Pyramid Scheme, Plant Spam, Traffic Bots

Over the last 3 days I’ve visited almost 100 garden shops.
They nearly all have the exact same stuff and almost all of them have an abundance of TRAFFIC BOTS promoting their ‘pyramid scheme’ plant spam

The plant market has essentially become a type of mutated pyramid selling scheme. Search for plants under ‘Places’ and you will find more than 100 garden shops all using the exact SAME textures for their plant and tree products and the top 60 or so showing a false reading of popularity due to the use of traffic bots

The ‘super abundance’ of the same photo plant textures is creating a new form of visual, virtual world PLANT SPAM.

What gives ? how come so many of the garden shops all have the exact same horrid photo textures ?

No need to re-invent the wheel.

Low prim quality scripted plants at Mihnas Tuscany Country Garden, Gorgeous detailed plants at Botanical, that full-perm sculpty plant your probably referring to is by svo Michalak and is sold on xstreet full perm.

Not talking about one sculpty full perm prim plant here and certainly not Botanical or any of the other handful of genuine plant artists in SL.

I'm am refering to the fact that dozens and dozens of garden shop are using the exact same plants and tree textures. Making for an incredibly boring shopping experience.

unbelievably , the same plant textures keep appearing in dozens of shops !

It doesn't bother me if there are a lot of the same textures in plant merchants. Less textures, less lag. Besides, the plants are only half the equation. The other half is what you do with them.

Pretty much the same as girl clothes stores in RL, at least over here...

I know what you mean- I saw some in a build the other day that i thought were horrible- the texture i suppose was meant to look like sunshine on the leaves but to me it looked like a bad clean up job-

In the FWIW department- I have spent the last couple weeks making some palm trees that while not blow it all out of the water in the grand scheme of things i can assure you they didnt come off the same old same old since i can shoot palms all day long and touch and tweak in Gimp til I am happy with them -Florida is good for palm trees - not ready yet to be inflicted upon the world yet though.

Weston Graves


Actually not less lag as they may be the exact same plant textures but there are dozens and dozens of different creator names and different UUIDs. SO not less lag, more lag, unfortuantely. And that's only one of the bad side effects of the current 'plant pyramid' selling scheme and plant spam that SL is a victim of

Actually, after 3 days of visiting garden shops I’ve realised that I do not like photosourced plants.

PHOTO SOURCED PLANTS look like zombie, night of the living dead plants, ripped from RL. They are frozen moments from another dimension and they don’t belong in SL at all. They are so out of place here, I realise now

Hmm less textures means you only have to download them once and use less texture memory and less swapping to hard disk... using fewer textures may be the best thing you can do to prevent "lag" ever! Names and creator ID's are nothing...

Wait, what am I missing? If you have two textures that are bit for bit the same but have different UUIDs how is the client to know that it doesn't have to download them both?

True, if they were reuploaded, they're two different textures. I didn't think about that possibility, I would cry and gnash teeth if the same texture was used often like that, but reuploaded every time. I was thinking of the more common situation, where it's the same texture being passed around... the item copied many times, but still the same asset.

Where does the pyramid scheme come into it?

I have been running a cartoony filter over mine in the effort to relieve just that after reading ur complaint in another thread- had never really thought abut it before- thanks for that

Well, I tend to think its more or less the same case you see in the clothing market. you'll see two identical outfits on people(which I have numerous times) and ask them both where they got them....and it's two different stores.

I'd guess for the plants, it's not so much content robbers as full perm texture, prim packs or what have you. But with clothing it's content robbing for the most part. All part of the game of getting ahead, unfortunately.

I've even had people say to me "ohhh you mind if I take a snapshot of your AV? I love your outfit and want to create it because I'm new at making clothing and would like to make something like that to sell"....sad. Why not just say "Hey, I have no imagination whatsoever so i want to take a picture of you so I can copy your outfit and sell it for 3/4 of the price you probably payed for it in the first place."

And unfortunately content theft is probably alot of the reasons people use traffic bots also. I'd guess to a extent anyway.

Texture shops sell plant textures.
Building classes give out plant textures.
Its not suprising that many people who make plants use the same textures.

Could you please explain the pyramid scheme?

Those making plants can purchase the plant textures from texture creators. Are you implying that they are passing the textures around via some kind of a pyramid scheme?

Log into Xstreet....type in "plant texture"....there they are. I use these textures to make houseplants for the store....I'm not involved in any kind of pyramid scheme....yes, some other stores will have them....they purchased them the same way I did.

You must have missed the really good garden/landscaping stores. How did you do your search. You can eliminate bot stores immediately, simply by looking at the map.....do you know how to do this?

Why don't you fly around and look at other people's yards....and click on their plants for the creator's name.....visit the Botanical Gardens.....or some other nicely landscaped areas.

Why don't you make your own if they're all so horrid?

Sounds like a great procedure. And I note that you are in Florida taking your own photos. You have a genuine creative process going on. Really looking forward to seeing how they turn out. The cartoon filter idea sounds great, anything to get away from the pure straight photo look. And since you took your own photos you will have a completely new palm profile that SL has never seen ! Thank goodness because there are some horrid palms out there, ragged Frankenstein bolt me together palms

For some reason, tropical plants look the worst when created using straight photo textures. Maybe it’s the glossy leaves creating white streaks in the photo textures, but nearly always photo palms look awfull – maybe it’s the frozen moment thing that makes them look out of place and weird in SL.

