From Avination to Second Life

In February 2011, I left Second Life, because of the lack of respect they showed the security and privacy of their customers, permitting the data-mining by the spyware zF RedZone for over a year, despite more and more alarming reports on how it was used to abuse Second Life customers. Linden Lab eventually banned the spyware and its controller, after it was revealed the controller was a convicted Internet fraudster who used the spyware to phish for Second Life passwords among other things, but they refused to take measures to prevent similar systems from continuing operating then or in the future.

I gave up Second Life then, abandoning two full sims, and moved to Avination, hoping it would be a safe haven from similar incidents. I had researched several alternative grids, but Avination seemed the most promising, from a technical perspective. Since it runs on the alpha-stage OpenSim server software, I was expecting technical glitches, and I got them, even a bit more than I had expected.

First it was the asset service disaster, probably resulting from a successful PR campaign bringing in so many new users the servers couldn't keep up, but lost, corrupted and threw especially textures any which way. After a month and a half, in late March, that was somewhat under control though, and life went on with just the occasional sim freezes and crashes, failed teleports and script failures. The latter was expected and quite manageable though.

Early April, the Redgrave / Mimi's Choice debacle struck, where two of the high-profile merchants left Avination over "differences" with the grid owner. Since I didn't know the full story, I gave Avination management the benefit of a doubt about what really happened, despite it didn't make them look good. I was more worried about the editing of the discussion "for legal reasons" and the gaming of it with alts of Avination management, and it did put a dent in my trust for them.

Mid April, Avination lost its PayPal services, and despite they were soon restored, the information about it to the customers left much to be desired.

Early May, the next glitch struck, when Avination management without notice tried to sneak in poorer rezzing performance to improve things for those few venue arrangers who attracted more than a few visitors to their venues. The result was a lot poorer rezzing performance and in-world experience to all the rest of their customers. After heavy criticism, management backed off from that "improvement".

Just a week later, the server upgrade with untested, bleeding edge code changes that sank logins and grid services for the two weeks to come were implemented. Logins were down repeatedly for up to 4 hour stretches, and meanwhile, teleporting, inter-sim messaging and often movement was poor or totally out in-world. That also marked the beginning of an accelerated decrease in region numbers lasting for almost two months.

Early June, Avination management decided to hire the infamous viewer developer JCool / Fractured Crystal to "fix" their viewer, despite him being known for developing copybot viewers and turning Second Life's then most popular viewer Emerald into spyware and a DDoS tool. Despite lasting only a few weeks before being fired again for continued violations of rules and after a public uproar, his appearance marked the beginning of a steep decline in user activity in Avination which is still ongoing.

In the aftermath of the JCool incident, I had a heated e-mail exchange with the Avination grid owner Melanie, where she falsely accused me of having made threats against Avination on my blog, and lied me straight in the face about things I had said according to her. I was prepared to let that pass with the half apology she made about it, even if it took away her last traces of credibility with me. However, four days later, my home sim, which was paid for another three weeks, "accidentally" got deleted from the grid, and my support ticket about it was ignored for 5 days, until I made the issue a public embarrassment for Avination management on their forum.

I got furious over the way Melanie got back at me, disregarding all the other shop owners in the deleted sim who got hit in the process, and Maggie broke down and cried over losing our home and security in Avination like that. We then decided to leave Avination, the weekend 2011-07-09 - 10, abandoning our own sim under construction, despite all the efforts and care we put into it together. Despite it made me feel sick to feed more money to Melanie, I made good on my promise to the others in the sim deleted and eventually restored, and another sim I had also "adopted" after its owner left Avination, probably because of "differences" with Melanie as well, and made a final payment to keep the sims up until late August, despite not having any real illusions about Melanie honoring the payment.

Right after the sim deletion, Melanie threw in another untested upgrade of the servers, wrecking about as much havoc on the grid as the mid-May upgrade did, and which Avination is still fighting to recover from. This time they claimed that much of it was owing to several disks happening to break simultaneous with the upgrade, and another server failing spontaneously at the same time. I'd give that as much credit as the sim deletion and support ticket ignoring just happened to coincide with my brawl with Melanie though.

