To fully appreciate the full extent of the slow down in region losses it’s best to turn to an expert. Unfortunately Tyche Shepherd doesn’t blog here, so you’ll have to read me instead. However the good news, I’m basing this post on the expert work of Tyche Shepherd and Tyche has kindly agreed to let me use her charts. Now please remember, these charts are Tyche’s work and copyrighted by Tyche, in other words, they shouldn’t be used without permission.

Ok on with the show.

Private Region Changes 2012 – 2014 (2 years)

Unfortunately this chart doesn’t display well on a blog this small, you can get a much better view of it on SLUniverse because there when you click the link, it enlarges. This chart shows the change in private regions between 1st Jan 2012 and 29th December 2013, so that’s around 2 years, give or take a few days. Private regions shrunk from 23,857 down to 19,273. A loss of 4,584 regions or 19.2%. That’s an alarming figure but hopefully you can see the slow down. The second half of the chart shows very few weeks where the third line down was reached.

Private Region Changes 1st January 2012 – 23rd December 2012

This chart shows the private region changes during most of 2012, 51 weeks of it. Two things to note, the losses during 2012 came in at 2,863, this means the majority of the two year losses came during 2012, it works out at around 62.46% of the two year losses coming during 2012, which of course means, the slow down in private region losses did not get well under way until we hit 2013.

Private Region Changes 30th December 2012 – 29th December 2013

Above is the chart for those losses in 2013 and what we can see is that there was a total net loss of 1,719 regions or 8.2% for the year. As I said, this is considerably lower than during 2012 but still probably a little high. The losses are heavily loaded towards the first half of the year, the slow down really starts to become apparent around July and August but as we head into the Autumn we do some weeks where the losses picked up again. None of this really indicated what was to come during the first few weeks of 2014, but the slow down is most definitely apparent.

Now before we get to this year, let’s take some small samples from previous years. I don’t have comparable charts for the exact same periods, but these small snippets do give an indication of the change and more importantly, they can be viewed without squinting too much!

Private Region Changes 1st January 2012 – 3rd June 2012

Now here we see the first half of 2012 and we can see regular net losses of over 100 private regions a week, with some brief periods of private regions fighting back and growing. Those periodic spurts would all but vanish. There was a net private region loss of 1,138 regions during this period. The second half of 2012 was worse, with a net loss of 1,725 private regions. The slow down really got underway in 2013.

Private Region Changes 30th December 2012 – 31st March 2013

This chart shows the first few months of 2013 and private regions suffered a net loss of 510 regions, or 2.4%. However this was much lower than the region losses during early 2012 and as can be seen from the chart, there is not a single week where net losses are above 100 private regions, whereas that figure was breached five times during a similar period in 2012. Only once during the whole of 2013 did net private regions losses go into three figures.

However although losses were down, the trajectory remained downwards too, growth was very rare and generally the losses were in the late teens, twenties or thirties as 2013 came to a close. Whereas there’s no doubt about the slowdown, the pace of the slowdown was about to accelerate.

Private Region Changes 29th December 2013 – 23rd March 2013

This chart shows the first few months of this year and the changes to net losses are rather surprising. The highest weekly net loss so far this year is 32, with 22 in second place, no other week has seen a net loss of more than 17 regions. Indeed in the last five weeks the grid has grown by 47 private regions, with growth being seen in four of those five weeks. Although the growth is tiny at times, each of the last two weeks has seen net growth of one region, the growth is definitely there.

The big question of course is whether this will last or whether there will be a correction. I suspect there may be a correction of sorts but I think weekly net losses in the teens are more likely to be seen, rather than losses closer to 100 regions a week.

This is all of course encouraging for Linden Lab, I just hope this doesn’t mean they will bury their heads in the sand about tier, because it’s still too damn high and it’s still far too much of a central backbone of the Second Life income stream, they need to spread the load.

For awesome stats, region information and much more please visit Tyche Shepherd’s site : http://gridsurvey.com/

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