camping chairs, why are they necessary for new clubs?

I recently went to a new club and was floored by how laggy it is already. Not a lot of people in there, 10 or so. Should be fine, right? I'm guessing the culprit is the over 40 occupied spaces for campers earning 2L/20.

I've never owned a club so could somebody please break it down for me? Why would you have campers and how exactly do you benefit from it? Besides making your place look more populated, I can't think of a reason for this money drain.

the reason is traffic. when you do a search you will see that by default the places are listed in order of traffic. traffic works off of a mathematical thingy or other that counts how many people come to your lot and each person is counted once every 5 mintues or something like taht. I'm sure someone else will answer this with a more detailed answer.

But basically, the people put camping chairs on their place to get people to come looking for free money and they will sit down and leave their computer (camp) while they earn a very small amount of money that's pretty much good for nothing. But it's good for the business owner, because each one of those campers is counted every 5 mintues, so if you have 10 campers, then every 5 minutes, it will go up 10 counts.

I don't really agree with the situation as I've stated in another thread, I have a club that is only a little more than a week old that already shows up on the first page if you type in "clubs" in the search, and I have not had one camping chair on my lot. All of my business and traffic is genuine.

That's exactly it.

The first reason is because traffic generated by campers enables you to place higher in Search.

The second reason is because otherwise it's easy to get stuck in a catch-22. Someone arrives at your club, but there is no-one else there, so there's nothing to do, so they leave - so there is no-one there for the next person to come. If you can attract "live" campers this can solve this problem, as they'll have a reason to wait around in order to earn L$ and can then chat to the new arrivals when they come.

I don't know the specifics of how traffic works either, but yes, more traffic = higher search results. Also, for social/meeting type places, you're more likely to get visitors if they see green dots on the map before they teleport. Campers = green dots. Of course this only works once...

It is possible, btw, to use this in ways that don't destroy sim performance or clutter up the place. A few camping poses that fit with the style of the sim, such as people cleaning or playing musical instruments, for instance, placed sparingly around a region can help build traffic without being so obnoxious, and can actually be a RP element in certain places. And make your place more noob friendly, if you consider that a positive.

That is so true, and the fact that people do that is somthing else to me.. I got my club going by putting up a classified ad looking for dancers. These dancers don't camp, they are there the whole time emoting and chatting to every customer that comes in. The customer stays because there are dancers, and they tip the dancers. The dancers stay because they like the club (I suppose) and the customers stay because they are treated well by real people doing a real job at a real club. I guess the other people put camping chairs or dance pads because they would rather spend the money than have to stay at the club when it is dead in order to chat up anyone that comes in. I have made a lot of friends just doing that, not to mention the club traffic is pretty high for being so new.

I guess I'm looking at this from more of a financial standpoint. 40 campers at 2L per 20 min is over 5,000L/day to spend on campers if the camping chairs remain full. I understand that your traffic would be increased by having these (probably bots) there... but how on earth would you generate enough revenue to support this continual cost?

Well, to my understanding, clubs aren't really a money-making proposition to begin with... it's more a matter of trying to lose as little money as possible... the theoretical business model seems to be to use a club with camping chairs to build traffic for shops located in the same region. Whether this actually works or not, I'm not sure... some people (a lot of them?) just like the idea of having a club.

Some of those camp chairs are filled by Bots owned by the Venue owner, so in essence he is paying himself. Or possibly friends who give the money back. To be truthful, I have no need to camp, but if I wasn't doing anyhing and a friend asked me to park my behind on a camp spot I'd do it for free.

(Disclaimer: I think Traffic as a means of ranking search is an anachronism, even if it weren't gamed to the point of also being a lie. But as long as it's still a factor...)

A club that uses campers is just confused.

To get better traffic, make a box of bots up in the sky someplace where they won't lag everybody to death. Make them sit so they're non-physical. Make them automatically logout when the sim starts to run low on avatar slots (or, theoretically, if the sim shows time-dilation, but usually getting rid of bots won't affect that problem).

