Ghostown...........

I don't comment here much, but I thought I would take a look around SL tonight. It's Friday night, about midnight mountain time.

Supposedly 52000 are on line. But it took me half an hour to find a real person to talk to................Place after place is gone and some of them were the most beautiful creations SL had ever seen. I had land in some of them so I know. If a place is there at all chances are there is yellow everywhere.........

Green Dots? Yeah they are still there in some places. Bots.

This is the saddest thing I think I have ever seen.........

Almost double prices in the worst RL recession the world has seen in 75 years.
Nice job LL.

Yeah my mainland sim is always "all bots all the time." So fun.

It does seem like ghost town sometimes even with 68k online.
That feeling really hasn't changed for me since beta personally but I
think it is because SL is so big and it isn't really designed for big
groups to gather without lag.
I went looking around at Jetski recently seemed like there may been
three actually people, myself, my friend and someone I knew from
somewhere else I hadn't seen in long time, the rest seemed
to be bots hanging out by the boats. It was strange so many people,
yet completely silently and eerie.

Think about it logically for a second. 52,000 may sound like a big number, but when you consider that there are around 14,000 regions in SL, that comes out to less than four people per region. Or, to put it another way, for every event going on that attracts 30-some people to a single place, there are seven other sims left entirely empty.

So yeah, the vast majority of SL will be tumbleweeds and crickets with only 52,000 people logged in. Even if you were to double or quadruple that number (which I don't think has ever happened), most of the land mass would still appear to be sparsely populated.

But it's important to realize it's not that the people are few. It's just they're far between.

It's arguable that that's not necessarily a bad thing, by the way. It's not always desirable to have a crowd everywhere you go. Sometimes you do want relative peace and quiet.

That's not to say I don't agree with you that it would be better if crowds were easier to find. Social interaction is of course one of SL's primary functions.


That's just how the world works. People move, people leave, people change their minds about what they want to display, etc. There really are no "places" in SL, just artistic expressions. It's not like in RL, where if you put up a building it's going to stay put for decades. In SL, dynamics are the norm. It gives new meaning to the old cliche, change is the only constant. Don't expect ANYTHING in SL to be around for very long.

And again, there's nothing wrong with that. The world is HUGE, and it's constantly growing. For every great old beloved build that disappears, five more new ones spring up somewhere else on the grid.

More importantly, the overall visual quality of the world keeps getting better and better. Man, if you would have seen what was considered "good" five years ago, you'd puke. The same goes for two years ago. I'd be willing to bet that if you were to compare some of those "most beautiful things you'd ever seen" from two years ago side by side with any above average modern build, you'd see that you like the new one much better. Nostalgia can be powerful, but it's rarely accurate.



Yeah, bots are an annoyance for sure. I hate encountering them too, and I really hate to think about what a drain they are on the system. But I wouldn't assume the experience you had today is the norm. I don't run into bots very often, myself. Almost everyone I ever see in SL is a real person.



Nah, things change, and the world moves on. That's the way of things. Deal with it. Don't be one of those "back in my day..." people. Learn to embrace what's good about the now. And if you don't like what is, build what will be. There's no sense pining for what was.




What exactly do you feel has "doubled" in the two years you've been here, and how do you feel LL was responsible?

Let's talk about the prices LL actually controls. The most obvious is tier fees, so let's start with that. Mainland tier fees haven't changed in 5 years, so that can't be what you're talking about. Private island tier does now cost about 50% more than it did a few years ago, which is certainly significant, but that's hardly a doubling. Openspaces that are overused/abused are going up about 67% (changing into "homesteads", which could maybe considered "almost double", but since they didn't exist two years ago, and since they make up only a small percentage of the total land mass, I can't imagine that's what you mean. So tier fees aren't it.

Next would be island startup fees. Well, those do fluctuate considerably, mostly in relation to current hardware costs, which are beyond LL's control. In the last few years, if memory serves, I've seen setup range from $1000 to as much as $1600. Currently, it's $1000, though, which is the low end of the scale, that can't be what you mean either.

How about currency exchange rates, then? Well, those have actually gone down, not up, so that definitely can't be what you mean. Further, while LL does play an important role by controlling supply and sinks (similar to how the FED behaves in RL), the exchange rate is the direct product of market forces. What L$ cost is exactly what people are willing to pay for them at any given moment, no more, no less. So even if they had doubled (which they haven't), you still couldn't say "nice going, LL" over it.

If you're talking auction prices, those are likewise determined by market forces. No one entity, including LL can dictate how much people will pay for ANYTHING in a public auction. The seller can set the starting bid, sure, but after that, it's entirely up to the buying public. So that can't really be what you mean either.

That just leaves the cost of in-world items, which quite obviously has absolutely nothing directly to do with LL, and is exceedingly difficult to measure anyway. There's really no such thing as an "average item" in SL, so there's no way to determine an average cost of goods, let alone whether or not there was any sort of doubling in the past couple years. But even if there were, again, you couldn't say LL was responsible for it. Individual content creators decide what they want to charge, and individual consumers decide whether or not to accept those prices.

That pretty well covers everything I can think of, and none of it fits your description of LL doubling prices. So again, what exactly did you mean?

Yeah it's a bit like going to an event or shopping centre, the carpark is packed full of cars but then the people inside are just cardboard cutouts.

Most land that is set for sell is pretty cheap recently but there are some Residents
asking for ridiculously high prices as always. Yet no one going to buy
a 512m lot for 999,999.999 L$ or least no one I know is going to pay
that much.
There are places that are asking for 20k or higher a lot but that not
entire grid.
Lot of people do buy and sell land, change their buildings,etc.

It's a bitter irony that cheap land makes the grid look empty, even in the best of times.

