Darn Resource Hog Casinos!!!

I know this is a constant forum subject, but still there has not been a resolution to SIM resource hogging casinos & clubs that prevent me and my neighbor's from enjoying SL. I currently cannot fly into my heliport because the region is full. This has been an issue for ages and still no resolution in sight.
How is it that my neighbors and I cannot access our land "freely" (not just TP to, but fly in access) because of the absolute inconsideration of casino owners that are spread throughout SL? Why can't they be required to buy an island?
I just moved from one region due to a casino lagging the entire area and you will never guess what happened within a week of settling in: A new casino moved in and now has me locked out of flying back into my heliport! Where is the equity of server resource distribution to citizens? WE PAY THE SAME YET RECEIVE LESS!!!! I cannot keep moving around as I am trying to sell my products from one place. My ability to enjoy SL and to run a shop is now impossible.

less than 10% of the area in my Region is owned by a casino, yet they use over 95% of the resources in their casino.

We in the Region of Burnet want equity now. Casino owners know exactly how badly they eat into resources and could care less. They have no desire to work with there neighbors by throttling there usage of resources. Please help soon! I have invested a hell of alot of time into my business and now am considering selling all and leaving SL.

This applies eqully to all resource hogs out there to include casinos, clubs, sex clubs, escort services, camping havens, New Citzens Plaza, etc. Yes I said New Citizens Plaza. They may help newbies and my hats off to them for that, but reality is they are bogging their region down as well.

Here are my list of suggestions:

1. Keep up with the growth by adding capacity
2. Equitable distribution of server resources
3. Tax (I hate taxes, but something has to be done)
4. Resource hogs should buy and island
5. Straddle multiple regions to balance the load (short-term solution)
6. Dedicate a new multi-region area to resource-hogs that will not interfere with the other 99% of the land owners

I know some of these are impractical but I am at frustrations end with this issue.

Update: Just spoke with a large group of neighbor/landowners and we are all filing abuse reports. LL are you listening? This has gone on for far too long! The time is now ripe for some serious grass roots movements to get your attention!

I understand your frustration, allocation of sim resources can be a very tricky issue. The suggestions are appreciated and we'll look at them as we continue to consider ways to solves some of the problems.

If you think that sim resources are being unfairly used by campers or other AFK avs that are preventing others from using a region. Consider filing an abuse report with PARCEL as the category.

Good luck dude it seems linden is on your side.

I'm not all that happy with the eternal considering. I want to stay on the mainland, but I don't like living in fear of every other landowner in my sim. Is the above code for LL not planning to fix this exploit, or is there an intention to do something about it?


Does this mean that sim resources being denied to majority landowners by non-AFK avs are not abuse-reportable?

There is, IMHO, a fundamental problem is SL : computer resource is billed to in-world prims, it is free for av-attached prims. As a builder, I struggle with a tight prim budget to design an attractive region. We have to weight every rez, cut in our design, tweak our heads everyday to figure how to be prim-efficient. The region will be visited by avatars wearing 30-prim hair, 40-prim jevelery (yes, i've seen a 40-prim watch!), prim shoes, totalling far more than our budget, sucking computer resource from our sim and adding lag.

I speak about prims, but scripts are worse. We avoid poseballs in favor of SitTargets. We are constantly on a diet when our visitors will llSensor every second. We wear programmatic hair and no prim-clothes to keep our sim lag-free. They do. Something goes very wrong here. Builders feels their work unrespected.

It's a temptation to restrict our sim to low-lag avs. But we can't "weight" avs. It is even impossible to see the total prim count in attachements, except when they are rezzed on ground. Most of the problem lies in education. They simply DON'T KNOW. Another part of the problem is vanity.

So, why should we continue to build nice regions for the enjoyment of unresponsible visitors? Seriousely, I will stop building if there is no answer to this question. Don't say "money". I'm not here to make money. I'm here to make fun and money is not fun. It's boring. I don't want to play Boring Life. I play a game powered by computers. Computers costs Real Money. I pay this cost in Real Money. Simple as that. BUT i can't pay for players eating more of my resources than they grant to me.