To make the place look busy, hire dancers. Pay them some low, flat rate just to hang out and chat-up any guests (it's an easy script to track when they're around), tell them their chat will be monitored for quality and timeliness when new guests arrive, and let them keep the tips--they'll learn soon enough how to make guests have fun and stick around.

It's a mistake to use campers to try to combine "traffic" and "looking busy." Guests will be so turned-off by the unsociable zombie campers that they'll never come back--way worse than the place just being empty the first time they visited. And "looking busy" campers will be at ground level, where everybody has to rez them, their animations, their prim hair, etc., adding to lag without making the guests feel welcome. Just a mistake.

Okay that brings up another question. Are there (there's gotta be) stats for how many avs can be on a particular sim before the lag gets out of control?

Also, I thought I read something about LL paying club owners based upon high traffic numbers. At what point does this kick in and how much do they pay?

Based upon what I've read here owning a club really appears to be a labor of love without financial reward.

It's not really how many AV's, is more like how many scripts are running. Everything from bling, to xcite parts or weapons all take thier toll.

AVs cause a lot more lag than scripts. (In other words, if you have just 1 AV in an area, they'll need to attach a _lot_ of scripts before the lag will become as bad as 2 AVs with no scripts.)

"Lag" is really complicated, but script execution itself is never the cause of lag affecting anything but other script execution. But this is a subtle point (except to scripters) because scripts can *do* stuff that causes lots of lag.

An avatar is a pretty laggy beast. For one thing, in the wild (not sitting), they're physical objects, and are pretty clumsy, too, bumping into stuff and clomping around on the ground or non-phantom prims. This affects the whole sim's physics processing.

And avatars tend to have a lot of prims and textures hanging off of them, which makes everything slower to rez anywhere near them.

But to kinda address the question: Mainland sims are hard-limited to 40 avatars; Estate sims can set their own limits. Class 4 sims lag out due to avatar count much faster than Class 5s. Nonetheless, a lot of avatars can be sitting in out-of-the-way places even in a Class 4 without it showing much lag. But get just 20 of them within view, wearing AOs with lots of different animations to download and lots of prims and textures and maybe a few color-cycling prim-rezzing scripts and, well, it's not gonna be a fun club. Nor a fun club to neighbor.

[Edit: Forgot to address the "pay for traffic" question. Indeed, such a thing used to exist, and "traffic" in those days was called "dwell." It was gamed just like traffic is now. Evidently LL was more conscientious about where it spent it's own money than it is about where residents get lured with phoney search numbers: they eventually canceled dwell payment.]

Well, at this point, for clubs its pretty insane, you would need to completely fill a sim with campers. But you can get to the top of a list pretty easily with some niche businesses with just three or four campers. I wish they'd get rid of the whole thing and rate things in some different way that wasn't as easily exploited.

Traffic as a means of seeing how many visitors you get, like hits to a website, that's fine. No problem with that but it really needs to be taken out of the ranking system for search, it's gamed beyond belief.

ah, dwell. and ratings. and first land. the "good old days".

Definitely would like to see the cancellation of traffic and camping bots. I'm ok with tasteful camping as its a means for some players to earn some money to buy some products....in essence the money gets recycled back into the economy.

And because you could run camping chairs and nothing else - and _make a profit_ (!)

Now, I'm sure that's true for a few club owners, which, I will never understand how they stay in business. But for most clubs, that's why they usually have dancers...the dancers work for tips, and the club takes a 20% commision from tips the dancers earn. If you know what your doing, it works really great, and everyone's happy.. I've never had a dancer get angry or disagree that she must pay 20% of her tips to the club, because it's a drop in the bucket compared to what she gets to keep.

Not all clubs use camping to get traffic though, the club I am not working at Palisades is run by my best SL friend, their a lot of the initial traffic to the club is friends, friends of friends, acquaintances and so on. I see new names all the time be they others of the previous groups I have not seen before or maybe new people that have just happened upon the club. This is one club that does not need camping because it has great word of mouth, talented DJ and Hosts that work very well together, and this brings people back.