Orphaned Raw Statistics Page Found!
by Alphaville Herald on 07/02/09 at 9:59 am
Land statistics “temporarily unpublished” by Linden Lab
Two other statistics page still missing – presumed dead
by Pixeleen Mistral – National Affairs desk
Authorities at the IETF Missing Web Pages bureau were relieved to see the orphaned “Economic Statistics (Raw Data Files)” page had been reunited with the rest of the Second Life web site – a scene that brought tears of joy to all involved.
Unfortunately, the wayward page did suffer some damage from it’s week-long ordeal and no longer contains references to the declining island landmass. A note at the bottom of the page explains, “Private Region data has been temporarily unpublished while we correct our reporting mechanisms to account for the recent addition of Openspaces and Homesteads. We apologize for the inconvenience”. The number of private islands in Second Life have been falling since a price increase was announced last October, but residents have continued to document the decline in detail on the Second Life forums, where shock greeted the news of the web page disappearances.
Why were the land statistics removed?
As land growth turned negative last fall, Linden Lab claimed there were inaccuracies in the statistics. However, continued delays in correcting the land reporting mechanisms raise troubling questions. Justice League Unlimited member Kalel Venkman notes in the forums that 4846 islands have disappeared since the October price increases calling this, “a loss of 18.1% of the total land mass. If these were a person, we'd be talking about a severed limb here at this point.”
While this story has a happy ending, earlier this week the raw data files page was believed to be in grave danger after all links to the page were removed from the Second Life web site, and many feared the worst.
Despite being de-linked and orphaned, some residents were still able to access the page by using saved bookmarks, and sent messages of reassurance and hope as rescuers worked feverishly to save the orphaned page.
A grim fate for two other pages
While the raw statistic page survived, two sister pages – Economic Statistics and Economy Graphs – appear to have suffered from possibly fatal neglect and abuse and were last seen on monday in Google’s page cache.
Sadly, both pages now seem to be lost to the world as the Google cache has been overwritten.
Web page anti-abuse advocates point out the Google cache pictures of the Economic Statistics page show possible signs of neglect or abuse – the numbers were radically different from the raw statistics and were significantly out of date. This sort of cruelty to innocent web pages is hard to understand — it would have been a simple matter to reformat the raw statistics to produce the page.
Was the shocking page neglect intentional? We may never know the whole truth.
Meanwhile, as a memorial to the deleted pages, the Herald offers these exclusive photos to the final days of the Economic Statistics page courtesy of Google.
LOL
Feb 7th, 2009
WOW what a shock Linden lab is NOT displaying is Negative stats. I guess that article in The Industry Standard on 1.30.2009 “Interview with Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon” is just a load of Bullshit! All that talk of stats and metrics was just canned responces to questions the lab will never answer pubicly.
Prokofy Neva
Feb 7th, 2009
This is so retarded, every bit of it.
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
Galatea Gynoid
Feb 8th, 2009
Yeah, the real problem with the private island count is that it’s not an accurate indicator of much. We once converted one standard sim to four openspaces, and recently converted four openspaces to one standard sim. In both cases, this wasn’t really growth or shrinkage for our estate — we continued to rent the same amount of server space from LL for the same cost. All that really happened was we fiddled with the software settings. But some people would spin those numbers into a huge increase or huge decline in our SL usage when there was really no change at all. If you were really stupid, you might fall for the comparison of these changes in numbers to the severing of a limb, when in fact it’s more comparable to getting a new hairdo.
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…
GreenLantern Excelsior
Feb 11th, 2009
Don’t forget about the Internet Wayback Machine.
http://www.archive.org/index.php
For example:
http://web.archive.org/web/20071215075108/secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php
Neo Citizen
Feb 11th, 2009
Galatea, that’s incredibly naive, I’m sorry. Yes, you can convert sims back and forth, and that skews the numbers. But your statements assume EVERYBODY is doing that, and completely ignores the fact that the sim numbers started falling like a rock over Jupiter on the very day of the announcement.
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.