We lost much in leaving Avination: Our home, our common labor of love in our own sim, Maggie's wonderfully artful and tipsy creations, and a friend who was very dear to us, who also decided to leave Avination after hearing about the way management had acted, but who for personal reasons refused to go back to Second Life. But we also learned a lot, about each other, about Maggie's abilities as a creator, and about what we can achieve when we work together, combining my straight-line perfectionism with her playful tipsiness. Hopefully, I also learned better not to be so naive about others. Where there's smoke, there's fire, and my decision to give Melanie the benefit of a doubt, despite what I already heard about her, was an obvious mistake.

I still dislike Linden Lab's way of managing Second Life, and their way of disregarding their customers, but my experiences in Avination makes going back to Second Life feel like the lesser of two evils, since the other OpenSim alternatives don't offer what I require yet. Fortunately, I still had a premium account and the "free" 512 sqm parcel to go with it in Second Life, so Maggie and me could start creating a new home there, first a simple, bought skybox, but after a couple of days a skybox we built ourselves, and keep improving. A 512 sqm parcel with 117 prims may seem poor after having owned 2 full sims before in Second Life, and a full sim in Avination, but we have the necessities there, and I don't feel like feeding Linden Lab money any more than I felt like keep feeding them to Melanie.

Love and devotion

This morning, Maggie overslept, so we never met, and I missed it a lot. But in the evening, she more than made up for it. No sex or naughtiness, but sometimes feeling loved and cared about means so much more than that. What happened feels too private to share, but I can just once more say that I'm truly blessed with her.

Economy:
2011-07-03: -
Avination stats:
2011-07-04 04:15 UTC, 33,862 residents, 6,749 in 30d, 969 sims

Further Avination deterioration

Owing to real-life problems, I didn't have much time to spend in Avination today. I basically just dropped in to tell Maggie I'll be away in the morning, and then I found some time to spend with her in the evening. Lena was there too when I came, and both her and Maggie were dressed up to the teeth in beautiful gowns. I never found out the reason why, but I guess it was some girlie-thing.

Maggie had really been busy, and turned our skybox in our region BDSM into a real home. She proudly showed me the things she found for a very good price, and she had every right to be proud. It was also just as well that she did finish our home there, because Sweet Hideout with our original home is still offline, and without any explanation or response to my support ticket from yesterday.

Avination has begun to act up a lot more in the last week in general. We get bad lag spikes in our sim BDSM despite it uses just a few 1000 of the assigned 15000 prims, just a couple of hundred scripts in total, most of them being simple, standard pose ball scripts, and with just 2 persons present. Maggie has even been forced to turn off her RLV now, because it flips her back into undesired states every time she's online. Script events are often ignored, and prim shapes and textures keep snapping back both during and after editing prims. Today there also was another total login outage.

I can't help but wondering if the performance deterioration in Avination has got something to do with the black hat developer they hired and fired. He said himself he launched DDoS attacks because he was bored, less than a year ago, and if he gets pissed from being fired, there are innumerable security exploits in OpenSim, which Avination runs on. I even discovered a couple of new ones myself by accident, which I reported into that big black hole where every Avination support ticket, requiring something more advanced than a sim restart or a recommendation to clear cache and relog, seems to go.

Economy:
2011-07-02: uploads -C$1840
Avination stats:
2011-07-03 04:15 UTC, 33,785 residents, 6,801 in 30d, 969 sims

Building lessons

This morning, Maggie showed me the latest development of our to-be home. She's really come a long way for someone who thinks she can't build. I gave her a little lesson in how she can texture her building prims better and easier as well, and she caught onto it right away.

When Maggie and me met again in the evening, we discussed the recent development in Avination, and our old friend and sim owner trad. It seems most likely he left Avination because he was royally pissed with management and their way of not dealing with the problems he experienced, and I can't blame him, after having had to deal with them myself. While the lag in the morning was hardly noticeable in our sim BDSM, in the evening it was worse than yesterday in both BDSM and Sweet Hideout, with lag spikes freezing movement and chat for up to almost a minute at a time. I noticed in my surveillance that the grid had went down entirely during the day, confirmed by a comment in the forums. It was a while since it was last noticeable now, and I thought it had been fixed, but obviously not.

