Why, exactly, is there still camping?

I've been racking my brains, tryin to figger it out.

I thought they got rid of the traffic payout thing.
Do you make money for the more people in your area, or is it simply "More people =more potential sales"?

Anyone?

Traffic numbers influence many merchants' decisions as to where to rent shop space. It may not be the only or even the defining criterion, but it is influential enough to enough retail renters to motivate land owners to use camping stations to drive up their traffic numbers.

There's another way, though, in which camping has become a bit of a mystery: Why bother with camping to drive up traffic when instead the parcel owner could just park a bevy of bots at high altitude? A lot of this goes on already... one supposes there must be Rent-A-Bot services for those merchants with better things to do than admin their own. And yet merchants still pay camping. It's nicer to n00bs--at least somebody benefits, however meagerly--but the campers are a lot more visible than skybots, and camping is viewed pretty negatively (n00b benefits notwithstanding), so one does kinda wonder if it's a net win for merchants, compared to the bots.

Doesn't the search results get ranked by traffic too? And we all know people usually click the first result they see...

Love.

Used strategically, camping exposes actual people to products. There is nothing to do but look around, and if there is something nice, they may actually buy something. I've camped, and sometimes still do when I've got some tedious task like editing a script - but I also spend money. And I usually do spend where I camp. They usually get more out of me than I take from them.

I usually start mid to bottom and work my way up, I find many more interesting new things that way and get to shop quickly and without interruption

Have you tried that with Google? You usually just get useless crap, unlike in SL. The masses are trained...

Love.

the cost of running a computer is more than the earnings of a camper. so why camp? better to spent your time on sl in a 'productive' way and just buy the l$ you need

Not true. This has been gone over before. It may cost you more if you live in Europe, but many places in the States camping does pay more than it costs to run the computer.

To answer the OP's question, LL simply hasn't had time enough to figure out that since they've trashed the traffic payout to landowners - they should trash the practice of sorting by traffic in search results. Just stack the bloody d*mn returns in alphabetical order, for Pete's sake! Just because a parcel is filled with twitching zombies doesn't mean it's a vital and interesting place.
I think it's just another example of a lack of coordination when it comes to rolling out feature changes/enhancements.

Be cool to see how many a's people could put before their product's description.

AAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa skins

Camping makes me want to beat my head against the wall. I just couldn't stand sitting there when I first started. I gave up and stuck $10.00 on SL and had more than enough to play around and have fun. I've stuck some more on since, but at about 9L/hour, $10.00 = 300 hours of camping. (10*270/9). If you can't afford 10.00, then you need to forget SL and get a better job.

I guess the only exception is if I'm gimping or doing something time consuming off of SL but I still want to be on to receive IM's or whatever. I guess I might as well be sitting in a camping chair. But then, if someone IM's me, I'm just going to get distracted and go play, so the purpose is defeated.

I just can't see the point. If people enjoy it, then good for them. They can do it to their heart's content, but as for me, forget it.

The question is less, why do people camp (They camp to get free money! After all, Trout, most campers just minimize and ignore any IMs that may arrive. In fact, they run several instances of the client, all minimized.) -- but, why do people still put out camping chairs?

I can see two reasons:

>> By far the most common reason has to be because of Search, as already discussed.

>> Many kind landowners still put out just a few chairs to help newbies. Unfortunately, since the advent of camping bots and camping.com, this generally doesn't work any more I've taken instead to just giving every real newbie I interact with a little cash. I think it is important that they be able to buy a few toys while they're still deciding if they like the game.

You're right, Nika. I guess as a gamer who is used to dropping close to $50.00 on a game based on the demo or word of mouth, I can't see looking around for free then dropping $10.00 in world as a big deal at all. It's cheaper than what I paid for the POS Pariah when it first came out. Blech.

If I owned land, with the current state of things, I guess I wouldn't put out camping chairs. I understand wanting to get your name at the top of the search list, but something about it strikes me as wrong, and I hate going somewhere looking for a specific item and finding that I'm surrounded by zombies and the item I want isn't even really there.

One benefit of camping, making friends, of course you have to be lucky enough to be sitting with people who are not zombies, I found Odds & Ends very early on and they had three chairs in the mall. I guess I sat a lot the first few weeks, or if not sitting just hanging around the area, in that time I met about 8 people I am still in contact with on a daily basis. We each have land and on a couple of plots there are low paying camp chairs. These camp chairs give us the opportunity to meet newbies, and through this we have provided a lot of help and I am certain kept a few of them interested in coming back to SL again. from that original 8 friends I guess I have a solid group of 24 firm SL friends too, three of which I went to meet in RL recently too.

So there are good points to having camping.

