Today's thread on bots

using some kinds of bots IS cheating/gaming the system, and all that means is that the "system" needs to be fixed so it can't be gamed.

In the case of the traffic system, it needs to go away.

Bots are useful to quite a few people. There's nothing wrong with the concept of bots, thus no reason to make their use against the rules, unless they are unnecessarily burdening the system; in that case, even, just make the system so that they can't burden it.

In the case of landbots, land sales need to have a delay added before the listings come up in search. Of course, then the landbot folks would just use their army of constantly teleporting landbots (or maybe a permanent landbot in every sim -- hoo!) to find the good deals faster than anyone else.

At any rate, there is no need to outlaw bots wholesale; simply change/eliminate the systems that can be and are being gamed by their use.

Same thing goes with the land extortionists. Make it not profitable for them to play their little mainland-spoiling land-cutting-and-extortion racket, and they will go elsewhere to game the system.

You know what we need to use instead?

That's right, voting stations.

I can already hear the trumpets of victory.

couldnt you just use all your alt accounts to "vote"?

So the trafficbots would become "Votebots"

They already have those in Florida.

Folks interested in the question of search rankings (with or without bots) may want to look and comment on the recent blog posting, here's a thread discussing it:

/327/19/249137/1.html
.

"In the English language, "Killing the golden goose" has become a metaphor for any short-sighted action that may bring an immediate reward, but will ultimately prove disastrous"

If it doesn't violate the rules that all players are beholden to... then it isn't cheating.

It may be unsportsmanlike... but it's not cheating.

[added in edit] Besides... we, as residents, aren't able to 'falsify metrics'. The metric reports some whacky number representative of the number of avatars in an area recently. Key word: 'avatars', not 'humans'. And the metric records that, as far as we know, accurately.

I would wager that MOST residents quickly learn that traffic is not a 'legitimate popularity' indicator after visiting a few 'high traffic camper-filled areas'.

Shades of Jeska on the blog.
"cloaking is not against the Community Standards at the moment, but it is considered bad practice in the search world. "

Pray tell, why is it considered bad practice?

Perhaps because it just plain dishonest, and has a huge negative impact the credibility/trust of the search engines.

At least the "at the moment" bit must give us hope.


Ad farmers didn't violate the rules... once upon a time.

Well, since we are now playing semantics games.. let's post the requisite dictionary definitions we are using here.

Here's what I mean when I say "cheating":

cheat (cht)
v. cheat·ed, cheat·ing, cheats
v.tr.
1. To deceive by trickery; swindle: cheated customers by overcharging them for purchases.
2. To deprive by trickery; defraud: cheated them of their land.
3. To mislead; fool: illusions that cheat the eye.
4. To elude; escape: cheat death.

Traffic numbers inflated by bots are misleading people into believing these places are popular ("popular" meaning "having significant population" where "population" means "people", "people" meaning real living, breathing humans that do things and that you can interact with), when, in fact, they are not popular at all, because the land owner is cheating the traffic system in order to gain an unfair advantage.

So, sematnicize and use any other definitions as well, if you want, but I will STILL call it cheating, and I will be just as right to call it that as you calling it something else.

I was merely pointing out my objection to the term 'cheating'... as to 'cloaking' ... I'd call that 'lying' not 'cheating'. =)

Fair enough, obviously the definition I was using (from m-w.com) was:

intransitive verb
1 a:[...]
b: to violate rules dishonestly <cheat at cards> <cheating on a test>

I can't call gaming traffic 'unfair' because everyone has a wide variety of effective ways to 'game traffic' ... some of which might even be relevant to the to the products that are being offered for sale! (gasp!)

Sadly, I'm pretty screwed when it comes to traffic ranking. I can't consolidate the three parcels because of different group rights and visitor permissions, so my traffic score is split up over three major parcels instead of being concentrated in one powerfully ranked spot.

I, personally, can't be bothered with trying to recruit campers or bots to adjust for that though.

LOL!
Jopsy......