I also noticed that the usage hours have dropped quite a bit in the last week. It may be just a random drop, summertime with nice weather, or some major vacation rush somewhere, but the suddenness and coincidence with the blackhat developer fuzz makes me suspect this is a result of it. So far, the number of sims haven't dropped much faster than before, but I suspect that may follow, if the number of people renting houses or shopping in malls and shops on the land keeps decreasing, so land owners, mall owners and shop owners don't have so many customers paying to cover their tiers.

Economy:
2011-06-29: sales +C$10
Avination stats:
2011-06-30 04:17 UTC, 33,571 residents, 7,063 in 30d, 975 sims

Dancing and asset problems

This morning, I met Maggie and Lena at Lena's place, and the Maggie showed us the progress of the skybox home she's building for her and me. Eventually, Lena had to leave, and Maggie and I had to split up for real life soon after that as well.

In the evening, I met Maggie and Lena together again, when they were out looking for furniture. Maggie tried to show Lena her new gown, but the bottom part of it was corrupt, so it didn't show. After Lena had to leave, Maggie and I went dancing and listening to live performers in two different locations, one female country singer and one Elvis imitator. None of them were top notch, and both suffered severe technical problems, the first with a repeatedly crashing sim, and the other with a music stream that came and went repeatedly. Yep, Avination still has some things to fix.

During the second performance, Maggie got response from the gown creator, and we eventually left the performance to let the creator have a look at the gown problem. She couldn't do much though, but believed the texture was somehow messed up and submitted a support ticket about it.

Economy:
2011-06-24: outfit -C$150
Avination stats:
2011-06-25 04:15 UTC, 33,180 residents, 7,157 in 30d, 983 sims

Showing things done

This morning, I spent chatting with Maggie in bed. In the evening, she came a bit late, but we also met Lena, and she showed us the home she created in the house Maggie gave her. It was really very nice, with clever furniture and tasteful shibari artworks as decoration. Lena had also added some BDSM poses into her bed, besides the ordinary sleeping variant. She really is talented.

After Lena had to leave, Maggie wanted to see the finished dungeon. I showed it to her, and she wanted to try the devices I put there. She said she liked it, so I hope any visitors to the island will too, once we open up to public.

Before I met Maggie in the evening, I kind of blew my top on the Avination forums. There's that guy there who is so smug, and who got really rude against someone who just asked if it was true that an ex Emerald developer was working on the Avination viewer. I had planned to not destroy people's joy over all the whistles and bells the new viewer brought, even if I myself won't touch it with that rogue developer from Emerald involved in it. But I couldn't help but hitting that guy on the forum pretty hard with the facts he tried to ridicule. I guess I won't be the most popular guy around after it, but I guess I can live with that. The question is if Avination can survive the utterly stupid decision to bring that rogue developer on board.

Economy:
2011-06-22: uploads -C$30
Avination stats:
2011-06-23 04:15 UTC, 33,011 residents, 7,255 in 30d, 987 sims

Whistles and bells

Yesterday, Maggie and me lay cuddling and playing some in bed in the morning. In the evening, I logged into Second Life for the first time in weeks, to check some of my creations there to try and re-create them in Avination. I got the prim part of them done, even if it took a while longer than planned, owing to a dear friend keeping me.

This morning, Maggie and me chatted about various things in the morning. In the evening, I finalized my old creations from Second Life regarding scripts and animations as well, while Maggie played around some with a sky box I created for her, creating an astounding atmosphere there. I think I'm about done with the dungeon part for now, after placing my "new" devices in the cells and common play area there. It looks pretty well equipped, and I hope people will find it exciting enough to try a few things out there, once we open the sim to public.

Today I also found out Avination released a new version of the viewer. The first comments about it was overwhelmingly positive, even if a few bugs were found as well. Looking at the release notes, it seems to be mostly whistles and bells though, and not so much really improved functionality. Also, considering the track record of the creator of it, concerning griefing, copybot building, spyware, stalking and harassment, I'm afraid the new version and future versions of the viewer are dead to me. In the end it will probably mean me giving up Avination as well, since I guess the old viewer I'm using now will become impossible to use as development proceeds on viewer and servers in parallel.

I have commitments in Avination until the end of August though, so unless things deteriorate too much inworld, I'll try and hang on until then. I've already talked with Maggie about the turn things have taken, and I think she will be OK if we leave Avination for some other virtual world. Considering the options, it looks like the only realistic alternative for me now will be to swallow my pride and crawl back to Second Life if so.

