Bloomin Campers Again

I really appreciate that you're working with your neighbours to make sure they don't get any probs with the sim hitting capacity. In my experience that's pretty rare!

Obviously the club owner will be keen to ensure that people space is available, but do you contact the other people living on the sim too? How do you monitor the capacity of the sim 24/7 to make sure it doesn't get close to full?

/me genuinely interested

Yes, but you haven't explained why any of that is cheating.

Business (capitalism) is selfish by nature. That's not going to change. But why do you say that it's at the expense of others? At the expense of who? It doesn't break the system, or make SL unuseable.

Its cheating because "traffic" was never meant to be a paid popularity system. It was supposed to be a actually popularity system. Back before bots and multiple log ons, and when almost no one had an ALT, etc.



How do you know this? Ive yet to hear the Lindens explain how large concurrency affects the total SL picture in a straightforward way.

I know for a fact that when large number of people are online, SL works less well.

Camping drastically increases the number of people online.

Thus not only can it affect local (SIM level) performance,

It potentially affects the performance of SL as a whole.

But how is it cheating if it pushes relevant places to the top of the search results - where people actually want to find them? Who is being cheated? In all fairness, I consider that languishing way down the rankings where very few people find places is bad for users, and that pushing relevant places to the top is good for users. I don't see who is being cheated.

Next we'll hear people saying that nothing should be done to improve rankings, and that everything should live or die on merit alone. But the SL blog suggested that people optimise their places for the search results, and the Web search engines say the same.

Define "Relevent" in this context for me, please.

Because your version of relevant affects the second half of your assertion a great deal.

the "Who" is being cheated could be those who cant afford to, or refuse to, buy their visitors.

Since the traffic metric was not supposed to be a purchased one.



The Classified are intended to have a ranking directly tied to money spent. Thus they should remain that way.

And "next" nothing, Ive been saying Traffic needs to go since before you were in Second Life.

Here's the simplest way of putting it: is your search ranking deserved? No, since you had to boost through the use of bots, hence making it cheating.

If your undeserved ranking gets you extra sales then someone else gets less sales, hence at the expense of others. The point there isn't that you should care about how well or not your competitors are doing, it's about how fair you run your business.

Lucky for you the majority of people doesn't realize or care, be it in SL or RL.

That doesn't make it cheating, Colette. Cheating is a strong word, and using something in a way that wasn't intended, with the full knowledge of the creators, isn't cheating. I still want to know who is being cheated.

How do you know otherwise? I go by what I find, and I don't find the system breaking under the strain.

The system does perform worse the more people there are online, but that's when people are actually doing things - moving aound, requiring more texture downloads, etc. Imo, the extra load put on the system by alt zombies is minimal, because they don't move, or do anything. afk campers are similar, although they do incur more overhead when things change around them.

Its cheating because your traffic figures are not real visitors coming into the shop and thus giving a false view to people using the traffic figures to decide if the shop is worth visiting. Traffic is, or at least WAS, supposed to be a way of saying, hey my shop/club/sim is great cos soooo many people visit, look at the figures! But now its more a case of, there are 2 people in the shop but hey I'll trick you to coming in by pretending the numbers are real visitors, not MY OWN alts in the sky.

Anyway, good luck, people spread the word of camper places which in turn ruins reputations cos more and more people dislike the use of campers to increase FAKE traffic.

ME, I'd like to see more interaction, not dead bodies everywhere lol.

Titania xx

There is no way to know this.

I doubt even the Lindens know 100% for sure how all this works.

I'm sorry but the 'cheating' back and forth is too tempting for me to ignore...

From the dictionary:

"A person who behaves dishonestly in order to gain an advantage. An act of deception or fraud."

There is nothing in SL's official literature or in the viewer that says that traffic in Search depicts anything but real visitor numbers. This is how it was designed and intended to work by LL.

So imho boosting traffic figures through inactive avatars is a deception in order to gain an advantage. Hence it's technically cheating.

Ill explain in very simple terms how and who its cheating

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CLUB A has a total Advertising budget of $10,000, they know this puts them at a disadvantage but they decide through better customer service they will be popular. They spend 10,000L on classified and other ads.

The Popularity ranking is called "Traffic" which keeps track of visitors to the venue.

They are hoping with an increases traffic number they can sell more vendor space and get sponsors who pick places based on Traffic

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CLUB B has a total Advertising budget of $40,000. They spend 20,000L on classified and other ads.

