How to help newbies financially?

Is this a challenge?!?! I never got into the whole camping bot thing since the income seemed to be so minuscule it wasn't worth the effort but I'm pretty sure I can write a bot to use this system too with much the same sort of techniques.

Anyway, I'm glad you like it. A lot of people in this thread seem to like it too. But it's not helpful for some people, including me, and you know, that's all I'm really saying.

I used it again last night....and was sent to all new locations from the previous night....except for my store and the Cone Headquarters, which were repeats.

I was sent to a ton of small shops...people with unique items....traffic less than 300 at all of those....they would never stand a chance in a Search....this gives them an opportunity...or at least adds another 100 to their traffic, so their store doesn't look completely dead with a 50 traffic count.

There are other Coneheads using it....I almost always ran into someone. I can see a Conehead Cult following forming....you can actually communicate with people while using it, and meet people.

I think I figured out why you wouldn't be paid at the first location. At a few stops I got bored, and thought, I'll move on....I'll go back to my own store and start again fresh. Well...if a person were allowed to keep going back to the same location....clicking to make their 2L.....over and over again....that would defeat the purpose....so I assume that's why it doesn't pay at first location.

The alt I used for the cone tour...is one that I developed about a year ago....to see if she could make it in SL without being given any money from me. She's had 50L in her account for a year, that she earned camping....hasn't spent one linden in a year.....now she has 100L and will purchase something on next tour, most likely.....so there you go....some money into the economy.

That seems to be a challenge with camping...but I've not actually used camping. On several occasions I went around to watch places with camping chairs.....and all the campers had empty profiles.

Either they were the store owner's alts.....or avs that were developed solely for camping without immersing themselves into the community.....and that's not what I wanted sitting at the store all day.

Elanthius - last night one of my stops was a location that sold and rented land. They had several rooms set up with billboards and info hubs showing pics of their land and handing out LM's. I grabbed a few myself.

There were Coneheads milling around and looking at all the ads. I talked to one....and he was actually considering renting or buying some land....and he said he picked up quite a few notecards.

They also had notecards designed for newcomers that gave information on renting and buying your first piece of land....that would be very helpful to someone. I was very impressed with the way they had their place set up.

They had it set up well enough, with plenty of tools....that I would wager they are going to get a bit of business from it.

The differences are mainly technical and in the flow of L$
The only major conceptual difference is the question of the mandatory stay.

The cones system doesn't have "an additional objective". It simply has a different objective of forcing the avatar to remain at a particular place.
In my proposal, the avatar has the choice to remain or not. However, the avatar has to be somewhere in between payment intervals. The 'somewhere' is most likely to be either the place they arrived at for payment or the place for the next payment.

In your case, for instance, you arrived into New Brighton and liked the place. You would have stayed even if you didn't have to.
Mickey arrived into places with unique stuff and would presumably would have stayed in those places even if not obliged to.

What happens if you arrive in a place, but it makes you feel ill?
You collect and move immediately on to the next place - which happens to be New Brighton.
You wait in New Brighton for the payment interval, and then you stay on for a second payment interval because there's no rush.

Or there's combinations. You spend 5 minutes in that last place and the remainder if the wait period in New Brighton plus the next wait period or part of it.


What's happening is the the most interesting places are getting more benefit from peoples' attention (and traffic minutes) than the less interesting ones.
What's happening is that some of those places you might have never found in Search because even if you scrolled down pages and pages to the low traffic ones, the particular place might have not jumped at you from the listings.


This makes the system difficult to influence successfully - other than presenting compelling content.
Someone might try to flood the system by buying 100,000 credits. The chances of someone being sent to their cone or cones(!) becomes very high.
If their place is crap and people keep getting sent to it, people can move on.

The only traffic advantage for the heavy hitter comes from the specialist afk tourists who *always* wait out the entire time at wherever they are sent, regardless of what they are presented with on arrival.
Overall, the system would be skewed in favour of attractive places.


This might lead some big spenders to abandon use of the system if they don't see enough traffic / sales advantage from the system.
That might be a problem in terms of the total cash injections into the economy from 'camping'-style operations.- *assuming* that such injections are genuinely necessary - which they could be.
However, it is likely to be balanced by large numbers of small-timer / new-merchants who would adopt the system as it bypasses the Search tabs.
There they would have difficulty competing and/or difficulty in learning how to rank - particularly in a Search in which the rules are changing.

The system could come to be used by some people whose primary goal is being introduced to good new places, with the payments just being a bonus.

OK - the Cone concept is one option. Are you willing to go back to the original topic and come up with something else ?

