Bloomin Campers Again

No they don't.

People want to shop in somewhere that provides a quality product, at a good price, at a good venue.

Somewhere that's lagged to hell because of camping chairs/bots/alts destroys that.

Having to go through 20 places that contain the word 'furniture' in the keywords to actually find somewhere that sells it, rather than simply using the keyowrd because it's popular, means I now have 19 stores I won't go back to.

Even because a place actually sells what I want, it might not sell the style I want. I still might have to visit 5 places until I find a place that sells a glass topped coffee table, instead of just tables generally.

If someone is cheating, or gaming the system, doing the same just means that you have no imagination or sell crap products if you don't get visitors.

I'm sure that "well, everyone else was speeding so I didn't think it was a problem if I did too" will get you a long way when a cop pulls you over.

Something else to consider, more of an abstract sense: We see only the campers sitting, "Doing nothing", and some no doubt are, but how many are organizing their inventories, IMing friends, reading something, maybe even creating something, like many of us do? I sometimes sit at my home for an hour, and outwardly look to be doing nothing. It happens at the hangout, several people sitting around, each doing something on their own, to an uninformed observer it can look like a camp site. But because it's done in a manner that's more socially acceptable, it's not considered a waste. I'm not necessarily defending the presence of camping, but when it's done by actual humans and not by farming bots, it is an activity in SL just as legitimate as any other and we shouldn't judgementally demean those that chose to do it.

Ok, I own a small company in RL, and know a little about how not to go bankrupt

I don't really understand why the "business" owners on this thread gripe about "fairness".

Often these are the same people who'll go on and on about how SL isn't a game, but another "reality"

From what I make out, camping chairs, alts and advertising hyperbole are all pretty straightfoward innocuous SL versions of standard RL business practices.

There really are no morals or ethics involved here. Unless you have particularly high moral standards and never personally negotiate hard, or stretch the truth, or make yourself look better than you are, in RL of course.

Small business in RL isn't for the most part all about egos, or big cars and houses.. most small business owners I know would make more money and have fancier job titles and cars, with less stress if they went back to normal employment.

Business, for most people is a lifestyle choice, but which also comes with responsibilities, the biggest of which is to look after your employees.

My experience is that you have to use any legal, financially viable lever available to you just to stay in business these days, without having to go the extra mile to screw anyone over.

Anyone who thinks otherwise isn't in "business", they're having some fun doing some RP as a business owner.

Not to say there's anything wrong with that Just don't be so holier than thou about people who are actually trying to run a profitable business in SL or RL.

Incidentally, what I do doesn't cause lag, so you'll be quite happy in my place if you ever want the sort of things I sell.

... Everything else is just principle.

What you're doing comes under "Disturbing the peace" in the Community Standards - "other objects that intentionally slow server performance or inhibit another Resident's ability to enjoy Second Life are examples of Disturbing the Peace."... your bots add lag, which is slowing server performance. Your 16 or so alts are using a disproportional amount of the sim allocation on your 8000 sq m - 1/8th of a sim = 1/8th of 40 avatars = 5 people allowed on your land at any one time to not infringe upon the rights of your neighbours.

Typical. I can't make someone agree with me so everybody come with me and we'll report him. Oh, and while we're doing it, let's invent a charge. I know. How about "unfair use of sim resources".

If you're looking for 'pathetic', look no further

You know, it's sad enough when people in real life pretend to popular... it's even worse when it's virtual.

Well, "unfair" is a generous formulation: the prohibition is actually against *anything* that may "slow server performance or inhibit another Resident's ability to enjoy Second Life." What that says, really, is that one's access to Second Life does not grant permission to deny service to anybody else, so RL laws governing denial of service are applicable.

How this applies to campbots, etc., isn't all that well-established, AFAIK. Presumably, if one owns one's own sim, one can fill it with all bots all the time and nobody would much care.

Perhaps, but 16 people at the same time in the same space for hours on end? I don't think so.

Even lower. Why can't you just discuss it and express your views, like everyone else is doing.

However in real life businesses don't pay people to leave their cars in their parking lot to appear full, nor do they go and buy a bunch of cardboard cutout cars to take up parking lot spaces.

People would know soon as they got inside it was all fake.

