Wagner James Au / New World Notes

SL land grid circa 2018, photo by Daniel Voyager

There once was a virtual world that kept growing and growing (and often shrinking along the way), with dozens of new islands and continents suddenly emerging, seemingly from the digital ocean, every month. But then in the real world, a global pandemic caused many to seriously reconsider how they spent their leisure time, and return their attention to that aging virtual world. Which in the meantime, was moving away from the old way of existing, on a network of thousands of connected servers, and go instead into the cloud.  And then those two factors coming together at once caused a major interruption, and stopped the world from growing. (For now.)

Or as Linden Lab just put it:

Second Life is in the process of migrating from our existing dedicated servers to a cloud hosting service. That migration has already moved a number of the most important services and databases, but we are not quite ready to host simulators in the cloud. We have a crack team working on that and are making lots of progress, but there are significant changes needed to make sure that we can provide the performance, stability, and security required. When that process is complete we will have a nearly unlimited region capacity, but until then we are constrained by the size of our existing server fleet.

While our migration project has been underway for some time, even our most optimistic business projections did not anticipate a surge of the magnitude we have seen in recent weeks for additional regions. While we planned for growth driven by improvements to Second Life and other factors, we didn't expect demand to be created by a global pandemic.

As a result, we are in the unfortunate position of hitting the maximum capacity of our “old” servers until the “new” cloud servers are fully operational.

And so if you want new land, Linden Lab recommends renting it from an SL land baron — or renting mainland territory from Linden Lab itself.  In any case, it is an unfortunate hiccup for Second Life's prospects, which was starting to see more usage and land ownership in the wake of the pandemic:

As you can see from Tyche Shepherd's grid survey(click above to embiggenate), the global quarantine helped to reverse a slow but steady erosion of Second Life land (mostly private islands people could no longer afford).

While this may seem like bad news for people wanting new territory, it might actually be a good thing for the virtual world as a whole, which currently has a mainland that has vast swathes of unclaimed or abandoned land. It's no fun to be forced to do more with less, but that situation often inspires creativity too.