Traffic MUST be redefined

My establishment made it onto the most popular pleaces list a few days ago and hase been climbing the list. Come visit us, there are no dance pad or camping chairs at this time. To suggest we are not "legitimite" is absurd. Why? Because it is an adult social club?

Agreed 100%! It has gotten to the point when I do a search, I automatically ignore the top 5 or so listings....you can GUARANTEE those places are going to

A) Have false or misleading terms in their desc to generate traffic.
B) Be lagtastically full of cheapassed people (not necessarily newbs) camping for money
C) '[Insert item name here] Superstore' is going to have ONE vendor with ONE item of that type in addition to the camping chairs/dance pads/etc.

I tend to start about midway or a bit below the 'high traffic' places...these are usually the players that are seriously marketing a product (usually somthing specialized) and are not going to generate the huge dwell...but are likely to have what I want and in multiple variations.

I can't disagree that many of the popular places in SL lack much aesthetic value. But people vote with their virutal feet, there's no point arguing about taste when in the real world Big Momma's House 2 made tons of cash. Those who are interested in quality will have to find reviews of builds on forums, blogs, and in-world magazines and newspapers written by critics they respect. Perhaps a grid of highly critically acclaimed builds would be a good tab to add to the search window, taking in data from some of the in-world media sources?

Great post Suzanna! You reflect my sentiments exactly. When everyone was screaming to get rid of DI so that camping chairs would go away, I posted that they would never go away until Popular Places becomes a thing of that past.

Someone early on mentioned categorizing the popular places list by casino, strip club etc. But as it is currently set up this won't work either. Most places are a combination of all of that and more, and will list it all in their description so they can show up when a search is done for that specific item. Or, as Raudf said, when she does a search for hair, the first places she finds are places loaded with camping chairs who happen to have put "hair" in their desciption.

So here we are now with no DI or Dwell to reward those truly creative, popular places that actually have real people as opposed to zombies, and a Popular Places list that is gamed more than ever, just for the reason Suzanna said - advertsing.

As far as the content of that list, we all know that sex and free money sells. Combine this with the annonimity and ease of Open Registration and we should only expect that the content of our Second Life Popular Places list, calculated by traffic, will continue to contain mostly sex, sex, sex and casinos.

And this - our Popular Places List - is the first impression we give to every new person who joins our community.

Or moreover (and worse), a carefully designed easy to search place that you can see in 2 minutes does sell what you want.

It would be far improved I think if there could be several different search criteria (time spent, number of teleports, average occupancy, L$ taken) and users could choose which one to use. Although they could be gamed it is (hopefully) unlikely any location could game all of them!

That right there would be gamed. Just by the "acceptable" people. You know, the right people. High society. In fact, they would own it.

coco

What makes that different from any of the rest of the game? It's quite clear us little people who contribute for fun not profit aren't important.

Lewis

Traffic should become the number of unique visitors per day to your location, with a minimum of a two minute stay.

That way sites with nothing to offer don't get anything from it, and there's no reason for a group of people to sit in one location that aren't actively participating in something.

No..the traffic system is not working. Why can you find people at a casino? Because they're giving away money.

What exactly is social about a room full of camping chairs where everyones afk?

Is that the traffic system working? I don't think so.

Perhaps, in addition to time per AV per location, number of characters typed per AV was added?

It's not a perfect idea, places like Svarga which is an incredible build would miss out some (except for "Whoa!" and "Spiffy!" but the camping zombies wouldn't skew the score so much.

I agree here, but how to you digitally quantify interaction via an automated system?

I mean if there was a way to do that most of the places with camping chairs as their content would be down in the 1000 range for traffic because the interaction level is so low in them.

You have me on that one.

SL saves your chat history, but I'm not sure if it's referenced to location at all in the servers ... that's a question a LL tech would have to answer.



Exactly

It is based on an av staying at least 5 minutes, if that av goes no where else during that log in, you get all of his/her traffic points. Hence businesses have been since the inception of traffic figures, have tried their very best to keep that av in one place for as long as possible. Therefore the concept of camping chairs evolved to what they are today, paying the av to stay as long as possible.

