Rezidents Online Nao

It is teh workin'!

I'm on ur homepage
increasin ur resident count



Hey, anyone see any difference between now and the Bot Age? I scanned the map last night, and honestly, it seems most bots didn't read the blog.

Overall, I think that concurrency is generally down a little, but not a lot. The way that LL have done it, it's as expected - not much change.

There is a difference in online numbers, and it's not that small - currently about 63 k online, which is about 20 k less than it was on previous Fridays. During my (German) daytime hours, I usually saw between 50 and 60 k online, now I regularly have numbers around the 40ks. That is already a major improvement, IMO.

73,584 online right now - not 63k. It's typical of the recent numbers at this time of evening here in Europe. It seems to float around in the 70s rather than pushing up over 80k. When I get up it's in the 40s as it was before the policy change. It's generally down a little but not a lot, imo.

The clock doesn't update anymore either

Friday has been postponed.
They are going to try again tomorrow.

I always suspected that that the percentage of online residents there were bots was smaller than most people guessed.

However, the Linden Lab bot policy has no clear standards as to what a "bad" bot is, which makes it hard for people who want to follow the rule figure out if they need to change their behavior.

Since there is no incentive in the policy for people to voluntarily comply, the best course for those who don't care about following the rule is to keep doing what they were doing until a Linden sends them a notice.

And since there is no clear method of enforcement of the policy- it seems to be based on the randomness and whim- Linden Lab probably isn't finding and noticing the abusers anyway.

However, Linden Lab wins- they get to say that combated the evil bots, and their concurrency numbers were not affected severely. A small drop lets them credibly say that the percentage of users who were bots was never that high.

And the losers are every honest person who played fair and did their best to comply with the rules. The result of their honesty is that they lose competitive advantage to the dishonest who have decided not to comply with the rules and will probably see no ill consquence to failure to comply.

It's too early to say anything about bot percentages from concurrency.
There are still sims with 80+ bots on them.
There are many places with a small number of bots that fly under the obvious radar

Not to mention the campingbots and searchbots that bounce from sim to sim 24/7

I agree with Phil. This is surely a bad sign Concurrency numbers are down, but not by much.

Most of the bot farms are still there. This is to be expected. They have no business model without the bots, so getting rid of them would amount to shutting down. They'll wait until LL shuts them down.

They aren't going to wait for LL to shut them down because they aren't smart enough to do something else. They are going to wait because that's just simply the best choice.

It's been federal law for a few decades now that stores make aisles big enough that wheelchairs can move through with them. Stores did not scramble to make their stores wheelchair accessible when the law came out, because the financial consequences of reduced floor-space for products was greater than the loss of eventually being sued under the federal law. Non-compliance, and waiting for someone to sue, was always the financially smart move (and still is).

There is no reason for anyone to give up whatever financial gain they get from bots now because Linden Lab will some point in the future shut them down. It might take weeks for LL to shut them down. It might take months. (The policy has been out for about two weeks now, right, and everyone observes that the bot farms are still there.) And honestly, based on LL's history, it's quite reasonable to assume that a few weeks after the policy is implemented, LL will have completely forgotten about it and move on to the next fun issue.

If anyone has an alternate plan in place, there is no good reason to implement it until- or if- LL tells them to stop the bots.

If those bot farms continue to operate for months and months, gaining the advantage over the people who tried to be honest and complied right away, then who is the smart one? The bots farms continuing to operate may be dishonest, They are certainly not dumb.