Economy:
2011-06-20: -
2011-06-21: uploads -C$70
Avination stats:
2011-06-21 04:14 UTC, 32,869 residents, 7,382 in 30d, 1,000 sims
2011-06-22 04:14 UTC, 32,945 residents, 7,337 in 30d, 995 sims

Fooling around and discussing the future

Today, Maggie and I spent the morning cuddling in bed and chatting. In the evening, Maggie was with Lena when I came, showing her some of the recent additions on the island BDSM. Lena seemed to appreciate the news, and I finally got a chance to see her naughty seesaw in action. She and Maggie looked really sweet straddling it, slowly bobbing up and down on the large plugs she had attached under holes in the balance plank.

After Lena left, Maggie and I went to a closing sale from a creator leaving Avination. Sorry to say, but with the prices and qualities, even with the items on sale with 50% off, I'm not surprised they're closing down. They may have made OK a few months back, but today, they can hardly compete since you can easily find twice the quality for half the price in Avination. Basically, they're one of those mechants I use to say try and sell a L$200 suit for C$1200, just because it's in Avination, also called Merchantville.

I am developing my surveillance of Avination and the analyses of the results continuously. The results from the grid survey, when analysed a bit more in depth, was really not very positive. Basically, I fear that when some of the things there get known, which they will eventually, regardless of if I blow the whistle or not, Avination will have many serious issues with their paying customers, maybe enough to push them out of business. What Avination needs is either a management replacement for the grid owner Melanie, or her understanding it's not a viable business model to have customers pay for her and friends' private sandbox, without caring one bit about said customers' needs.

Economy:
2011-06-19: -
Avination stats:
2011-06-20 04:14 UTC, 32,776 residents, 7,405 in 30d, 1,003 sims

More toys finished

Tuesday morning, I sneaked into Second Life, to rezz a couple of creations I made there and refresh my memory on how they were created. I made new versions, not identical but hopefully improved, of a whipping machine and a cell for the dungeon, and also got the scripts in the whipping machine working after some tweaking. When Maggie showed up, we spent the time just chatting about things in general.

Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, I was occupied real-life, and couldn't come to Avination. Wednesday evening, I found time to finish a few of the cages as well, while Maggie was busy prettifying the sim. This morning, Maggie and me just chatted some. In the evening, Lena was there, and we chatted some, the three of us. After Lena left, Maggie and I just relaxed some together before bedtime.

I also found some time to start a project of mapping Avination, more in economic terms than geographical. I managed to track some 97% of the sims in Avination through the map interface offered, getting a clue of distribution and ownership for them. Some 80% of them are located within 100 "squares" from the grid center at position X=1000, Y=1000. There is one really big land owner, and then a handful of semi-big ones, but most of the sims are owned by people who only have one or two sims. I'll add more as I find time to analyse the data better, and present it in a good way.

Economy:
2011-06-13: upload -C$40
2011-06-14: upload -C$10
2011-06-15: upload -C$30
Avination stats:
2011-06-14 04:16 UTC, 31,849 residents, 7,337 in 30d, 1,007 sims
2011-06-15 04:17 UTC, 32,013 residents, 7,355 in 30d, 1,003 sims
2011-06-16 04:17 UTC, 32,175 residents, 7,348 in 30d, 1,003 sims

One problem down

I'm still not up to much in Avination, owing to real-life circumstances. I spend most of my time there chatting with Maggie. This afternoon, I made a new little discovery of discrepancies between Second Life and Avination concerning animations. That finally enabled me to finish one of my toys I re-created from Second Life, but where the animations didn't work properly.

I also heard a worrying rumor that Avination management had engaged the infamous cracker JCool / Fractured Crystal to develop their viewer further. It's not even a year ago since he was permanently banned from Second Life over the Emerald debacle, where he installed spyware in the most popular third-party viewer Emerald, and used it to perform DDoS attacks against people he didn't like. I have asked for a confirmation or denial on the rumor, and if it's true or Avination management refuses to answer, I guess I will have to seriously re-consider my engagement in what they will be turning into a spyware-infested paradise for griefers and copybotters. I'm no friend of Second Life, but even their mismanagement will be better than the purely malicious disrespect Avination management is showing the safety and privacy of their users, if the rumor is true.

