Clubs = the all-powerful, can't-do-shit-about server thieves.

Ellie Edo and Yumi Murakami both make a valid point. Their ideas speak of a solution for the lag that can be used immediately to help reduce the lag. Of course I like the idea of having everybody stripped of there scripts when they come to an event that does not need them wearing scripts. The suggestions that I have seen from reading this post that seems fair to all concern, is to take down the most popular list. But this wouldn’t be fair to the Newbies. Still having everyone stripped of the scripts, that they have paid hard earn money for wouldn’t be fair to the oldsters. This would be like going to a club in r/l and being searched at the door for guns. I like the idea of turning off outside scripts. If this worked like rending a club patron scripts inactive, we could do this doing the event that does not require scripts. After the event turn the outside script feature back on. I know people like to look as life like as possible when they are just standing around interacting sociably when there is no event. Doing the big butt, big tits, best dress or whatever events. Scripts are really not needed as the main focus is on the above mention items. In the end the easiest solution for lag would be to ask folks to de-script. Never hurts to ask. I know that’s what I will be doing. Maybe I’ll just make a big lag introducing textured sign that says “Please take off any unnecessary scripts doing this even".

It's done. Many people ignore it. Not too surprising - for many their avi and its visible ancillaries IS their work of art - their creative contribution to the world and their identity. Admit it - some are astonishing.

Why do you think it wouldn't be fair to new folks?

Please read and reply to my proposal on how to deal with the problem of resource-hogging clubs.
I'd appreciate the feedback. Thank you

Do clubs cause a lot of lag? No doubt many of them do but I personally believe that casino's cause even more lag. I do however believe that most people have probably no idea that they're even causing any harm with all their scripts so it might be a good idea to talk to the club owner and explain them what the problem is. I do feel for ya because I'm experiencing the same problem...

I'm sorry, Angel, it's well intentioned, but it's all wrong. A technical solution like this would need to be much more sophisticated to avoid limits operating when they needn't. Too sophisticated, I guess, to be considered whilst we have so many more urgent bug-fix and development needs.

Also LL want to preserve everyone's freedom of action as far as possible, including club owners, and at root I agree.

The first step is to remove the perverse motivation provided by the "Popular Places" list. If we can reduce camping and get to the point where every problem attraction is at least a genuine one, not bribing attendees to squander sim resources for nothing - Then we could see see how big the remaining problem is.

If we could all trust that these "attractions" were genuinely and deservedly popular , then maybe it might be logical to look at gifting them more server resources from the common pool. But not when they bribe their way up the list.

Might be able, for instance, to put them and their poor neighbors on faster servers, or give the sim two cpu's. Not technically easy either.

I believe they also tried this back in 1.7 (see my prior comment about the script scheduler). I believe it's still in play now, but thusfar only increased the latency of scripts to then-unheard of levels. In the end, it really solved nothing.




Really, the "right" thing to do is twofold. First is, as Ellie pointed out, to stop offering popular places slots to cheap, "game-the-system" mechanics. As much as it was decried in the old days, the "Linden Picks" was closest to the mark, offering genuinely interesting places to visit at regular intervals. On the subject of popularity and information, more people should be part of the process, not fewer.

The second optimal thing to do would be to produce cheaper sims, such that a person could own one at a realistic rate. I'd venture to guess far lesser hardware would be able to run a sim, in addition to the higher-tiered behemoths, at cost of performance and prims. The "sparse sims" idea was close to the mark, but in true Linden fashion, only half-hatched.



The problem we have now is, at core, the tragedy of the commons. I've long hoped they'd just let us run this on our own hardware, precisely for this reason. But in the absence of that, at least a compromise would be better than nothing at all.

You're right, traffic is being gamed.
You're right, the solution I proposed is imperfect and I try to avoid unsuitable limits.
You're right, it probably won't happen soon due to the high demand on LL coder time right now.

