All camping is banned if it inflates ....

/me runs and hides behind nearest big strong-looking person. Desmond's story scares me!

I wonder how in this world they're going to enforce a camping ban in addition to the traffic bot ban they seem to be having difficulty keeping on top of. I foresee a lot of people trying to keep their bots and camping operations small enough to fly under the radar, for the upper limit of traffic manipulation without being detected.

when I started I camped, I meet about 30 people by doing that, at least 12 are still on my friends list, all active after 2 years.

When I joined SL, I put $20USD a month into the game, for the first 3 months. By the 4th, I had gotten smart enough to camp overnight. Since I didn't have a phone, I'd leave my computer online so that AIM, Yahoo, etc could catch any messages my friends had for me. Plus I'd leave downloads running, and winamp was my only TV. So I'd just leave my computer logged in. Not too long thereafter, I figured out how to run multiple clients on my spare PC... and when the nights came, I would set up a couple of alts wherever I could find chairs.

That was then. Within another few months I was able to start making money from actual building and selling, and by the end of 6 months I'd guess.. I wasn't seeing the need to camp.

Of course, what made camping unproductive wasn't the idea that it was bad (I would make something like 3USD a night (90$ a month)).. the problem was competition from bots. It became harder and harder to find even ONE chair. But the real blow was when gambling was banned. MANY casinos offered dance pads and camping chairs and camping dance-poles.. There was one casino I knew of, where I could camp in one corner, and cam over to the freeplay machines, and play blackjack for 1L here, 5L there.. When a spot was available there, I'd camp and play for a couple of hours, then go to bed.

After the gambling ban, camping really became a joke. 5L/10m became, if you were LUCKY... 1L/10m. the number of chairs went down, the number of bots went up, and it wasn't long before we realized that the bots were very likely owned by the same person who owned the chairs.

It wasn't long before these bots moved to skyboxes and the chairs vanished altogether.

I think the primary difference between Lucky Chairs, and "Camping Devices" is that lucky chairs, freebie groups, etc.. all "attract customers to your business".. the real world equivalent of a sidewalk sale, or free hotdogs and balloons for the kids. While they do in fact "game search" by generating traffic, I think that (at least for now) they're well on the "good" side of the line, because they provide "rich content to SL users".. as compared to camping, which only provides L$.

Lucky Chairs, etc, provide free content, generate social interest, and attract live people to a location. Camping chairs only attract bots and people who are going to sit idle for hours.

The real question will be, whether "camping for products" will be eliminated in this purge. Many hair and fashion shops have camping chairs that say "sit for X minutes to get this free hair".. I'd wager that those systems may skirt the issue, because they are not as widely abused, or used in a mechanized fashion. Even a wildly successful shop with 5 of those chairs is likely to have 4 of them empty at any given time.

I'm still watching a certain sim and am betting that when the "Adult = Verfied" takes place a whole bunch of green dots there will be wandering the grid looking for chairs/camping that will not exist.

I would think the way to handle the camping chair issue would to be put them on a micro parcel that way they do not inflate the main sales parcel. Then LL would not be able to say they were being used to just inflate the popularity of the sales site.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the "elimination" of camping devices or traffic bots. Still seeing micro parcel abuse, multiple rotating signs on sims, particle etc. griefing spam, and of course if you can't find a casino you probably are not looking very hard.


ARing these activities rarely brings results, so a system that does not encourage reporting of these new "abuses" is even less likely to suceed.

Once again a great to do about very little.

I've received several notifications lately from a club and they advertise that their sploders are full. I never see them anymore so it was funny to see them around and sad to see how inefficient LL can be.

I have seen slots and other gambling devices in clubs all over the grid. Sploders are even more common.

What did you expect? Really. You rail about the manipulation of search, and this is the natural result. There is no such thing as a perfect system.

A little thought please, LL aren't going to start a sim by sim sweep of every model bot & lucky chair sytem. The policy is so they can remove the big offenders, previously it was basically a free for all, run a 100 bots if you could. They will be policing the big offenders.

