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.

Regions By Class Rating

Type	16th Jan 2011	19th Jan 2014	Change
Class 5 – Estate	21,557	2,198	-19,359
Class 5 – Linden	1,262	1,279	+17
Class 5 – All	22,819	3,477	-19,342
Class 7 – Estate	1,565	9,150	+7,585
Class 7 – Linden	5,245	1,351	-3,894
Class 7 – All	6,810	10,501	+3,691
Class 8 – Estate	0	6,998	+6,998
Class 8 – Linden	0	4,213	+4,213
Class 8 – All	0	11,211	+11,211

This is the table that shows that some of the background work on technical improvements were certainly in progress during Rod Humble’s reign. When he arrived, there wasn’t a Class 8 sim in sight. The vast majority of sims were Class 5 rated.

As we can see there are now over 11,000 estate regions on class 8 hardware. There are also over 10,000 estate regions on class 7 hardware. However we can also see that mainland gets plenty of class 8 loving too with aroud 61.5% of mainland regions running on class 8 hardware.

Linden Lab certainly spent money on their technical infrastructure during Rod Humble’s reign.

Estimated Monthly Privare Region Tier Income

This table is based on Tyche’s reports for her January 2011 private region survey and Tyche’s November 2013 private region survey, which was published in December 2013. All figures are in US Dollars.

January 2011	November 2013	Change
5,151,000	3,857,000	-1,294,000

This is another painful table, with estimated private region tier income dropping by well over 1 million US dollars a month. That’s a big hit to take. What we don’t know is what steps, if any, Linden Lab took to mitigate some of this lost income. We do know that they introduced adverts to Second Life properties but there’s no way they will fill the sort of hole that such a large drop in estimated monthly tier  leaves.

Tier Pricing

January 2011	January 2014	Change
Too Damn High!	Too Damn High!	None!

The above table has been adjusted for inflation, the tier is too damn high! There’s no easy fix here, Linden Lab need to find alternative revenue streams somehow, tier remains way too big a central plank of the Second Life income model. That means Linden Lab simply cannot afford to slash tier as things stand because they’d be cutting off too much gas to their main supply line. However this really needs to be looked at.

The Weather

Country	January 2011	January 2014
Australia	Seasonal	Absurdly Hot!
United Kingdom	Seasonal	Absurdly Wet!
United States	Seasonal	Absurdly Cold!

The weather during Rod Humble’s reign has gone nuts all over the world! I don’t know what to make of this, in the UK, even by our standards where we are often found singing “Why does it always rain on me” it has been absurdly wet lately. I’m not sure whether the portents are good or bad that Rod’s reign has ended with such meteorological turmoil. Time will tell.

Conclusion

Statistics only tell part of the story and they should never really be used to tell the full story. The full story has a lot more nooks and crannies that create circumstances beyond Linden Lab’s control. A global financial crisis being one glaring example. An ageing platform being another. World Of Warcraft has been shedding subscribers too during this period. World Of Warcraft, like Second Life, is an ageing platform and although both make valiant attempts to breathe new life into them, there’s only so much that can be done.

However Second Life still has a very healthy following and although some of the stats may appear somewhat worrisome, they are far from fatal. If all else fails, go and have a pint with The Dwarfins somewhere on the grid!

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