The Alphaville Herald

Meta Linden Talks Land Statistics

by Alphaville Herald on 08/02/09 at 5:53 pm

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

As Mitch Wagner and Cybergrrl Oh regaled the audience at today’s Copper Robot gabfest with tales of social network marketing from the frozen tundra of Alaska, it dawned on me that I was standing next to the spider that creates the land and economic statistics for Second Life – Meta Linden. Could Meta help explain the fate of the land statistics that had suddenly been “unpublished”?

As my attention wandered from the official program, I turned to Meta for a private chat covering life as a spider and asked for arachnid insights into where land statistics may be headed.

Pixeleen Mistral: hi meta – nice avatar!
Meta Linden: Thanks!  I like spiders, quite a bit.   Nice to meet you.

Pixeleen Mistral: I imagine people give you plenty of personal space with that av
Meta Linden: Depends. Some people get fascinated – and new users that don't know camera controls sometimes walk over me trying to get a good look.
Pixeleen Mistral: LOL

Pixeleen Mistral: meta – do you have any idea when the land statistics will be back?
Meta Linden: soon, though they're gonna be a bit different

Pixeleen Mistral: LL is hurting itself with this hiding the land stats thing
Meta Linden: We were confusing people with the older ones, too.    I wish we had a simple win-win instant solution
Pixeleen Mistral: well – its good to know it is being worked on

Pixeleen Mistral: is the idea to  do land stats based on prim capacity or something like that?
Pixeleen Mistral: that would make folding several low-capacity sims into one regular sim be equivalent
Meta Linden: "something like that" I think is a fair and honest answer.

Pixeleen Mistral: will you be able to convert the historical land stats to the same metric so there is an historical record and trending? it would be good if you could
Meta Linden: I don't know how much back history will be published.  but I hear your request.  We'll at a minimum do some top-level history charting

After Meta departed for some high level web spinning inside the data warehouse, I pondered the Lab’s situation. 

Zee Linden had made growth in land mass a major selling point for SL’s success last summer, proclaiming “Land mass grew over 44%.  The total number of regions owned by residents increased 44.2% over Q1 to just over 1.5 billion square meters.  Our growth was due to the popularity of our newly launched “Openspace” land product along with a change in pricing to make the purchase of land more accessible to first time buyers.”

But in the aftermath of the OpenSpace price hikes, land mass metrics lost their charm for the Lab – leading to speculation that a land statistic tied to number of prims and perhaps potential residents that can visit the space as a way to salvage a positive spin from what is widely believed to be the removal of 4869 sims.

Being a game god means you can change the rules at will -  at the risk of creating more uncertainty on the part of those who fund the Second Life experience – the resident land “owners”. Without a clear picture of the potential resale market for their land, players who put money into the virtual land game must do so on pure faith. If the current real life mortgage and banking mess in the USA teaches us anything, it is that uncertainty about asset values is not the way to grow an economy. The sooner the Lab clarifies the land situation, the better.

Eventually I decided that while Mitch Wagner’s interview of Cybergrrl Oh at today’s Copper Robot might have been even more interesting if less time was spent on discussing how cold Alaska is – all of 4-chan will agree that cold state is cold – the meta-event was certainly worthwhile.

Crap Mariner, Mitch Wagner, and Cybergrrl Oh get ready for a Copper Robot interview