This is how the internet works: grant me access to your resources, i will grant you access to mines. It works as long as there is a fair equity. In SL, there no fair equity.

Attachments cause no lag on the sim based on the number of prims in them. The only impact attachments have is on scripts (as you note) and on rendering when they are in draw distance.

I brought this question up a year ago when Linden Labs announced they were killing DI and traffic payments: what is the incentive to create nice builds when visitors are a net cost... not just from people who are innocently causing lag but from people who are actively aggressive. And after DI and traffic payments went away several of the nicest builds in SL vanished or went private... funny thing that.

For the avatar overloading, I've suggested this:

True. But keeping av out of draw distance means no socializing. I build also on a sky platform. I can pan and zoom at lightning speed, in full screen on a 20", with rich rendering options. I can work great this way, complex designs with uttermost speed and precision. But if I have 20 prim-everywhere-neighbours in a 10m radius, my camera chokes and freezes. What these av are saying is : hey guy, we are rich, we have high-end graphic boards, go buy one.


And what is the incentive to create nice builds when there are no visitors? I really think it relies on a lack of information. Lots of av around me are amazed when I say them: rez your hair on ground and count the prims. Open your scripts and see the never-ending llSetTimerEvents. This costs, and it costs to everyone looking at you and everyone sharing your sim. So, do you want Gardens of Apollo or do you want bling-clubs? You choose. Some will choose clubs, by most will choose Apollo.

But wait, they *can't even see* what is in their scripts since they bought nomod ones! And they had no indication from the vendor that they were buying clothes weighting almost all of what à 512m2 land can hold. My suggestion? Education. And an "AV weight" such we have a metrics to act on. LSL can't, but the simulator should.

I agree with Blue. Keep ARing until something is done about it. Those casinos are a public nuisance which IS against the TOS.

This whole "limiting prims on AVs" thing is fine and dandy if you're concerned primarily with lighting-fast FPS, but the bottom line is I'm more focused on how my avatar looks. Now, I'm not so cocky as to wear a 40-prim watch but having a furry avatar I have a naturally high prim count.

I don't want to have to choose between looking how I want and being able to go places. I do NOT have a high-end graphics board, my system chugs the same as anyone else's. I simply like looking a certain way.

I think the issue is not the number of prims on an AV but rather about 1 person with 1 parcel having 30-40 AVs on their parcel while the other landowners in the sim have to suffer for it. Now if they owned most of the sim then I would agree they are paying for the right to be resource hogs, but if they only have 1 8192m plot then that hardly qualifies them to suck up all the region's resources.

Like it or not, If someone buys land, it is their land. As SL says, YOUR world, YOUR imagination. I do not like casinos and high lag clubs much either but it is a fact of life in SL. One good solution is to pool your resources together and get an entre sim or an island. Limits on scripts and/or resources isnt anything that can be done very easily unfort. and I would be amazed AND Happy to see it. SO many things cause lag in a SIM Take a look at Malls whose vendors are using 1024x1024 textures. Even Builds can cause alot of lag if the builder is not considerate in their building and take the time to optimize their texturing. I have a few islands and thought it would be nice to rent out a bunch of 2k and 4 k parcels. I had 25 all on one island and quickly found out that that was a miserable idea. Now that I limit the parcels to 4096 and 8192 and larger sizes with perhaps 10 residents per island, life has gotten alot better.

The only reason I post this is NOT to shout out that ISLANDS are GREAT, but rather to say that it IS your world. Get with other people who share your views and buy up a large chunk of a sim, Im afraid you will be waiting forever for the Lindens to handle this problem, it has existed since forever.

I do know its frustrating, I bought and MOVED to 5 properties on the mainland within the space of 4 months and it drove me nuts, especially since my first land was beautiful and the neighbors fantastic. Almost overnight, Hobos moved in ( they were kind of fun, just hated burning tires and toxic waste LOL) , a casino followed and lots of 512 plots quickly were created and sold. I got tired of my heart being broken over the sorry state that my home in SL had become.

