Actual Islands Lost so Far/Economic impact

I believe openspaces run 16 to a server. Normal sims run 4 to a server. Even so, your maths scale up to the same result... huge profits for LL. But don't forget you are also paying for staff wages and other intangibles, not *just* the servers.

In reference to why OSs are being abandoned now, people have given the obvious answers already. In my case, I got rid of two as soon as the price rises were announced, then another a few weeks later when we'd moved things off it, and there will be two more going in the next month.

We do it *now* instead of in January because I'm not giving another penny to LL from my own resources. We'll continue to own land that is funded by the people who live there. Lots of people seem to be leaving, so we'll scale down to fit.

Add -3 more to your stats. Tickets went in to combine and full transfer way 4 more OS sims this morning.

It is 4 Openspaces per core. If you have a 4-core CPU it makes 16, so you are right. And that makes my calculation wrong. If you rent an Openspace or Homestead how it will be called soon, you pay LL 95$x16 = 1520$ for a single server a month. The same machine one could rent in the open market for 100$; or buy within 2 months for the combined rent including connectivity charges. Correct me if I am wrong. And that includes already fees for staff and "other intangibles".

This whole thing makes me sick.

Based on the average loss rate so far, we are on track to lose 3371 total islands by
January 1st, 2009, when the first price increase takes place. This is more than my
estimate of 2750 for Linden Labs to break even. In simple terms, they are going to lose more islands than the price increase will cover for.

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Re: previous comments

A previous poster is correct that we don't know all the details of every sim purchase, transfer, and cancellation, and we never will. That was not the intent of this thread. I had two reasons to start this thread. One was to provide a convenient place to track the overall island count. The economics statistics page only gives the latest figures, and past days by opening a new page for every prior date going back a month or so, which is terribly inconvenient. Then you can compare the total count trends to past trends (which was adding around 40/day), and see what total fraction of the islands have gone away.

The other is to make an estimate on the question "Does Linden Labs gain or lose revenue from this price increase". If you have studied economics, there is an income curve for any product. If you price your product at zero, you get zero income. If you price it too high, you also get zero income, cause its too expensive for anyone to want it. In between there is a price at which you get maximum income, when the number of people willing to pay the price x the price is the highest.

The question of the "right price" is an important one for any business, and this thread was intended to take a look at it.

I understand that this price increase hurts a lot of people, and lots of other threads express people's feelings on that issue. I have friends affected by it, so I'm not ignoring that side of it. I just wanted to look at the overall grid and business side also.

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@ Boy Lane re: server hosting.

As Zee Linden has pointed out, hosting the sims is not Linden Lab's only costs. They also have a huge set of backend databases, and internal networking. A web server only has to send a web page when requested. A sim has to talk to other sims nearby on the map and fetch data from the back end databases, and do some of that even when nobody is there and needs to be fed data.

In a web situation, where your traffic is X, and you buy or rent enough servers to meet X traffic and keep them pretty much busy. With second life, only the sims which have enough people in them to start to lag are "busy". That happens around 15 or 20 people. Since the average grid population/sim is around 2, theres a lot of lightly loaded sims which still have to run to keep the grid updated.

The other cost to linden labs is software development, which a hosting colo does not have to pay for. So you cant directly compare server hosting to sim prices, they are different things.

Believit or not losing islands was part of the plan to improve performance, just taking more money wouldn't fix it.

Beautifully put, Desmond. I tried to buy a small plot of land for the homeless pigeons from Spacexcape but every land owning pigeon that I contacted from the past said they were "out of business". So we are flying off with the flock too. There is no doubt that the Open Space sim fiasco will not affect Linden financially - they also are not stupid. Good luck to them - they will soon be known as the best virtual sex site in cyber. Nothing more.

Spacexcape spreads her wings .......

Tegg says:

Believit or not losing islands was part of the plan to improve performance, just taking more money wouldn't fix it.

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What performance problem? A full island gets its own core on the server, and has 15,000 prim allowance. The open spaces were stacked 4 per core, and had 3,750 prim allowance each, for a total of 15,000 prims. So same total either way.

They have done a lousy job of explaining where the problem is. Perhaps an empty sim still consumes 20% of a core's capacity, so running four sim processes on one core eats up most of the resouces, even before you build anything there. There are lots of smart people in SL, we could understand a technical explanation like that, and it would make the price increase more palatable if we knew where exactly the problem lies.

The last five days have seen an accelerated loss of island count. Updated first post with latest figures for today

the performace problems caused ever weekend, by the 30k of traffic bots people need to attract people to their isolated malls & shops on OS sims...........................

Updated figures at the top of the thread. The last several days have shown loss rates of over 100 islands a day.

Overall 1/15 of the total island count has gone away in one month (1776/26665).

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Re: Tegg: the performace problems caused ever weekend, by the 30k of traffic bots people need to attract people to their isolated malls & shops on OS sims

My comment: The whole grid consists of around 19,000 full islands and mainland sims, plus 12,000 openspaces, which equate to 22,000 server cores. The highest number of people I have ever seen logged in is 75,000, which is 3.4 per server core on average. My experience is full sims start to lag noticeably around 15-20 avatars. Not sure where you start to see problems on openspaces, but the average population just isn't ever high enough by a factor of 5 or 6.

I did a little research in the raw data files in the statistic section (it's a little annoying though, that they only keep the recent information (easily) available).
I think what scared the hell out of them (after they were sooo happy about the rush into the OS - see the post by Zee Linden http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/07/08/second-life-virtual-world-expands-35-in-q2/ ), were the following numbers:

Avg L$ Paid Per Square Meter (L$)

June 2008 2.82
July 2008 2.29
August 2008 1.98
September 2008 1.78
October 2008 1.60

The trend is obvious. We'll see whether their decission managed to revert the trend. At the moment the AV price is at L$ 1.99

well tickets are taking 5 days to process ... so either they have extra staff working on it or they don't have any new sales to process.

The average price for land sales *includes* land on islands, which often trade for a very small upfront amount (like 1 L$), with all the charges in tier to the island owner. So the drop in the average mostly represents more islands relative to mainland, rather than the price of mainland itself.

Its a bad statistic, since it mixes two very different products, mainland, which is "sales" (where you pay tier to Linden Labs directly) and islands, which are "rentals" (you pay tier to an estate owner)

I don't know if they include island transfers in the statistic. Probably not, since they are done in US$, although those represent "sales" just as much as mainland does.

Ideally we would want to see:

* Average price for mainland parcels (L$/m)
* Average price for island parcels (L$/m)
* Average price for island transfers (US$/sim, with openspaces counting as 1/4 sim)

The data is available, since search segregates land for sale by mainland and island.

The land prices made an interesting price jump from the 28th to the 30th. According to the official statistics the Avg L$ Paid Per Square Meter for November is now 2.6307.

That may be true, but at one point this year land was at nearly $L7 per square meter. The fact that it bumped means some big chunk of land got sold at a very very high price - could it be the new Nautilus area the Lindens built?

Unless this is sustained, it's statistically unimportant.