New news on the possible fate of landbots

Perhaps. As someone who was in a similar fog at one point, nothing is going to stop it when people are rushing to get it done and not paying attention. "The selected 3584 m2 land is being set for sale. Your selling price will be 6000L." This did not stop the glaze. Changing the order of Select User and Anyone will not stop someone rushing to get it done, and too complacent to realize that anyone means anyone. Luckily for me, the bot runner was compassionate and gave it back.

This might be true if bots were not available on the market at all, and were closely held by a few. Anyone who wants a bot can obtain one if they are ingenious, or pay someone for one. The playing field is leveled by money or desire. Not everyone can afford Photoshop CS3, or a subscription to skin models. Not everone can afford a motion capture system. These things allow people to excel in their respective fields, and the only thing that separates others from them, besides natural talent, are resources. No one is going to put Ginny Talamasca or Craig Altman out of business.

I hate to break it to you, but relative to actual wealth in SL, the wealth is held by a few. Look at positive Linden monthly flow. Few people do better than break even, and even fewer can make a living. SL is not that far from RL in terms of behavior. Yes, LL sells a glamorous image... if people are willing to put in some money or earn it. But if you do neither, you don't get to look like Shannen Doherty and shop for purses or shoes. But more than anything, LL's focus is on establishing a platform - hence the "SL Grid" and "solution providers." They love the media focusing on Anshe Chung's success. SL is not RL, but human nature doesn't change.


I think this highly romantic view of SL is the source of the disconnect. For many people, SL is a business and conduct themselves in that manner. Linden Lab markets the place as a great place to do business, from hiring to working. It's highly capitalistic, with few restrictions, and allowing anyone to use whatever edge they can to outperform the competition. The only practical solution to bots is to get one of your own. If you have neither the desire nor the cash, that is something you have to live with. It's called choice and personal responsibility. If you want to run with the big boys, do what the big boys do - in any industry. That is how the world works.

Now, abusing resources is a whole other matter - if someone is running 12 bots and continually pinging the databases, that person should be AR'd and their bots banned, because that is a true performance drag on SL.

Firstly, you can't say changing the order won't help with ANY abosolute certainty. Your example is also fallable, because the order was at the time, ANYONE before SPECIFIC USER. I can't be certain changing the order will work either, however, here is why I believe it will. If someone is in a fog, they are going to use the first thing in the pull down menu. They are too zoned out to think enough to scroll down. With Anyone as the first option, it is the one that most people are going to reach for. If specific user is the first, it will be. In addition, specific user brings up a pop up personfinder that impedes the seller from going farther until that pop up is dealt with. Another event that could break the glaze over. If the person wants to sell to ANYONE, they can't be glazed either because they have to pull down the menu. However, that action in and of itself is simple enough, so it won't impede the person who is alert with unnecesary steps to selling on the general market. You are not going to stop all mispriced land by changing this order, but I never said you were. You will, however, LIKELY stop a good deal of it. There isn't one simple solution This is why I offered up a 4 point plan.




You are confirming my point. Bots are part of the creation of SL oligarchy. The hallmark of an oligarchic market structure is a high price to market entry, be it in skill, capitol, or both. Saying that anyone can buy or create a bot is ludicrious. They can't. And because of this, most are barred from the wealth. In purely competative markets, you can't just start a business without any capitol or skill, but the average person can do so with far lower amounts of capitol and skill, if they choose. The skill set is not excessive, nor the price for market entry. Just to use my own industry, SL real estate, before bots, the skill set consisted of watching the market a few weeks, learning how things worked in SL real estate, then starting with that one piece of land when you were ready to jump in. Now you pretty much have to have a bot, or buy large gobs of land and sit on them for weeks in order to make even .1 meter on your land. That takes large initial start up capitol. I've survived the transition because I learned enough and made enough when the market was purely competative to buy those gobs of land, bought high value land and set up rentals. If I were starting today, I'd never be able to do that due to the change in the very nature of the market.

And let me just add something. Desire and ingenuity don't make bots, technical SKILL does and that takes education, and in the case of bots, not just basic or even intermediate technical skill, but programming knowledge. That takes advanced education in a specific field. Again, an aspect of oligarchy. Basic intelligence is not enough. Advanced skill, requiring education primarily restricted to those who have the means to afford it from a formal institution of higher learning, is required.



