Are we catching World of Warcraft ?

Alexa thinks so...........according to this graph

Alexa's traffic trends are faulty because they only monitor the traffic of people who have their software installed within the browser.

According to recent numbers though, World of Warcraft has over 7 million subscribers world wide whereas Second Life has had less than 400 thousand log in within the last 60 days. This isn't to say that Second Life is doing bad.. Many of the games in the MMORPG spectrum have less users and World of Warcraft commands about 60% of the market. However, I don't think that Second Life is actually a game in the traditional sense and is more of a virtual community. However it is up to you to decide what you do with it.

I belive this is a data transfered graph, not a user population graph. WoW has some 3mil? users? I'm not sure on the numbers and too lazy to check it. But back to the point, SL transfers ALOT more data then WoW would, as SL is a dynamic world with dynamic content whereas WoW is mostly static maps loaded from the hard drive.

Well I can say I am one of those people who has switched to World of Warcraft and I know that at least 4 of my friends from Secondlife now play W.o.W with me.
Secondlife has disappointed me the past couple of months. So I had enough of the lagging, hacking, and constant shut downs. I much prefer W.o.W...don't get me wrong I still like coming in Secondlife once in awhile (more like once a week) but that is just to see check up on all the latest "fashion trend".
So yeah, I will be on W.o.W until SL gets there shit together.

Since they're not remotely the same kind of thing I can't even see comparing them.

I just tried WoW for the free one month trial. I was so bored I stopped playing after 2 weeks. It's way too structured, and I can't build/script anything worth its salt there.

Is WoW a disease now?

Always has been IMO.

you catched the WoW! now youl get hooves horns and a tail! and your knees wil break and stay in an odd location! Congratuliations you have morphed into a tauren!


I like WoW it needs time and i usualy play it when the lag and the annoyingness in Sl bugs me and makes me spaz like Doug from the Headshot video and theres enough time to play wow then! couseee! sl lags 24/7

oh wel atleast i can still talk on sl

I'd call it a drug, though it seems to spread like a disease.

Still, I'm hooked on it. Tried weening myself off it but I think it should be called World of WarCRACK.

Even South Park's last episode was done mostly set in W.o.W.

...and most of those have been new accounts who haven't stuck around for more than a couple of weeks.

The actual number of accounts registered prior to 14 days ago that have logged in over the past 14 days is around 19,000 (out of 101,000 created). The number of accounts created prior to 30 days ago that have logged over the past 30 days is in the neighbourhood of 21,000 (out of 136,000 created). This means SL has a decent sign-up rate (close to 1M accounts registered, with that number growing at ~25% per month!), but a low rate of retention (~12% out of all registrations will stick around for more than a month).

Logic copied from a thread I started over at Second Citizen:

"LL recently started posting their 7, 14, 30, and 60 day login numbers. As of yesterday, those number were:

Accounts logged over past 7-days : 112,611
Accounts logged over past 14-days : 152,762
Accounts logged over past 30-days : 234,888
Accounts logged over past 60-days : 355,186

Look at how those numbers are growing! Impressive, right? Well, actually, when you sit down and grind through things, these numbers tell a bit of a different tale.

Right off the bat, we can plot up these figures. Fitting a power-law, we find a 1-day login rate of approximately 38,000 unique accounts logging in per day. Of these, roughly 8,000 are new registrations and 30,000 are accounts that already existed.

To get an idea of user retention we start by asking how many accounts were created in each of the stated time periods. We have today's population number (841,765) and the population as it was 7, 14, 30, and 60 days ago:

Population 7 days ago: 793,200
Population 14 days ago: 729,294
Population 30 days ago: 628,109
Population 60 days ago: 491,624

Note, that the 60 day value is an estimate based on an approximate growth rate of ~24% per month. This is slightly slower than the previous month's growth rate. The approximation was used because 60 days ago is before LL started publicizing total population, so the actual number is not available.

Subtracting each population number from the value today, we find the total accounts created in each time interval:

Accounts created in past 7 days: 48,565
Accounts created in past 14 days: 112,471
Accounts created in past 30 days: 213,656
Accounts created in past 60 days: 350,141

If we make the assumption that each new account logs into SL at least once (probably not the case, but also not too far off the mark now that there is little incentive to register creatively-named alts for the purposes of posting in the forums), then we can estimate the number of *previously existing* accounts that logged into SL during each time interval by subtracting new accounts from total logins. By "previously existing", I mean an account that was created prior to the beginning of the interval under consideration.

Accounts created prior to Sep 29 that logged in over the past 7 days: 64,046
Accounts created prior to Sep 22 that logged in over the past 14 days: 40,291
Accounts created prior to Sep 5 that logged in over the past 30 days: 21,232
Accounts created prior to Aug 6 that logged in over the past 60 days: 5,045

Now, we divide by the total number of accounts existing at each date to get an estimate of the percent of users retained over each time span.

Past 7-days retention: 8.1%
Past 14-days retention: 5.5%
Past 30-days retention: 3.3%
Past 60-days retention: 1.0%

The population numbers form a very clean exponential curve, which a non-linear regression tells me is best approximated by the equation:
N = 84243 * exp(-0.0469 * t)

where t is the time interval under consideration (in days) and N is the total number of accounts created prior to (today - t) that have logged in over the past t days. If we set t=0, then we find the total number of honest-to-Crom accounts that are likely to log in today is roughly 84,000 or 10% of the total number of accounts ever registered."

Thanks for that Ricky, I had seen your post at Second Citizen and am glad you added it here. We were having a more anecdotal discussion of the numbers over at SLHomePage:

http://forums.slhomepage.com/showthread.php?t=177

I would guess the reality of your numbers doesn't really help Robin or Torley or the others involved in the User Experience program at Linden Lab, but they should be fuel to the fire regarding Second Life's changes once "bug fixes" are behind us (and no jokes about "if".

I guess you could say I cringed upon hearing Philip's talking of the hundreds of thousands of new accounts at the top of the last Town Hall, as if all these people were flooding in for the long haul. At some point he theorized that around 20% of all accounts were ALTs which seems low but is sobering nontheless. I wonder how that number would fit into your formulas?

Thanks, Clubside. I've been meaning to register an account and post my numbers over there too. You just motivated me.

As for how alts affects things -- that's a bit of a tricky one. One the one hand, the numbers I posted are simply for "accounts", i.e. by its nature it includes alts. If we wantd to find a "person behind the screen" number, then we would need to reduce account registrations by the "alt factor" (~20% according to Philip), then make some assumptions about alt login patterns. I've been pondering that question a bit, but I'll think on it further and post more when I've got something solid formed.

Yet another bit of grinding reveals:

Accounts created between Aug 6 and Sep 5: 136,485

Accounts created prior to Sep 5 that logged in over the past 30 days: 21,232
Accounts created prior to Aug 6 that logged in over the past 60 days: 5,045

Accounts created between Aug 6 and Sep 5 that logged in over the past 30 days: 16,187

In other words, if we consider all the accounts created in a certain month (August in this case), roughly 12% (16,187/136,485) will log in over the next month (September). If we had the 90-day unique number, we could extend this to 60-day dropoff as well...

Always has been. Go to the clinic and get yerself some cream lol.