Bot Count, The Estates Strike Back: 50%

37% of what?

Eli didn't say that. He said that if you leave yourself in your workshop while you make and eat lunch, or watch a TV programme, or entertain an RL guest for a while, you're a bot.

heaven forbid one should go afk to visit the "Little Goddess' Room" or grab a soda....


*sigh*

All of this means nothing if we don't have an OBJECTIVE definition of Bot that is universal.

Until then, it's all just semantics, isn't it?

Potahhhhhhto potAAAAAAAto Tomaaaahhhhhtoooo TomAAAAAAto...

Bog where I live: a swamp
Bog where my sl partner lives: A toilet

Until we're speaking the same language, it's all moot.

To me you can look at this as a glass half full or a glass half empty. If 50+ percent of avs logged in are indeed bots, then just about the same amount are not.

If a sim has 100 bots in a box, how can anyone come into the sim anyway...esp on mainland. They defeat their own purpose in large numbers by clogging up the works, making lag with those large numbers etc. So no one will come to that location to do anything on a regular basis and those 100 bots will soon be gone in my estimation.

This whole idea that inactive avs are the same as bots also makes no sense to me. I can work for hours on notecards, ims etc. and never leave my spot and ALSO not answer ims or chat questions because Im toggling back and forth from the web etc. Does that make me a bot...ummmm NO. It makes me a busy av who isnt answering which at last look is my choice. I would bet that there are many folks who are being counted as bots in these various surveys who are doing those types of things and just dont "appear" to be active.

Also, if LL is populated by 50% bots, yet in the parts of SL that i frequent they dont exist or interfere with any of my activities, why should i care? If there are still 35K avs that i can interact with at peak times, that seems to be plenty in my mind. I have more difficulty getting away from people and ims than i do finding people in SL. I think this obsession with counting bots and rehashing the topic is really a waste of time and energy. I think a more productive use of the energy would be to promote the places that are NOT empty and are NOT clogging the sims with bots. If we all did that and frequented those places, the others would fade into nothingness and not get the constant recognition of the numerous people all running around on their sims inflating their traffic by looking for the bots! lol

If anyone here finds SL barren and no people to interact with, please contact me...I am never at a loss for that. I can show you the ropes...

Alright, it's not yet a large survey but I decided to do my own on the mainland, and I chose the old north continent. I looked at it yesterday and today, and it has a nice distribution of avs pretty much all the time. Just going by the green dots on the map it looks like some could well be bots and some could well be real people, so it looks like a nice area to survey.

I'm doing it during high concurrency ( >60k ), so that there is likely to be a fair number of normal avs in the area, not that it really matters. I started on the top row (just 2 sims in that row) and I'm working my way down the rows. So far I've only done 4 rows, including that 2-sim one, because I get talked with by avs - I was even offered a tour of a castle which I may take later So far the numbers are quite interesting:-

Sims: 39
Total avatars: 68
Normal avatars: 52
Campers: 7
Bots: 9 (including one of Elanthius' )

23.5% of the total avatars are bots and campers combined - at highish concurrency. The percentage would almost certainly be significantly higher at low concurrency, of course.

This is only a tiny sample and can't be apllied to the whole grid or even the whole continent. I'll do more rows, but even just looking at the green dots on the map suggests that these numbers would be pretty much reflected through the whole of that continent.

Get back to us when get to 500 sims. I expect the count will nearly double.

who can tell I'm bored…it's 2.45am and i should just go to bed I guess!

Here's what I found for the same sims between 7:13-8:12pm SLT (about 55K concurrency):

Total avatars: 45
Normal avatars: 27
Campers: 9
Bots: 9 (including one of Elanthius')

40% bots and campers. The biggest difference in our number is the normal avatars, which you'd expect to vary a lot in a small sample.

Edit:

Also note that there are no bot farms in this sample, and when I visited only two regions were by my definition high-occupancy (6+), and only barely so (6 in Ello, 7 in Yucca). There's a sharp increase in the percentage of bots above 5 occupancy in my surveys.

There is a bit of difference between doing that and packing 95 ruths into a box above your store, "oh, they are all helping me work on 95 new designs at once"...............
But in theory, yes you are camping / traffic gaming, I don't see why any traffic system should count owners and staff other than it's technically a PITA to bother doing so.
It would be like buying a business that said it had a $1m turnover per month then finding 90% of that was owners putting money in and taking it out againm buying and reselling stock to themselves.

erm ... a tiny little nitpick

random sampling is not prone to error. How we interpret it can be. We can state with 100% certainty that 30% of the 500 jellybeans sampled were red. There is no error here. Extrapolating this 30% figure onto the next 500 yet to be sampled is where errors can occur.