Until LL changes the way traffic is figured camping/money/dance chairs etc will continue to flourish. A very simple way to measure traffic would still be the five minute rule or less and not split that avs points with anyone else, you’d get the same amount for each av that stayed that long on the parcel, the next place would get the same amount of points for that avs visit. This also encourages the player to go more places, see more things, spend more money..what could be so wrong in that?

I don’t mind so much the most popular places list, those ppl have worked long and hard to get there, would love to be there myself.

Not necessarily.

A Tringo place that's open 24 hours isn't anything spectacular. It just means that the person bought a large lump of land, bought a game unit someone else had made, and managed to hire enough people to have a 24 hour shift, paying them enough money to make it worth their while, and keeping the rest of the profit for themselves.

Most Tringo places are very plain, in fact, apart from the scoreboard and the seats. Maybe took a couple of hours to set up?

It seems like pure capitalism in action... someone makes lots of profit whilst paying peanuts to other people to do the actual day to day work for them, simply because they had money up front to invest in the first place.

Again, camping chair places... it doesn't take a lot of skill to buy a plot of land, chuck down a couple of camping chairs, and buy some cash on Lindex to fill them.

Very little work, yet easy ways to the popular list. Think then of some individual guy who spends months terraforming and building the most spectactularly complex and visually impressive place to visit... yet nobody does because all that's on their mind is "CaN i HaVe SuM mUnY pLz lOl!!!!!111!!!1!1!"

I say we just dump the stupid list altogether. Retain traffic calculations because people are interested in it, but let people decide whether something is any good and whether its worth staying after they visit. After all, now we have p2p teleporting it's a lot quicker to find out.

Lewis

I shudder to say this, but I agree with Lewis here. The Pop Places list should go the way of event support, telehubs, DI and Dwell. Keep the traffic calculations on the land when you right click "about land", but don't publish them in the form of a "Popular Places" list. LL might possibly generate more revenue for themselves too in the way of classified adds, as that list is the same in principle - the more you pay the higher up you appear on the list.

The "5 minutes and then it's a percantage" rule was for dwell. It's been pointed out elsewhere on the forums that the formula for traffic is probably different.



Bear in mind that there's practical reasons for this - Tringo boards take a lot of prims and, if the area's going to be busy (and the builder would hope it would be!) you don't want too much detail there because it's all extra rezzing time. Unfortunate, but true



This seems a bit cynical. Premium membership $9.99, plus tier on say 4096, US$25, plus the Tringo machine is about US$30... US$70 is hardly an amount to make the difference between proleteriat and bourgouise. And the last time I searched for Tringo (which was a very long time ago ) there were lots of Tringo places with very, very low traffic. The winners must be doing something else to be the ones that succeed.



Have they advertised the build? Also, the above poster did have a point: many people play in online worlds in order to feel more powerful or express themselves. Does this person's build allow that?

(Although I should say I'm surprised by a number of new folks who see builds around and say "I could never do anything like that." I used to be like that too, until one person told me something that in all consideration I should have realised was blindingly obvious: "Artists learn art by looking at other people's."

The problem is really what draws people to visit something. It doesn't necessarily matter how much advertising, classified or whatever there is, it has to have something that attracts people.

The vast majority of busy places are those that are either connected with sex, money, gambling, or a combination of all three. There's very little else (the only one I can think of was Clubside Granville's sandbox) that gets a huge amount of traffic.

It doesn't matter if I've spent the last 3 months constructing the most intricately detailed, photorealistic, spectacular building in Second Life... given a choice between visiting somewhere that is "nice", or somewhere they'll be paid L$5 every 10 minutes for doing diddly squat, then most people will go for where they get paid.

