Tyche Shepherd » 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.

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

New Land Products Would Halt The Land Losses, But What Would They Do For LL’s Revenue?

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Jan 312013

Tyche Shepherd this week reported that the grid is ligher to the tune of another 61 private regions, this brings the losses for this year to roughly around 235, I say roughly because I’m basing this on Tyche’s last four reports and there’s a little bit of carry over from the last day or two of last year and the last report was on January 27th, so it is almost certainly slighly higher.

Now a lot of people want Linden Lab to slash tier and in many ways, that would halt the decline, for example they could slash the tier on homesteads back down to USD$75.00, or slash the tier on Openspaces to USD$25.00 a month and insist they’re only used for scenery with a stingy prim count. Openspaces at USD$75.00 a month seems extremely high to me. They could even slash tier on full regions to say USD$195.00 a month. All of these moves would halt the decline of sim losses, temporarily at least. However another route would be to introduce new products.

Now there’s no doubt that one way Linden Lab could halt the losses is to introduce new land products, such as a region that supports 7,500 prims for around USD$150.00 per month, or a region that supports 11,250 prims for USD$225.00 a month, or mega regions that were double, treble or quadruple the size of current regions in terms of prim count and land mass but had a pro-rata rata tier rate that was a fair bit cheaper than four individual regions, that might appeal to the large Land Barons.

There is a precedent for new products increasing the land mass, it came with the Openspace fiasco. When Linden Lab removed the requirement to buy Openspaces in packs of four and then allowed them to be placed anywhere on the grid, the land mass exploded, so much so that on July 8th 2008 Zee Linden opened his blog post with:

“Linden Lab is pleased to announce results for Second Life the second Quarter.

Land mass grew over 44%. The total number of regions owned by residents increased 44.2% over Q1 to just over 1.5 billion square meters. Our growth was due to the popularity of our newly launched “Openspace” land product along with a change in pricing to make the purchase of land more accessible to first time buyers.”

Now as those of us who were around at the time know, this didn’t end well, but in terms of bringing new land to the grid, the Openspace initiative produced staggering results.

2012 Reviewed – The Full Monty

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Dec 262012

This will be a rather long post as it’s a review of the year, this is the fifth in a series of annual posts, the other four look at different years… I think you’ll have worked that out already! This post isn’t made any easier by Linden Lab not being as active in their blog as they once were. This was also a very difficult year for me personally which meant I took a large break from regular blogging between April and September, with only sporadic posts appearing, so I’ll have to delve elsewhere for some information for the year, fortunately there are plenty of resources such as Inara Pey, Nalates Urriah, Tateru Nino and New World Notes amongst others, as well of course as Linden Lab’s underused blog, it still has some useful posts. Also a special mention for Tyche Shepherd and her awesome surveying which provides so much useful information.

I’m also doing things a bit differently this year as these posts are getting pretty epic. This is the full post but as it’s pretty TLDR, I’ve also broken the post down into four quarterly posts elsewhere, the information will be the same other than this initial commentary, but it may be easier on the eye to read in smaller chunks. To read the quarterly reviews go here.

2012 brought us viewer improvements, Pathfinding, Advanced Creator Tools, Direct Delivery and a lot of bug fixes by Oz Linden and his team as well as new scripting functions. I’ll miss plenty out in this review, I’ll also include trivial aspects. Some of the issues can be summed up in the following photo:

However there’s a lot more than that to cover, so let’s get this rolling.

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

Second Life, Virtual Worlds 6 Responses »

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.

Tyche Shepherd’s Awesome Mainland Census – March 2012

Second Life, Virtual Worlds 4 Responses »

Mar 172012

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd, who was recently interviewed by Hamlet Au over at New World Notes, has unveiled her latest work in the shape and form of her March Mainland Census, which you can read in full over at SLUniverse by clicking here.

The census tells us that mainland regions have stabilised since December and remain at 6,723, this is still a record figure but it’s the same figure from the December census. This figure excludes Linden owned regions such as help islands and Linden realms, which in themself amount to a figure of around 500.

The census reveals good and bad news, the good news is that ownership of parcels is up, by 0.2%, this means that more unique avatars own land than the previous census. The figures Tyche gives us reveal that this amounts to 68,485 unique owners, with individual parcel owners at 56,660, up 163 from December’s census, whereas 12,825 groups own land, down 14 since December.

However on the bad news side, abandoned land is now at record levels, of between 7.2 – 8.3% of mainland abandoned. Tyche informs us that this is an equivalent of 484 to 557 full regions, which is rather shocking when you think about it but I’m not sure what Linden Lab can do about that, moving people would cause chaos and mayhem and have people searching for their pitchforks left, right and centre! The increase in abandoned land since December is estimated by Tyche to be the equivalent of 27-30 regions.

Second Life Is Alive And Well

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Feb 012012

Hamlet has a post with quotes from Stat Goddess Tyche Shepherd, showing that private estates are being shed from the grid. Tyche reported these losses on her excellent grid survey thread over at SLUniverse, the particular post in question has details of Tyche’s private estate survey, you can read the post here.

Tyche’s comment that raises eyebrows, or causes gasps is:

“ Taking these figures a good estimate of private estate tier due each month is US$4,920,000 +/- US$58,000 . (Calculated using known grandfathering rates but excludes any academic reductions and is rounded to the closest US$1000), this figure is down on last month’s estimate of US$5,006,000 by $86,000 , a significant fall of about 1.8%. This is the first time the monthly tier figure has fallen below US$5 Million since I began the private estate surveys and the margin of error indicates this is a significant finding. ”

I’m not going to say Linden Lab shouldn’t worry about this, they absolutely should, but it’s certainly not time to man the lifeboats, just under USD$5 million per month in tier for private estates, is still a healthy figure, especially in these tough economic times. I do think tier is too expensive these days, but to lower it Linden Lab need to boost other income streams, slashing tier now would more than likely give a short term boost, but Linden Lab need to play the long game.

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