A fascinating insight though into the botscene being provided by those doing the sampling. So well done and thanks for your efforts

Yes, the pecentage will vary greatly. That's why I put no store in percentages. They don't mean anything on their own.

I agree that there are no large bot farms in the sample and, if my memory if correct, there doesn't appear to be any in the whole of the old north continent, and that's good. Selecting an are to survey, especially because it contains some large bot farms, would be skewing the results from the start, and making them no good. By the same token, selecting an area that doesn't have any bot farms also skews the results. I picked the old north continent because the whole continent is quite small and could be done over not too much time, and the avs on the map are well distributed, making it seem a little easier to do. Also, whilst there doesn't appear to any large bot farms, there are still groups of avs that could well be small bot farms. So it looks like a homogenous mix within the continent.

I don't see any relevancy about the number of avs in a sim. I don't see any relevancy about sims themselves. Sims don't matter - they are just convenient areas. It's only avs that matter, so 5+ avs in a sim (your "high occupancy" is irrelevant.

I doubt that I'll do the whole continent, but if I did, and the numbers turned out to be similar to the ones I posted, which they look being judging by the map, it wouldn't say anything about the grid. It would only say something about that continent. It would need a lot of surveys to deduce something reasonable about the grid as a whole. That's why the titles and data in your threads are misleading. They imply that there are ~50% of bots on the grid - especially the titles - and that's something that cannot be deduced from your efforts.

I just reinforced that it didn't seem ridiculous, not that it wasn't ridiculous.

I posted the numbers from the small number of sims because they were markedly different from Anya's and because, judging by the map, they are very likely to be similar as I continue. I seriously doubt that I'll ever do 500 sims but I'll probably do at least the number that Elanthius did, and maybe even match Anya's surveys of ~200. By that time I'm sure I will have seen that the numbers aren't going to change much in that continent, so I will have become too bored with it

At least it will provide another sweep to add to the mix but, like the others, it won't tell us much. Unless there is an organised set of surveys, and quite a lot of them, I can't see surveys, like the ones that have been posted, telling us very much at all. Without something organised, I still say that the best way to judge is to take the low concurrency number and guestimate how many of those are likely to be bots and campers, because bots and campers are pretty much 24/7.

Because you're going north to south your initial sample had a lot of coastal property in it. Being a small continent the whole thing has a lot of coastal property in it, but I think you'll find that things degrade a bit when you get to a lot of interior sims.

Sims don't matter at all. They are merely convenient areas that help to keep track on where you've been and where you're going. It's only avs that matter.

You may be right about what will happen as I continue southward. I don't think you're right, but you may be. I wouldn't use the word "degrade" though. It doesn't matter to me if there is a small number of bots and campers or a huge number of them as compared to normal avs. I'm anti-trafficbot myself, so I'm not particularly looking for low bot and camping counts. A low bot/camping count is bad, imo, simply because of the reason they are there.

hey!

than in therory all stuff in sl is build by bots, ...
well the funny part, im not counted by the traffic system. my trafficinput on my own sim is 0, i have talked bout in another thread some times ago.
in rl a lot of people will have the shop owner around, simply to talk to (small business).
my experience with sl, most people wont socialize, its more a freebie and money for nothing hunting, and sim hopping.

I"m not gaming traffic anyway in my workshop. It's over a bit of vacant land I use for extra prims in my main shop, but it's across the sim from my main shop, so there's no reason to want a high traffic number on it. Besides, it's dead center of the sim, so if you just tp to the sim, you land there anyway. Thing is...there's nothing there, no signs, no tp's to my main shop, nothing...just a nice plot of vacant prim land. I can see where gaming traffic on my prim land would get me a whole lot of ....nowhere?

Have you thought of putting an LM giving sign on the ground at the center if the sim? My store is in the sky and I have the center of the sim so, because of the discussion surrounding the advertisements policy changes, I decided to do a little test and I put an ad board where anyone TPing to the sim will see it. It doesn't even suggest that people click on it, but people do - not a lot, but a few is better than none.

No, you're a statistical error.

*sigh*






Time and time again, I get asked by a noob "What can I do here?"
I tell them that there is a classic response to that question. It is "What do you want to do?"
Unsurprisingly, the answer from someone who has to ask "What can I do here?" is "Meet people"


I believe that the essence of the thread is a measurement of that noob issue.
Where are the other people?

That simple idea has been drowned in a flood of semantics and red herrings.

A bot-in-a-box is not "other people"
An avatar parked on a camping pad to earn L$ while the human operator is doing something else is not "other people"

An avatar not moving while scripting or building in their workspace is "other people", but to an observer is another person that is busy.
An avatar dancing in a club but not responding to chat could simply be unfriendly.
An unresponsive avatar washing windows, busking, scrubbing the floor, or doing whatever while an "earned" floater text is nearby is not "other people".

