I’m a vampire.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to
anyone who regularly reads my blog or knows me inworld, even though I been very
lax in not having posted anything since, oh my god, November last year! So,
this will be my first blog of 2024, and it’s already June!
I’m a vampire, I’ve said that
already, but, spoiler-alert, I’m only one in Second Life (SL) and not for real.
Although I might be, I wouldn’t admit it though because people tend to get
weird and run away if you do, or start whittling stakes. I’ve been one since soon
after joining SL in February 2008. I hadn’t planned it when I entered this
world, didn’t even know about it, but after a mere few months suddenly I was, almost
by accident, I’d been embraced into Bloodlines.
Bloodlines, or BL for short, for those who don’t know,
is an SL inworld roleplaying game that has thousands and thousands of players.
Players, among other things, are defined as ‘active’, or not. I’ll explain this the best I can soon. Most
players are a member of a ‘Family’, the
umbrella term for clans, hordes, covens, guilds, etc. Of those who don’t have
an allegiance to any family are regarded as ‘clanless’, the Bloodline’s term
for it being in ‘Curse’. This can be
by choice or circumstance.
I’ve worked out that there are
currently 5,692 Families in the game, all pretty much being a mix of races, such
as vampire, lycan, angel, demon, or a hybrid of any of these, i.e. a
vampire/lycan is called a ‘vaewolf’. One
other race is humans, and as with all other players are either in a ‘family’ or
not. Families lead by humans are known as guilds.
5,692 is a lot, the largest family
in sheer numbers to date have 78,522 members, while the smallest ones have only
one. These are ranked according to the number of members who are defined as ‘active’. On saying earlier that I’d
explain this, truth is I’m not entirely clear on what defines ‘active’ in Bloodlines terms, it may be
those not ‘destroyed’, as in
bloodless (or empty of your particular
race’s vital life-source, of which we lose a little each day unless you
regularly feed on others, or, you’re protected with a special amulet), or
it might be how recent you’ve logged in to SL, or something else entirely.
Perhaps someone can tell me.
I am the head, or leader, of my own family, or clan, called Veiled
Fang. I founded it years ago after having spent a couple of years in
other clans learning the ropes, finding my feet, or, my fangs, so to speak,
then suddenly found I had my own clan. Out of curiosity, I did a few pointless
sums on my BL family’s statistics to work out what percentage of our members
are actually defined in BL-terms as ‘active’.
So, out of our total 394 members, only 49 are shown as ‘active’. This is only 12.44%.
This sounds low but it’s not bad at
all in comparison to many other clans. Some, especially those with huge numbers
in the thousands, can have as few as anything between 1.5% and 9% active. I think though that this metric
can’t be used as a reliable measure, because of those families with, say, only
one or two or three members, many show all one, two or three members to be active, which is 100%, that’s hardly a
fair comparison when working out how active a clan is or isn’t, or at leats its
members.
Another interesting sum I did was
that out of the total 5,692 Bloodlines families to date, a whopping 1,880 have
only one member, that’s 32.92 % of the total number of families. If you include
those families having only two, three or four members, that’s 3,831 families, equating
to 67.30%. Phew!
This is what a few empty moments in
the day can do to me, make my brain want to play with pointless things. Still,
it gave me something to write about, even though it may not be of any interest
to you at all, and may even have made your brain hurt.
© Anan Eebus
