So it didn’t affect you personally very much – that indicates you didn’t have many open space sims to start with. I’m happy you’re satisfied. I really am. But what you’ve forgotten is that the grid is bigger than your one estate, and no matter how you try to explain it away, a 20% drop in land area is a massive, massive problem. If all five thousand had been conversions, we would have seen more full sims appear over that time, but we haven’t seen that – the actual number of conversions is somewhere around a fourth of the total loss. The rest are just quit claims.

http://www.archive.org/index.php

For example:

http://web.archive.org/web/20071215075108/secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php

The numbers don’t appear to be bad, but they can be made to look bad when explained by someone unscrupulous to someone who lacks the knowledge to understand what’s really happening. In order to really see what’s happening, you need things broken into categories like full sims, openspaces, and homesteads. Until that’s done, you just have a fairly opaque number that doesn’t mean a lot — the same number from one month to the next could represent a 400% increase or a 75% decline. An 18% change means nothing until you can see which of the three bins it came out of it, and which almost certainly increased at the same time (i.e. how much of that is a four-for-one change in sq.m. which represents zero change in prims or usage).

The fact is, the number was inherently inaccurate, and it was taken down. LL says it was taken down because it was inaccurate, which happens to fit the facts exactly. But don’t worry, I’m sure it’s all due to some sinister LL conspiracy…

Yes, the Lindens are ducking and weaving with the numbers, but it’s not the tragedy you imagine.

If there is a huge artificial bubble of thousands of openspaces sold in a short period of less than six months, that is then corrected when prices go up, what of it? That’s not some 18 percent shrinkage of the world, that’s just the normal pricking of a real estate bubble.

Since so many people took private islands off line last year when the prices of them went way up, and converted them to openspace sims, 4:1, then converted *back* to full-prim sims when the OS prices went up, there’s a lot of shaking out that occurs. The numbers went down, up, down again but out of every 4 openspaces comes a full island, so you have to see what you wind up with. It’s not known how many people, like me, COMPLETELY abandoned an open-space sim, and didn’t then replace it with full-prim.

Meanwhile, while you’re all nay-saying, there’s always another guy to buy the island. People go and buy homesteads because the tier isn’t that terrible. If you are coming at all this fresh, and you see $295 full-prim sims and $125 quarter-prim sims, guess what you buy? You buy $125 rather than nothing if you really want an island badly. So there are some increases there, some exchanges, and it shouldn’t be the chore they claim it is to count, but it is something that requires bean-counting through each ticket.

In real life, you don’t determine the health of an economy by its land mass. Growing land mass or real estate development is one indicator, but hardly the only.

The real number to watch, as I’ve been saying, is number of people who spent more than one dollar inworld, which has steadily increased, and Positive Monthly Linden Flow accounts, which has been going down. If the sales really increased from the XStreetSL take over, then there should be more businesses in the clear, even as some go down due to the openspace debacle