How Many Islands have gone so far?

Inaccurate because the formula they've been using for ages doesn't work so well when people abandon and convert islands. They didn't like the numbers so the stats were suddenly inaccurate. To be fair they've never had to deal with negative consequences before.

Nope! Not even a little..

There are, quite literally, thousands of posts about how LL has screwed things up and how the openspace pricing change was a plot to grow the mainland.

I was just hoping this one would not turn into yet another one of those, filled with the same old posts, over and over and over.

The old formula seemed to be ok with them when it made them look better. And I'd give them a F at dealing with negative consequences, although not sure this is the first time they have had to deal with it before, just the first time on this scale.

This is the first time ever land mass has shrunk. They're simply untrustowrthy, every single landowner needs to be aware of this before we do business with these guys and then you take your chances. However we all need to have our eyes wide open, there's no point blaming Linden Lab, they are not a trustworthy business partner.

They should have not touched it.. I still think the smart money is on the shrinkage stopping very soon now, now that the first price bump has taken place. They should have either not touched it at all, done it right when they announced or waited until, say, April. Messing with it now, after 2 months of really horrible numbers, just looks really bad.. Perfectly bad timing.

I don't believe those bullshit conspiracy theories about why they removed the stats. From what I can gather from what they've said publicly (which admittedly has been little) they're stats did work fine for years and years but the thing that broke it was not just the dumping of OS sims which the stats were designed to handle but a large number of conversions from OS to standard which was never an issue in large numbers before the OS change so in effect they always were inaccurate but never to the point it was an issue.

If you have proof otherwise feel free to tell everyone but otherwise you're just going on a theory with no proven basis in reality.

It seems like it should be about 20 lines of libsl code for a resident to ask the grid how many regions there are. How hard do you think it is for LL to come up with the number?

The metric isn't about, and has never been about, the types of regions; it's about the grid land size. I also don't really believe the conspiracy theories either but a) can't believe it's a hard number to get and 2) think they should have been a bit more paranoid about looking like they're trying to play games with the numbers.

As already mentioned, the number of SIMULATORS is what the name says: "number of SIM", it doesn't account openspace, homestead or regular SIM, they are all the same in that number, because it is a land mass (in square meters).
It does requires no effort at all to know how many simulators are on the grid on a given time and even in realtime, so if you loose you convert 4 OS to a regular SIM the correct number will be (as result): 1 and the region "added" will be: -3.
This is what happened today and it is perfectly working, because it's noway complicate... it's math!

As to why they haven't fixed the stats it may be because it's embarassing to them that the numbers are so low but not only does that give into the paranoid delusional crackpot theories but that also doesn't give LL enough credit for foresight since I think it's pretty safe say that they weren't assumed by the drop in sims. More likely it has to do with the fact that statistics just aren't a huge priority for LL, doubly so when they can't be positively blogged about, so something as simple and seemingly unimportant both for service and for publicity isn't worth them fixing right now.

As a friend of mine is apt at pointing out.... the cover-up is often worse than the crime. If that is the case they should just bite the bullet and post the statistics. It looks worse to make them unavailable completely. I think that will fuel conspiracy theories more than just making the facts public. At least then people would be blogging about the facts and not speculating (as much).

Right. They should have either nuked that stat in late October, sometime a few months from now or not at all..

Now - this week and next week - is when it's finally going to start (I think) showing improvement. Perfectly wrong time to shoot it unless I'm totally missing something.

And, yeah, I may bitch and moan but I do hope SL pulls out of this and LL learns some non-fatal lessons, which they remember well.

Honestly, what can break in one single database question "how many regions are running at the moment"? That is the only important number, LL themselfs used the growing number in the months before the OS debacle to boast about themselfs "hey look how many regions we add each month!", never asking if they were full regions or OS. Now this number is going down rapidly, and I don't really care about what percentage comes from totally given up regions and what from 4-to-1 conversions. LL always used the "look what a big and growing landmass we have!" strategy - now they have to live with our "look what a big shrinking the landmass takes!". They can't now say "oh the formula is wrong, one lost OS region isn't really a lost region bug only a quarter of it, and a conversion 4-to-1 isn't a 3 region loss but just the same as before".

As LL prefers to hide these figures you can get them here:

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/business-land-economy/8523-new-second-life-sims-past-12.html#post539750

The situation is actually worse as i found out yesterday, there is a whole estate with 200 OS on the grid where the owner just left sl after the price increase announcement and didnt pay his tier anymore. These sims should have been taken of the grid for along time, but they are still there and counting in the total sims.

I wonder how many like that are out there, does anyone knows how long it takes till LL takes the sim from the grid if you dont pay your tier. I guess there are many more out there.

I've seen SIM taken from the owner (still on the grid but not accessible) just after few days of not paied tier and put offline soon after; in other case i've seend (and tested) simulators that still running for 3 months (yeah three months) and fully accessible by the owner with a negative balance (that have been "invited" after to pay these months tiers... that he never paied). So i believe that a precise amount of time simply doesn't exists, whenever (reading the forums and blogging around..) i've noticed that recently (especially with the OS abandoning...) they are putting these SIM's offline pretty soon.

the tier for that estate is not paid for 2 months, they are all empty on the grid and you can still tp to them, the sims names all start with "zweite welt"

I am sorry that you have to read the same old opinions posted over and over again, and I assume you do not contribute to that effect yourself, and change your mind once in a while.

