Wow! 300K+!

Right now the population counter says 304,160.

Congrats SL! Another milestone! Remember when we made a big deal out of every 10,000? Going from 70,000 to 80,000... now we've gained over 60,000 alts... erm... I mean accounts... in only about three weeks!

P2

Phoenix, you know as well as everyone else that there are really only nine people who play - the rest are alts!

Meaningless figures.

What makes the difference is the amount in-world at any given time.

Right now.... 4,829.... about average.

What percentage of that 30,000 "new accounts" are actually in world now, on top of the existing players out of the 270,000 that were there previously?

A tiny minority. A miniscule - almost irrelevant - percentage.

I have recruited perhaps a dozen new people to play SL, having talked to them about it through other means I have to communicate with my friends. They all came here because I enthused to them about the possibilities of SL, and showed them pictures of what was going on here. Not one of them came because there was an article about Anshe Chung in Business Week.

Lewis

/me peeks under the "Ignore" tarp to see what fertilizer Lewis is spreading today

Last night there were nearly 8,000 online at one point. Most of the user base is in the US, where it is presently between 9:30am and half past noon, depending on location. Many people (myself included) were in SL until the wee hours (4am in my case) and have earned the right to sleep in.

Stop raining on SL's parade, Lewis. You know, I'd gladly buy you a lifetime membership in some other MMORPG if it would get your cynical, piss-poor attitude out of here.

P2

I think the 300 thousandth was my alt.

The gold farming industry in China is booming!

Invest in China!

I think 200,000 are my alts.

I go by the figures that I see during my regular playing time, and those haven't changed much.

I am fully aware that most of SL is "US based" - something the rest of the world are frequently reminded of most wednesdays during our peak play time.

I would differentiate also between "active online" and "online zombies on camping chairs and dance pads".

Lewis

Aye, I agree. It is a meaningless number. 300,000 what? "Created accounts"? What are those?

At one point, DarkSpace hit the 100,000 account mark. At that time, there were less than 100 people online at any one time, with less than 1000 active subscriptions. Shortly thereafter, the owner did a database purge of accounts which had not been accessed in over a year, never paid, and had zero prestige (XP in that game). Dropped the number of "Created Accounts" to somewhere around 15,000, a more realistic number.

Anyway, it's a milestone with no real value.

Almost 8,000 on last night, let's see, I seem to recall a certain "log-a-thon" a few months back (the Benshee log-a-thon) that only netted about 3,500 concurrent users. And the close to 8,000 count I saw last night was at 11:30pm UK time (ok, 23:30), hardly prime time in the USA. Meaningless indeed. It's not showing growth, no; let's see, perhaps I just have 2,000 computers running 2 sessions of SL each with my 4,000 alts. Yeah. That must be it.

Congrats on 300,000! Now please, let's lose the kids and griefers until we have proper controls, eh? 300,000 is by no means a meaningless number, in fact, many more accounts than that have been created. When that number was 30,000, I had close to 55,000 name/key pairs in my avatar name/key database. The real number to look at is on the economic stats page: 155,389 in the past 60 days. That's pretty frickin' active. WoW provides two numbers: accounts ever created and current subscribers. Take a look at the disparity in them too.

Regards,

-Flip

Actually, 11:30pm in the UK is afternoon/evening in the US on a holiday weekend span-day, so it is not surprising that there would be a lot of folks online, especially from the US.

Players online IS a meaningful number, as are paid accounts. Those numbers, however, do not in any way make that 300k mark any more meaningful than when it was 200k, or even 100k. Is it making LL any more money? Is it making the game more fun and attractive to the existing residents as well as the new ones so much so that the existing paying ones want to keep on paying, and the new ones want to start paying? Those are meaningful litmus measures, not how many total accounts have been created since release.

I'd love to see statistics on online accounts, paid accounts, average account activity, etc. Would mean a whole lot more.

You know, I have only been here just over a week and I was able to tell who posted that message without even looking at the name. Are ALL of his posts so depressing? He sounds like Marvin the Paranoid Android. "Second Life. Don't talk to meeee about Second Life."

The question is how many of those 'members' are alts.

I am pleased to not have more than two alts. SL would suffer A Crazy Alfred Hitchcock-ese Bird-Related Incident of No Particular Origin, and become too awesome. ^^

It used to be 8.
Who's the new player?

Less than those who've made too many alts themselves think.

I keep an Excel Spreadsheet of all my alts. It's the only way to keep track of passwords and all their functions (sometimes I forget which ones are for griefing and which are for work) LOL. So as of right now, my spreadsheet has 829 names on it. You can take out 4 of those which are paid accounts though.

LMAO
Don't believe me huh?

ROFL You should see this spreadsheet!

Peak time, btw is approximately 19:45 SLT.

I record the concurrent population every 60 seconds - because I want to make some pretty graphs and analyse the data for my own interest.

Peak concurrent population so far was:
Wed Jun 28 02:23:00 UTC 2006 - 8,017

DAMMIT!!! Someone lied to me!