Bloomin Campers Again

Well, not having a direct line to LL, I'll have to go with your insight into their perceptions. ALthough I'm surprised that a bunch of clever people like LL can't come up with a solution to such a diabolically difficult problem

As for LL business practices and motivations for supporting the use of alts and accounts with no payment details, I think we'll have to agree to disagree on the motivation and associated benefits realised by explicitly supporting multiple individual accounts.

Whatever their espoused motivations for indulging in these practices, I think the point is that we both accept they do benefit in several ways from the same business practices so abhored by people on this thread.

Finally, I'm really not sure why you think that supporting and maintaining hundreds of thousands of alts doesn't increase costs and decrease system performance.

Put another way, if LL doesn't have a commitment to a certain level of access, perfomance and service to each and every account registered then I'm not sure I'd be looking to them for an example of good business ethics anyway.

Reading the justifications for gaming search makes me think of guys playing poker and saying it's ok to deal off the bottom of the deck because it does not hurt anybody "that" much.

Of course, as more and more do that, it approaches a point where the card game turns into complete chaos.

Ironically, as soon as the ones that started it don't have a guaranteed advantage anymore, they will leave screaming that game is "rigged"!

Oh dear,

Well I've put my point of view, but in the end you guys have every right to yours, so stick with them is what I say.

My one parting request would be, please, please, for the sake of your financial security and the roof over your family's head, please don't try and build a business of your own in RL without at least a business 101 course under your belt..

Well.... actually, they can't, and it _is_ a difficult problem.

If placement is search is determined by anything that's under the parcel owner's own control, it'll be gamed, as we've seen already happening. But if it's entirely out of the parcel owner's hands, they're left floundering with no idea as to how to create a marketing strategy. If it's based on money, new people will never be noticed.



But they're not really the same business practices at all. Anyone who runs a virtual world can select beneficial population statistics; not everyone who has a business in SL can run a farm of camping bots above it. Also, LL allowing free registration didn't cause any other virtual worlds to slow down, whereas having camping bots above your business does.

Business 101? I don't think business 101 is about teaching people to do absolutely anything they can to make their business success and damn anyone else. And I don't think there are many successful RL businesses who try to increase their popularity by hiring shill customers to mill around in the store, and make sure to hire so many that they are spilling out into the mall corridors!

As I have watched this develop for the past year, what I am sure I am seeing
is that a small majority of the business people here are manipulating a huge portion of of the economy through the gaming of search.

There is no way that is right.

It can't be justified by what happens in RL either------People come here and stay to get away from RL! or I should say------they used to.

If programs like Windlight and Voice can be created------SL can be made fair to everyone
and right now it is far from it. And it's moving further away by the day.

Nice, possibly a bit long to get to the point, needs more story through it to keep people interested.

In the way anyone who could realise by morals they are doing the wrong thing.
Your store looks good enough for me to belive you don't need trafficbots to do well, IF the playing field was level. But I also don't subscribe to the idea of defrauding people because the neighbour does it to make a living.

I just would like you to explain to us how you think traffic is supposed to work.
And if you're not cheating, why hide them in an invisible cube at 600m with a security orb ejecting anyone coming too close?

Well now there are thousands of gold farming campbots loose on the grid, of course you can pay less but the rooms full of PC's in asia don't cost much to run, anyone who thinks the majority of campers are residents obviously hasn't tried speaking to one recently, do some island hopping to green dots and when you find them offer $100L for anyine to answer you, your moneys safe. The people running these don't care about anything inworld, they just keep watching "Money for Nothing" in their accounts.

It's no coincidence the economy for most people has been dead since the introduction of bots "free for all", population climb is only due to more bots and campers online. The offpeak population used to be 1/3 of the daytime, now due to 24/7 bots it's 2/3, 1/3 of "residents" online aren't residents, their campbots, traffic bots, searchbots and landbots.

A very small percentage are actually not campbots, run by the camppad makers or asian goldfarmers who do the same on WoW and CoH and any other game with inworld currency.

Umm they are only visible when they stop moving, I have seen them appear next to campads in a sim where even staff are forced to rez at the landing point. My land greeter sends me "X" has arrived, "X" has left at least twice an hour, I am standing next to it and they don't show on the minimap and they don't rez.

So even though there are legitmate uses, which ones make it necessary to run 100 bots hammering the crap out of the grid teleporting by the second for free?

Stop calling them campers, they are NOT campers or even CAMPBOTS, they are TRAFFICBOTS.
There is nothing wrong with campers who are real people behind the AV and hence, real residents, even if they are AFK at times. But when they are AFK 24/7 and one of 50 other LibSL client AV's running on someones spare computers to farm money from SL thay are CAMPBOTS. BOTS put on their own land land by the landowner with no payouts are TRAFFICBOTS.
The way SL is headed I propose search is best completely removed from SL and hence becomes run by private 3rd parties who WILL care when their results are being gamed.

