Tycharrific » Ciaran Laval

Tyche Shepherd’s Private Estate Survey For April 2013

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May 072013

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd has some really interesting reports going around right now and I think I’m going to have to poke her about using some of them, but the results of her private estate survey for April are in. As usual I won’t report all the findings, you can find them in the link. There isn’t anything eye catching in terms of changes in land holdings this month, the grid has shrunk and at a faster rate than in March but one interesting point to note is the change in class of Servers, there has been a leap, a rather significant one, in class 8 hardware.

Now remember this is a survey, not a census, so there are margins of error.

The key points I will highlight for this survey are:

Private Regions down 158 regions (0.8% since last month)
Total private regions now stand at 20,324
Estimated monthly tier income – US$4,091,000 +/- US$51,000 (Down around $45,000 or 1.1% on last month).
Top 20 landowners own 38.3% of private regions (Up 0.8% on last month).
Top 20 landowners pay 30.7% of private region tier (Up 0.4% on last month).

Nothing earth shattering in these figures, although the decline in private regions was higher during April at 0.8%, when compare to March where it was 0.3%.

Whereas the top 20 landowners holdings are up slightly, the Top 10 are down slightly, very slightly at 0.1%.

Private Sims Show Growth For First Time Since June 2012

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Apr 012013

In her regular weekly report on the state of the nation regarding land mass, Tyche Shepherd has reported that private sims grew by 13 sims during the last week. This is the first time they’ve shown growth since June 2012, a period of 40 weeks of pretty much decline has been reported since then.

The last reported growth came week ending June 24th 2012, when Tyche reported growth of 30 private regions. At that stage we had 22,864 private regions on the grid. This week’s report shows that the growth of private regions now puts private region numbers at 20,482. That’s a loss of 2,382 private regions over the period of 40 weeks since growth was last reported, around 10.4% loss by my calculations.

Whether this is a sign that grid losses are stablising, it’s way too early to tell but the decline in the number of private regions has been slowing in recent weeks, here are the recent changes

24th Feb -36
3rd March -55
10th March -18
17th March -6
24th March -23
31st March +13

Another way to look at this is to compare the last report of each month so far this year:

January -242
February -179
March -89

So there are definitely signs of a downward trend in the number of sims leaving the grid, although those monthly reports can be skewed, for example there are five weekly reports during the March period, as opposed to four in January and February, so not an exact science.

Tyche Shepherd’s Awesome Mainland Census March 2013

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Mar 172013

Tyche Shepherd has published the results of her mainland survey for the first quarter of 2013 over at SLUniverse : Mainland Census For 2013. The results reveal that three mainland sims have disappeared from the grid, all homesteads and all bordering The Blake Sea.

Unlike private region surveys, mainland doesn’t change much in shape or size unless Linden Lab launch something like Linden Homes or they auction off new sims, which doesn’t really happen these days, so the figures don’t change much in terms of the number of sims. There are currently 6,726 mainland sims on the grid, in December 2011 there were 6,723 so not much change over the last year or so. Tyche’s census also doesn’t include around 360 sims which are made up of help islands or Linden Realms.

Where the mainland census does see changes is with regard to things such as the total number of parcels, the number of owners and the amount of abandoned land. This survey reveals:

Number of Parcels – 14,5238 (Down 2.2%)
Unique Owners – 67,405 (Down 1.8%)
Abandoned Land – Between 51,388,816Sqm and 55,615,680Sqm or 11.7% to 12.6% (Up from 10.6% – 11.6%)

Abandoned Land has increased by somewhere around 66 to 70 full regions since last quarter’s census, giving an overall total of 784 to 840 full regions. Abandoned Land has been on the increase since September 2011.

Tyche Shepherd’s Private Region Survey For February

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Mar 072013

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd’s private region survey for February 2013 revealed a couple of stark points:

The large estates now hold a bigger percentage of the grid.
Older hardware in the shape of class 5 regions is declining, whilst newer class 7 and 8 regions rise.

As this is a survey there are margins of error in the results, so they may be slightly out, but not by much …. I think I’ve got that right! Now February continued the decline in private regions on the grid, there was a net loss of 146 regions, so if you held steady during February you’d hold a larger perentage of the grid. Let’s take a hypothetical example here, imagine you owned 10 regions and there were 100 regions on the grid, you’d hold 10% of the share. However if 10 regions disappeared, you’d now own 10 regions out of 90, making your share 11.1%, so without doing anything yourself, your percentage of land holdings increases when there’s a decline.

However February’s overall decline was 0.7%, which is healthier than January’s 1.5%. However when it comes to the top twenty landowners, their holdings went up by 3.8% (+/- 1.3%) in February, giving them 38.9% of private regions. Tyche also comments that taking list prices, their holdings are up 2.3%, meaning they pay around 31% of all private region tier.

Tyche also looks at the top 10 owners and figures out that they hold 29.1% (+/- 1.2%) of regions and pay 21.4% of private region tier. This backs up Tyche’s statement that larger estates own more homesteads than smaller estates.

The big mover in February was the ACS owned Azure Islands, up 0.8%. Anshe’s estate holdings don’t show so well in the full list as there are individual estates, but overall they amount to 14.7% ( +/-0.9%) which is up 1.6% on January.

