did you read the blog recently...

Not much. The avatars do have textures that any visitor to the store will have to download, and of course the animations (which is rather the point, after all). I certainly wouldn't lose sleep over it.

I'm just surprised, though, that you find traffic it generates worth the trouble, in comparison to the bot-box big guys.

An alternative for merchants of any size: after Traffic is gone (it's inevitable, eventually: even in this SurreaL world, there's a limit to absurdity), there will be a business opportunity to hire personable customer service "models" at just above current camping wage, and with even a tiny bit of training, some simple no-spamming rules, and a modest commission, they'll boost sales way beyond what Traffic or any bot-able activity can do--while at the same time earning real loyalty from customers and helping to support that bottom end of the wage scale that gets squeezed when camping disappears.

Hmmm... now that I think about it, the meta-opportunities here are scripting of vendors and "timeclocks" for accurate time and commission/incentive payouts, and employment agencies for such "models." It's gonna be a huge business for somebody.

Colette, I could not agree more.
Though I do have one thing to ponder:
Myself I do pay my premium at 72 dollar a year, and as well pay 15k rent each month to my landlord, which lets him pay his estate tier to Linden Labs. For that price, I run 1 real avatar a few hours a day, and 2 Sleek avatars 24 hours a day.
Next 2 users are free accounts, and they dont spend a dime. Maybe they camp a little, but dont contribute a nickle to Linden Labs. In that case who should login: my 2 alts or the 2 freebies
Just a thought though, I would not complain if LL decides to kick my 2 Sleek clients on rush hour.


The traffic it generates, contributes to me ending in the top 10 of the search words important to my business. At 3th place in Search All even. Without the traffic I would be unnoticed probably.
Mine is around 3000, the heavy bot users that are above my in Places, get of course between 40k and 60k traffic. Well I don't even think I want to compete with those. Since most people browse a few stores before buying, I am pretty sure they end up in my shop anyway, and some people even skip the high traffic area's at all.

So, it hardly is any trouble to keep the 2 demo characters running, they do show how nice the used animations are, AND they set a nice base for traffic. Visitors will have to do the rest

I would think that anyone who decides to make their bot a premium account would be able to log on ahead of Real Human residents, that should be enough preferential treatment to fake bot Residents.

I do not think access should be based on how much money someone spends. However their contingency plan does do this. But it does NOT order the premiums by how much land they own, etc.

You are right, my example was a bit overdone. I do think premium players do have more right to access since they are members, but the amount of land they own should not matter though. So forget about my rent

I do still feel for a system where one MUST pay membership after a few months, and then has a right to a main and some alts. That would for sure make the amount of cuncurrent users much lower. On the other hand I seriously doubt that would solve the problems, since the bots do not generate stress on the servers I guess. And now I am gonna check the blog to see how close we are to the next asset server failure

The latest blog update on this seems to agree with you. Maybe I'm just trying to see hidden details where there are none but I thought the wording was interesting...

Anyway, I guess the point I was trying to make was that this latest (2 week long) round of issues didn't really feel like SL had gotten maxed out on it's design. It seemed more like they were bumping up against some limit that they hadn't hit before and were struggling to work out what needed doing to smooth it out.

Not having the automatic logoff after inactivity on these bots is the killer imo.
I know we all have the right to enable and disable these choices, but last night at a certain store there was a "person" in the "get paid by the minute" chair.
This is of course fine, but the fact that she was parked there for 600 minutes kind of pissed me off. The lag in this place was horrible, and trying to spend 800 linden was a chore.
Sure having these bots can create traffic to the location but i think quality products and word of mouth can sometimes work just as good.
In the past 2 weeks between me and the other 3 people I brought there, 4 items were purchased....around 3200 linden. So to see my money going to the 600 minute sitter gets frustrating.
there are i think 3 spots to sit there always full, always big minute people who don't respond, and it is always irritating (coming from a premium member)
models and pose bots are one thing.....these money leaches kill the system and the fun.

Probably you don't have to worry much, the person sitting in that chair might pretty well be some alt of the store owner Why would they pay for something they can do themselves for free?

The only good camping systems are the ones that force the camper to prove they are real persons. I don't mind paying a few lindens to new users who don't have cash yet (the money tree on my parcel gets filled quite often), but I refuse to pay someone elses bots.