Back to Sling's initial suggestion. I just received this from one of the Coneheads I talked to:

"so u remember yesterday u took a survay"

"and gave me 100 bucks"

"well i bought a tiger with that money"

"as pet"

"i wanted to just show you that"

Is there a way to do that "mechanically" or not? I'm not talking "surveys"....just getting lindens into the hands of someone who is going to spend them.

Or is the only effective way to do that....one-on-one....is it impossible to come up with a relatively low maintenance and widespread effective option....???

I'm sure it wasn't a challenge, but it would very interesting, and extremely useful knowledge, to know if you could produce a bot that can go cone hopping successfully. For instance, does the OpenMV system cater for the reading of floating text? Could it be used to find a cone that isn't right next to the spot where the bot lands, as is sometimes the case. I assume it caters for the reading of menu buttons?

The creator didn't suggest that as a reason. In fact, he didn't give any reason. When I pointed out that I wouldn't want my shoppers to TP out immediately without being offered a choice to earn the money here or somewhere else, he saw the point. Perhaps he'll make a modification.

Also, I don't see a big problem with people choosing to stay at the same place after earning there already. Some places need more time to get round, as I found at New Brighton, and people are likely to move on when they've seen enough and become bored with a place. I wouldn't like it if people could remain in the same place ad-infintum though, so it would be easy enough to limit the number of consecutive periods in the same place. E.g. offer the choice twice and then don't offer it again.

Sling:

It's a long post to quote, so I won't quote it

I understand your argument about not compelling people to stay in a place they'd rather get away from, but it doesn't persuade me. They are free to leave - they just won't get paid, that's all. If they want my money, they have to give something in return. I know you'll say that it then becomes traffic points, but that's not what I mean, and that's not what I want. I don't want people to stay in my place if they don't want to be there. The cone doesn't make then stay. But I don't want to pay people for coming, receiving and leaving immediately either.

Of the two types - yours and the cones - I prefer the cones because people don't have to stay (same as yours) and I'm not paying them if they don't stay. If they do stay just for the money, they might even notice something that interests them, which they wouldn't have noticed had they just been rushing round, collecting free money, as quickly as possible. For instance, the chances of me going outside and looking around New Brighton, to kill the time, would have been totally remote if I hadn't chosen to stay for the money. It simply wouldn't have happened. I would have seen the cone in the room where I landed, clicked it, got the money, clicked again for the next destination, and I'd be gone. I wouldn't even know what was there.

Yours is a system of completely free money. The cones-type isn't. You want to give people the choice of seeing a place or not - I don't. If I'm giving them money, I'm not going to give it for nothing. I want their eyes to see what I've got (no comments please ) whether they like what I've got or not. I don't think that's too much to ask.

A feature to "opt out" of that particular location, not stay, and not get paid....but to be handed the next LM would be nice.

If a person wanted to stay for three intervals and continue to get paid for those - that is fine with me - - but don't let Sling know.

I've not been able to get a LM into my cones....but have sent a notecard to the creator to ask for help with this.

That would be really good.

I hope that Qie is taking notes of all this stuff

That's very odd. If it's no mod, you shouldn't be able to put one in. Most odd.

There are different versions (I used one without the floating text, for instance - presumably an older version), so maybe he made it no mod in the newer versions and forgot that it will stop people from putting an LM in.

When I was touring last night....some of the cones had the store's LM inside the contents, and I was given a LM.....must be a different version than what I have. Mine is No Mod.

Actually, your place is a good example too. It takes time to go over all of it. And I think mine is as well.

There are two aspects

1. How to identify people who one feels will spend it onwards. Largely this could be a bot-blocking issue. Multiple-Alt-detection isn't really possible I think.
You could pay people to be the bot-filters. You'd have to trust them not to pass their own alts. They would need to cover all the language groups.

2. Where does the money come from? Residents who put up the level of money to replace current camping levels are likely to require a benefit to themselves in return. There are residents who give to others without condition, but I doubt that their pockets would be deep enough.

Let us know how that works out. Customer service is important.

The way I had thought of it was that they could not get paid more than once for the same place within a timespan of (something to be thought about).
They can move on to the next place rather than linger if the payments are more important. They have a LM to come back to for their own sakes if the place has made an impression.
If they choose to stay on at the time, they don't get paid.
But... a limit of two consecutive payments might not be an issue.

Hey! I dislike the mandatory stay idea on the basis that it's a pure pay-for-traffic enabler. Multiple mandatory would reinforce that.

