Why aren't there 1 million people in SL?

If I knew I wouldn't be asking the question. I log on and see 2500 to 4000 people logged in which is pitiful considering all that SL offers as it is free and all of that. I realize that SL doesn't offer the opportunity to level up and kill a zillion monsters but is that what people really want in an "internet game"?

Well, if growth rates continue the way they have, it might. Things still take a while (and a lot of advertising) to grow to 1 million+.

Word of mouth helps a lot too(and news articles), since there isn't any official advertising for SL (or is there?).

...because we would be shoulder to shoulder across the grid?

4000 people on a single "shard" is actually a fairly decent accomplishment. Most MMORPGS like World of Warcraft copy and paste the same world like 150 times, each with a population of around 10-20,000 people total, with max peak times of around 4000.

Eve Online, which has a cluster system similar to SL, and no shards, has had a max of I think 16,000 people on at once. They have a fair bit more accounts, too.

Give it time.

A million people? My RPG is happy with 20. x_x
I don't think any internet game has ever achieved one million people; Maybe neopets, if you include multiple accounts.

Neko, WoW has over 4 million separate active subscribers worldwide. so the 1-million mark has definitely been beat by several games.

19.6k concurrent for Eve. But like you said, it's not a real "shard" system like other MMO's. It's a cluster/grid system, so it isn't really a huge accomplishment for them, even though it seems like every week they are throwing out new press releases about how they are setting world records...

I played EVE for a while -- but the daily downtime sucked; does that still happen?

Second Life isn't stable enough. Performance is flakey. Streaming 3D isn't really good to look at. Especially when its created by us amateurs.

Why would somebody want to explore a flakey world when they can explore a world like WoW or Guild Wars? The best thing Second Life has to offer is the tools to create and I don't think the majority of people want to create.

But the fact that you're now asking this question is a good sign. It could mean that you're starting to see Second Life in a much better light. Maybe because of the water and P2P? P2P does mke the streaming 3D more bearable. So lets hope the new recruits will see it in a better light too.

Yup. But it's only an hour a day at 11am-12pm GMT (ie, around 3am/6am for most 'mericans). And they're usually up before the hour is done, and are extremely prompt with their updates. And don't require a new client download every time a developer sneezes.

What is that SL offers people?

If you want a good chat program, Yahoo, AOL, mIRC, Trillian, etc. and many others offer immensely superior chat capabilities, have done so for many years, and have a huge number of users to chat with, and will for the most part run on dial-up. These programs typically offer features such as the ability to send files, click on urls in the text and have a browser display the page, select from a broad range of visibility option, preserve the text from session to session, and on and on and on. What they've got SL has not.

Free services such as Skype and Google Talk offer voice chat, SL doesn't.

If you want a building program that can print out a design for a house or a bookcase SL isn't much use. You can build a crude model but not a very good one, and you can't print the design, or anything else at all, from SL. If you want to design in inches and feet and miles in SL you are out of luck.

Want to play games? Free games abound on the 2D internet, and so do pay ones. Word games, card games, good implementations of pool, gambling of all sorts, the range of choice of free multiplayer games on the internet is very large. SL's offerings are slim in number and poor in quality by comparison.

I'm tired, time to stop typing.

Obviously their must be something I like about Second Life as it is, but maybe my tastes aren't shared by enough other people to lure them away from other forms of online interaction.

Yeah, but .. 1 hour of downtime a day, that makes LL look good.

Trust me, there is nothing about EVE that makes LL look good

CCP seem to be *really* on the ball. I think the whole thing runs so smooth because there is an hour downtime every day to tweak it. And it's not like it's at a time that really impacts anyone. I don't know why it bugs you so much - I'd rather an infinitely playable game that's tweaked daily to get rid of bugs than a laggy piece of shit thats unplayable for a week after each update.

Ya also got to note they don't really have any age limits on those others games. Even the teen grid has a minimum age requirement.
I'm pretty sure the original Lineage set the first record for having over 1 million users.
UO and Everquest weren't even close at the time.
SL needs to push for a more international market, I feel they have stalled abit on this.

Kris, go give Jennyfur some advice about what to do when bored with SL. She's waiting in the next thread.

Hello new here....

is there any news on a SL2 with better graphics capabilites?

We're told they are working on a new graphics engine for version 2.0 but that will take a WHILE
If you mean meshes, well, AFAIK that's not even being considered.

And that's depressing Seriously, the single greatest improvement, in my opinion, that could be made to SL is the addition of meshes. You'd suddenly have much more engaging environments. Prims alone are just far too limiting. MMORPGs will always look better because of that.

Because Second Life is the Swiss Army Chainsaw.

Nothing offers everything SL does, in the manner at which it offers it.

But then, I'm one of the folks on the forum who come from the strange parallel universe where SL runs well, and I only ever have serious problems when, say, idiots try to gray-goo attack the grid.

(Even the client download issue mentioned above puzzles me; the SL client is 20 MB; All I can compare with is City of Heroes, WoW, and Everquest, but their patches can be that big. A patching system for the SL client would gain nothing.)

Could you imagine 1 million avvies logged in at once?

Even if the grid had 2000 sims... that would be 500 people online PER SIM.

We know the grid can barely take 100 people online per sim as is.... and that'd be 200,000 people total.

well, at 10% growth a month

that would be 90K*1.10^x=1M

1M/90K=1.10^x

log1.10(11)=log1.10(1.10^x)
log1.10(11)=x

now, change of base tells us:

log1.10(11)=log(11)/log(1.10)

so, basically, 25 months or two years before we get 1 million people at a 10% growth rate.

And while the LL "legal team" investigates continuing global grid attacks and no enforcement action is taken to protect inWorld residents, investments and stake holders - LL continues to show an unwillingness to effectively deal with security..Thus risking a crisis in confidence.

Ooh! Let's have a poll on whether people think that SL will last that long and if it'll still be owned by LL if it does exist, and whether there will be that million people in it?

Polls rool! Especially ones that can create dramah!

Pardon my ignorance, but don't meshes take up an unholy amount of polygons?

Could you imagine mesh hoochie hair, for instance?

400 meshes on someone's head times 40 avs in a club.... can a 7800 even render that?