Economy:
2011-06-12: -
Avination stats:
2011-06-13 04:16 UTC, 31,661 residents, 7,314 in 30d, 1,010 sims

Stagnation

I haven't been in the mood to do much in Avination lately, owing to real life happenings. What time I've spent there, I've mainly spent with Maggie chatting and playing, and almost nothing on building. I managed to create a simple show sailing boat, and also help Maggie some with a couple of her projects.

I guess part of it is that I'm becoming more and more hesitant to if Avination will survive even until the end of this year, looking at the development of the economic data for it. That makes it hard to motivate spending a lot of time creating things that will be of no good in the end. Hopefully it's just part of my general down mood at present though.

Economy:
2011-06-09: tier -C$600
2011-06-10: -
2011-06-11: upload -C$10
Avination stats:
2011-06-10 04:15 UTC, 31,408 residents, 7,461 in 30d, 1,010 sims
2011-06-11 04:15 UTC, 31,497 residents, 7,399 in 30d, 1,007 sims
2011-06-12 04:15 UTC, 31,576 residents, 7,352 in 30d, 1,010 sims

Real life interference

Some sad real life happenings have prevented me from visiting Avination for a few days, but today I was there as usual, although not in the best of moods. Maggie and I spent the morning chatting, and in the evening she showed me what she and Lena had built while I was gone. Maggie has prettified the sim BDSM quite some more and created a new hammock, while Lena had built a pretty naughty seesaw toy. Those two girls seem to like each other quite some, and I'm glad for that.

Economy:
2011-06-05: -
2011-06-06: rock and grass -C$275
2011-06-07: -
2011-06-08: -
Avination stats:
2011-06-06 04:18 UTC, 30,890 residents, 7,531 in 30d, 1,027 sims
2011-06-07 04:18 UTC, 30,988 residents, 7,468 in 30d, 1,020 sims
2011-06-08 04:15 UTC, 31,066 residents, 7,437 in 30d, 1,013 sims
2011-06-09 04:15 UTC, 31,235 residents, 7,405 in 30d, 1,013 sims

Trouble shooting

This morning, I logged in to find Maggie and Lena at our house. Lena actually left so quickly I didn't see her, but Maggie told me she had been there. Maggie and me then had a long talk about the relationship between the three of us. We both like Lena a lot, but there are some quirks that needs to be straightened out.

In the afternoon, I had a long chat with Lena as well, and I think that both opened up some between her and me, as well as giving her the security of knowing what goes around the three of us. I then tried to fix one of my devices, without much progress. When Maggie showed up in the evening, she and Lena had a long talk again, while Lena demonstrated her latest creations to Maggie. Damn, that girl is good at design and scripting!

At the end of the evening, Maggie wanted to spend the night in the half-finished dungeon, so I left her there and headed home for our bed in Sweet Hideout alone.

Economy:
2011-06-03: -
Avination stats:
2011-06-04 04:16 UTC, 30,721 residents, 7,590 in 30d, 1,032 sims

Mini mall

Today, I worked mainly with the forum and the attached mini mall. There will be 3 proper shops to start with, one for me, one for Lena, who I hope I will manage to persuade start selling her creations, and possibly one for Maggie. I also added place for a number of ads or small vendors to the mall. I'm still not done with all the details, but the major layout is done at least.

This evening, Maggie and Lena had a long talk, and afterwards, Maggie and me went window shopping for some accessoirs to the island. We found quite a few pretty good things at decent prices by a new designer, and I'm pretty sure I will shop some there when I know better what I need exactly.

Economy:
2011-06-02: -
Avination stats:
2011-06-03 04:16 UTC, 30,648 residents, 7,635 in 30d, 1,034 sims

Permission problems

I spent much of the day today trying to fix problems with permissions in Maggie's and mine sim BDSM. I discovered them when I tried to give Lena permissions to build there. It first looked like she couldn't build when she should have been able, but later turned out she could build, even when she wasn't supposed to. In the end, after numerous setting changes and restarts, I submitted a support ticket, without much hope of having the problem solved. Bottom line is, I can't open the sim up to public, before I made sure they can't rezz, build, litter and grief all over the place.