I'm gonna take this last part as one big chunk. My interpretation is no more romantic than yours, the difference is that oligarchy is romantic to you. Capitolism is NOT synonymous with the limited monopoly (oligarchy). Purely competative markets are just as pure an expression of capitolism, they just serve the self interest of a larger number of people.

As for 'choice' and your 'personal responsitibly' arguement, that is as much a bunch of ballonie in SL as it is in RL. We don't all start off at the same gate, and you know it. I'm disabled and barely able to work part time in RL. I get medical benefits from the state for low income folks, and I pay a premium to get it too. The only reason I even had a computer and internet connection was because my parents bought me the computer and I skipped lunch three days a week, and gave up my basic cable service, to afford DSL, but just that little bit of money, in a purely competative market like SL real estate was back then, gave me the means to create my business. My first parcel of land that I made money on, a 512, cost me, in RL money, just under $11.00 US. I made aoroximately $2.05 US on my first deal. In a purely competative market, it was able to use my skill and what I learned from observing SL real estate for a month beforehand, and limited capitol to grow an SL portfolio worth just over $18,000 US in my first year. Purely competative markets are capitolism for the common man (or woman, furry, neko, etc). Personal Responsiblity becomes an ACTUAL, ATTAINABLE reality, not a fantasy of those who were blessed beyond measure from the moment of their birth and need a means to rationalize why some folks suffer in poverty, despite being responsible and making the best choices they have the knowledge and ability to make. And before you go claiming I'm some example of 'personal responsiblity' and 'choice' for what I accomplished in SL, I'll have you know, I was blessed with parents who were just middle class enough to send me to a private, parochial school, rather than a public school, in a poor part of Manhattan. My father was obsessed with computers in my childhood, so much so, he used every spare moment and dollar he ahd to buy and play around with Vic 20's and Commador 64's. when I was a kid and taught me a love of the internet back when the internet was a text based. In short, I was one of the blessed, maybe not with that much money, but with opportunity. I was NOT some fantasy bootstrapper who unlike her peers was the only 'responsible' one. Capitolism requires responsiblity, any many people don't have it, true, but no amount of 'personal responsiblity' can replace a level playing field when it comes to business.

As for your claim that SL is a business platform, and marketed as such. Read the busienss publications. They are calling SL overhyped and some businesses are actually disinvesting from SL islands. SL has GREAT business potential, but it hasn't been realized. It has also been reviewed as 'cartoonish', even when the businessiness magazines were praising it. This has turned off many in the busienss world. They see the bright colors and spinning signs and see a consumer's toy not a serious business platform.

And my assertion that SL is still, primarily, a dream factory is what MOST of the press on SL, particularly since the business tomes started saying it was overhyped (so not) as a business solution, has been in the dream enhancement sphere. Being a furry, or having an SL spouse, or clubbing at an SL sex club, etc, all are part of the capitolistic dream in Sl. Somebody has to make the skins for the furries, or the sex beds, or the clubbing genetalia, and those creaters are human, not bot. They are not run by folks that came into SL with gobs of capitol from RL corporations but those who have improved over time in a purely competative market. This dream fulfillment, especially the dream of a self-started business, are SL's current A product line. This too is starting to fade, but bots are just in their infancy now, so LL can keep up the charade. As more and more industries fall to them, or to other third party programs that ruin the fairness of capitolistic competition in SL, this image of the open market will be replaced. New residents will be told by those who have had their business usurped by a bot, that it's not worth it. The luster of a few sex encounters will wear off an they will come in, get their fill, sell off and leave for good, rather than stay and build a market for the RL corps to sell to when they do see busienss potential. The dream factor is still VERY important, and the continued proliferation of bots is a serious danger to that dream. But then that dream is based on purely competative capitolism. Bots are anitthetical to this.

Small point, but this fallacy keeps getting brought up: "Anyone means anyone."

There is nothing in the universal understanding of the common English word "anyone" that connotes "unseen automated programs that can act almost instantly to buy your property far faster than you or the person standing next to you can act." Nor is there any specialized SL definition spelled out anywhere that specifically includes this qualification. You have to know such a thing exists in SL to know you have to deal with it in SL, and too many people simply do not know that until they get hammered by one.

