has Second Life® reached player saturation?

While trying to diagnose chronic packet loss at Linden Lab's data center internet connection point I had occasion to watch the numbers on the frontpage at www.secondlife.com.

Although the "population" number - the number of accounts that LL says could potentially log in at present - keeps increasing, possibly due to the FREE! first basic account giveaway, but the "inworld" number has does not seem to increase at all above what it was months ago (~3500 at peak times).

I recently read that WoW had past the 3.5 million subscriber point and, to the best of my knowledge, there are no free WoW accounts.

Can anyone confirm or explain this observation? Does anyone know if the active player base has actually reached a plateau? Will the "population" count be one fewer after the moderators read this post? Thanks.

If the average peak number is 3500, then it really is growing. When they did the first log-a-ton, and where give away prizes and free lifetime accounts, they managed to get about 3800. From what I heard that was a record for most people logged on at once. Now, I don't have the stats all on me, but I am sure someone out there has a plot of the numbers.

The number tossed about was 2500 during peak usage hours in the earlier part of this year. Sounds like an increase if the old peak of 3500 is the new average number.

Well, Chromal's graphs suggest that we're now often at "log-a-thon" rates - but I didnt experience the packet loss I'm getting now during either log-a-thon. Somthing else has changed.

Dang it, everyone else beat me to it

3 months ago, peak usage was around 2200, ish. Now it's hovering around 3600-3800 ish.

We're growing.

LF

Yeah, we're growing. I joined live help about 2 months ago and I can see a huge jump in the number of requests we get in just that short period of time. Lots of new players. It's cwazy, especially on weekends.

Someone(s) is making an interesting bet that this is not the case.

There were ~30 mainland sims purchased in the last week.

Do correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that is more than twice the historical record of sims released in one week.

Links:

https://secondlife.com/community/economy.php
https://secondlife.com/auctions/index.php
https://secondlife.com/auctions/closed.php

Thanks for correcting my casual observation with real data, folks.

Ingrid, I have no doubt that the number of new entrants is climbing but also know that it is far different than "conversions" to paying accounts that LL wants and needs.

Jillian, you are right, there is packet loss, significantly so, I even believe I have pinpointed it to LL's front door and believe that the effects of it could be pretty far reaching throughout the experience.

Yeah, I agree, but it was a good marketing move, as it gets people in the door so to speak. If they enjoy SL, they will likely tier up. I'd love to know what the numbers are for that.

Edit to add: I've had some major packet loss too lately. What a shame if the 2 are linked.

Malachi, I observe the same phenomenon everytime I log in. LL seems to send too many packets during "heavy downloads" and my connection can't keep up with it all, hence packet loss rates that peak beyond 100% (). And I'm playing on a 20mbps link...

... but if LL still can saturate the down link of clients, then it's rather good news to me, it means they can send much more data to a lot of people than is necessary

I'm not sure LL is as after tier-paying cutomers as it is after customers willing to spend money on LindeX. They are actively positioning SL as a rapid development platform, and the structure of the LindeX strongly suggests to me they'd like to get thier money from the content creator types who need the land and server resources to actually run the content. Just speculation on my part, really.
Yep.

I'm not sure if I misunderstood you or you misunderstood me (or both).

From my investigations, not only is the border router at their server facility dropping packets because of overload, but there are also mechanisms in the SL transport code to reduce the amount of data sent to you should certain types of packet loss happen. Worse still, it seems as if the outbound (LL to you) traffic is throttled, the throttling is being done in a way that almost guarantees wild oscillations in bandwidth use thus "lag spikes" and other instabilities.

If my analysis is correct, more "inworld" players will only make the existing problems worse. Unfortunately, I have asked LL to look into this as they can get a much clearer picture from "inside" as I can derive from outside. As yet I've seen no indication that they even consider it to be an interesting question, let alone a potential cause of many problems.

I hope that was more clear.

Nah, they'll just send around Brent and Ben to bust your kneecaps.

Physically assaulting customers may solve problems in the short term and would undoubtedly be emotionally quite rewarding but it the long run it would be a public relations nightmare and produce endless litigation.

They should hire skilled professionals for jobs such as this.

Hahaha... what a combo they'd be.

Er...

I've definitely noticed a lot more green dots in the wee hours when I'm on SL.

Invect, that gets me thinking... Brent and Ben could start a Linden S&M club! Or at least, uh... ask for Resident content.

I wonder what kind of QoS policy LL uses on border routers ? From what you mention, it might be RED. Any Linden reading ?

Well, according to my orthopedic surgeon, yes, and better still I should be able to walk normally again someday. Torley was right - they are quite a combo!

For the severely humor impaired, my knees are actually fine and the above was a JOKE.

Is this why I've been having so much packet loss and lag lately?

coco

I think so, but as I've noted various places, I can't tell for sure but Linden Lab can. Unfortunately they seem to be studiously avoiding the subject. Sigh.

The amazing packet loss and lag has been going on for almost 3 weeks. Causing private sims to crash and a slew of other interesting effects including permissions on object out in world to change. I never had packet loss like this, even during log-athons. The last time SL was performing this bad we had that great 4 day lockout in May or was that June?

Perhaps this is the answer regarding certain private sims having inconsistant performance and mysterious lag/crashing issues.

I didn't have this much packet loss and lags during logathons, either.

And here I thought it was just me. I turned everything I HAD down to the lowest possible number, like low instead of medium for land detail, but nothing has worked.

coco

Agreed. As SL is a client-server game using an unreliable transport (UDP) through a router showing strong indication of intentional packet dropping, effectively all bets are off and almost any "bug" could result from this.

I'm trying to think of a less techy analogy, the best I can come up with is a game of poker where some of your cards might not get dealt to you or your fellow players and none of you know if you have a short hand or not.

The thing that I find particularly troublesome is that I've done all I can from outside to determine if this is a real fault. On the other hand, it is dirt simple to check whether this is a problem by LL - all they have to do is look at some counters, they don't even have to test anything; every router I have ever seen or built will happily tell you if it has been dropping traffic and how much. This ought take one person 5 minutes to confirm or deny, LL doesn't even have to do it themselves, they can say to their co-location service "Hey we think you are dropping traffic, check it out".

Given how easy it is to confirm or reject this claim, and how dramatic the consequences are if it is true, I am simply baffled as to why no one has looked into it.

GUFFAW FaW HAW!

maybe LL is planning to use the heat they get from residents over packet loss to super saturate SL??



ZOMG JWU WAS A CHEMISTRY GEEK