If you want a shock go to Popular places and count the Alts!

I have been monitoring the New Search quite a bit--so I have been checking all the
different ways to search to compare them.

Anyway I clicked on Popular Places----I won't name the place I went to and it really does
not matter because they are all the same.

The Map showed 92 people there----I counted 3 that were walking around after I went there. I found a couple of the alt piles in the sky, used my camera and stopped counting at 70!

This is clearly getting out of hand--and the soul purpose is to keep everybody else
at the bottom of the search list.

Sorry for the rant, but I don't know about the rest of you, but this is really starting to bother me! I love SL I love to create things, and sell them. Like a lot of others I have invested thousands and more time than I even want to think about with my small businesses. What am I missing here? Why is this allowed to go on?

Sighs.

so even the new search system can be gamed?
i thought ways to prevent that were being implemented

yup, and every popular place is like that, even if they aren`t yet popular but a huge big green dot on the map, 95% of the time it`s just alt and campers

count them all and u know how many real ppl are logged on, LL stats are inflated, total residents count is a joke

Yup. Thanks LL for prefering numbers of accounts over quality of accounts.

My thread on the issue:
/327/9e/215659/1.html

I'm confused. How can you tell who's an alt, and who's just some jerk in a camping chair?

EDIT: Nevermind. I just read the post JayDee linked. What a disgusting abuse of the system.

The alts are packed together and on a platform in the sky.

Camping chairs are so last week! It's much cheaper to just stack bots like cordwood somewhere obscure. Less laggy, too, so you can game the system even more before the sim becomes completely unnavigable.

This is new? Shakesheads...... populary places is more of a WHO`S WHO in alt counting these days. 100 on a island Equal AFK people doing rl well they believe they getting rich on sl. Wow i can sit 5 alts down and make xLindens per day! WOW.Oh well there use to be a time where people played SL for fun. Now well..

still lags the crap out of the sim either way, maybe a handfull of extra avi`s more but with max of 100 that doesn`t matters much :/

think the main reason is that people are getting a stripped client and just switch from campers to a pc running a dozen alts wich is alot cheaper in the end

the main problem lies with genuin stores wich have to lower them selfs to use alts (know a couple who are "forced to do this)

new search will screw it all lol

i guess im just mean because if i tp to a shop or mall and find it full of camp chairs or a platform with zombie alts i wont shop there

i look for the smaller stores or the new up and coming places i just cant stand the gaming of the system

Nah, it's also good for hiding real visitor counts from potential renters.

Many with in the system are doing this to show they have users from "Fill in the blank country " To say we have such and such users from this part of the world ...... So what you expect from LLABS? They need to show they have xnumber of users online to push the belief to those unknowing commerial they have resources at their finger tips. But true to counter belief we are not even close to those google stats numbers.

For all the brilliance it took to create this place, I cannot understand why it would be allowed to get to this point. No I take that back----I'm afraid in my heart that I do understand and so do others that have given it more than 10 seconds of thought.

But still, it is very sad. Truly sad.

I will say no more.

Lion.

what annoys me is that none of you are dressing up, cageing or doing other things to these alts and posting pictures



-Crunch

Many of us came here because RL was not so great--and statements like "If you create it in SL you own it!" seemed not only possible, but actually in existance--virtual world or not.

What that meant to me was--if I was good enough to create something that people would buy, I could salvage some self esteem--if not a little bit of money. That in itself was a huge draw for me.

But now I find--that although I have the talent, it does not really matter at all. Little by little my successful little SL business is being forced into oblivion because I have to spend most of my time trying to be noticed and read about what the latest way to game the system is.

If this trend does not stop--everything for sale will be like BIAB stuff most of which was stolen (and I can tell you it happens--the flowers I made last winter are all over SL now. I went to buy a gift for my SL girl frend--at 3 Gift shops I found nothing but MY Flowers!)

Sims will report 100,000 in traffic and the only guy that will actually be there will be the owner, his SL Girl friend and his group of chums--who are'nt really there at all because they are at their computers generating inbound links with more ALTS!

Noobies will flock to the place in the belief that they too make a fortune here--and then they find out that if the cheat hard enough they just might too. And why not? Everybody is doing It!

Sorry guys--I am really disgusted tonight.

I've been reading about the whole bots thing for a while, and now I can tell myself pretty much when the people around me 'not quite right' so to speak. Bad hair/clothing, nothing in their profiles...etc.


But, I'm still confused as to how this is being done with multiples? I know I can log in with my alt and park her somewhere AFK, but I'm one person with one Avi. How are these "farms" with tons of Avi's working? Does each one belong to one computer or what?

Totally confused...help?

They're using bot programs which connect to Second Life's server in the same way as the client does, but aren't capable of speaking or moving or anything like that - they just log in, do nothing, and idle. But because that's all the bot client program is capable of, it only needs to be a few kilobytes big, so you can easily run many copies on a powerful enough PC.

Lion, you're right, of course, but that just raises the esteem in which I hold those folks who are doing really creative stuff, and especially those who have the fortitude to try to sell their products. Personally, I still love to make stuff, but I've lost the taste for trying to sell anything new I've made for at least a year now. I guess I just find it more rewarding to give some of it away to a few friends than to fight the battles of making any kind of business of it. But some do, and do it honestly, and they've got my respect for that.

The other observation is that, for some of us, the likelihood of us buying something at a place is inversely proportional to its popularity. Who really wants to have the same stuff everybody else bought? May as well stick with freebies or whatever's in the Library folder.

But, yeah, a boutique "nobody goes there anymore: it's too crowded" customer base doesn't really help if you're trying to clear a profit.

All it takes is an afternoon and learning how-----then you get a group together and have 10 people do it to insure traffic to the place owned by the group. Really not very hard--but I won't go into detail.

As for fighting back--well good luck--When I just mentioned to the owner of a place about all the alts that were at his place, I got hit with a griefer an hour later with a message spammer that shouts some low class crap and fills up the screen. There were two of them and they hit the place when I had sevaral customers there.

What is the recouse? File an abuse report? What a Joke.

I just shut off the script option and rebooted of couse, but I had only one sale the rest of the night.

This stuff has to be stopped by the people that write the code. And can enforce TOS

Sorry.

OH! Ok, thank you for the explanations.

just bring back that people have to pay for an alt. simple

but LL makes more money from investors thinking that there are thousands more people in world than there actually are, than the 10 bucks an alt deal

*shrugs* what ya gonna do?

For all we know the people who are doing all the botting and setting up these "high traffic" areas are.......

Bots should be against the TOS. All of them, landbots, shambots, sheepbots, anything not a fully human controlled avatar.

We can create--and with some of the brilliant things I have seen here I tip my hat to those
that went through what it takes. I admire them and respect their talents, I really do!

However--I do have the right to a fair chance of at least covering my tier payments. Notice I said Fair Chance--not the automatic right to cover them just because I through up a place and put stuff in it to sell. If I don't have the skills then that's just the way it is.

But this is not about that--this is about certain low class SOB's abusing and taking advantage of the other part of the citizenship of SL. Those that want to make SL a truly great great place--and COULD if certain practices were stopped or at least addressed.

What would happen if it cost $72 a year for each alt beyond say 2 or 3? You know the answer as well as I do...... There would not have been 90 alts at that place--and the rest of us could actually TP!

Lion

I hate camping chairs

I found a cool game, wish it was in more places, it is called guess and win
I put it in my store

kinda like a tic tac toe type game (find the hidden match to win the prize shown)

I tried to find more but only found 1 other place (besides the person selling them)

otherwise ppl are not advertising them if they have it