I appreciate that, and I agree that it's true. I've said that a couple of times in the thread. But just because something can be used in a bad way, doesn't mean that it should be denied to the whole population who could use it in a good way. Jack used guns as an example.

I suppose that I shouldn't mention that the traffic for a showroom that I had neglected to promote and placed the first cone in.....went from about 28 to 347.....the newest showroom that I haven't finished or promoted yet went from about 20 to 148, with second cone in place.....and a section of the store that gets traffic already, increased about 100 from what it normally is, with third cone in that section.

oooops....shouldn't have mentioned that

If one of them had gone from 28 to 13,470, you shouldn't mentioned it

Oh, I don't know....I think a few would have a problem with a 500 a day increase. However.....

The following will do the same:

A promotion to group

A few forum ads

A few new classified ads

A few new Xstreet ads

An offer to a freebie group

Darn those traffic manipulating tools! Ban them all!

Store owners don't need traffic - they need someone to come in and buy an item within 30 seconds and leave....so that those darn traffic counts are not deceiving. How dare a store owner attempt to hold a person hostage in their store with interesting items, and inflate the traffic....and how dare them to use any of the above tools to do so! Shame!

Was that not a problem with the placement of the cone?
It wasn't placed such that someone arriving there is being presented with an attractive proposition. Not even a big image of the wonders outside? If the cone had been placed on the pier, or somewhere giving a view, would that have grabbed you?




I wouldn't agree that it's completely free.
They don't have to stay, but they have to be somewhere. Generally, that's your place for some or all of the wait period or the next place for the wait before they can initiate a new cycle. It could balance out for you. Sometimes you are paying a fixed amount for the 30 seconds while they look at the immediate proposition that you chose to present to them. Sometimes you are paying the exact fixed amount for the 11 minutes - 30 seconds paid for by the last place and the 11 minutes that you are paying for when they choose to stay.
i.e. sometimes you get 30 seconds to make your pitch. Sometimes you get 22 minutes.

If you think of the system purely as the worst-case event, then obviously it's a non-starter. Pay L$ for a 30-second rez and a LM that maybe gets deleted on sight?? Crazy!

The key is what they see during the first 30 seconds. Is it good enough to make them begin to explore? You seem to be saying that New Brighton didn't do that. They failed to grab you in the first 30 seconds.
Done right, and they could have had 22 minutes of your attention for L$3/L$2 in what I was floating.

That's why I see the unimaginative heavy hitters with indifferent content not benefiting from the system as much as the better presented places.

mmmmmmm, Jack is also telling people that anything that unfairly drives up traffic is going to get whacked - Like paying people to stay on a parcel flagged for search.

In terms of the policy, there is no difference between a camping device and a cone that only pays for time on site.

Even what I propose falls under that. What edges it out of "unfair" is the absence of a direct fixed payment for time connection.
The benefit to the landowner is not a given as it is for a fixed rate of L$x/minute.

If I'd been going round collecting money as fast as I could, I wouldn't have wandered round New Brighton wherever the cone was placed. It's only because I had time to kill that I decided to wander round - and was impressed.

If I understood your OP suggestion correctly, your idea is to give someone 20L and an LM. They can choose whether or not to use the LM, so there's no guarantee that they'll come to my place anyway. But I may have misunderstood. Perhaps the idea is to give them an LM which they have to use to get the 20L at the place. Then you say that the place has approximately 30 seconds to sell itself because the person can TP out immediately. I'm sorry, but it doesn't work for me. If I'm going to give someone money, I want something in return. I don't want to have to sell the place to them at the landing point.

Your idea just doesn't work for me, Sling. The cones idea *does* work for me and I wish the cones were as I think they should be, but they have too many shortcomings at the moment.

The Cone is a Tour. Merchants/Venue Owners pay for the Tour. I never could handle camping....but I think I'll take another Tour tonight.

It's just another tool like running a classified ad. I paid for the classified ad, too. I enticed someone to come into the store, and generate a few units of traffic....as do all the other tools I mentioned above.

The by-product of the traffic is a sale. There is no guarantee that the classifed ad gets you a sale....so the person only generated a traffic count for you. Same with the cone.

I used to do heavy promotions on Thursdays and Fridays, in order to get a larger traffic count for the weekend shoppers. Although I would never be on the front page of a "furniture" search....an additional 500 or 1000 on your traffic count...WILL give you at lease a slight edge for the next day.....

So there is no way that I can say that I am not trying to generate traffic. I am.

As you wish. I'm not going to argue the toss with you. In this thread, the intention of the cones is to get eyeballs into places, and not to gain traffic points. There is nothing unfair about that. Jack can say what he likes - it's nothing to do with me.