A Curious Observation

Some time ago, there were all sorts of "statistics", as to how many of the online avatars were bots. The "statistics" varied greatly, depending on who calculated.

Prior to the big bot boot, the online population between midnight and 3am (SL time) was approximately 45-47k.

Now, since their demise, the online population between midnight and 3am (SL time) is, still, approximately 45-47k.

Seems to me, like there has been no real change. So, is this proof that bots logged off, to sleep?

SL Metrics on his blog page.
http://danielvoyagerblog.wordpress.com/sl-metrics/

I have live updated SL Stats here too.
http://www.netvibes.com/danielvoyager#SL

I hope this will be handy for you.

So far, all indications are that "the big bot boot" was in name only. People keep finding the same old bot farms in the same old places.

The people who should be booting bots are busy dealing with adult parcel moves, I suspect.

It's probably the bots that are being migrated to Zindra

They made a few stores get rid of camping chairs, which were probably being used more by regular residents than by bots --- but it allowed LL to be able to claim they did something.

Maybe it's time to start AR-ing bot farms after all?

I'm going to take it you're american. I have a surprise for you, Those people on when you sleep....


they're not bots...



They are...


Europeans!


The bot population has never been anywhere *near* 47k.

Europeans tasty?

It seemed to me the concurrency numbers dropped significantly after the policy went into effect. The peak was topping 80,000 right before that. When was the last time that happened?

I resent that

Don't forget us in the Southern Hemisphere. Australians and New Zealanders are on at that time too

I heard they taste like chicken.

Wait, there was a big bot booting? And... I didn't notice it? Clearly it either didn't work or they booted all the actual users.

they are tasty. ;0 free healthcare taste like cupcakes.

I think this kind of misses the point. Wherever on the globe the sun is shining, at some time during the day there's a minimum concurrency. Assuming (not necessarily correctly) that bots are in-world 24 hours a day, one would expect that the minimum concurrency should drop by a larger percentage than the peak.

According to the OP, that seems not to have happened. So, if the bot banishment was in fact effective, those bots must have been magically replaced by new residents who are in-world during those off-peak hours. And for the peak hours to see the reductions they have, one would have to hypothesize that only Far Eastern timezones have these wondrously growing sign-ups.

I would guess that one factor is that some of the booted bots were only in-world during peak hours. (I know; that makes no sense, but I've seen a lot of people who traffic-game only during peak hours. I have no idea why.)

I also suspect that more non-bots than bots have exited recently, flattening the concurrency curve.

I don't think my post misses the point at all. I actually think rather you missed the point of my post which was to say that any real people on after 12am are not necessarily European but could be Aussies/Kiwis.
I was not posting with reference to the bot situation at all.

I actually have no idea how many bots vs. people are on at that time.
Curious that you picked my post instead of Darien's to reply to

Actually, I am Australian. That's why I see the late night figures.

I guess my point is, if traffic bots made up 20% of the total SL online population, and those bots were all removed, wouldn't the overall online population, across all timezones, drop by 20%?

I might add 20% was a figure that I plucked from the air.

I've seen several bot farms on Zindra actually...

They're amazingly easy to find as Zindra is still underpopulated. Just go to any cluster of green dots - at any given time there's only going to be between 1 to 5 of them on the entire continent. Chances are one of more of them will turn out to be a bot farm.

One of them is right next to the info hub...
- Its a giant porn-store, and uses models all throughout - that are not 'there' as people.

I was at a large shoe store the other day that had something like 20 lucky chairs. Since I was working on a non-mind-bending RL project, I hung around and snagged 6 pairs of heels. Nothing Moody quality but not bad either and I can always use the oddball colors you get from those things.

I didn't buy anything. Am I a bad person?

Yeah, that was pretty arbitrary of me. Yours was just more recent and that seemed to suggest that the discussion was drifting from the OP's intent, possibly without fully exploring what the OP had in mind. But "missing the point" wasn't the most graceful shorthand for that, and I'm sorry if it caused offense.

In any case, observations of who's in-world at 3am SLT are more germane than pastry-molesting ferrets.

If the OP is correct that the diurnal peaks in the concurrency curve are flattening, it's interesting and maybe important.

It depends on the bots' sleeping habits. The point I was trying to make was that in fact, if trafficbots were round-the-clock creatures as many are, one would expect that booting some of them off the grid would reduce concurrency by a constant *number*, which would be a higher percentage of the off-peak concurrency figures than of the peak.

No but 3 years ago the nightshift population was about 1/4 of the daytime now it's 3/4 of the daytime, and I think there has been a drop in bot numbers to some degree as even the daytime population is down from the 80k it was 6 months ago. Whether they are policing it or not, at least they stopped encouraging massbotting as normal business practice.

Molesting? It's a perfectly consensual relationship!

You are forgiven, I only mentioned it because to large parts of the world you are in either Europe or the US, the rest of us get forgotten about and so I like to prod people to remind them we are here too

You used the chairs as intended, to create lingering traffic and promote products.

And, not that the two things have to do with each other, but not as far as I can tell: no.



"We are here, we are here, we are here!"

(Where?)