Wow are we on a sidetrack or what

Quite easily, go to a money island or somewhere where they are all wearing 400 prims and running a hundred scripts each. And then tell us that 99 campers do no harm?
Concurrency is only climbing because everyone fed up with the cheating of the system is now decideing to join the bot bandwagon. The influx of bots outstripping the frustrated residents leaving.

ROFL! I said the same thing to my partner last night when I got about the third LL blue drop down menu letting us know some things were awry. (Like I hadn't already noticed.)

OK, sorry, misunderstood

So, on the blog

========================================================

In order to test load mitigation strategies, the Operations Team will be disabling multiple in world functions for 30 minutes, starting at 1:30 p.m. Pacific

Specifically:

* Profile information will not load. This affects both floating and embedded profile windows.

* General group information (name, charter, etc.) will not display in floating or group embedded group info windows.

* Groups will not show their member lists.

* Group owners and officers will not be able to eject group members.

* Group proposals will open the UI, but will fail to create.

* About Land will show 0 for traffic. This is temporary.

At the conclusion of the test, you’ll need to either relog or run Client -> Clear Group Cache (a Debug option) in order to refresh group behavior.

We will conclude these tests as quickly as possible, and apologize for the inconvenience they cause.

=========================================================

No login throttling.
They intend to reduce database and bandwidth load by turning off functions in a 'controlled' fashion in an attempt to avoid/delay an uncontrolled brown-out/melt-down.

"load mitigation strategies"

So basically they will purposfully turn off a lot of things that start to break anyhow.

Umm yes .. did you ?

Its funny how we were taking about traffic camping and bots yesterday and then last night a friend told me about this experience he had. He and a friend went to a well known Jazz club which is hosted on an island. He relates that the lag was extreme and yet there were less than 15 people he could count in the whole building. His mini map was full of green dots however.
He decided to investigate as he could not rezz any poseballs anyway. He used his cam to hop up high where he found a platform with lots of people sitting down not doing much. He hopped on a poseball there to instantly get to that area and said a "Hello" to everyone around. Only one person responded and she said she was camping, in fact there was a Camp Master or something installed there. She said everyone else was asleep - so they were either afk or bots. All of them were dressed properly, some had blank profiles, some didn't.

He and the lady he brought to the place left in disgust - it seems the place would rather be near the top in ratings than provide a good experience for the actual people dancing there. He told me they won't be going back there again.

They are doing the right thing with a load test.. I was kinda supprised they were doing one lol

Oh, something else interesting happened last night too. I was upgraded to havok4 in my region yesterday. I even posted about it being whilst I was logged on and getting the vacate notice.

Well I was at home again last night and I get another message about the region going down. So i hop across the border into Tuli and when I get back I get the "Region is running a different simulator message" again. Now Tuli was upgraded soon after Atai last night. I checked the sim version and sure enough a new version of the sim software had been delivered already.

Any ideas on whats going on? Lag fixes? Non Havok4 related fixes?
Are they doing a second wave upgrade of some sort?

You have to relog to get the bensfit from a restart "Rolling" or not ..

Jumping the wave only delays that.

No, no you misunderstand - between getting the first vacate message (night previous) and last nights vacate message. I had been offline for some considerable time lol Yes I do in fact sleep lol.

I only hopped across the border because I didn't want to log at that point for some unknown upgrade. After the sim went down and then back up I compared the v1.20.XXXXX minor versions betwwen Tuli and Atai - they differed but before the second upgrade they were the same. A second upgrade really did take place.

lol, i'm an ex premium too. My thinking goes like this though,

ok, throttle logins for non premium accounts during peak usage, what do i miss out on? ummm asset server issues, lost inventory, failed transaction, and failed tps.

Where's the downside?

/me rubs ya temples a bit.

More than likely related to

"Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 12:03 PM by: Joppa Linden
[RESOLVED 8:11 p.m. PST - kate] Over the next few days Operations will be putting out fixes to alleviate the load caused by continued use of our databases. We will be adding additional servers as quickly as possible and improving the performance of our database clusters. Until the servers are in place, it is good practice to check the blog for updates, particularly during peak hours of 12:00 pm. - 4:00 p.m."

These "Fixes" serverside will need sim/region restarts .. even though the blog does'nt specificaly mention that.

So instead of rolling updates - its more like cascading updates - Wow I hope it does not continue for long.

So nice to read a common sense post in this thread

Do bots that are just camping traffic use the asset servers? I always assume that they were just sitting there - why should they download textures and objects and such?

Depends on how well said bot was written/compiled