I also concur with other posters where in my 4+ years of SL involvement, I’ve not seen any improvement of the user experience since LL fixed the non-compliance of the viewer with Mac machines about 2 years ago (an issue that took LL 8 months to remedy). Other than introducing the much vaunted Mono script engine in August 2008, there doesn’t appear to have been any user-intended development done.

Just some observations from a self-confessed SL sceptic and one of those who left because of the actions LL took in changing the region pricings and openspace sim rules – apparently the first round of the M Linden corporatisation-at-the-expense-of-gameplay strategy.

That’s how it’s like on SL. A lot of people don’t know what’s wrong, but they know something is wrong. Consider: 30,000+ sims (supposedly… no actual stats, eh LL?) and less than 60,000 concurrent members most of the time now. 2 people per sim? That’s healthy? That’s active?

Our merchants reported the worst 4th quarter sales in the last 5 years. Part of that is due of course to the RL economy. But a larger part is due to the fact that LL has allowed the grid to become saturated with “merchants” that don’t build or script– people selling freebies and fraudulently-presented items because they know they can get away with it. Then the real merchants can’t make enough to pay for their investment in time, uploads and rent.

Like both of you, I strongly question Linden Lab “stats”. I once tracked their “last 60 days” stats for a period of several months. Those stats were highly questionable (actually, ludicrous) with figures falling 200,000 one day and rising 180,000 the next. No company experiences 20% growth and loss over a one day period. They tell us there are supposedly some 30,000+ sims, but refuse to post the hard-figure statistics to prove it. They claim company growth over and over, but we’re able to clearly see– as you both pointed out– a definite declining trend in concurrent users. Again, a company that refuses to publish its subscription numbers very likely has a seriously declining subscription. Otherwise, they’d have those numbers all over the place as bragging rights.

So I fully agree; I don’t trust a company that hides behind an obscure shroud and hides their data. I don’t trust a company that (as you so aptly put) has to use bait-and-switch marketing techniques to make a buck (if they were really good, they’d be making money hand over fist and wouldn’t have to resort to such stunts). I don’t trust a company that competes against their own customers wherever there’s a buck to be made (case in point: selling their own L$ on the LindeX instead of trashing them as was the original intent and promise).

Of course, whether or not I trust LL or not doesn’t really matter to them. But the point is HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of customers don’t trust Linden Lab. Thousands left over the Homestead issue and merchants are jumping off the XSL bandwagon right and left. I see years-long simplistic bugs (I mean, they can’t even deliver a group notice correctly) with nothing being done to fix them and all I can say is, “What are those guys smoking?”

Perhaps they’re all avatars at work now but I don’t think so.

LL is pushing the platform as a business one, not entertainment. My adult sims see far less visitors since the rules came in and it’s not because people don’t enjoy the niched experience I provide, I know if i switch to mature my visitors would jump right up. It’s two things, firstly people not knowing I exist because theyre unverified and secondly many not knowing how to verify. Europeans seem to have trouble verifying.

The new 2010 post didn’t interest me much, it roadmapped a much more corporate Secondlife slowly turning into a real-life situation, taking away the value and what made people wish to join the the first place. SL is no Facebook.

Was sad to see that a small link towards improving performance was the last thing on his roadmap too…

If they advertise on places like youtube as they do now, showing pictures of sims full of people, no grey slow loading textures and the visitors after climbing through the massive learning curve find out SL is nothing like advertised, they certainly wont stay.

Drag Philip back into the circle!!

In other words, my social environment doesn’t feel like a heady metropolis, teaming with people. It feels like a small town. I know this is a completely subjective assessment, and mostly valueless, but it’s the impression I have. But I can’t help the feeling that a huge number of the people in Second Life try it for a week or two, or perhaps a month or three, and then just get frustrated and leave. I remember about the middle of last year, we had concurrency of around 77,000 people online at once. Now it’s down in the low 50,000′s and apparently falling.

And what’s Linden Lab doing?
* Bait and switch pricing tactics on open sims (now called “homestead” sims)
* Privatizing their own user support base (the SL Mentors are now gone, they may have been disfunctional but at least they were there)
* Genericizing the roles of the Lindens who actually log into the game, so you no longer have a good sense of which Linden does what anymore, so you never know who the appropriate person to ask for help is, with the effect that people just stop asking
* Utterly failing to even keep track of how many Copybot-enabled clients are out there, let alone doing anything substantive about them (there are at least two ways to really screw these Copybot clients over that will work without endangering normal users, and they haven’t done anything in well over a year to address the problem)
* Screwing with XStreet listings fees to the point where there’s been a mass exodus of vendors. Pro tip for Linden Labs – don’t try to force a price change on people when you don’t already have 100% lock-in. All it will do is make people leave.

The new management at Linden Lab has just enough smarts to keep the thing gliding, sort of, but not enough to actually stop it from hitting the ground eventually. What a senseless waste.

http://greendots.typepad.com/ has a wealth of information related to bot and camper hunting, though sadly it hasn’t been updated for some time now.

Nonetheless, it shows that there are others who are also interested in finding the true concurrencey rate.

@LittleLostLinden: I’m not confident that even Linden Lab can identify a bot vs a non-bot with any high-degree of confidence. If I had to *guess*, I’d say there were about 5,000 or so bot accounts active at any time — but that’s just a guess, and not necessarily any better than fondling goat entrails. The Lab’s probably got some idea, but the margin of error on the figure would very high.

True. However, Linen Lab had no problem with publishing such statistics until those took a downward trend. What results then, is sheer propaganda and hype. With a product like Second Life, membership figures are the standard of trade. When they chose to remove sim stats and user stats from the listings, I considered that to be one huge announcement that those stats were experiencing major drops that they didn’t want anyone to see.

@JustMe: You may very well be right, but we’ll see over the next year how SL does. While it may be that the recession had to do with Premium membership, there were too many things going on at the time to say “that was it and it’ll get better”. There was the Homestead fiasco, the Adult sim situation, the gambling decision and now the XstreetSL stunt. I’ve read several reports from industry analysts that aren’t very impressed with LL as an operation, one in particular that cited it as a very poor business investment. So I’m not alone in my analysis of SL. But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong in your statement regarding the impact of the recession is wrong. You may very well be right. We’ll see how SL does over the next year… and if they’re even still around Jan 1, 2011.