"Traffic" doesn't exist in the real world as a Metric, but rather as a perception. The fact that Traffic exists in Second Life as an actual metric changes the dynamics some. Becuase a huge chunk of the potential customers DON'T KNOW that traffic is gamed.

They dont let Used car dealers roll back the odometers anymore either.

However in real life businesses don't pay people to leave their cars in their parking lot to appear full, nor do they go and buy a bunch of cardboard cutout cars to take up parking lot spaces.

People would know soon as they got inside it was all fake.

"Traffic" doesn't exist in the real world as a Metric, but rather as a perception. The fact that Traffic exists in Second Life as an actual metric changes the dynamics some. Becuase a huge chunk of the potential customers DON'T KNOW that traffic is gamed.

They dont let Used car dealers roll back the odometers anymore either. Ethics do apply to businesses.

The bot alts cannot be seen by the naked eye ( no green dots on the maps ) but they are there none the less there for adding false and high traffic to a store and costing the owner nothing but the added electricity of running his 2nd PC 24/7

If it's not cheating Phil-----prove it.

Pull you alt farm. If your products are so damned good people will come anyway.

I know you will never do that and so does everyone else--because you cannot win unless you stack the deck.

To you business is business means it's ok to do anything to win--if it means stack the search results with traffic (or anything else for that matter) then it's fair because you win.

You are cheating everyone else in SL--my bet is you would not survive if you coud'nt. SO, IF THAT IS NOT TRUE----AND YOU COULD COMPETE ON A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD THEN PROVE IT.

End of story

Something else to consider, more of an abstract sense: We see only the campers sitting, "Doing nothing", and some no doubt are, but how many are organizing their inventories, IMing friends, reading something, maybe even creating something, like many of us do? I sometimes sit at my home for an hour, and outwardly look to be doing nothing. It happens at the hangout, several people sitting around, each doing something on their own, to an uninformed observer it can look like a camp site. But because it's done in a manner that's more socially acceptable, it's not considered a waste. I'm not necessarily defending the presence of camping, but when it's done by actual humans and not by farming bots, it is an activity in SL just as legitimate as any other and we shouldn't judgementally demean those that chose to do it.

As for camping I used to camp out over a year ago ...I was a noob then, and needed money. I found THEN I could talk to several campers and they actually talked back. I got curious and tried that randomly in the last few months and NADA! not one camper I tried to talk to ever responded. Either they were (away) or they were bots.

I had a thought...what if the only way one can sit in a camping chair were to have to fill out a questionnaire with code letters to input at the end. That would bring the number of true campers to a realistic level and eliminate 99% of the bot traffic that is hogging the servers and SL bandwidth ...and monetary resources.

I don't hate camping, I do hate what it has become...

What camping does .. realistically is take two search criteria:

Classifieds and Places,

and makes your ranking totally dependent on money spent


The Places ranking wasn't supposed to be dependent on money spent, it was supposed to be dependent on how many visitors.

However in real life businesses don't pay people to leave their cars in their parking lot to appear full, nor do they go and buy a bunch of cardboard cutout cars to take up parking lot spaces.

However in real life businesses don't pay people to leave their cars in their parking lot to appear full, nor do they go and buy a bunch of cardboard cutout cars to take up parking lot spaces.

In the city where I live, Police Officers are encouraged to take their cruisers home at night and to park them where they can be seen.

I am told it is quite effective, but I will be sure to pass on your concerns about deceiving the poor thieves.

second life hasn`t grown, it just gained more and more bots and traffic alts

remove them and we`ll have 30k less "concurrent" users, less inventory problems, less lag and a better second life in general

defending the use of traffic alts or camping bots is pritty much pointless and shows you have no understanding what problems these resource hogging monstrosities create grid wide

you claim you don`t add lag, but you do, these alts are connected to the SL servers and thus connected to every service, online status, asset server, login server, traffic calculation and network servers, all those clients need to keep sending non used packets trough the system backbone and thus adding unfair system usage along with your fellow camping alt bot runners to cripple the grid at peak times when REAL people are online

wished LL would give us 5 non payment alts and if you want more then have to pay the $9.95 a month atleast to compremise for the unlimited alts
1 month ban if caught the first time and a perma ban for the second time to discurrage cheating

you still don`t get it and you will never get it...