Lie on the ground
Open your legs

And let us put the boot in.
(and I'm not talking about TP's here)

Pshaw. I try not to 'lie'.
On the ground or otherwise.

(curious that lying WITH someone can lead to lying TO someone else... but that's an entirely different flavor of 'cheating'.)

you must realize, he doesn't consider it cheating and gaming. his definition of cheating and gaming is different than yours.

he isn't breaking any LL laws, so in his mind, it's legal. you are never going to change his mind. please give up.

Blizzard sues BOT maker today

You are right about that.

Phil's definition of cheating and gaming serve his own purposes.

Convenient that.

Link doesnt work. Try this...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7314353.stm

Links have to be copy and pasted into browsers, excluding the tags. they both work.

It will be interesting to see how that turns out, and whether or not Blizzard's allowance of mods and plugins to their client software end up hampering their ability to prosecute this successfully. It's been ages since I read their EULA/ToS... but I have to imagine there's something in there about the use of automation (especially with regards to gold-farming).

Their argument about resource utilization sounds feeble. So what if a bot continues to play during non-peak hours, there should be more than enough computing 'resources' to go around during times when someone might not normally be active.

My own personal bias, having played enough WoW to be cured of it... is that the 'grinding' aspect of that 'game' turns humans into mindless addicted bots anyway. Ugh.

Keep in mind, that in our world here, if they outlaw bots... it will also necessitate the outlawing the Nicholaz viewer and anything like it as well, because alternate viewer/clients can trivially incorporate 'bot like' functionality into them.

It's been so well documented I don"t see how Blizzard could have any problem winning this law suit.

They have a strong TOS and have never allowed these bots to flourish, and have done a very effective job of catching them and documenting it all. Circumventing the Warden Software, is clearly hacking and there is no grey area here.

/me is proud to be WoW-free.

Not really surprised, though. Blizzard has been a sue-happy piece of crap company for many years. Remember bnetd?

THAT is why I am proud to be WoW-free.

I'm Necroposting, sorry. I'm stuck in a non-paying camping chair in RL, bored, and my mind is wandering back to the "Bots Are Bad For Concurrency" tangent this thread was on some time ago.

Concurrency itself is not a problem. SL could probably handle 100x as many logins as it does now! (Easily, if they were all blind, friendless, mute, stationary, and idle camperbots spread out evenly across the grid.)

The real concern is ACTIVITY, of course.

Every action has a cost, and when the costs get high enough resources become scarce and problems result.

So... what problems do we see most often? Being ruthed? Texture missing? Failed Teleport? Group Chat problems? Slow Asset retrieval/storage? Textures not rezzing fast enough? L$ or inventory Transactions failing? Online Friends indicator broken? Waiting for profiles to load? Inventory loss? Region lag? Bad FPS? Viewer crashes?


Quite often, these problems we see are due to specific overloaded resources ... resources that MOST bots use very little of.

We are, in most cases, competing with other humans for those bottlenecked resources.

The solution isn't banning people or bots.. The solution is to grow/tune/re-architect the resources to better handle the load so that we don't run into these kinds of bottleneck problems.


(For a list of possible "resource bottlenecks" you need look no further than http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Service_Disruptions)

Where as I can't say I have finished forming an opinion either way on the bot matter, it does bother me a little to see a guy like Phil Deakins come here and post his dribble. He's the same, so called, big wig expert on search engine positioning who massively downplays the need for traffic while at the same time Botting the heck out of his own lands and defending to the death, botting, not because he is for it, mind you, but because, well...hmmmm, oh yeah, cause he uses it successfully to game the system.

Now before flameboy takes out his flamethrower and fires back, would I use bots? Probably if I thought of SL as a job instead of a game. Are bots good for the game? Only if one takes a narrow self centered, helps me so it's gotta be defended approach.

Will the argument ever end? Greed and gaming will be with us forever, and those who will lie and twist the facts to make themselves feel or look better by far than they actually are will always be amongst us to dribble their self serving arguments, so I guess not.

Oh....you've finally figured it out eh?