Yes quite so Harmony, you do see a similar thing going on in the clothing market. But, in the clothing market we do have several dozen very talented clothing and avatar accessory designers. All producing unique and original work

The difference in the plant market is, there is probably only a handful of genuine plant creators. Probably less than 10-15 plant designers who are genuine plant artists. The rest of the market, the other 100 or so garden shops are all relying on the same photo plant textures. These shops are merely collating and representing the same texture content over and over again. And it’s the SUPER ABUNDANCE of these photo textures that qualifies them as a form of spam

The 10-15 or so genuine garden shop are drowning and lost in this sea of photo plant spam . Photo style plants and trees make SL look kind of 2.5D SL, they break the illusion of ‘another world’very easily.

Also photo sourced plants are almost impossible to landscape successfully with and to create a pleasing look to the eye. One of the main reason for this is that all the photo plant textures have different shadows so if several of the plants you are using have the shadows on the left and other plants have shadows on the right, and a couple more for good measure have shadows from above, the human eye finds it confusing to read. It just doesn’t look right. It’s confusing and tiring for the eye as it tries to make sense of the visual chaos

Well, ok, you got me. It’s not a real true pyramid scheme. But it could qualify as a kind of mutated form of pyramid scheme possibly only capable of life within a virtual world. Pyramid schemes and similar businesses with diminishing returns are a kind of micro organism.

So basically I see it like this.
At the top of the pyramid – top level - you have the photo plant texture sellers and also the full perm sculpty prim sellers – a twin topped pyramid.

And below that you have the massive second level of hundreds who buy into this BIB type biz.
Buy it, represent it and open your shop with hindreds of products, over the weekend.

So at first glance it only appears to be a 2 tier re-seller market. But when you add traffic bots to the mix it creates a multi level pyramid type organism. You can join the pyramid at any time and by using traffic bots rise almost to the top. In fact the traffic botting plant sellers probably make more money than the top tier. As when you sell things full perms you always end up the victim of diminishing returns.

So not a true classic pyramid scheme I grant you but it’s a similar unsavoury biz organism as hundreds of people buy into the idea that they can start a business , plant shop etc. But never actually make a return on their investment unless they are ready to deploy a gaggle of traffic bots to game the system.

Seems to be an unintentional pyramid, organically evolved within the virtual goods market

Didn’t miss any of the good stores. Found them with great difficulty and perseverance, in an ocean of spam plant sellers. There are probably only 10-15 real plant artists/creators in SL. Only if you MAKE YOUR OWN plant textures - digital artwork, take your own photos and process them etc – would you qualify as a plant creator.

Sure there is a place for buying in textures to make house plants for your store. Nothing wrong with that, sounds like a good idea for a furniture shop and helps you set the scene and tell your story to your customers. Go for it Mickey.

But the situation with plants seems to be almost like no other market in SL. The good creators are overwhelmed by bot runners and the super abundance of the same, same, selection of mediocre and low quality photo plant textures, depriving us all of choice and making SL look second rate.

Ting, for clarity sake - the only ones i have shot myself have been the palms- the smaller, tropical types I have bought the textures for. I don 't consider myself a plant maker but I do carry some for the sake of having things rounded out.

Putting stock textures on prims is no more "making plants" than crafting swords by fish mining in Warcrack is "making swords". These "business in a box" plant sellers are living Yumi's fantasies of getting rewarded by the game without actually having any skills.

I realize that you got upset by the bots. I used to as well. I simply keep a list of resources and landmarks that are not bot users.

But in defense of some small time shop owners who do not use bots.....and might not have skills yet, to make their own textures or whatever. Maybe their fantasy is simply to run a little shop and sell a few things. Yeah - they will be all over the grid, with the same stuff,....just like they are in RL....retail store owners do not sit in the back of their shop all day, and make every single item....they buy from wholesalers.




.....let them have their fantasy. I don't see a stigma attached to it. I know several people who get a huge kick out of having a little store to run.

To each his own....on what they want to do with their SL. I don't see why it's necessary to be so judgmental.

Sorry....that doesn't make any sense to me at all.

That's fine. I buy clothes in game from affiliates sometimes because their prices are cheaper than the real store. But shop owners who aren't making their own stuff don't normally create their own labels and pretend they're the maker.

My mother and grandmother ran a shop together for most of my childhood. They sold stuff they bought at Obscure Imports like all the other gift shops, but they didn't relabel them and they also made stuff, unique stuff, not complicated but stuff they made that wasn't actually for sale anywhere else.

These guys are pretending to be the label... but they're not actually making anything.

But really, what I was more getting at, was the problem with Yumi's ideas of SL-as-fantasy-economy. It's not, it's a real economy in a fantasy world.

It's like the people whose fantasy is running a club that Yumi was angsting about, who'd run a club and never get any customers, because everyone else was running their fantasy clubs. She wanted to have all the clubs be in shards of the same club, so the club owner would see the people in the club as if they were in their own club. The problem is that those people aren't actually in your club, in fact they may all be in different clubs, so your club isn't actually popular. Shop owners are actually worse off because they don't just want people in their shops, they want to be, you know, selling stuff.

So, OK, if they're happy with their empty store or empty club, that's OK. If they're not happy, they're either going to come back to the forums and gripe about how the economy in SL is ruined, or they're going to turn into Yumi... or they're going to do whatever it takes to solve the problem. And that's where the bots come in.