Dead easy to prove they aren't bots, offer them $100L to step off the camppad.

OH RATS - we agree now I have to be reasonable - how dull

Actually I am reading Warren Buffet on corporate profitability right now and he has some very "pointed" things to say about company management who play games with their number. ALL very bad things ...


Like it or not, LRL (AKA LL) is part of the whole "con game" and forced to play games with their numbers so that THIS quarter's results are EXACTLY what the analystas say they will be...

The penalty is the the top brass lose their jobs! (Oh WOW!)

Unless of course *I* am on the board of directors in which case ...

I am *NOT* on the LRL board BTW - be thankful

You might ALL be camping if I was LMAO

The Marxists on this thread are correct in assuming corporate incompetence (NEVER assign to malice what can be ascribed to incompetence - Arthur C Clarke), but you can either "stand on a cold street corner handing out leaflets or you can fight them from the oak paneled offices from within the system" (Alan Greenspan).

The bottom line is dishonesty, the real question is what do you do about it?

Some thoughts:

1) All that is needed for evil people to win is for good people to do nothing (Adolf Hitler I believe)

2) I have been rich and I have been poor. I prefer rich (Karen Palen (anonymous rich bitch in RL), Mark Twain (Samauel Clements in RL) et al ...

but if they are AFK 23/6 or maybe 22/5 or maybe 21/4 or ...

Depends entirely if:

(a) I am busy with something else, like talking to one of my grandchildren. See Zoe - I DO stop this when you get on my lap.

He He - I love you Gramma! (Zoe)

(b) I have some other reason to hang on to the spot

(c) I have programmed the "bot" to consider the "present value" of the "anticipated future earnings" (Warren Buffet). Sounds complicated, but it is a standard Excel/MS Office function!

(d) I am just feelin bitchy and won't move no matter WHAT you offer!

I am not sure that is a function of the viewer or just the standard "crud" of Second life. I have often had two "alts" standing together who each thinkingg the other is "offline".

SOMETIMES having one email the other helps, other times it does no good at all. It does not seem to matter if I use a standard viewer, a "hacked viewer", or TestBot, the reult is much th esame.

My guess is that this is a bandwidth issue between servers (sims), but I really don't have the data to be certain.

BTW this also happens on Opensim and the "test grid", but you really should expect weird things in a development environment!

well. we have clearly made a wrong turn here. I am no client expert or scripting bot wizard I just know what I saw when instructed to click " ABC" in the debug menu at the stores land.
And I saw 17 green dots that wasnt on the standard mini map.

The legal term for that is FRAUD.

LRL is "playing with fire" by allowing such things to happen. Especially since it is consistent enough that there are "groups" devoted to warning people about these actions. Ask Oliver North about the effect of emails on your career! (He shredded all the paper, what "hung him out to dry" was the backup tapes on the IBM PROFS emails!

There is NO limit to redress from fraud - ALL of your "protections" such as "corporate identity" and "statute of limitations" can be struck down if there is "proven" fraud.

In words of one syllable: ANY LRL employee can expect to pay 25-30% of ALL future assets and earnings to make this good! This includes janitors and everyone "higher on the food chain".

Corporate fraud (or fraud that you "Should have known about" is not a thing to mess with!

At the end of the day this all comes back to the question;

What exactly is SL?

If it is indeed just a warm and fuzzy little virtual environment where running a business is simply fun RP along the same lines as playing a vampire or Gorean kajira, then your point of view is fine.

However some businesses in SL are effectively RL businesses. They provide RL financial security for their owners, who have invested time and money into making it a success.

It's actually ironic that alongside this thread, there is another where a guy is asking for RL tax advice concerning his SL derived earnings

In this view of SL, the idea that an SL business should adhere to a more prescriptive set of business ethics than those faced by RL businesses is ludicrous.

Whether it is accepted by you or not, every solvent business in the world will have adopted RL versions of some if not all of the tactics tagged as abhorrent here.

If you don't believe me then thats fine - it says more about your naivety than my cynicism I'm afraid

The idea that a person should (as encouraged by LL by the way) invest considerable amounts of money and time to build a business, but then curtail it's legal activities so as to placate you people is again ludicrous.

If you don't like the commercial environment supported by SL, then lobby LL. Despite what some of the posters say here an alternative is not beyond the wit of man to devise.

This is particularly the case since, despite what the LL apologists say on this thread, LL is in fact engaged in RL versions of each one of the activities you are abusing SL businesses for here.

Well the more resident/less borg I mean bot, they become
Look, we're trying to cull the competition for legit campers here without dropping them in the same basket, work with me please

Well if you are AFK and you leave a AI chatterbox running your AV' you're a bot as far as I care

It happens too often to be purely a SL glitch the fact they are teleporting out in under a second bfore the viewer has a chance to rezz them is more the case.

That would be by use of an invisibility cube they are hidden inside. And often it is filled with a black solid phantom cube so even if you cam inside you see nothing but blackness.