LL - Let us count the bots!

I believe Anya's numbers. They're in line with the "feeling" I get on the grid these days, and with our decline in rental business.

There are a lot less people in SL than the concurrency numbers would indicate. This makes basing a business decision on those numbers highly suspect. You might think that there are more people around to buy your stuff, go to your club, rent your parcels...but there are not. Just a sea of bots.

LL: I remind you of the classic phrase that defines SL (I think Prokofy Neva is the source) -- we are a nation of shopkeepers.

Send us customers, not bots.

I also AR them, and I hope that's not how people use group invite bots. A non-spam way to use them is to have people click a sign. The sign sends a message to a bot, and the bot makes the invite. More intuitive, one fewer steps, and probably a higher success rate than clicking a sign to generate a chat link.

Well, i was at your store once and i saw 2 people on a bed (i was camming around and saw them) so i got elven impish and started manipulating them on the bed and laughing so hard about it.

Now i know they were bots and i am a sad elf.

That is better.

But yes there are still reasons like i mentioned and I am confident other people have their own reasons.

I get the impression that there's a bit of a general decline all round, and not just in the rental business. I'm putting it down to people not putting as much real money into SL as they did before the financial crisis. I dont know if that's true, but a number of people have told me that they are cutting back on RL money for SL because of it.

We all agree that there are a lot less real people in than the concurrency figures, but there are still a lot of real people in. Think back to the concurrency a year ago. It was a lot less than now, but the rental business did perfectly well back then. I don't see that making business decisions based on concurrency is wise at any time.

It's not that there's "a sea of bots", as you put it. There isn't. The established rental businesses are likely to be suffering from very low land prices, and new people entering the business because of it. If you want to start a business, what is easier than buying some cheap land and trying to rent out homes? In the current low land price climate, rents must be down too - new business are likely to be charging less, and established rental businesses may not not be adjusting the rents to compete with new businesses. I'm just speculating here.

Aaw. I'm sorry. Most people go into the cubicles to use them, but some do it from a distance. You were one of those - maybe below in the lighting dept.

Those models are usually on my laptop screen (quarter screen each) so I see what happens. A few days ago, a girl walked into where the couple are, looked for a few seconds, said "you wish", and walked out again. I just had to ask what she meant, so I used the male model to ask - the girl was still in range. The male model's name is 4times Nitely - that's what she meant

Isn't the whole idea of Second Life to find friends? Can't you find one friend that will go shopping with you? And the idea of pixelated sex and cuddles is just plain creepy. If you can't get any in real life, you can go to Second Life, find a sex bed and please yourself in real life? Creepy!

I don't really care about the concurrency numbers, except that it's obvious (to me) that LL is either being dishonest or really doesn't know how many people use their product. I think there are far fewer people that LL claims, and I wouldn't be shocked if the actual number of bots was in the 60%-70% range (but I think the number is 40-50). I said I don't really care because even in the 60-70 range there are still more people than there were when I started.

I'm not at all anti-bot. I run one.

But imagine if you could open your map and be able to tell where the people are. Wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't it be cool if you could find hang-outs in search?

IMO the potential of SL isn't as a technical playground (even though that's what I use it for). Its potential is as a social playground. I think LL has tapped the technical crowd. If they want the platform to grow they should be doing everything they can to encourage social usage. It'd be a more interesting place if the non-technical majority of the world's population could find something to do here.

I'm assuming LL employees have non-technical friends. Don't they wish they could get them interested? I figure they must occasionally wonder how to accomplish that. So, I hold out hope they'll consider social as well as technical changes.

Fixing traffic gaming is a social problem as much as a technical one. LL obviously admires google. Google tries to keep its rankings clean and useful. I believe LL will, too.

The whole idea of SL is what each individual makes of it.

It may be a creepy idea to you, but it's a very functional and useful one, and one that gets used quite a lot. I'd estimate that at least half of people looking at the beds in my place are on their own at the time. They may bring someone with them later, but they are on their own at the time. For epople who are on their own at the time, what better way to judge a bed's animations than by watching a couple of models doing them, with the customer controlling the menus?

In all the time I've had the models, I've only seen a couple of occasions where someone appeared to be getting their jollies with them.

The beds models are not naked, btw. They have very little on but they do have some clothing on. The cuddles models are fully clothed.

Seeing it in the flesh? Since when did avatars have flesh? Seeing something in 3D is useful, I agree. But why do you need bots when we have sculpties? Can't someone create a human like sculptie? I'm sure if you look hard enough, someone has. Prims are less resource hogs than client connections.

Phil, I don't care much about pixel nakedness. I'm just saying that going online and having "sex" is dumb. It has no useful purpose other than wasting more time. And I agree that SL is what each individual makes of it. I think people should strive to make to better and useful but lose the sex, crime, drugs, etc. We get enough of that in Real Life!

Yes, like it used to be.

Oh right. I misunderstood that.

So go play WoW. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.

The problem is, "Non Technical" people tend to be the type who don't want to sit in front of a computer for hours on end, especially if they have to at their jobs. I'm pretty much non technical, for some reason SL grabbed me, but otherwise, if my computer disappeared tomorrow, it really wouldn't bother me that much. So LL does have to find a way to get those people to stay if they try SL, but they also have to figure out away to let those people know about it. They do very little in marketing and publicizing SL to "regular" people.

The problem with that is that, if there was no camping, and no traffic bots, the listings wouldn't be any better. Instead of listings that are affected by camping and traffic bots, we'd have listings that are affected by other things, such as a well-used club on the same parcel. These days, many clubs have shops attached. The shops are rarely visited but the club traffic will cause them to rank highly, and the top rankings will be down to which parcels have the most going on on them, rather than which shops have the most visitors. Manequins, models and other bots will also boost the rankings, even if the places don't get any shoppers.

There really is no way for traffic-based rankings to be good for everyone.

My Dad used to say: "Once a King always a King, but once a night is enough."

They decided SL was supposed to be one thing? Was there a blog post on that, or memo? Maybe I was out of town when it was announced.

Try telling that to 4times Nitely

I'm surprised the Name Nazis haven't come down on you for that actually.

I agree.

Why would the idea of having 4 cups of tea a night trouble the Name Nazis?

That's what search categories are for . If in combination with the whole search abuse flagging they announced a while back but haven't done anything - visible - about.

If a club wanted its mall on the same parcel it would be listed under Hangout and wouldn't show up when searching under Shopping (and if it did you'd just flag it and move on and eventually enough people would flag it to have its category changed to the proper one).

Manequins and models are campers when they're human and traffic bots when they're bots. You're contradicting your own "if there was no..." hypothesis.

Fixing traffic influences is easy enough anyway as per a prior post.

That system doesn't exist. I was talking about camping and traffic bots being removed from what exists now.

I disagree. They have the same effect, but they are not necessarily the same thing. I use models. They also have the same effect, but they are functional models and would be there whether or not they affected the traffic numbers. Other places have manequins in just the same way. The difference is in *what* they are - not in the effect of them. I was pointing out that they would have that effect.

Which one?

Parcel categories have existed for years, search abuse flagging was/is something they were/are planning and asked feedback on (there was a whole thread on the forums about it as well) a short while back but it's been quiet about its progress since (or if it's even still planned).

Not that I'm in any way surprised that you outright dismiss any change to search that limits manipulation .