As is obvious from my rezz-date I am pretty new on the block, rezzed into the eye of the storm; reading through most of the blogs, statistics and big part of the forum, to get a feel for the community active here, over the last two months, was an interesting experience.
It seems to me the voiced opinions on LL seem to be mostly on two ends of a very scary scale:

a) LL is incompetent, i.e. they make their decisions without foresight and without a proper business plan in place, trying to fight the fire whenever there is too much smoke

b) LL is 'evil', i.e. they are well aware of the mid- and longterm consequences of their decisions, which are made with a well defined (publicly not admited) goal in mind

Let's take the two examples in case: the OS fiasko (and you have to call it that, considering all the anger from residents published here in the forum and a 20% shrinkage of resident owned landmass in three months) and the statistics numbers.

Is LL realy still the start up of techno geeks, who have no idea about business and economy aspects, that cant predict the consequences of eliminating the restriction, that OSs have to be bought in a pack of four and have to be attached to an existing 'full' sim, and raising the prim limit to an attraktive level which makes 'abuse' viable in the first place? And were they realy that surprised in Oktober when somebody made the effort to look at the growth numbers, that the thing is taking off like a rocket and the infrastructure couldnt bear the load? And did they just panik, and try to raise the prices (again economical unreasonable) by 60%, just to step back and stretch out the increase over half a year, because the are simply incompetent?

Or has LL been taken over by the 'dark side', fully aware that estate owners and mid range residents would throw them self into the sword so nicely set up, swallow the hooked bread crumbs, that would rip out the intestines once the rope is tightened, thereby dealing a blow to the mainland competition, which would take a long time to recover from, and some admitedly colateral damage of a few loud but irrelevant residents, whose complaints get muffled by giving them a forum to whine in?

And the statistic numbers?

Is it so hard to count the number of sims online at a certain moment of time, dump them in a database and project them on a html file? Are we seriously assuming they are not competent enough to do THAT?

Or are they professionaly hiding unfavourable numbers behind 'technical problems', because the majority of users doesnt even know where to find the numbers, nor are they savy enough to see the weak excuse here?

Neither option a) nor b) are actualy filling me with that much trust.

It doesnt even get better if I move away from the comic book black-and-white thinking, and assume that the truth might be somewhere in the middle:

c) LL is partialy incompetent and 'evil'

Some here obviously have made up their mind, and you are here long enough to claim that this opinion is based on 'experience'. I am not here long enough to make that claim, and I have to admit, I havent made up my mind yet and find the discussion still interesting, despite the fact that all positions have been posted over and over again, but what do you expect with 8000+ posts?
There are only that many theories you can come up with, and since LL is not participating in this discussion to enlighten us, all that is left is theories you can consider or reject, or did you get any deeper insight out of the bear with headphones?

LL apparently.

That's the winning answer. Look, they changed the product and around a month later changed the pricing. They don't know their arse from their elbow, however those of us who have been here for longer than 6 months should know they don't know their arse from their elbow so we only have ourselves to blame.

There is no way I will spend my work budget with Linden Lab, they are simply not a good business partner. I work in education, LL are blogging about the wonderful way education uses Second Life, they have more hope of seeing Jesus than me spending my work budget with them, they are an absolute disgrace.

That is a very good move Ciaran, I would not spend my companies money either. Nor would I support and public company that did.

I agree with you (partially) on that Ciaran but I think that you're wrong both here and on 2ndplace in saying that they didn't know what they were doing or what the consequences were doing. I'm guesing that some if not all of them realized the consequences and either didn't care or were told to shutup and sit down by the higher ups and whatever the majority group is within LL. I'd bet that Jack knew even if nobody else did but I'd also bet you'll never get a statement to that effect out of him.

Edit: Despite the fact that I do overall like Jack, come to think of it I don't think it's possible to ever get an entirely open answer from him, he doesn't lie he just doesn't tell you stuff and avoids your questions.

Well, he's management..

edit: I kinda like him too, except for this openspace crap.

More or less he's in marketing though in terms of answering questions it'd be just as easy to think that he was in politics.

One of the reasons I respect Jack as well as Rob and a few other Lindens as well as Ciaran and even Prok when she sticks to the point and holds back on attacking people personally, is that you know they're not telling the whole truth, you know that they're conniving and plotting against you but it's somewhat fun to play mental chicken with them in the process.

If you look at the way the product changed, then it doesn't look like they knew what they were doing. The changes came a month or so before the price cut, so some people were happily ordering them at a higher rate and just one month later, LL controversially cut pricing. They initially didn't want to make any deals for people who had islands and openspaces on order but realised that was a tad off, but it was another example of not thinking a decision through carefully.

With the price rise, I do believe they knew the consequences so I agree with you there, but again they steadfastly took a poor customer relations route this time and they didn't update their pricing page in a professional manner, they kept the old pricing up without any indication on their pricing page that price rises were coming. A simple * with details of the forthcoming price rise would have sufficed through December, not doing that is shoddy.



I think Jack does many great things and there are certainly areas where he can't answer questions, I don't for example expect him to admit the new openspace product isn't really fit for purpose, or that it's technically quite a whopping increase. Jack's work with the LDPW is without a doubt beneficial to the community as a whole and they should be shouting about it. They've been building new roads, quietly I may add, they should be screaming about it.

I don't think I've ever accused Jack of being a liar, I've said he's evasive and that he engages in a lot of spin but he's certainly not a liar. There's a good person within Jack, he needs to focus on the positives and avoid the spin.

He does indeed...

Since the official statistics page is still frozen (on Dec.24th) and even the raw data page seems not to get update (since Jan.8th), here the numbers from Tyche Shepherd (who does a hell of a job) on his blog ( http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/business-land-economy/8523-new-second-life-sims-past-12.html ):

A net loss of 327 regions this week, very similar to last weeks figures. Total number of region is now 27324 ( 22107 private estates & 5217 Linden mainland).