of 26,178 regions on the Second Life grid, with 19,195 being private estates and 6,983 being Linden owned.

Now to get this shift in fortunes into some sort of perspective, let’s compare the scores on the doors during the first few months of 2012, 2013 and 2014.

2012

Type	01/01/2012	25/03/2012	Change	Percentage
Estate	23,857	23,046	-811	-3.4%
Linden Owned	7,221	7,105	-116	-1.60%
Overall	31,078	30,151	-927	-2.98%

In the above table we can see that overall losses were over 900 regions in the first few months of 2012, coming in at just under 3%. This table is a little bit odd because there were a higher number of Linden owned regions disappearing than we’ll see for 2013 and 2014, but this table is also the one with the largest losses for private regions too, both in numbers and percentage wise.

2013

Type	30/12/2012	24/03/2013	Change	Percentage
Estate	20,992	20,469	-523	-2.49%
Linden Owned	7,102	7,088	-14	-0.2%
Overall	28,094	27,557	-537	-1.91%

Here we can see that losses were still rather high with a net loss of over 500 private regions, but that in itself was an improvement on the early part of 2012, although the figures look disappointing there is indication of a slow down with a net loss that is almost 300 less than a similar period in 2013.

2014

Type	30/12/2013	23/03/2014	Change	Percentage
Estate	19,273	19,195	-78	-0.40%
Linden Owned	6,986	6,983	-3	-0.04%
Overall	26,259	26,178	-81	-0.31%

Here we can see that the slowdown in net region losses is getting quite significant. A net loss of just 78 private regions as opposed to the 523 in 2013 and the 811 in 2012 is extremely impressive. That’s just 9.61% of the net losses we saw during a similar period in 2012 and just 14.91% of the net losses we saw during a similar period in 2013.

Continue reading “Second Life Grid Size – Steady As She Goes”

February 24, 2014

Second Life Grid Achieves Week On Week Growth For The First Time Since March 31st 2013

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd’s weekly grid report has revealed that the Second Life grid grew this week for the first time since March 31st 2013. Tyche reports:

The grid actually grew this week by 14 regions , Private Estates had net growth of 15 while Linden Owned dropped by 1

Total number of Main Grid regions is now 26145 ( 19163 private estates & 6982 Linden owned)
60 new regions were added and 17 returned to the grid, with 63 regions removed (20 were renamed and 0 came and went since last report)

A modest growth this week , the first time the Grid has grown week on week since 31st March 2013 . The growth was distributed across a range of estates – no particular estate exhibiting a significant change in size due to new regions.

However before anyone starts poppnig champagne corks and heralding the dawn of a new age I should add a word of warning. The grid grew by 13 regions back on March 31st 2013 and that in itself was the first week on week growth since June 24th 2012, when the grid grew by 30 regions.

However there are definite positive signs. The loss of regions has undoubtedly slowed down. Let’s take a look at some tables! A point to note here, my calculations could be wrong, I may have made a glaring typo but calculators and stats make my eyes go funny, I think it’s right but if you spot any glaring errors let me know.

The first table I’ll look at is the overall changes between 24th June 2012 and February 24th 2014. This gives us an overall picture.

Grid Changes Between June 24th 2012 and February 24th 2014

Type	24th June 2012	24th February 2014	Change	Percentage
Estate	22,864	19,163	-3,836	-16.19%
Linden Owned	7,117	6,982	-29	-1.9%
Overall	29,981	26,145	-3,701	-12.79%

So we can see that during this period of less than two years, the grid experienced a rather whopping net loss of 16.19% of private regions. A much smaller loss of Linden Owned regions doesn’t really tell us much as there are numerous reasons why Linden Owned regions come and go, but I’m leaving them here for reference.

Continue reading “Second Life Grid Achieves Week On Week Growth For The First Time Since March 31st 2013”

January 27, 2014January 27, 2014

Rod Humble Years By Use Of Statistics And Tables

In this post I’m going to use tables to take a look at some statistics during the Rod Humble years. Allegations that this is just an excuse for me to remind myself how to do tables in HTML will be vehemently denied. I’ll be taking data largely from Tyche “Statto” Shepherd, which can be found at SLUniverse or from Tyche’s wonderfully useful site at http://gridsurvey.com/

I’m basing the following tables on Tyche’s reports on January 16th 2011 and January 19th 2014.

Region Numbers

Type	16th Jan 2011	19th Jan 2014	Change
Estate	24,756	19,205	-5,551
Linden Owned	6,673	6,986	+313
Overall	31,429	26,191	-5,238

This is quite a painful table. A loss of over 5,500 private estate regions during three years, which comes in somewhere close to 22.4% by my reckoning. My reckoning may be out of course but that looks about right.

The loss in private regions had started before Rod Humble came onboard and although they certainly seemed to accelerate under his reign, the losses were slowing down by the time he left. I posted on January 4th that net private region losses were slowing down. During 2012 the net loss was 2,865 (12.0% during the year), in 2013 the net loss was 1,719 (8.2% during the year). I’m not sure what anyone can do to stem the loss of private regions at this stage.

Regions By Maturity Rating

Type	16th Jan 2011	19th Jan 2014	Change
Adult – Estate	2,043	4,074	+2,031
Adult – Linden	346	346	0
Adult – All	2,389	4,420	+2,031
General – Estate	3,047	1,931	-1,116
General – Linden	1,492	1,622	+130
General – All	4,539	3,553	-986
Moderate – Estate	19,663	13,196	-6,467
Moderate – Linden	4,835	5,018	+183
Moderate – All	24,498	18,214	-6,284

As we can see, during the three years Mr Humble was in charge, Second Life appeared to get more adult. Over 2,000 more Adult rated sims now furnish the grid than when he arrived in 2011. Adult rated private regions have almost doubled.

This seems to have come at the expense of moderate and general rated regions. Moderate region net losses were well over 6,000 and not far off 33%. General fared worse in terms of a percentage loss, at around 36.6%.

The usual caveats apply here, I don’t know why Adult ratings have risen so much but I do know that many an adult sim is not dedicated to full on adult activities. Some people just prefer to have the highest available rating to give them the most flexibility. This is why Moderate rated sims score so well, in the old days there were only two ratings and moderate (then known as mature) was the higher rating and therefore gave the most flexibility.

I’m sure someone somewhere may be able to delve further into the reasons for Adult becoming so popular, but it would be a painful task.

As one would expect, there’s not that much change in the numbers of Linden owned sims but there clearly were some additions.

Continue reading “Rod Humble Years By Use Of Statistics And Tables”