I was flying around the mainland the other day and did see a number of nice sims with only a few residents and a few homes, it really impressed me and I think that would be your perfect solution if you do not like living on private islands

It is the access to my land I have an issue with mainly. As restated by Tristan, we are at the mercy of the inconsiderate & greedy casino owners. An indication of their disregard is the deployment of new camping technology that enables them to host 30 campers from one scripted sign. The CampMaster is a dream come true for these casinos and effectively shuts down the region with region full messages. I spoke with the creator of the CampMaster to unload my frustration and she informed me that she has received several requests from CampMaster owners to raise the capacity to the region limit. She has refused to do this, but it still does not change the fact that this new platform is being abused by most of her customers and at the expense of the region in which it is deployed. The residents of Burnet effectively launched a campaign to pressure the Cadillac casino owner to turn it off. We filed AR's as Blue suggested and also place a HUGE sign across from the casino expressing our concern for his total disregard for his neighbors. He has now responded by turning it off and we will be monitoring his resource consumption.

The Fair Land Use policy in SL Community Standards supports my argument that a landowner owning 10% of the region is in violation of this policy if he knowingly interferes with his neighbors enjoyment of SL by hogging all avialable AV limit capacity on the server at the expense of the other 90% of landowners in the region. YOUR world YOUR imagination does not give you the right to interfere with other residents enjoyment of SL. Just as hate speech is banned, so should total selfish disregard when it impacts others.

In RL I may own the land, but common resources such as water rights does not entitle me to over indulgence at the expense of neighbors. Grass-roots organizations have and continue to successfully curb corporate resource hogs. We have tools as wel to influence landowners that intentionally hog resources: Ban them from our land, protest signage, AR's, in-world media coverage, etc. The first action taken is always to try to work it out with the offender. If this does not work, we then file AR's. AR's in large numbers from all of the neighbors do make a difference and get the attention of LL.

The argument that the land is "yours" is really irrelevant, and though technically correct it SHOULDN'T be. I don't mean to say that people shouldn't own the land, but much like in real life there should be zoning. Make entire casino SIMS (like legalized gambling) and let those casinos duke it out for users amongst themselves, not people trying to own a home or run a small shop. You could make them city sims, which, if I recall correctly, are allowed more resources than typical sims.

Set clear guidelines for what's allowed in a casino-style sim and what's allowed in residential/light commercial sim. At least on the mainland.

It's not the prims so much as the scripts. I've been monitoring this lately since my home sim has over 2700 active scripts (just from people's houses and security systems), and it's very common that one person will enter the sim and use up the whole remaining script capacity. Then I have to stop work on whatever scripted item I'm making, motion gets choppy, and the sim generally becomes uninhabitable.

Usually it's someone less than two months old, in a human avatar that looks relatively normal. I would like to know what is this item that has 250 scripts in it that so many almost-newbs are wearing, but they themselves don't know what it is.

I understand that it would be a major (but necessary) infrastructure change to allocate resources fairly. But I don't see that it should be prohibitive to give people a way to monitor the resource weight of their possessions. Then at least the hogs would know who they are.

I'm not saying that "chichi hair" doesn't have an effect on people around you, but it doesn't have an effect on the *sim*, it's not using the computer time you're renting from Linden Labs. Quotas or (preferably) lower priority for avatars with lots of scripts, fine, but there's no "load on the sim" rationale for limiting prim counts on avatars.
That's why many of the great builds closed. Too many bad visitors, and no recompense for putting up with them. The ones that went private are just kept open for for friends and acquaintances.

I'm commiserating, friend, not arguing.

They didn't buy a sim, they bougt 1024 square meters of it. If they have 40 avatars on their 1024 meters they're using up basically *all* of the sim's resources... the people who own the other 64512 square meters *can't even enter the sim*, let alone do anything on it, no matter whether that club is visible to them or not.