One of Second Life's big flaws is that there is no way to make money for yourself unless you have a skill in building or scripting, which is something most don't develop for months. In Sims Online, you can spend maybe half an hour skilling, then go to a money house and get paid - as part of the game - for making a set of jams, or a gnome, or something. This enables people to build up their house, buy some furniture, and achieve something in the game.

With SL, your only option is either to hit Lindex (for many new people, spending real cash on an unknown entity is not considered a smart move), or hope that they get lucky with a raffle ball, Tringo game, or sitting on a camping chair.

True, you don't need money in SL like you do in TSO to do anything - but the option of "making it yourself" doesn't become part of a new player's gameplay for some time.

The 'expressing themselves' is an interesting point. Many players do seem to want to create perfection - you will rarely see a short fat bald ugly avatar in a wheelchair for example - but what difference does it make what you look like if you are merely visiting somewhere? Nothing on my plot prevents people being 'what they are', yet I get few visitors. I just don't want to end up being a replica of somewhere else with a handful of slot machines and suchlike that look completely out of place on my land.

Lewis

Traffic is useful in many ways, and while the system isn't perfect it does give a reflection of how busy some site is. The numbers are extremely important for mall owners, club owners and places like casinos-I mean I like to say hey I got 10k traffic but no camping chairs on my place, ergo my mall can make you money.........

Now, if you have a build and you want people to see it, you need to list it, advertise it (we are talking a 25k add in classifieds), and you are gonna want to have some events there, if you do that you'll get traffic and people will see your build. If nobody knows about your build, its cause you aren't advertising.

We are all competing for other players time here, so if you want your special castle to compete with uber casino XXX, you will need to advertise to get your message out.

You think we were *dancing* in that big black box? 0.o

Seriously though, if you put together a great build and list it, word will get around. I have two folders of landmarks I give to newbies, "Freebies" and "Scenic". All but one of the scenic LMs is an island that someone put a huge amount of effort into.

Many of the places on the "popular" list are actively avoided ... using the list as a guide. "Oh, it must be lag-hell" ... and they generally are.

I haven't looked at Popular Places since my second day in game. But, I'm not big on visiting clubs or casinos or sandboxes, and that made up most of the list (and probably still does).

Even shopping, these days I turn to SLExchange. I've wasted a lot of time trying to find a particular building item like a vase, with Search and getting lost in malls. At least SLX has a good search tool, and I don't even have to leave the build site.

It is kinda sad that if someone joined Second Life and said to themselves "I want to see the best second life has to offer!" and finds the hot picks list, assuming that it should be taken literally, and goes out and finds nothing but Camping chairs, casinoes, and gor.

I know that would have made ME quit and never come back.

Alot of Tringo places don't have alot of traffic, the ones that do, pay hosts 24/7, give them a tip jar and teach them how to welcome and be entertaining for the guests. To me thats an investment of time and money. I worked at such a place for the 1st six months i was here, very well run, by very nice, hard working people. It gave me my beginning in SL and my investment towards my own business. People don't show up for tringo unless there is a good crowd, and a good host to encourage good pots. To me that is a well run organization, thought and hours of work have gone into making that gaming area popular.

That sums up pretty much what I've been trying to say. Thankyou.

I often go out looking for random dots on the map, to see what people are doing. If they're obviously somewhere like inside a private house, I'll leave them alone, but if they're in a public area and appear disturbable, then I'll go up and say hello, and more often than not people are actually grateful that someone took the time to chat to them and interact (even if it is me).

Whilst I accept that, amongst Tringo or club regulars, there may be a 'group socialisation' of sorts, there's so much more social aspects to this game that could be encouraged, and they seemingly tend to get overlooked amongst everything else. I once organised a 'discussion group' event, just sitting at my camp fire chatting about whatever with whoever turned up. At one point there were 16 - and this was around midnight game time.

Lewis

You forgot the part that explained to me why this is amazing, creative, quality building, or worth while of anything except a manager position at McDonalds?

Yes! First impressions are everything and its sad that our "Popular Places" list, which is mostly innacurately skewed by zombie campers, is the first representation we make of ourselves to each new person to Second Life.