This is simply taking advantage of the untutored and unwary with a booby trap, and blaming the victim for not knowing it's there, in order to deny guilt or perhaps boost one's own ego.

Yes, put "Specific Person" first. And put a simple sentence on the pop-up where you choose between the two that says: "Anyone includes automated programs that may buy your property virtually instantly after you set it for sale." Then "anyone" will indeed mean "anyone," even the least wary will be fairly warned, and it will not require yet another confirmation or timewaster.

And best of all, we can finally stop having this stupid conversation.

I have no objection to the suggestion, but I sincerely doubt that changing the order will make a world of difference.

When I say that anyone can buy a bot, I mean that there is no secret society here that keeps the code locked up. If one gathers the cash, they can get anything desired. That we are not all equal financially is a different matter, and let's not forget that life is not fair.

With as many free or low cost resources out there that will let people teach themselves how to program, I give this argument little credence. And again, life is not fair.


I take exception to this. Where have I celebrated oligarchy in some loveydovey sense? I do not find oligarchy romantic, but I accept that technological advantages are going to be had, and accept that if you want to compete in certain markets that you will have to make the investment. Life isn't fair. I got over it.

I know it, and I accept it, and I don't expect to change it by impeding technological advancement, in RL or SL.

Personal responsibility is not a fantasy to be had, it is a characteristic of a person. I expect people to do the best with what they have. As my mom says, we can't all ride the horse - someone has to open and close the gate.

I'm not saying that it is a viable business platform, but people who come here and do business, and TREAT IT like a business, must realize that you either advance with the times or get left behind. That is the way the world works. If you treat this like a hobby or a game, then the impact is different. Let's say some new enhancement comes out to Photoshop that is extremely expensive to obtain that makes the process easier to make superior skins. It can be had, if you have the money. ZOMGWTFBBQ it creates an oligarchy for skinmakers!!! I's not fair!! Sound ludicrous? That's because it is. And the same goes for bots.


Talk about arguing at the extreme. There are very few industries here that are susceptible to botting. Land is the primary one. Camping is the other. I really can't think of any other. A bot cannot replace talent in making clothes, shoes, hair, gadgets, animations, etc. so this argument is suspect.

Life is not fair. Neither first nor second. Although the second gives us the ability to enjoy things we cannot in the first, we shouldn't forget that we are not entitled to have everything we want. I don't have unlimited resources and I accept that. But if I wanted to treat this like a real business and enter the land market, I would advance with the technology.

The automated thing is still owned by a person, so it still means "ANYONE." It is hardly a fallacy. A person map-hopping at the right time would be in the same position. We all agree that people need education about the bots.

I'l agree with Joy here on the overlaying tone of her original post, SL was surely a more exciting and fun place wher the average person could make a little investment and come off big with smart moves and choices, now, with landbots, that supporting structure of freindly competition is gone. Where there was ( guessed number ) 200 land barons runing around competeing with each other for a little piece of the pie, when Elanthius introduced landbot, it killed that business, now you dont have those people doing it anymore, atleast not in any recognizable fashion. No more Anshe, no more Sarah, no more Raymond, No more Marcus, no more Joy, and the list goes on and on, these people made SL great and appealing to hundreds of thousands of members.

Landbots took that away for everyone. and that is where the SL romance died. Thanks Elanthius and everyone else that helped kill another good part of SL

Business in SL is not designed to be based on "dream fulfilment". If it was, it's be a nightmare: it basically couldn't also be real business. I know that SL used to be marketed this way, but LL realised that doing so was unstable and stopped.

I don't really support landbots, but saying they have to be banned for this reason isn't right. Should we rule that every texture must be drawn from scratch with a mouse or tablet, and ban anyone who dares to use Texture Maker, Genetica, Apophysis or Ultra Fractal? Great, but then, ok, only the good RL artists can succeed in that market now, so it's actually less fair..

He did end my days of being a land baron. But it was way too time consuming anyway. You had to keep refreshing the search page and then racing to the land, and with my slow computer I usually lost the races to the other brokers anyway. Then you had to set the land, plant a few trees, put up a for sale sign, for what? A few dollars on a good sale. I never did it the right way like Sarah did, where she built up her name with steady promotion and great dealings with people to the point where folks knew to IM her directly when selling their land.