Textures cause *NO* lag on sims. None. Zero. Zip. They hurt your local rendering performance if and only if you can see them, but you can control that.

When I had land on Raccoon Hill we got moved next to an incredibly laggy shop with dozens of huge cycling textures. I put up a wall of invisiprim panels between us and them and got an immediate *doubling* of my frame rate.

You can't do anything like that when the lag is on the *sim*.

From the "Town Hall" chat transcript:

[15:15] Jeska Linden shouts: Chalky White: Do you have a technical fix imminent for the camping/clubs making their neighbors land permnanently unusable?
[15:15] Cory Linden: a question about camping chairs making land unstable... we are looking to change dwell to eliminate the benefits of camping chairs.

What does that means, given that dwell doesn't exist?

nci was mentioned... yes they have a heavy av load, and a some heavy scripts running but in all fairness that sim is a (old) class 2 server with a class 3 load on it, even dead empty that sim has a habbit of being amazingly slow like in the 0-7 sim fps with only me around

even my home sim (jouppi) which is 70% barren and empty 99% of the time will be humming along and drop to 0-14 fps for HOURS

so theres obiously major issues with the simulator software, when i started there was no fps speed limit, and most sims were fine altho some yahoo could suck down all the power with a poorly written script, after the 45fps limit was installed most hoggy scripts failed to perform, and sims seemed to move freer

then magically one update they cant even run empty

i can really see where the op is getting upset, no restrictions on AV usage per parcel and just plain ol piss poor performance makes a un-enjoyable time on SL

I would assume they plan on changing the rules on how traffic/dwell is counted.

Saying "send an AR" is the Linden equivalent of "go away kid, ya bother me" or perhaps more accurately "gripe where we can ignore it better, thank you".

I may be wrong, but i think resources optimization sould be done from the beginning and I'd like to reorient the thread in the technical way, not the political one. Perhaps it should move to the Content Creation Forum. Will see.

First there is prim efficiency. You can do a lot with a prim when you know how to tweak them cleverly. I want to learn that, and to make that known to new builders. I organize ASAP a local contest "the more with the less"

Then we have textures. Unnecessary huge textures lags. And unnecessary number of textures also, I think. We may have a benefit to re-use textures in a same region, say 4 for stone, 3 for wood (in the case you own the region, of course). Use untextured shiny when possible.

Then we have scripts, and everybody agrees the the resource hog is here. In a new region, I already see 150 scripts. You will find this number ridiculously small. But the region is empty, excepted a very small number of scriped objetcs I know each. What are these scripts?

As for the tools. I use llSense (yes, this discussion has certainly to move) to probe the scripted objects. It has a ridiculous 16-result limit. We link as much as we can, but this is insufficient. To be able to optimize our builds, we need tools. Listings of every object and script would be a real help. Of course, naming objects is essential.

Poseballs. Are they necessary? When we try to drop them in favor of SitTarget, we have failed sits, random sits, and avatars speaking to avatars in their back. I scratch my teeth on this problem. I don't want poseballs but I cant's sit the visitors properly.

As they are guide rules for the responsible av, there are also for the responsible builders. Please, let's share them and make them available in-world to the community.

well, move to another place or make an arrangement with the casino owner or move to a private island, or kill yourself, i dunno.

Otherwise, don't bother the world with your little personal problems.

That was not a particularly intelligent response,

The bottom line is that casinos are a nuisance in every possible way, not just scripting, They're brightly-colored boxes FULL of talking objects, scripts, sounds, animated textures and shouts. You could buy nice land in a beautiful sim, one will move in and then it's ruined. Furthermore, if someone has a home directly next door to a casino, their chances at privacy and quiet are pretty much nil unless they move a few hundred meters up.

solution, know your neightbors or get all the useable land of the sim.

another way that i know is to own tiny strips of land (bit like pathways) in the sim that prevent any large land owner to install as they cannot make a continuous plot of land.