Adult Rated Regions Outnumber General Rated Regions

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Feb 182013

Tyche Shepherd informed us on Saturday that Adult rated regions now outnumber general rated regions, this the first time that this has been the case. The state of play has changed slightly since Saturday and on Sunday looked like this:

3,940 – Adult
3,925 – General
19,836 – Moderate.

So Adult has just pipped general but Moderate is still the rating of choice. Adult rated sims make up around 14.2% of the grid, however they are more popular with private region owners than Linden Lab’s mainland.

Which brings us on to more of Tyche Shepherd’s statistical goodies. This week’s update over at SLUniverse informs us that the grid is lighter to the tune of 84, however 44 of these are Linden Owned and were largely made up of Linden Realms and Premium Wilderness sims, however that still means there are 40 private regions no longer on the grid. Now for the updated stats:

Estate – Adult: 3,594
Estate – General: 2,200
Estate – Moderate: 14,809
Estate – Offline: 4
Linden – Adult: 346
Linden – General: 1,725
Linden – Moderate: 5,027

2012 Reviewed – January To March

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Dec 262012

January

The year started with the news that the mesh clothing parametric deformer, paid for and funded by Second Life residents, was going Alpha.

Mesh itself got a boost with the news that the 1920′s Berlin sim was embracing mesh.

Direct Delivery, the new funky way of selling items on the SL Marketplace went beta.

Bryn Oh’s art installation of Immersiva, which had been previously subsidised thanks to the generous nature of Dusan Writer, had to close due to financial difficulties.

llSetMemoryLimit a new scripting function to set the upper limit a script can use in terms of memory usage, got rolled out.

The Simple Inventory Project Viewer was launched for testing, this was a project aimed at improving how inventory performs.

Avatar Rendering Cost was replaced by Avatar Draw Weight, with this being a new performance tool to show us how costly our avatars are.

Duran Duran got their very own section on the destination guide, it’s still there today.

Tyche Shepherd’s Awesome Mainland Census December 2012

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Dec 242012

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd has again unveiled the magic powers of her survey bots to produce the latest quarterly mainland census over at SLUniverse. The survey was last ran in September 2012. The latest census, which should be read in full in the link, reveals that mainland regions are at a record high, but that the number of parcels, owners and estimated income are all down since September’s survey. Abandoned land has reached a record high.

Keypoints

Overall number of parcels down 3.1% from 153,263 to 148,524.
Unique parcel owners down from 69,773 to 68,664.
The top 22 Non-Linden owners increased their mainland holdings from 6.2% to 7.4%.
The top 3 Non-Linden owners increased their holdings from 3.1% to 4.2%.
Abandoned Land at around 10.6% to 11.6% of all Mainland – an equivalent of 714 to 783 full regions an increase from around 9.8% to 10.9% or 714 to 783 regions.
Estimated Monthly Mainland Tier US$926,089 , down by an estimated US$17,846 or 1.9%.
Number of mainland regions 6,729 a record high, up 2 from 6,727.
Linden Home Regions occupied plots 41,435 (97%) down from 41,689 (97.6%).
Land For Sale 30,556,368Sqm down 11.7% from 34,618,224Sqm.

Private Estate Losses Reach 12% For The Year

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Dec 242012

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd reports a net loss of 106 sims this week in her awesome survey post over at SLUniverse. Linden owned regions increased by 16 this week, but private estates were down 122. This makes the year to date loss of private regions from the grid 2,863, which is 12% down for the year.

The increase in Linden Regions comes from the arrival of 18 Linden Realms staging regions, so it looks like we may get some new fun sims to explore. However amongst the losses are sims owned by Dell, IBM, The US Army and The British Council. However the vast majority of the 122 losses are not corporate sims.

The good news for Linden Lab is that the size of the main grid still stands at 28,097, of these regions 20,994 are private regions with the other 7,103 being Linden owned. This means there’s still a very healthy amount of usage, but the trend remains downwards.

By my estimates private region ownership is somehwere around the level it was at in June 2008, although in June 2008 we had seen some large growth during the year.

Private Estate Losses Slow To Lowest Decrease Since June

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Nov 042012

Tyche Shepherd’s weekly report of the size of the grid has revealed this week that we lost just ten private regions this week. One Linden region was added, making a net loss of just nine regions, the smallest fall in regions since the week ending June 24th, which was actually the last time we had growth in the number of regions on a weekly basis.

Now considering that this is a much smaller loss than recently, it could very well be an outlier, rather than an indication of a change in trend. Time will tell. The same can be said of the net loss of over one hundred regions reported on October 21st, that was much higher than usual trends and thankfully looks like an outlier, that was linked in with the Royal Properties estate going belly up.

Tyche has also reported the results of her October 2012 private estate survey, which is based on a random survey of 5,000 private regions to determine the results.

Private Regions Down Almost 10% This Year

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Oct 202012

Graph Of Sims

The image above is a bit difficult to read here, but it’s a graph of sim losses since January 1st this year, published here with kind permission from Tyche “Statto” Shepherd, for the full sized image click here. The graph is from this post over at SLUniverse, where Tyche updates us regularly on the state of play with the land mass. The latest post (a new one usually appears over the weekend) points out that the grid is lighter to the tune of 2353 private regions this year, which is around 9.9% of the total number of regions recorded on January 1st.

Estate losses are painful, to owners and renters. TheRoyal Properties website currently displays the following message:

“Sadly, due to so many avatars not making payments as promised, Royal Properties has had to officially close its doors. Enjoy your journey… I only wish it would have worked out for me to… ”

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