I'm actually glad he put me out of business. I like sitting on my sim watching my hummingbird and servicing my awesome tenants a lot better than trying to beat Weedy to a steep granite 512 to make 50 cents.

Yep and they won't stop till they kill SL completely, 100 bots is never enough..........

Difference is one person has hundreds of Avatars map hopping nearly for free repeatedly for their profit, bringing SL to grinding halt contributing nothing positive to the world but LAG.

If you can prove that the same person is running hundreds of bots, then by all means AR them.

I never said we were all financially equal or that life was fair. However, in RL, you can't push away from the keyboard and seek some other form of wish fulfillment when the market structure is stacked against you. In SL you can, and as I've said before, dreams and wish fulfillment is the heart of SL AT THE PRESENT TIME. RL business isn't here yet, nor does it look like they will be transforming SL significantly any time soon, so permitting the dream aspect of SL to be tarnished by making market difficult and oligarchic, is a dangerous strategy for LL.

Give me a break! Anyone who knows anything about computers knows programming is one of the most difficult skills to master. Almost anyone who is successful at it is so due to formalized training. You don't just pick up a book and start writing code.

Spoken like someone who has the means to ride the horse.

Responsiblity demands a person have some level of self determination. What you're describing, accepting that you are the guy to open and close the gate, when you had no choice in that reality, is conformity. It's obedience. It's not responsibility.

Supporting a Purely Competative market structure in SL industry does not impede technological progress here or RL. Realtors in SL used land scanners and terraforming tools before bots came in. However, these tools did not perform the transaction for the realtor. The question is simply which direction the technology will progress, not whether or how fast it will progress. If SL banned bots tomorrow, it would likely encourage technological breakthroughs by encouraging investment, as resident confidence would increase, encouraging the starting of new busiensses. They could take the risk because they would no longer have to fear someone creating a third party program that made their new SL business obsolete. Widespread investment spurs technological advancement in SL, not a desire to completely take over a market by a handful of individuals.

Flawed analogy. Photoshop doesn't make the skins, nor put them up for sale in SL. The bots buy the land. The bots sit in the camping chairs. The bots do much, and in some cases all, of the work.

Oh sure it can! All you need is a template to the hair or skin or clothing, as well as a bot that is responsive to certain input from the consumer, such as a bot that spits out a list of color or texture choices, then then asks the consumer which color they wish. In theory, MOST SL businesses are bottable. Land and camping are just the simplist. That's why they were the first.

For the last time, I never said life was fair. This isn't about fairness. This is about market structure. One that gives a select few, who usually start off with more, the ability to control the majority of the wealth to be made, and one that allows competition on a level playing field to determine the welathy and the poor. Purely competative markets are not fair by any stretch. Before bots, you had land barrons who were very good at reading the market and baby barrons who weren't as good who lost their shirt. However, purely competative markets as a whole, tend to distribute wealth more evenly. They permit a larger number of people to take firmer control of their economic lives, first or second, and it is that illusion of control that is SL's draw at the present time. If and when it becomes a more viable business platform they can chuck pure competition in favor of more RL-favored economic systems. Until then, LL needs to reign in bots and other third party programs interfacing with LL that can offset major SL industries and tarnish the image of the place to live out your dreams.

BS that this isn't about unfairness. This whole argument is about how bots destroy the market and create an oligarchy. Oligarchy = unfairness, privilege and opportunity for a few and not all. In SL, just like RL, you can fulfill whatever wish you want if you put the money in or earn it. Noobs that refuse to put money in camp forever to get the cash to look like Shannen Doherty and shop for shoes and purses. Some people give them handouts, but by and large, SL mimics RL in this manner.



I make a modest living and kill myself for 12-14 fucking hours a day to live just a tad above hand to mouth thanks to my exorbitant student loans, for which I also worked my ass off for. I don't come from money, and am often pretty cheap. I work to ride any horse if I so choose. I could easily do less. Don't start this class warfare crap.

What you fail to see is that the bot is just a tool, just like Photoshop. A tool that can be purchased, just like Photoshop. That it has different features does not make it any less of a tool. You too can have one if you have the desire and the cash. That's your choice.

