thx

Strange numbers….
571,881 new unique users in September but only 316,961 new members added to the over all number of accounts? That is 254,920 accounts removed?

Hummm…

Lindens, STOP this NOW! It’s within your hand to do so.

Second Life is becoming a place full of scavenging zombie bots… I am so dismayed by the situation that I am seriously thinking of scrapping my work here.

Lindens… here is an idea for you. Give us a function that returns a one way hash of the combination of local and internet IP addresses of the user. Bots are controlled from the same machine and as such the same hash would be provided. I am not interested in IP addresses but this is the only way to preserve anonymity and also fight against dishonest bot camping. Please think something up quickly.

Regards!

From this we can see that it’s bad news indeed. Almost evry country losing users, including for the first time the US, dropping from 540k active users last month (August, the holiday slow period remember? Not September - I guess those kids went back to school but their parents didn’t come back lol) to 516K in September…

Some countries have lost a third of their users in one month. Israel, Romania; Brazil lost 4.5K, Japan nearly 6K, many countries lost more than 10% of users in one month. This is active users, by LL’s definition, users who have logged in for more than an hour per month. It would be nice to have some bands on this, say 4 hours per month (one hour per week), and so on, so we can see how many core users there are. One hour a month is nothing, unless you are solely collecting rent money lol. And not all premiums are doing that.

I haven’t checked this month, but for the last two months, they paid out L$7m in referral bonuses for new premiums. They pay 2K in three installments, of 500, 500 and 1K, so the minimum number of new premiums has been 7K for the last two months, which when added to the drop month, since if numbers don’t change, new users = old users who left/downgraded, then on the 6k loss month that was actually at least 13k old premium accounts left, over 15% of the total. [Just checked and they paid out L$10m this month, that's at least 10K new people, maybe substantially more if most of those were the initial 500 payments, last two months or this month - either way that's more established premiums lost, so they gained 10k new ones, only grew 400, so 9,600 established productive residents left or downgraded in the month, over 10%. Take about bad retention rate lol. That's all users cycled in less than 10 months including that 15% drop the other month...]

In the same way as active users have been decreasing over the last few months, Last 60 Day Logins has been plummetting, from almost 2m to 1.4m. And yet, we are supposed to believe that Total Residents increased? Yeah, just like the suspicious Unique users. That went up 550K when Total users only went up by 250K, the worst in a month for an awful long time. So those numbers must be lies. Or they are better with creative accountancy than the auditors for Enron :-O

Last month, and the one before, it was mostly western Europe user numbers falling, but now it’s nearly every country. Since they started issuing the user numbers, not just percentages, France and Germany have fallen every month, and over 30% of users have globe in each of those two countries. 59,610 for Germany down to 40,940 for example. I was doing some graphs last month, I may update them and post them somewhere.

So on every counter, bar the dodgy unique/total users which don’t reflect all the other numbers, user numbers fell considerably, yet user hours increased by 3%? Maybe they are having to work longer and harder to make tier lol.

Not only are these dropping numbers worrying and serious (with the two growth countries of Brazil and Japan dropping too), but the European ones don’t yet include the effects of the VAT application, or indeed the effects of ID Verification…

Total $ exchanged on all exchanges has not been as high as since March generally, and only increased by 60K from the “holiday” month.

And whilst looking at stabilising, maybe due to the holiday period, land prices have started to fall again, though that is probably in response to VAT, today down to 6.17 from September’s 6.46 /m2.

Which ever way you look at it the numbers are bad. SL is sick and getting sicker. I don’ think people are leaving in droves because they are fed up with waiting for Havok 4 or Windlight. I think it’s because they see increasingly worse lag, inventory loss, performance issues, region problems, and on top of that, decisions by LL that are sometimes and sometimes not their fault (ageplay, gambling, VAT). Increase in scammers and lack of policing, and multiple bank collapses cannot have helped either.

If they’d listened to residents earlier, realised that the Open Letter was not a few new disgruntled residents, but a group ALREADY at the end of their tether, they might have acted in time to stop the rot. Instead they continued to ignore them. Now they better hope to sell to corporates, because there are no countries left to market to and raise up lol. That must explain the sudden and strange jump in islands sold this month (which has dramatically increased since I checked a few days ago), as those have been following a dropping pattern since June or July too.

@ 57 - those population numbers are wrong, at least for France. There was a big news story recently that the UK population, of around that 60m mark, has surpassed France for the first time ever. Poor souls, in about a third of the land that France has too lol. One of the reasons the UK property market has not yet crashed as expected, they’ve been letting more people in the country.

@ The rest. You don’t need region count, although islands owned is now given on Economic Statistics web page. A km2 is 1,000m x 1,000 m ie a million m2, so multiply that by total km, and divide by the 65,536 m2 in a region and you have from September Metrics, 871.32 km2 total, which comes out at 13,295 regions, plus another 737 islands sold in October to date, and a few mainland sims, and there are now over 14,000 regions. At peak population of 50k concurrent, that is an average of just 3.57 avatars per sim, dropping to about half that at off peak times. Those numbers have also been steadily decreasing over the last months, (remember it stuck at 38K for over three months earlier in the year, and only topped 20K in December the same weekend as the great 13 hour downtime [which was due to a "failed battery" and then a hard drive failure and hours of negotiating with their supplier, and nothing to do with forcing concurrency over that magic number, natch ;)], so I can’t remember the numbers, but let’s be very generous, and say they had 25K concurrent in January, when there was just 360km2 of land, or 5,700 odd sims, that means the average number of avs per sim was over 4.3). Meaning for sure there is much more land creation than new users, or concurrent users online active and spending or doing things, hence the thinning out of everything, and the consequent drop off of traffic, and therefore sales for everyone.

So pretty clear: fix the problems people have been asking you to fix for sometimes over a year and stop rushing out ever more bug ridden lag inducing shinies, and try and stop the haemorrage of people before it becomes terminal. Do not try and rush out four major changes at once: New Search, Havok 4, Windlight, and the disastrous RC that crashes like crazy.

I mean is LL trying to bork it up on purpose or what?