Tyche’s Grid Stats – Page 2

July 2, 2014

Phoenix Firestorm Q&A Session On The Future Of Second Life Featuring Oz & Pete Linden

Today’s Phoenix Firestorm question and answer session regarding the future of Second Life has been filmed and is on youTube. I will also in traditional style embed the video at the end of the post. I will point out that if you’re looking for a chat log, this blog will not include the droids you’re looking for. However the lovely Inara Pey may well provide a transcript in the near future.

The session was hosted by Jessica Lyon who was assisted by Lette Ponnier and featured guests Gray of the Lab from San Francisco (AKA Linden Lab’s Director Of Global Communications Peter Gray) and Oz Linden, Director Of Open development at Linden Lab and chief Second Life man now that some of Linden Lab are working on the new virtual world space. I will hereby label Oz “The Man Behind The Curtain“, because he is bloody important now in terms of Second Life, not that he wasn’t important before of course, but now he is really really important. Oz is the man behind the scenes, pulling levers, pressing buttons and keeping the magic in Second Life and things will stay this way as long as people believe in Second Life. Oz points out in the discussion that this was a position he really wanted, which is very positive indeed.

Anyway on to the discussion, it runs for almost an hour but if you don’t have that sort of patience you only need to watch the first few minutes to hear Peter Gray reiterate that Second Life is not closing down, Linden Lab have no plans to close Second Life down, investment and development will continue. Rumour has it that if you play this part of the video backwards at the correct speed you will also hear the phrase “The Tier is too damn high” uttered”, but I haven’t been able to confirm that!

Oz makes an early point that is one I’ve long agreed with, people criticise Second Life because they care about Second Life. Oz also talks about the challenges of working with a smaller team and admits that in some ways this is helpful because it helps the team to focus on the important issues. Oz also confirms that whereas the team working on Second Life are smaller than they previously were, it’s still a significant number of people. Oz also adds that the numbers in the team may be dynamic, some people working on the new platform will at times be called upon to work on Second Life and vice versa.

Oz talked of the new experience keys beta, the fact that Linden Lab really are working on improving group chat including hardware upgrades for servers. However there is no quick fix here, it’s going to take a while but they really are working on this. Another part of the team are working on improving the web framework in the viewer where they are moving from webkit to the chromium embedded framework.

There’s also news that they are working on improvements to texture and mesh loading speeds as part of the HTTP Project. Inara Pey touched upon this in her Server Updates blog post.

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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.

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March 14, 2014

Second Life Grid Experiences Largest Week On Week Growth Since 17th June 2012

Over a fortnight ago Tyche “Statto” Shepherd reported that the Second Life grid had experienced net growth of 14 regions, 15 for private regions, with Linden Lab dropping a region. This was the first net growth on the grid since March 31st 2013.

A week later the grid returned to losses, although it wasn’t an awful decline with the grid experiencing a net loss of 10 regions, 11 private regions and a Linden region appearing, possibly the missing one from the week before. However this did buck a trend of sorts, the grid growth of 31/03/13 was followed by a net loss of 16 regions, meaning the grid was smaller than it had been before the growth.

Prior to that, the grid had last grown on 24th June 2012, this is an important date. That week the grid grew by 30 regions, which was the third consecutive week of growth. However the week after that, the grid shrunk by a whopping 237 regions, wiping out all of that three week growth, which in total stood at 149 regions. This is why people shouldn’t get too excited about signs of growth too quickly.

Last weekend, Tyche was busy, it should be remembered that Tyche is pretty much a one woman band, she does have assistance from her survey bot, but a survey bot can only do so much. Therefore there has been no report from Tyche on the scores on the doors last weekend. However there is a backup plan, it comes in the shape and form of Tyche’s fantastic website : http://gridsurvey.com/

There we can see the scores on the doors for last weekend. The total number of Main Grid regions on March 9th was 26,176 ( 19,193 private estates & 6,983 Linden owned). This meant a net rise of 41 regions, all of them amongst private regions, there was no change in Linden owned regions. This is the largest single week rise since the 17th June 2012, although it should be noted the grid has only showed week on week growth four times since then, with last week being the fourth.

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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”