Ridiculous. A bot's application is limited at best in clothing and apparel, and animations. It takes a human eye to line up seams from different textures on the avatar, or make the aesthetic choices that make a good product a superior one. A bot may be able to do some things, but it takes a lot of human work on the back end to make it not look look like crap. A bot will never imitate highly detailed works. Do you even make clothes?


BS. It is people that impede technological progress, when others have an advantage that they don't presently have. The market itself is as free as any. But different people use different tools to get an advantage, in each and every industry. If you want to run with the big boys, do what the big boys do. The tools are advancing. The only market that is suffering from bots is real estate, where the practical solution for all would-be landbarons is to get your own. And the savvier among them have.

SL Business is an opportunity, but no dream is guaranteed to be fulfilled.

Well said. Great example.

LL introduced a throttling mechanism into the Land Sales search in the early months of this year.
This was an attempt to reduce the load on the database.

Landbot operators responded by running multiple bots in parallel to hammer the database.
Logically, this increased the load rather than reduced it.
The operators set out to circumvent LL's attempt to improve performance for everyone.

LL's God status allows them to identify the avatars involved in a number of ways.
The activity would have a clear profile.

Despite the fact that the operators simply gave LL "the finger" when LL tried to slow them, LL just don't seem to care about it.

Yes, the one thing that never sat well with me about the bots is that they made one half-assed attempt to throttle the bots and when it backfired and actually throttled live residents searching instead, they left it as is and never took another action on the issue. I wonder if it's laziness, incompetence or apathy that's to blame...

Maybe all 3. At least the first 2.

Yep join the big boys in the "who can run the most bots race" that strangles SL performance to the point where the bots will be the only ones left moving and the customer base erodes to just other bots, sounds like a great economic model. Then listen to them whine about how land is too cheap, and LL should stop releasing sims that they keep bidding against each other for, out of fear a person could actually buy land direct at cost price otherwise.
Wanna make more money? Just keep adding as many lite-client bots as your connection can handle, then set up a couple of bot only machines and maybe a second or 3rd line as well like some bot owners boast about, bingo another 200 odd bots hammering the buggery out of the grids servers 24/7.

Look up oligarchy in reference to economics. In economics, oligarchy (also called limited monopoly) is one of the four basic market types. There is the centralized market, the monopoly, the purely competative market, and the oligarcy. Each has different charicteristics. The telltale signs of the oligarchy are a small few who compete with one another, but where there is extensive barriers to entering the market by new competitors, and as the few competitors who do exist are price givers, that is they are primarily price givers, although the fact that there are a few competitors, does create some elasticity, but not much. A Purely competative market by comparison is characterized by a larger number of competitors who compete against each other. Because of this fact, that there are no gentilman's agreements possible, they have to be price takers and this type of market is extremely elastic. This is basic economics. I am finishing up a degree (I more semester) in Geography, economics courses are required for that This was econ 101.

So much rage here, and yet you claim you've gotten over the whole 'Life isn't fair' bit. If you were riding the horse you want to ride, you'd not be this angry. You're obviously working very hard to get the opportunity to ride, but you're still holding the gate, and sadly, you've bought into this lie that anyone who isn't in the saddle is only holding the gate because they aren't saddleworthy. If I were still chained by this mentality, I'd be P.O.'d as well.

No I don't make clothes, but clothes in SL aren't real clothes. They are part of a computer program. And creating computer generated clothes for a computer generated avatar is not as complex as you believe. There are tons of patterns and templates out there for RL clothing, all draw with measurements included. Scan them and create a bot to modify and retexture based on preferences. ALL of SL is an environment created by complex computer programs. Hair, clothes, buildings, skins, ALL these other industries COULD be botted for that reason. Nothing here isn't already part of a program. The only diff is how you get the idea into SL. Right now, it takes humans working. Next month or next year it's a bot that creates from scanned templates, and offers various forms of customization to boot. It does all the work creating, modifying, and selling the object or outfit, and just like land, all the botmaster has to do is maintain his or her own computer. Perhaps the botmaster would have to scan in a few templates, like the current land botmasters have to put in the rates to buy at and sell at, but at the end of the day, a customizable botted outfit would be no different than a carefully designed outfit.

Land sales are again the easiest industry to bot. But in SL, a computer generated world, EVERYTHING is potentially bottable.