I spent a couple of hours with Lena, first trying to set her up, and then helping her out with a scripting problem she got stuck on. That sure "paid off" fast, because already in the evening, Maggie showed me her latest gift from Lena, including the functionality I helped her with. Lena really is a great designer, and very fast at learning too it seems. Actually, she added at least as much to the solution of the problem today as I did, when we discussed the best way to solve it.

Economy:
2011-05-28: paid votes +C$14, upload -C$260, contest -C$2
Avination stats:
2011-05-29 04:15 UTC, 30,156 residents, 7,650 in 30d, 1,048 sims

Taking care of friends

This morning, Maggie and I tried to set things up, so that we could let Lena come to our sim. Probably owing to lag of some form, it took time for the required setting changes to come through, but eventually we had it working, using Maggie's old avatar as a "crash test dummy".

Maggie met Lena this afternoon, and invited her to the island. It seems everything went well, and happily accepted Maggie's offer for her to have our island as a home. We both like Lena a lot, so we are happy for that. I hope I can manage to persuade her to start selling her creations as well, and having at least one shop for it on our island, since she's really a good designer.

In the evening, I added a few more information scrolls to the temple library at the island. Then Maggie dragged me off on a free money hunt on some island. After that we returned to our island and tried to set permissions right, to permit Lena to build, but not ordinary visitors and basic group members.It didn't work at all, but it may again have been because of lag. In the end, we gave up and went home to Sweet Hideout to bed, and I restarted both BDSM, Sweet Hideout and Sweet Retreat, hoping that would solve the permission issues on BDSM.

Economy:
2011-05-27: bird bath -C$200
Avination stats:
2011-05-28 04:18 UTC, 30,077 residents, 7,698 in 30d, 1,051 sims

Amphitheatre done, dungeon in progress

Maggie and I've spent much of what time we've been in Avination during the weekend building on our island. Maggie finished a nice little house, and worked some more on her park and decorations. I helped her out some with a door script in the end.

I spent Friday finishing the amphitheatre next to the temple with 120 seats. This is really a bit overkill, since the sim hardly can take more than 40 or 60 persons, but it looks nice.

Saturday, I prepared the dungeon under the temple, building a maze and some cells. I also managed to make a fully working "sit teleporter", which unsits you automatically at destination. It took a little trick that I think few are aware of is needed in OpenSim, but that I discovered when I investigated some performance problems with my scripts in Sweet Hideout.

Today, I re-created a couple of my interactive interactive items from Second Life: my bondage stake with 63 home-made animations, and my scroll reader, to display information in style in-world. I will probably need to adjust the bondage stake some, because it seems avatar geometry differs some between Second Life and OpenSim, so some poses ends up a bit off.

I was glad to see Maggie's and my friend Lena back online this weekend. She has been missing during the week, and I was worried she had left like so many others seem to do. But it seems like she just had a very busy week real-life, so she hadn't have time to log into Avination.

Performance in Avination actually seems to have improved a bit, compared to a week back, but Saturday, there were two login outages again, accompanied by freezing in-world, teleports and IM's between sims not working, friend's lists and statuses being inconsistent, scripts stopping, builds breaking and general fuck-up. Both Maggie and me has been ejected from sims without warning, including our own, a number of times, indicating crashes or restarts.

All the curves describing economics in Avination are still pointing downwards, save for the number of total accounts created, that quite naturally will never decrease. But usage hours are decreasing in a tempo that indicates Avination will be empty in 3 months, the number of sims have decreased by 31 in just a week, and the number of unique users the last 30 days is accelerating downwards again, having decreased by 9% in the last 4 weeks.

Economy:
2011-05-19: -
2011-05-20: upload -C$10
2011-05-21: upload -C$80
Avination stats:
2011-05-20 04:14 UTC, 29,299 residents, 7,968 in 30d, 1,068 sims
2011-05-21 04:15 UTC, 29,389 residents, 7,918 in 30d, 1,064 sims
2011-05-22 04:15 UTC, 29,481 residents, 7,877 in 30d, 1,059 sims

The temple with the finished amphitheatre in the sim BDSM


The dungeon under the temple in the sim BDSM

Maggie's house in the sim BDSM

Roller-coaster in Avination

No, unfortunately the title doesn't imply any amusement park. I had a clash with Avination management today, after being falsely accused of breaking my word and the appointment Friday (my interpretation even if the accuser claims it wasn't meant that way). I could say a lot of nasty things, but I'll try not to, and just conclude that I have "differences" with the "A-team" about what went down. Maggie did her best to calm and comfort me, but I guess I really was no fun to be around tonight.