Having said that, some problems :
1) LL have a motivation not to replace 'traffic' with 'Linden Picks' (it costs them time to maintain), and another motivation not to upgrade the host servers of popular sims (it costs them time and money!). I agree in principle your solution is good, but I worry that it has the same problem as mine - lack of LL time/money to implement. The different between our ideas is that my proposals require coding time now - but are low maintenance in future, whereas yours require ongoing Linden intervention to maintaint he Picks list and ongoing intervention upgrading servers.
2) Fundamentally, it makes no difference to me if the laggy place next to me is a club or a beautiful self-growing garden. It still lags.
3) Programs grow to fit the memory availible to them. Upgrading the servers might not make any difference - the clubs will just run laggier scripts, and more of them. Enlarging the resource 'pie' takes away the motivations residents have for being efficient with that pie - namely, fear it may run out.

So... I think your ideas are good, but I don't know if they're workable.

Ehm. I think you're addressing me with that one too?



With regards to popularity, the most effective means of communicating "hey, this is a really cool place" have been search engines and blogs/news sites, which share a symbiotic relationship. What we currently have is, in essence, half that.

Barring the fact the Linden Blog utterly misses the point of communication in my opinion, resident blogs have been doing pretty well to bridge this gap. This includes privately funded ones like 3pointD, to more professional outfits resembling print media, to single resident blogs like, yes, that hosted by Prok.

But those are only one half of the matter. The other half is finding the damned things in the first place. For that you need a unified system in some fashion. On the internet, we have Google, Yahoo, et cetera. In Second Life, however....




Therein lies our problem. The internal system, for "popular places," clumps things together from disparate fields. Our library, for example, simply cannot compete with "FREE MONEY BALLS WHOOPIE!" This is partly by design.

What's missing from the system is that which Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, and the rest sort their sites: by page rank, based on what you're looking for. You can fiddle with the current system and (I believe) sort by traffic and term, but it still leaves much to be desired. And, in keeping the dated "here's the most popular places we have evar" and making that the default, the problem remains.




Additionally, there's no rule dictating the Lindens must use the biggest, baddest server hardware, at $1,250 a pop and $195 a month, to own a full sim. This would mollify the issue because, hey, you own that piece at a direct cutoff point. Ultimately, it should be on user hardware anyway, letting us make those decisions.

Yet it is not and we cannot. And there, we still have our problem. If popular places were rolled out in favor of "really cool list of info sites," things would be moderately better. And if LL focused on the idea of the sim instead of the idea of the parcel, things would be better still.

What it comes down to, or should come down to, is us being in control. This was the original selling point of Second Life. Yet, by the day, it's becoming more the lie.

Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing Popular Places replaced by a "Top Picks" option based off of how many people have added a place in the "picks" area of their profiles. Makes camping nearly a non-factor (increasing the number of player who've added your place to their picks would be more important than simply the number of players there at any given time) and replaces it with how much fun, interaction, useful info, beautiful items, etc. can be found their instead. It'd make places that are newbie friendly more prominent as well, despite the low numbers that might be there/go their at any given time. The Ivory Tower would be a good example, or Eagle River Park, or even Yadni's Junkyard. doing it this way would even help LL pinpoint areas that deserve special treatment/praise/reward and might actually cause more people to be aware of/use their in-game Profiles.

Hard to come up with a system that can't be 'gamed'. I'd almost recommend a system like the feature voting. Give us 10 votes or however many and let us apply them to places. And to make it more unique and less gamed, on the backend use the hardware key or wtf that thing is they use to track computers so that computer can only issue a number of votes. Sure it could be gamed with alts and finding ways around the computer tracker thing but its a start IMO. Almost nothing will be perfect.

Maybe just get rid of everything and let word of mouth do its job?

"I'll pay you L$100 if you'll add my parcel to Picks."

Competing against places that get added simply because they're cool/beautiful/helpful. Plus, no need for camping idiots who kill the server.

And all 15 of my unverified alts too? This could be better than camping :/

It isn't quite that simple, though. For example, some business folks would only have Picks to their own businesses, rather than just to generally good places they liked, because they don't want to take attention away from themselves.

Perhaps rather than using picks, the number of people who have created landmarks to the location should be considered. Notice, I mentioned creating landmarks - being given one wouldn't count.