I think that an empty sim is less disappointing than a sim with unresponsive avatars.



I wonder at the impassioned knocking of the OP's reports.
Why are some people upset by this?

Options:
1. The have a vested interest in the use of bots/camping. They do *not* like anything that highlights the question
2. They have not vested interest in the use of bots/campers, but fear the possibility that SL is less relevant than they would wish it to be. - That not only are we alone, but that our numbers are insignificant.


The question has been put a number of times - why do this survey? The suggestion is that the OP must have an agenda.....

As far as I am concerned, the reason to do this sort of survey is to discover the truth. The method seems sensible to me. Go and look. Bot/camping is one of those things where 'you know it when you see it'.


That's it. The essence of science and inteligence..
What is the truth? What is really going on?


For LL and SL, there is a very essential noob question.
"Where are the other people?"


The answer to that question can *not* be "go to location x,y or z"
A sim starts to creak at 20 avatars or so. No sim can survive being the #1 place for noobs to go to.

People have to be able to find other people.
Sims with significant percentages of 'non-people' get in the way of that. They also lie to people.

The issue of bots and the social side of SL is being overplayed here. Last week we had 76,000 concurrency, even if 50% are bots/afk campers and creators there are 38,000 people on. If someone can't find something to do it's not a bot issue, it's an indication that the platform doesn't deliver social networking and that brings us to the issue of groups which like it or not are a wondeful form of social networking on other social networking platforms.

"Originally Posted by Danielle Harrop
So..if I'm a designer, and I have a box over my store, which is my workshop, and I'm in my workshop, making and fitting clothing items, then I am camping? and I am a bot?
Can't agree with that."
Well I took this to mean you were talking about a workshop above your store, and I don't see why not, it's not unethical in my view, just technically incorrect that it counts as traffic.
It doesn't make you a bot either, just a camper I perhaps.
The issue is the number of avatars who's primary activity is being inactive deliberately to make money for nothing. These avatars don't socialise create or contribute to the community, if they were replaced by cardboard cutouts no one would notice.
Imagine if in other MMO's it was ok to leave 95 bot accounts standing in monster spawning points 24/7 set to auto attack as the monsters or players spawned then transfer the loot to the primary account. Would that be fair and ethical to other players?
I don't see a point inpersonally attacking botrunners, many of them know it's wrong and opposed them, but they just run them because it's a standard business practice to do so.
It's just sad that it's necessary to have a traffic bot arms race but seeing it has started the faster it progresses the better. The sooner till the arguements get more common as everyone with a 512 store plot plonks a dozen bots on their plot the more likely LL will act on the problem.

If you care to actually read the posts in this thread, you'll see that there are no "impassioned" ones from anyone. And if you try to understand the content of the posts, you may notice that nobody appears to be getting upset about any of it. Your suggestions that both of those are happening won't raise the temperature at all - sorry.

I would find it a bit odd that someone who does not like anything that highlights the question of bots would join in and keep the thread going, so I think we can rule that option out.

I agree with that except that one small sweep doesn't tell us anything, especially when the conclusion is a percentage of a widely changing whole. Percentages are meaningless in this case. What's wanted is an approximate number (total) for the grid as a whole, and that is only possible with quite a large number of sample sweeps covering the various types of land.[/QUOTE]

Oh dear! We're into the definition of "impassioned".


Nope. there are people about who "like a good argument", and some people like to try and destroy something rather than hope that it will go away.



The "various types of land" is not a real issue I think.
There are two basic types of land.
1. The owner wishes to attract avatars to visit that land
2. The owner has no interest is attracting visitors

You know, it is not so hard.

We all do know there are way too many bots in SL. There is no one that likes bots. There are a few with a strong dislike, probably most people do not care about them, but I cannot imagine anyone liking them.

With a bit of thinking, we do know that spending a few days counting bots in sims does not give a shred of evidence. Apparently the OP has enough time on her hands to do these surveys, but I seriously doubt the validity of the resulting numbers. Just because I can easily visit the same amount of estates without meeting a single bot. Which also implies nothing.

But, I do see the good thing of these surveys. The more of them we have, the stronger the voice towards LL could be that something is wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these surveys are useful at office hours. Posting them on the forums seems pretty useless, but handing them over at office hours might be useful.

On the other hand, I am convinced they are no surprise to LL. It is very easy to count the amount of 24/7 connections, after all.

Furthermore: I remember that at the last breakdown of logins for a longer period, there were about 15K users online in the end. Which would imply that the number of bots would be around that number.

Final thought: The more there is posted about bots in the forums, the more people could be tempted to implement them. It would not surprise me, if with the total of bot topics in the last few months, a few thousand extra bots were put up