Today's thread on bots

Please, for the love of all that's (un)holy, can someone put that on a shirt?

If and when the LLs discover that being drowned in bots drives Residents to leave SL or stop spending money in it, the bot tribe will decrease, probably drastically.

Like a tree falling in the forest

impressive metaphor, leaving the remainder to the readers imagination. & ^5

I think I'm gona make a few alts to help feed you people paranoia lol
and remember I am not the OP's alt or bot =(^.^)=

Do bots make a sound when they die..if no-one is around to hear?

Someone should to a study on that.

What do you think some good names for bots are?

like
Piebot
Botrific
Botastic
Botaclisim
Notabot
and so forth and good names?

Botulism..?

I'm strongly in favor of erasing the last bits of the 'traffic' metric from SL. Two years ago LL hinted that they were phasing it out, perhaps they re-considered for some reason.

Exactly right. As far as I'm concerned, there's no need to ban bots, but there are many reasons to make them economically irrelevant. Traffic is one place where--bots or no bots--the metric is completely irrelevant now, even if it weren't gamed. I can imagine some historical reason why "dwell" and "traffic" could have been reasonable incentives, and "popular places" might have been a draw instead of a warning, but those days are long gone.

And (to repeat myself), if LL would just increase the functionality available to scripts--and to web-based programs--the grid would perform much better for their current user base, and have some room to grow again before hitting the current scalability wall. Perhaps the biggest win: enable web search of land-for-sale listings, followed by web purchase and sale of land; it would be immensely more efficient for everybody.

Yes getting rid of Traffic would work.

I don't think they will though,

Because LL is the ultimate Traffic Gamer.

And its not any more seemly for them to do so, than anyone else.

there is a particular camp spot that has now been totally lost to bots. even when the sim goes down and comes back up, they are waiting - patiently. LOL as you probably know, they can steal a seat before you can blink an eye. but, what's funny about this particular scene is that now 2 other bot programs have their bots trying to steal the first bots positions. so while paying 3 campers 24/7, the store owner is also getting 6 more at no cost, and driving her traffic through the roof.

it's really a magical wonder to see the bots fighting it out with the bots.

edit for correction: it appears there are now only 2 sets of bots there now, so one group must have given up.

One problem I see here, is there isnt an established definitiion in SL as to what a "problem" Bot is. People confuse Alt accounts with Bots it seems (and this is a common problem in many on line games).

A person who has a alt account to check prices, or model clothes in thier store is not running a Bot. most people would consider them "alts" or "secondary" accounts. There was even one fellow in Everquest who ran 24 accounts at the same time so he could do his own raids....yes he had a dozen or so computers set up around him to do this, but hey, he was controlling them all.

A problem bot in most games is considered to be a fully scripted account that is totaly run by a computer with no human *ever* touching a keyboard. These would be scripted to log on, find a camping spot and regularly send the lindens it earns to a "bank bot" that would hold anything the army earned. The bank bot would be the only one that would ever feel the human touch on a keyboard as someone once a week would convert the lindens to RL cash.

A person (using yahoo / hotmail etc accounts) could set up 50 or a 100 of these (depending on how much computer power they have) and let them loose in the world. I know to most of us in the developed world the small amount of RL cash they could earn would not seem to be worth it to do this, but in some Developing countries this could double or triple thier monthly income. and yes it has been proven in other games that people will set up banks of cheap computers to do just this sort of thing.

Most games see these as "gold farmers" who resell thier gains on websites to other players, but here Linden has nicely taken out the middle man by directly offering to by back the ill gotten gains themselves.

Camping (even more so for a non-functional avie like a model "alt" is still not normal use of the platform. It doesn't really matter whether it's bot acting on its own, or a human pulling the strings only to go AFK for the next 20 hours.

SL's back-end was not designed, nor would it be able to even remotely cope, to have everyone log their avie on for hours of unattended use, it was designed for humans who may be idle for a stretch but who on average will simply log off when they're not actively using it.

As far as putting stress on the back-end goes, campers and zombies are actually far, far worse than bots. At least bots don't care about the visual aspect, or what's happening around them where the regular viewer will constantly download and hit the system since it was never meant to be used in an unattended fashion.

/me nominates Annabelle for the SL Medal of Honor.

I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but...

You make several statements (quoted above) as "fact" about what SL was or was not designed for.

You know this HOW...?

Are/were you a member of the design team?

Or are you falling into that common forum poster trap of stating your opinion as fact?

I really don't think your inital post (or any of the subsequent ones) added anything constructive to anything LMAO

That way>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>to the "how to build better bots and more bots"


threads.">>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I wasn't part of the design team of the universe either but that doesn't mean I need a disclaimer to state that if I take a glass and smash it on my head right now that 1) the glass will break, 2) the glass shards will fall down, 3) my head will hurt and 4) those glass shards will still be there next week if I don't clean them up .

If your personal observations or experience leads you to a different conclusion then pick apart what I said that you disagree with. Failing that, use some common sense when reading a post.

Yup. I will. You know, common sense. Things like stating opinions as facts.

I completely disagree with that. SL is designed as a system that deals with avs, and there's no back-end difference between those that are one-to-one with a person, and those that aren't.

I don't think you (and to a lesser extent Soloman) really read what she said.

Second Life was designed around people having a certain level of usage. Obviously it couldn't handle everyone who logged on in the last 30 days to log on all at once.


Traffic Bots and camper Bots (and to an extent other bots) *DO* change the resultant concurrency equation

By the simple fact that they are on in greater proportion and more often (such as 24/7) than a corresponding human controlled resident.

At least someone get what I meant, thankies .

Here's a - flawed - RL analogy: a restaurant has a certain capacity and the assumption is that people will come in, order their food, eat it and eventually leave to make room for new customers (log on to SL, do whatever it is you do, and when you're done, you log off).

The fact that some will linger for however long after their meal is perfectly acceptable and part of the service (going AFK for half an hour, an hour).

What isn't acceptable is setting up camp and occupying the table for hours on end, or lay down your head on the table for a powernap (campers or zombies of any kind). Regardless of whether there are enough tables to not have it affect business, such behaviour is unreasonable use.

Even if a single person doing that doesn't affect anything, there is a point where it will start to affect everyone and the assumption that there will be enough capacity for new customers most of the time breaks down horribly all because a few selfish individuals feel entitled to disproportionate use.

Maximum concurrency seems to be for the most part a fixed number at any given time, whether it is 59,000 real residents and 1,000 bots/campers/zombies or 40,000 real residents and 20,000 bots/campers/zombies doesn't seem to matter a great deal otherwise the number would fluctuate much more than it does/has.

---

Or turning it around to look at what you're claiming: *if* SL had been designed around the fact that every single last avie should be able to log on at the same time and stay logged on indefinitely without any ill effects on the grid as a whole then we would have a maxium concurrency of 1.2 million. The fact that we have a concurrency that peaks at 5% of the active user base shows that the grid simply was not designed for such use by the majority of the users.