You are working under a false assumption again. Technical progress is not dependent on an oligarchic market structure. In fact pure competition has far more incentive to advance technology. In a purely competative market, when an advancement is made, the competitor that makes the advance gets to be, for a short while, a price giver, as the advanced product draws consumers to that competitor. Because there are so many competitors in the market, everyone scrambles to get the advancement or create a similar one. Some fail and leave the market. This drives profits up for the rest of the competitors that stay in and successfully get the new advancement. The higher profit margin encourages more people to try their hand at this particular industry, and the greater supply of the enhanced product created by the newcomers, returns the market to equalibrium. The product and industry has truly advanced. In Oligarcies, the few competitors know there is such a high cost to entry into the market they don't bother improving their product much. Most of the time 'advancements' are minor or just old features repackaged. Innovation is slower in Oligarchy, because with so few competitors, there is no real incentive to improve. Unless one gets the idea that they can completely trounce their limited competition with an advancement, which is very rare, advancement is slow and only happens when consumers become dissatisfied with the industry as a whole or a major change in the market happens. The first landbot is not that different from the few that have come since. The advances have only come from LL updating their viewer and databases. Same with the camping bots. Before bots, everyone was working on new land scanners and trying to find scripts that allowed for better terraforming of land that was baked poorly or ways to sort the land listings better so you didn't have to plough through undesirable listings to find the good buys. Innovation, verses bot stagnation. A bot itself is an innovation in a purely competative market, but once they transform a market into oligarchy, they undergo little advancement.

Back in May LL suspended several bot accounts for hogging server resources. They were having performance issues and looked into what was happening. According to Elanthius Flagstaff, he was told that 16 avatars were using 70% of the server resources! Bots owners had to make changes to how their bots hammered the servers. However, it wouldn't be a surprise if they still use a very large share of server resources.

Good point.
Landbot activity is not particularly clever in itself. The actual development of the first landbot was interesting as a technical exercise.
Thereafter, landbots became brute force instruments that did nothing for 'the community'. Rather they hurt 'the community' by imposing extra load on the system.


LL are unwilling to "ban bots" because that would be to suppress creative uses of bots ('bots' as in 'software-contolled avatars').

To many, there is a blindingly obvious difference between a bot that constantly hammers the database and one that is designed for research, product demonstration or game-playing in-world.
Bot activity designed to game the system and/or to take by consuming resources without giving is instantly recognisable to a human (who cares to look).

However, LL seems to avoid making judgement calls on anything as far as possible. That would get them into defining what is and what is not acceptable. They simply don't have the balls for that.

My understanding is that they basically converted their DOS into a DDOS ('Distributed' Denial OF Service - for the uninitiated).
1600 avatars popping in a random to consume 70% of server resources could be harder to track than 16 doing the same thing, but an intelligent forensic trawl of the server logs would find the connections.
I've done that sort of thing on web server logs, identifying the bots that trawl for bulletin boards and then send in other bots to try and post spam. There's always a pattern.

My anger is at YOU for being a presumptive twat. I launched no personal invective at you, and you chose to be a bitch and make it personal. I work for everything I have, and I don't envy people for what they have. So shut up.

So if you don't know, don't speak. I have played with the process and can tell you that a bot's application is limited at best, and will never replicate the highly detailed works that separate superior clothing from good clothing from crap. It will never, of its own, make a finely laced corset, or simulate shading, jewelry or beading. It never removes the human element.

It's not a true oligarchy if everyone has the ability to obtain one, and you haven't made that case. Everyone who wants to and can front the cash can obtain one. If you can't front the cash, too damned bad. That's life, first or second.

Listen, I am no fan of landbots as they currently are, but I do not believe that they should be banned solely on the fact that they complete the purchase. I would prefer that LL institute controls that limit their application - the CAPTCHA jira, for one, that I have already voted for. Your name is conspicuously missing.

Bots should be used for information gathering. The best landbot had a completely benign application in that it was watching land sale prices, but was banned for hammering the database. There needs to be a balance but I wouldn't ban them outright just because they are what they are. LL does need to do a better job at taking care of those who are using too many resources. Why they don't, I don't know. I will refer back to Ray's post a few up.

Didn't get them memo about Flame-free Sunday, I see.

Have a hug anyway.

lol. doh...thanks for the hug. hugs back!