Akela Talamasca 
wonders on the Second Life Insider blog why there is such a disparity between the number of Second Life "residents" and those who are logged in at any one time. Certainly, when less than 1% of the total resident population is online, one must wonder if there is a problem with Second Life. While there are many possible explanations, one may be that Second Life, like every "metaverse," "virtual world," or MMORPG, suffers from the demotivating effects of network latency, packet loss, or general "lag." We've learned to use our networks for things that they aren't quite ready for yet...
Seemingly in answer to Akela's questions, ACM Communications
published an interesting article in this months issue which seeks to
answer the question: "How Sensitive are Online Gamers to Network Quality?". The authors of the paper (Chen, Huang,
Li) have demonstrated a mathematical relationship between measures of
network quality (lag, ping time, etc.) and the time that gamers stay
online. 
Of course, these results are completely expected -- in general.
What is most interesting about the results is that by establishing the
sensitivity of gamers to a number of inter-related QOS metrics, it now
becomes possible to reason about tradeoffs to be made QOS optimization.
For instance, they clearly show that "packet loss is less tolerable
than network latency." Thus, one might comfortably increase the
redundancy in messages to reduce the impact of packet loss even at the
cost of increased perceived latency...
"Given the strong relationship between game playing time and network QoS, we can “predict” the former if we know the latter. Forecasting when a player will leave a game could provide useful hints for system performance optimization and resource allocation. ...
...systems can be designed to automatically adapt to network quality in real time in order to improve user satisfaction. For example, we might enhance the smoothness of game playing in high-risk sessions by increasing the packet rate (if the risks are caused by long propagation delay or random loss on a noisy link rather than transient congestion) or the degree of data redundancy, so players would be less likely to leave prematurely." [From the paper.]
bob wyman
Did you consider that people may be signing out and back in in order to improve their packet loss numbers? Because that's what everybody does when they see their lil 'ploss' bar go high.
Second life has low numbers of people online because it is not addicting. There is nothing to do but talk, and the talk is not as cool as real life.
Posted by: Scott | October 31, 2006 at 15:08
Bob, you need to get back to serious work. Tracking Game sites...
Actually, I have been watching my kids doing "world of warcraft" - I can't believe they take down their servers for maintenance for several hours once a week. Haven't these folks heard of clustering...
Posted by: Peter Q | November 01, 2006 at 08:06
Yes indeed i have seen many people doing the same to increase the number of packets lost, virtual networks community is now growing very fast.
Posted by: managed dedicated server | November 04, 2006 at 06:50