Tyche Shephed – Ciaran Laval

July 28, 2014

Second Life Private Regions Drop Below 19,000 Mark

Tyche Shepherd reported yesterday that private regions have dropped below the 19,000 mark for the first time since June 15th 2008. There are currently 18,988 private regions on the grid. However it should be pointed out that the rate of loss has slowed down and that is particularly apparent for this year, although the last couple of weeks have accelerated the fall to below the 19,000 mark.

This comes around 53 weeks after private regions dropped below the 20,000 mark. Then the private region count stood at 19,997. However by the end of 2013 there had been a further net loss of 724 private regions, leaving the score on the door of 19,273. At that point a fall below 19,000 looked likely to come in the first couple of months of 2014, but private regions have fought a brave fight against that until the last fortnight. Two weeks ago there were net losses of 39 private regions and this week a net loss of 26 private regions. That means that 65 of this year’s net loss of 285 regions have came in the last fortnight, or to put it another way, 22.8% of this year’s losses have came in the last fortnight.

There’s no rational explanation as to why private region net losses have risen like this, at around this time last year, give or take a week because Tyche went on holiday, there was a net loss of 29 private regions during a fortnightly period. Back in 2012 at around this time of the year there was a fortnightly net loss of 154 private regions. Actually, a fun with numbers quirk from that fortnightly net loss shows that in the first week private regions dropped by 59 and a week later those numbers flipped around with a weekly loss of 95 regions ….. ok it’s just me who finds that interesting isn’t it?

If we go back to the heady days of 15th June 2008, Tyche reported things a little differently, so I don’t know what the net change was but 593 regions were added to the grid that week. Yes that’s right, 593 new regions came online. This was also at a time when Linden Lab could auction new mainland regions and in another, fun facts incident Tyche reported :

Only one new mainland sim was added this week , or more to the point a mainland region has returned to the Grid “The Corn Field” is back since last Monday.

Play spooky music now!

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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”

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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December 30, 2013December 31, 2013

2013 Reviewed

The challenge with a review of the year is to try and make it worth reading. There’s a balance between including information and including too much information. This year’s review is largely based on Second Life and my own posts, so there’s plenty of information that I will be missing. For those who want a more in depth review, Inara Pey has been reviewing 2013 too.

For me personally it was a difficult year, Reed, Dee, Izzy and TJ Linden all gave me wonderful support, even when I myself was more than a tad grouchy with them but I do appreciate the efforts they made to accommodate me.

This post is not as long as it looks, if you skip the pictures, links and embedded videos it won’t take as long to read as you may think at first glance. I did consider breaking this down in to different posts, as I did last year. However at the end of the day it is what it is, so it looks like it’s epic in length but it’s really not. However to aid people I’ve decided to go back to HTML school and create a table of contents! Hurrah.

Contents

January – March
April – June
July – August
September – December
Summary

Continue reading “2013 Reviewed”

March 7, 2013

Tyche Shepherd’s Private Region Survey For February

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.

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