There will always be little traffic botting around, can never stamp it out, but now it ias illegal you are crossing a line where before you weren't. A lot of people opposed bots but then when they found ZLL approved of massbotting they did what they wouldn't have done to survive because other people were doing it, whethr it was morally wrong or not doesn't matter to many.
"Common sense, if it were any rarer, it'd be a goddamn superpower"

I was kidding


-- about the store staff ignoring the costomers

---- in SL




But on a serious note.

I'm not the only one who talked about the inescapable result of LL moving on the obvious Search gaming methods.
There would be a migration to alternative gaming methods. It is the expected result. That's a no-brainer.
Yet again, we'll have gamers doing semantic dances, trying to prove that they are not breaking TOS after someone calls them on it.


Q. What's the answer to a store with 20 employees and 2 or 3 customers at any time.
A. LL do a Maggie Linden !
What do all these employees do? Knit or something?

Just in case people have form sigs turned off, my sig for some time has been:

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Maggie: We give our residents a lot of tools, to build, create, and manage their lands and objects. That flexibility also requires people to exercise judgment about when things should be used.
http://www.ace-exchange.com/home/story/BDVR/589
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LOL nice work Desmond

no, because without traffic, there's little reason to do it (I forwarded the idea of using camping to employ staff years back and I wasn't the first...) there's just not enough benefit in it without the traffic numbers (and some risk too)

@Desmond:
that was brilliant, I love it.

so I guess if traffic were to poof from search... no body would set up a timeclock for club security, dancer/entertainers, store helpers, etc...

People who game search--sucks/sucked the life out of SL. LL not making this the first commandment of SL and taking the hand's off approach, because people game the search on the internet ---has been incredibly short sighted for "visionaries."

A real, honest and true search in SL is absolutely necessary.

I run a bar inworld and have never paid much attention to traffic numbers, or really cared one way or another because this build is a labor of love and I'm keeping it whether it makes any money or not. So I have never worried about the camping issue and LL's policies, because they didn't apply to me, right?

But what exactly qualifies -- in LL's eyes -- as gaming of traffic? I happen to have one bar regular who often just parks his avatar in the corner and is AFK for hours. In fact, it's a bit of a bar injoke to play tricks on him so that he "wakes up" to some indignity or other.

He's not sitting on a scripted chair (other than a normal sit anim) and he doesn't get paid (in fact, he's a heavy tipper to the bar tip jar). So does that make his presence okay or do I have to tell him to hangout somewhere else when he's afk?

One of Jack's replies in the blog is that people who are afk are not included in the ban. They are fine.

Question:-

I've seen it said in the blog that Prize Chairs and Lucky Chairs are good ways to give out samples of work and, because of that, it's hoped they won't be included in the ban. What difference does it make whether samples are given out via a Prize or Lucky chair, or just given in the normal way - as a free sample?

Without having thought about it much, it seems to me that Lucky and Prize chairs, that are on land that's set to show in search, are for the traffic, and not for anything else, and are already included in the ban, but I'd be interested to know if there are valid reasons for them.

They are for the traffic and to attract people, anything that relies on people waiting around is for the traffic, no they shouldn't be banned, nor should camping.

These are marketing techniques, the big issue is people taking the p*ss. 20 camping pads is taking the p*ss, one or two really isn't.

I believe the psychological reinforcement of winning something from a lucky chair makes it more attractive than a simple freebie vendor.

I can understand that, but the reason the chairs are there is purely for the traffic.

No it's not purely for traffic, it's to attract people to the parcel. This is why bot camping isn't a great ploy by any business owner, putting bots in your camping chairs means avatars who want to camp can't so they toddle off somewhere else.

Interesting.

I wish there would be some sort of definition of what is "fair" and "unfair" when it comes to increasing Search ranking. Now the decisons on "popularity" and search ranking will be based on whether someone is lucky enough to draw the favor of Laissez-Faire Linden, or unlucky enough to draw the wrath of Strict Linden.

I think it's a more effective more effective method of cultivating loyal customers.