If only LL had intended to drive us all closer together by raising the OpenSpace fees.

That obviously wasn't their intent, but driving folks off the grid in droves wasn't the plan either, I bet.

Too much fighting on the dancefloor.

Bands won't play no more.

Tumbleweeds.........cool,

they never succeeded at what they wanted to do so this outcome is expected

same price of a void now, i`ve orderd my own island and 3 water sims that a lol to pay for
price of 1 homestead and you pretty much have 2 islands

time to build a new community...
OL growing fast with some known names move in aswell, people said "make them hurt where it hurts the most", this is going to cost them not only in tiers but in members aswell

funny that the ghost thread is here, interrested to see if SL will hit the 72000 again as i see OL`s green dots popup every where

M`s letter to the residents... no one listens, every one was flaming him and jack and now sucking up again with *great post yada yada*, i wonder in what shape the grid will be in 6 months compared to how it was last month

About the same, more bots than real people! =P

I can't find precise data from two years ago, but in recent months the Linden$ has been going up, not down. The best price for sellers has gone to 262 twice in the last week. Keep in mind that the Lindex quotes Lindens/USD, so that lower numbers mean the Linden is more expensive, not less.

It's harder to read the graph, but other than the chaos at the beginning, it does appear that the Linden has slowly been getting more expensive over time.

The rest of your post is correct, but I wouldn't know how to measure the impact of LL policies on the exchange rate. What I can say is that in October, they took in 188ML$ in fees, put back 133ML$ in stipends and Supply Linen sales, and the total supply currently is 5,300ML$. So their activities relate to 2-3% of the supply, and they took 1% out of circulation.

I know where one of those gaterings of ~20 people were yesterday evening..... one hell of a show, er class

I think the green dots create a weird effect when it comes to finding people to interact with, and determine what spaces are occupied or empty.

In RL, if I want to find people to socialize with, I don't look around for a cluster of people and then walk over to them and expect to strike up a conversation. Nor do I expect my residential neighborhood to have too many people in it between 8 am and 5 pm. Population shifts back and forth across an area, and social gatherings cluster very tightly in small areas. When the event is over people disperse, same as SL.

Only, in SL people need not even "be there" at all when not active. SL is a really large landscape, and people are generally only logged in when they want to do something, unlike RL they don't have to be somewhere 24/7.

I'm not saying there aren't a lot of bots, but I see avi's run by real people all of the time, far more often than I see bots. Groups I am in have lively chat at all hours of the day and night, stores generally have shoppers in them, and if I decide to go to an event or party, people are often complaining about "lag" from the presence of so many people.

Also, the OS debacle and the established popularity of traditional private estates suggests to me that many people find SL too crowded, both visually and personally. There seems to be a great desire to be the only person/people (private friends) in an entire sim. I think many residents want their private spaces (some or all of their land holdings) to feel like a ghost town most of the time. They want to know they hold that kind of privacy in reserve for when the mood strikes them to use it.

As Chosen Few has mentioned, I kind of like the ghost town aspect of SL much of the time. There are people around and I know where to find them if I want them.

My biggest problem is in my own needs for interacting with others. Too many and it's hard to interact because too many lines of chat are scrolling up the screen or you have chat lag. Too few and it feels awkward to me. I'm always looking for between 5 to 10 green dots and I know that's asking a lot of fate.

Lol we should have synchronised this so we got the lines the right way round!

Go to the dance club "Frank's Place" most anytime...that's one place a lot of non-bot green dots are...to the point of barely being able to move.

(DISCLAIMER: I have no association with Frank's Place except as an occasional patron )

since when is 52000 not a lot in sl..just this summer we were bitching about being maxed out at 60,000
if it's quiet it's bots
or prime time event time or something going on..
but 52,000 if it were all real people would be still a good showing..

No one's arguing that, Ceka. The point is that with the shear size of the land mass in SL, there's no way that 52,000 people can make SL feel crowded. Whether it's all real people, or all bots, or any combination thereof, doesn't change that in any way.

As for the past complaints about "high" concurrency, that wasn't about crowds at all, but about the fact that the system as a whole was ill-equipped to handle so many tens of thousands of connections. So the whole world would slow down as server clusters would get overwhelmed, routers would screw up, etc. That doesn't seem to happen much these days (knock on wood), so LL must have made some serious progress in that regard.

But again, 52,000 people, or even 100,000 people, dispersed over 900 million square meters does not a dense crowd make. That doesn't mean 52,000 isn't in and of itself a high number, which is why I said in my first reply here that it's not that people are few, just that they're far between. For the currrent land mass of 14,000 sims all to feel crowded, we'd need something on the order of half a million people logged in all at once, ten times what we typically get now.

And even that would only mean about 35 people per region, hardly the equivalent of a RL crowd.

true the map has grown since then hehehe

I like the empty malls selling latex jumpsuits, strange outmoded flying jetskis, useless tools. I like these echoing warehouses and drifting dance halls with 80s music. Or houses obviously abandoned (you even imagine food in teh 'fridge). It's an end-of-time scenario and we should appreciate being allowed to "play" here.
Sometimes you meet another person but they wanna be left alone. Often 40 year old men for some reason and maybe laid off work in real. You say "Hi" and walk right by and five minutes later they IM you and say "Hi" back and they were busy and didnt notice you.
Art galleries that are empty, moorland deserted, then a hubbub of activity at a sex sim, or a bathhouse or a fantasy "hotel".
That's sl. Flying houses and people rooted in real traditions in a strange transparent world.

i am legend!

except the zombies in this scenario are all stacked in tubes or hiding under lakes? =X

Well, look at it logically: There's the population (of online users) of a very small city spread across a world the size of...what, any two Earth continents? And you're surprised there's a sparse distribution of people?