Post-release bugginess driving concurrency rates down?

We're seeing the number of concurrent users drop a little on Chromal's excellent population statistics page. I believe this is caused by user's dissatisfaction with SL's post-release instability, so often expressed here in these forums.
I have to say though, the total number of accounts seems to be growing a bit too linearly. Are these numbers real? Who's making all those accounts if there's less people logged on?
Total population has doubled but peak concurrency rates have risen only slightly, seemingly at a similar rate of growth as before.
Are people trying out SL en masse, but not staying? Why?
Is it the steep hardware requirements? Too hard? Not really a game?
How many of those shiny new 30,000 accounts are even being used?
What the heck do we have to do to turn SL into a proper metaverse?
Why can't LL do something to preload some assets into the caching servers, or simply not wipe them with every release?

http://planet0.planet-zero.org/~chromal/slpop/

They are playing WoW now since it IS a game

WoW is an RPG. RPGs, especially of the online variety, are a miserable treadmill where you can't really gain anything except weight, and the diseases that come with it. In the end, you will have wasted hours of your life clicking the same god damn mouse button over and over and over again just to add some numbers into a stats panel, with the excuse that you are witnessing beautiful visuals and a shallow, cookie-cutter fantasy story. I can get the latter from BlockBuster or Amazon without having to waste hours of my life clicking the left mouse button.

Or you enjoy rpg and get some satisfation and fun from it. No sorry no profit with RPG but then again, profit realy isn't the point of playing a game

Mar

PS if that is your pitch to get ppl back into sl you really need to work on it LOL

Everyone needs to start measuring by concurrent users.

I wasn't talking about monetary gain, but rather intellectual gain. It's ok, I realize most people could live perfectly fine without one. Heck, some people wouldn't mind living as a disembodied brain floating in a vat of goo as long as the wire attached to the part of their brain that says WHEE TEH FUN YAY kept sending electric impulses

Some interesting observations and some really good questions there Eggy.

When I got here in June, I was somewhat happy to see that out of 30,000ish users, only about 10% of those were concurrent users. After all, low concurrency in an online environment usually means low lag, right? Now we are creeping towards 75,000 users...and there's still only about 3k on during peak times. What gives?

Judging by the graphs, it appears that more people are signing up for SL, but are staying away in droves. I don't think it's post 1.7 bugginess that's keeping them away, as the population graph was steadily increasing while the max users was still relatively flat even before the patch.

I think that a lot of true new users (not alts for existing avs) are staying away due to the new user experience as it is now. I know when I got here, I stuck around the Welcome Area just long enough to get hit with lag, spam, push weapons, offers to be and/or own a slave, and racial epithets. That is probably not the best 'face' to present to new users, assuming you want to keep them.

I've talked with five people in RL that signed up with SL and didn't make it past the WA before they uninstalled. Their experiences there were so bad, that only one is considering coming back.

Also the fact that there is no real 'game' here has a lot to do with it. Linden Lab promotes SL as a place where you can create your own content. Unfortunately, the vast majority of online gamers don't want that but would rather instead bitch about the lack of content in other worlds provided by Blizzard, SOE, and others.

I'm just thankful that I am not one of those people as I hang out in my skybox, keep to myself, and make stuff.

BTW, I suppose the change in slope on the population graph corresponds to the free account thing? Just curious as that's quite a sharp increase.

I have a question, which is worse

a) LL is fudging the data
b) LL can't measure the data properly (buggy)
c) People are signing up and just leaving
d) People are creating fake accounts to farm the stipend

I know, I know!!! The answer is E!! all of the above.

Now there is no proof of A or B. D seems kinda silly, not much money to be made, plus the 5 account limit. So it seem it could be C. But maybe people are signing up, but not always on. More of a once in a while thing. There is a trend upwards of more players being on. We seem to be at about the 4000 mark for each day.

a) LL is fudging the data
The data is very uniform. Plus we know they're fuding the transaction data on the same page, so why not the population data?


b) LL can't measure the data properly (buggy)
Right. This is so improbable. LL measures everything perfectly? (how many active scripts do you have again?)


c) People are signing up and just leaving
This is possible. It's free to sign up. Whereas before, if you paid you were likely to play.


d) People are creating fake accounts to farm the stipend
Do we know if LL hits the CC company everytime someone enters in a CC number? CC# generators on the web do exist. And you get, what, 500 L$ when you sign up? That's 2$ per auto-generated cc#. 40K accounts = ~80K USD.

They didnt use to, but now they do. A credit card generator was exactly how I got into SL in the first place.

This bears repeating. The new user experience is crap. The Welcome Area needs a permanently stationed Linden who will be very strict about enforcing the rules.
Orientation Island is a dung heap. It's been the same since Beta and has never taught you anything remotely useful. Plus, there need to be less of them so that users can actually meet someone there and hang out. Put some actual content in there. Games. "Stores" with free stuff. Interactive tutorials with flashy visuals. Make them want to STAY in Orientation Island until they are comfortable with how the world works.

Can I quote you on this? Best. Definition. Ever.

I like the fact that when I'm on SL, I'm learning real things!

It's so very practical.

... cut into 40 thousand different accounts with transaction fees on each and every of them.

Only if you adress my original post first

Rain check. I have an answer to it that is way, WAY too long for a forum post (!). On the plus side, it'll be linked from my sig once it's done.

I wondered how goons could be back in game seconds after they'd been permabanned. Now I know. I would have otherwise marvelled at a particular griever's vast number of friends to have access to so many credit card numbers. I do hope to heck that LL runs the credit card numbers. ??? (thinks this is worth a hotline to linden maybe?)