I was talking to someone who wanted me to rent at their place. I had actualy been there near to the open date already but forgotten and remember seeing some campers. The other day they contacted me to see if i did custom work (which I dont because I simply dont have the time or want to put aside things that I like to do etc etc). They mentioned their place again and said it ranked in the top 2 or 4 usually for that category and they asked me if i had seen it. I said probably and if i didn't rent it was likely it had campers or maybe there was a central landing point and the shops I could find open were to far from the landing point. It turned out it had campers. I then tried to explain to them as we were just talking as those traffic numbers as a result of the campers are actually false and so I have no idea of how much real traffic they get or if anyone even buys anything there. I may rent anyhow as I like the build and the theme fits what I sell, but I dont think people understand the concept of "false readings" beacuse she seemed to have not thought of that..

In any event I have often considered putting up 1 camping station on my land and having it pay slightly more for newbies since there are less and less ways for a person who just plays as an end player for free to gather a few linden to spiffy up their avatar. Some people genuinely can't realy get lindens using a credit card etc. Maybe they are students or have access and share a computer but just dont have the budget to actually buy any currency for use. They still want to play the game on a social level and party and do small things so for them really the only thing that is left for them is camping as not everyone wants to create things to sell.

Yeah but just like the RL phone book youd instintively bypass all that noise at the begining.

Which is basically what you do with traffic.

I figure if the place has more than 30k traffic as a club, or 20k traffic as a store - its a camper wasteland - so I dont bother tping there.

I rarely start at the top. Frequently I start at the bottom, but rarely do I start higher than the middle.

A better solution would be to have the order of responses set randomly. It's very easy to program and would pretty much eliminate this whole problem.

I've often thought what would be cool is if LL could hire out Google to handle the inworld searches. Instead of gaming the system by traffic or by alphabetical listing, they could rank searches based on relevance and whatever other magic google does to make it work. As long as the search returns a result that's sorted by something that residents can influence, i.e. name, traffic, or (in the case of classifieds) L$, people are going to take advantage of it.

Whereas a decent and effective search system that ranked things based on relevance and clicks might prove a lot more resistant to these shenanigans.

After all, if they can outsource Voice, and use 3rd party software for Windlight, why can't they outsource or bring in a 3rd party Search system?

-Atashi

I think google is the biggest gamer of the google system.

HEHE for a while there if you did a search on "Second Life" Google returned the top pick of their 3d Chat program "IMVU"

Just want to plug as one possible approach to making Search results relevant. From all the enthusiasm the Lindens expressed a couple months ago, one would have expected Search to be changed and Traffic to be dead by now, but it seems something needs to spur them on at this point.

its all a bit odd anyway ....

I have reasonably good traffic as I run a tree and I get a lot from that....
My nearest competitor has a sky box with 10 camping chairs, yet I now have the wonderfull situation that a new competitor has similar search words to mine, has only 10% of the traffic yet is higher than me in the listings. So I guess its all a bit strange.

The ONLY suggestion i can make is ... make the searches based on TP's within a time frame per AV rather than dwell.

If you get rid of dwell figures then camping stops....bots stop.... alts stop and places only get traffic ratings based on the UUID of an avatar in any 24 hour period...
therefor if bob visits my place ONCE, he gets one point, if he visits my place 30 times in 24 hours .... he gets one point. LL can track any AV at any time so theres no reason why they cant record AV parcel stats at any point. (Where AVUUID <> LANDUUID, LANDUUID +1)

Eseentially search will be based on ACTUALL popularity of a place at any point in time, cant be gamed the same as the UUID will only be registerd once in any period. The owner would have to run some pretty funky stuff in order to get the sort of traffic they get now.
The ONLY loosers I see are the free accounts who dont want to pay for membership...or money...or ANYTHING, or the bots that are being run by chinese camping sweat shops

Ive seen both the good and the bad of camping and yes I DID camp for a while .... but I know people who STILL camp and they have been in game for 8 months..... they never move ... just camp.... and if you REALLLLLLLY want to see how bad it is ... goto popular places and selecect a place where they can get ..... free money, theres about 40 AV's in a lines all begging for money ... and dont like it when you talk to them.
Im not gonna sit and slate those that ARNT paid up members but .. the no payment info on file ARE those that use the chairs/buckets/ladders etc
I had to build a bar recently with a camp script inside ..... not becasue the owner wanted camping ... but becasue that way he can pay those people who helped the club.
As for noobs ... maybe its time for LL to bring back the noob stipend

Maybe LL moving the stats has shown that they are getting ready ... no camping ...= no freeloaders = lower users = faster sims = better assett management

For some reason it appears that a lot of SLers think it already works this way.

I keep finding parcels named " My Store", apparently people who think putting a bunch of spaces in front bubbles them to the top of search results. It doesn't. It just makes you look like an idiot and/or sleaze.

Same goes for classifieds.