I was cheered up a little by the very nice gift we received from our friend Lena though. Maggie happened to mention to her yesterday that she missed her blindfolds from SL, and Lena had created one seemingly simple but very nicely designed and with several different functions for her today already. Both Maggie and I enjoyed trying it out a lot. So that was the first down and up of the roller-coaster in Avination.

The second part of it is unfortunately still mainly downs. I'm talking Avination performance and user statistics. The login outages continues, even if it seems Avination support has become slightly faster at restoring them now. At least there's been no 4-hour outage since Thursday, but both Friday and Saturday were spiked with many shorter ones, and there's been at least one more severe today as well. One little up has been that OpenSim developer Diva seems to have found a fix for the IM's and group notices that have gone missing while off-line, and that Avination seems to have implemented that now. At least I found a lot of those messages waiting when I logged in today.

Usage is dropping steadily though, and has by some 20-25% since the middle of Mars. The long term trend (28 days linear extrapolation) of unique users in the last 30 days indicates that Avination could be an empty ghost world by 2011-12-21, while the short term trend (7 days linear extrapolation) of usage per day indicates this can happen by 2011-07-15 already. The number of sims is also the lowest since the beginning of Mars, with 1090 sims this morning, compared to its peak of 1162 sims in the morning of 2011-03-12, a decrease by 6%. I really hope these trends will turn up soon again, but they have been declining for more than two months now, and seem to be accelerating downwards rather than slowing down.

So, those are the one and a half downs-and-ups of the Avination roller-coaster for today.

Economy:

2011-05-13: -

2011-05-14: -

Avination stats:

2011-05-14 06:14 CET, 28,630 residents, 8,021 in 30d, 1,105 sims

2011-05-15 06:15 CET, 28,747 residents, 8,009 in 30d, 1,090 sims

Generosity

Maggie and I have spent quite a lot of time chatting and trying out the erotic toys our friend Lena gave us. Today, Maggie received new and improved versions of them, so we ended up in bed all evening. Even if I helped Lena quite a bit with her scripting, I didn't expect any pay-back for it, but she's almost overwhelmed us with her generosity. Lena's a very talented designer, and is learning to script with amazing speed. I've also learned more than a little from her about RLV scripting. Maggie really likes and cares about her a lot, which is a bit rare from Maggie towards other girls, and I'm glad they seem to get along so well.

Economy:

2011-05-09: sales +C$10

2011-05-10: -

Avination stats:

2011-05-10 05:59 CET, 28,206 residents, 8,133 in 30d, 1,117 sims

2011-05-11 06:01 CET, 28,325 residents, 8,117 in 30d, 1,114 sims

Gifts and planning

Lately, Maggie has gotten a couple of very nice gifts that our friend Lena has created, and I helped some with scripting. They are for erotic role-play, and today we finally found time to try them out properly. They really added some to our interaction, and Maggie really likes them too, both the design and the functions.

Before playing, we also discussed some of the implications with getting our own sim, and e.g. where to place it in this world. Fortunately, we both agreed on the best way to go about it, but I still want some more time to think it through thoroughly.

Unfortunately, most statistics about Avination, that I've collected since February, points to that it loses both sims, activities and people. Many who have been here more or less from the start seems to have had enough and sold, abandoned or cancelled their sims before leaving Avination themselves. Some announce it publicly, other just leave quietly. I feel unsure about investing money, and even more a lot of time and efforts, into Avination under those circumstances, but at the same time I have a strong urge to really get started with creating something more permanent.

Economy:

2011-05-07: clothes -C$425

2011-05-08: -

Avination stats:

2011-05-08 09:45 CET, 27,947 residents, 8,182 in 30d, 1,111 sims

2011-05-09 06:01 CET, 28,077 residents, 8,175 in 30d, 1,116 sims