They get some camping chairs. they spend $20,000 on Campers.

Their Traffic numbers are 5 times those of Club A.

They have no problem getting vendors and sponsors, too bad for club A

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Thus Club B has just Cheated Club A

Well, all I can say is that it's normal business practise to try to do better than the competition. Taking sales from the competition is what business is about. I don't consider that to be cheating the other business. It's just normal. I also consider that advertising is fair, and that improving the traffic figures is a way to better advertising.

If you want to talk about fair and cheating, have a look at my competition and you'll see places claiming to be something they are not. That's cheating, because it's deceptive. I see nothing wrong with taking steps to get RELEVANT places high in the places rankings - where people want them to be.

I was in my store for a few minutes yesterday, during which someone came up to me to say how great she thought the store is. Someone else joined in and one of them said that I'm performing "a service" by producing what I produce with such low prims. I get a lot of positive comments like that when I'm in the store. I really don't think that those people mind at all if they got there via unnatural traffic figures. They got to find things that they were looking for, and they were very pleased about it. That's what matters. Everything else is just principle.

I call that competing well Club A should learn to compete better.

Its also cheats others who live in the SIM of the place running the camping chairs.

You live in a SIM that can support 50 residents,

You own 1/4 of the sim.

You decide to put up 30 camping chairs to boost your traffic,

You also regularily get 10 customers based on all that traffic.

You have just limited ALL your neighbors to getting by with only 10 slots for avatars. Heck there might be more than 10 other people LIVING in the SIM.


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Even for responsible camping operators, the fact they tie up 1/4 or 1/2 of all the spots in the SIM day in and day out puts a crimp in everyone else's plans. Heaven forbid their neighbors want to ever have a party and have 20 people over for a couple hours once a month.

That explains everything.

You aren't interested in fairness, you are interested in advantage.

I've already agreed completely about the hogging of resources aspect - either in this thread or in the parallel one. That's something I don't do - to the point of deciding to move because another land owner in the sim will soon open a club, and I'm not going to hog the allowed agents. But it's not cheating the other land owners as long as I ensure that there is plenty of agent space for all.

If both the Classifieds ranking

and the Places traffic rankings

are both determined by how much money you spend.

then the Traffic ranking is redundant.

Furthermore, it is deceptive because it is not commonly known that the Places Traffic rankings are largely only determined by how much money you spend on campers.


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Thus Traffic should just go.

Businesses can just spend more on classifieds, since all traffic is anymore is paid advertising.

I'm interested in competing in business. You're right. I think it does say it all

I'm not sure how you ensure that.

But what YOU do doesn't mean that is common practice. My personal observations would lead me to beleive it is NOT the common practice.

Thus those camping chair owners are cheating their neighbors.

Its nothing to be proud of

since camping is taking a metric that was supposed to help fairness by not being a pay for ranking system and turns it into one.

I have no objections to that.

The reason that I got into camping not many weeks ago might be interesting. As was mentioned by someone, I specialise in low prim furniture. Looking at the Places rankings for 'low prim furniture', I found a business with a much higher traffic figure than anyone else at the top. I went to the place and I didn't find any low prim furniture, even though the text in the Places listing said that they do it. I did find campers scattered all over though. So I decided to outrank that place. NOW there is a place at the top of the rankings that belongs there from a searchers perspective. I didn't invent the Places search, or camping, but I *did* improve that particular search for searchers.

If you insist on things being fair, then I say that I am being much fairer to searchers than the other place. My text says what's in the store. The other one dossn't - at least not that I could find, anyway. My concern is for people - not for pseudo-principles.

I can't speak for other people - only for me. I ensure it by consistently looking at the map, and by knowing what is going on the sim. I know that I'll have to leave plenty of agent space for the club when it opens, and I'll do just that - by moving. Right now, things are fine with everything in the sim.

true, thats another problem.

Its definitely preferable that the top ranked places actually have what they claim to have.

With traffic gone it would be just classified ads to go on.

which would help some of that i think

I'm proud of the fact that I help people, and I'm certainly not ashamed of the fact that I improved the Places rankings for people.

The Places search was screwed since long before I came into SL, and nothing that anyone can do, short of eliminating the tab altogether, will change it. All I do is improve it for people in a small way. The Places search hasn't reflected the reality for a very long time, so it's pointless moaning about it. Until LL remove it, which they may do, it is as it is, and business that wish to compete use it for that purpose. It's all perfectly fair.