Blizzard goes after Bots in WoW

So, why can't LL???????

because LL is more like a light breeze?

So, why can't LL???????

I said here somewhere recently, an I'll say it again. I suspect strongly dat the days of the (camping/traffic type) bots in SL are numbered.

Traffic Matters… kind of – Traffic is a number for each parcel which is based on the amount of Residents who visited, and the time spent on that parcel out of their total time inworld that day. It’s calculated using a complex algorithm. Read more about traffic in the Knowledge Base (KB). Traffic is still used to help determine relevance with the new Search, but not as much as in the old version.

For traffic bots, I bet you're right.. The recent LL blog about improving search results says..


http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/03/26/tips-to-improve-your-search-ranking/
https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417&task=knowledge&questionID=3941

As I read this, the traffic bots that hang out at a place 24/7 don't give it any more traffic than ones that, say, logged in for 15 minutes once a day. Hopefully people who run these bots will read this and take the hint.

Also, Blizzard is playing the copyright card. With SL being open source it would be rather difficult for them to take the same tack.

Also, Blizzard is playing the copyright card. With SL being open source it would be rather difficult for them to take the same tack.

When traffic bot runners read that, they won't realize that they should just stop, they will just create more alts and have each one log in for about an hour each day at one location instead of 24 hours... they will then switch to a new alt to work the next hour.

This will just increase processor time as each bot logs in and out.

They may even decrease the time spent so they can do more bot logins... let's see... a mainland sim - 35 bots (allowing for 5 real avi's) - every 15 minutes is 140 bots per hour - 24 hours per day is 3360 bots per day, each one logging in and out - hogging processor time, creating lag.

Because unlike in WoW, there are legitimate uses for bots in SL. It's not bots themselves that are problematic; it's how they're used.

When someone games the traffic system with a hundred mindless zombies floating in the sky above their place, that's wrong. But when someone uses a bot quickly to assemble a complex scene from a hundred sculpties in just a few seconds, instead of spending six hours doing it by hand, that's a good thing.

It's just like push scripts, or particles, or rezzers, or anything else. There are good uses and bad uses for everything. You want to go after someone who's abusing a thing, fine. But never blame the thing itself for the actions of its user.

Bots in SL seem to be an annoyance - but removing the ability to do it will hurt the benign users too. Its been said before, remove the perceived reason that so many bots exist and they will probably go away.

I think there is an important point being missed here. WoW software is closed sourced, closely gaurded and heavily armored against any sort of tampering. Using WoW even requires that the client computer run a watchdog process that monitors for bots and other suspicious behavior. Even with all that, blizzard is incapable of stopping bots from invading WoW..

Bots are now a fact of life in both virtual worlds and more and more in RL. The idea of banning them is archaic and almost certainly impossible. From the grid's point of view, what really is the difference between data generated by a person, a person assisted by clever macros and scripts, an autonomous program, or even an honest to goodness machine AI? The target of regulation should be behaviour not the origination of that behaviour.

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Since many bots are programmed, and that programming sold, the programmers are in violation of the limited licence for the viewer code.

Of course it's the people not bots themsleves, but since the lowest common denominator will float to the top like river scum, so it is only practical to outlaw BOTS and use a heavy banhammer. It's also practical to overide the the whole Open Source thing. It's already been proven that allowing that community to work with the code is not trustworthy...ala the Copybot, which led to people's work being stolen. There is a fairly large cadre of people who believe it should all be free and as anarchic as possible.