Please help fight camping

Well there was a time when the game had meaning, but now there is no real direction.

Should you ever decide that there's something about Second Life or a Linden Lab (Research?) policy that you don't like, I suggest you keep your mouth shut and just spend time enjoying the place instead, lest ye be considered a hypocrit.

--Hugsy

It's easy to see how this happens. At any venue where LL solicits input on Search, the only part of the customer base represented are those who want to be found, not those who want to find things. And the most vocal among those in attendance will be those who see an opportunity to gain advantage. So LL satisfies the customers it hears and sees.

But LL is at the top of the food chain. The money actually comes from the people looking for stuff to buy. The people who sell stuff hand some of the proceeds to LL in tier, etc., but if the world doesn't appeal to buyers, the revenue stream to sellers and that flowing through to LL doesn't grow. We have ample evidence of this in recent statistics: concurrency is growing very slowly now, and if bots were factored out it in fact may be shrinking, as are the number of premium members.

We've seen a number of business owners express concern about the "quality of life" for their customers--some in this thread. Unless the businesses make that concern known to LL, there's going to be less for anybody to enjoy.

Executives at Enron, HealthSouth, Tyco, Dynergy, WorldCom and Adelphia used to say the same thing. Fraud is fraud, even if it isn't illegal in the Metaverse.

Why not just eliminate traffic numbers completely? That would solve two problems...camping and threads like this one.

In this instance, they developed this thing with the finder in mind, not the organization. Why else do you think this process has been so bitter for businesses? We were beta tested without thought for how we would feel, and we put in the most money per capita into the game.

There needs to be a balance - or else LL loses a hell of a lot of L per week in LindeX purchases because the money business pay toward classifieds will go away from classified ads into something else, probably tier and then shopping. And a L shift of that magnitude is something LL would notice and possibly feel in their pocketbooks.

Yep-----and whether it is the old traffic system or Inbound links------it is the customer that has been left out and it is His Vote that should be Most protected especially in the new search.

Actually he does not have much of a vote right now at all! Pretty disrespectful way to treat the people we count on if you ask me.

Thats all I want to do.

But whether they do or not I would rather not see people trying to justify something that isn't really justifiable.

If they want to do it, cool, but don't claim its the way its supposed to be.

That was easy enough to find in-world. The same brand just rents space at every possible mall that has traffic.

I don't think anybody is against camping as it was intended---abuse of the mechinisim that was provided for it yes, but against giving somebody a little money and helping them out, nope--don't see that.

Botting made a mockery of it.

Camping itself isn't bad, the problem is goldfarmers are running thousands of bots on the grid that just camp, sucking money out from real campers who spend inworld. Thes peoples idea of being a resident is to open the accounts pages of their hundred CampBots every week and transfer the money out to RL. Real residents are using Trafficbots to make their store rank higher than other businesses.
These are just FAKE residents. Some do use them as maniquins and keep them low in numbers to respect others enjoyement of second life. Others will nearly fill their land (40 to 50 Bots) with them hidden in invisible skyboxes till even customers have trouble getting into the sim, let alone neighbours.

Hmm, hear that echo of emptiness to your call?

Well seeing over 1/3 of the population are fake mindless zombie CampBot, LandBots, SearchBots or TrafficBots sucking money out of the wotrld for goldfarmers whose idea of being a SL resident is to open the accounts page to transfer money out to RL, you got to expect some negative threads about Botting, at least till the Bots start posting themselves.
Maybe if enough noise is made LL might realise the "Our World, Our Imagination" is becoming "Bots World, No Imagination" and REAL residents aren't happy because they are fighting each other and cutting their own throats in business to finance the goldfarmers.
You don't like a thread? We don't make you read it, so don't

They are not taking the money out of SL. They're transferring it to someone that is buying Lindens so they can buy things in SL. The L$ do not get lost when they go to people that want to turn them into US$. They get tranferred to people that are trying to turn dollars into lindens so they can buy things at your shop.

Do places that have so many campers that their customers can't get into the sim really exist? If so, do they exist for longer than a month?

The people trying to be found are trying to be found by the people that want to find things. Any system that will work for one will work for the other. If you only sell shoes, you don't want to spend your resources going after people that are only looking for hair. The people selling shoes want to be found by people looking for shoes. People looking for shoes want to find people selling shoes. You're implying that sellers are trying to find people that don't want to buy what they sell.

The problem isn't really the fact that customers might not be able to get into a region because of all the campers.

The problem is more down to the fact that the other landowners in that region can't get into their own land due to the 40 avatars/region limit on the mainland, because the 2048m2 plot in the corner has 30 camping chairs out.

If someone has camping chairs on a private island... who cares? It's their loss, they don't affect anyone else, and are in fact damaging themselves even more because of the increased cost of owning a full region.

As you say, thankfully most people that put out loads of camping chairs to try and attract people don't last too long because they a) can't afford it, and b) soon realise that what they offer is crap, and without camping wouldn't get any visitors anyway.

It's fairly easy to tell who is in SL for the fun and long term, and who's here just to make a quick buck. The latter I don't think many of us would mourn the loss of.

Well mostly that the way its suppose to work anyways.

You haven't seen the 'keyword spam' advertising where someone selling - say houses - puts 'sex camping free lindens free money pussy cock porn gay furry hippiepay cheap land' in their parcel description so it comes up in totally irrelevant searches?

No, they take money out people don't pay kids a bowl of rice a day to run hundreds of bots to buy stuff in SL, they do it to MAKE MONEY easily in RL. These guys are organised they run their own servers for email adresses and are farming every other game on the net purely for profit. Even Blizzard can't keep a lid on them in WoW, we just give them everything they need here, and LL approve of them.
And you don't have to fill a sim completely to make it impossible for people already having TP issues to get in. Yes as others say, they leave 10 spaces left for the customers and other 20 residents in the sim to share.

Yes exactly by putting out 40 camping chairs they invite people into their store that will certainly cost more to pay than they spend, considering most will be goldfarming bots.

Susie, that was the precise point of this thread: to encourage people to vote for the JIRA entry in the first post, and to help bring it to people's attention. Since you agree, I hope you voted!

The debate included a few novel ideas, but it's become mostly repetition ad nauseum of old arguments.

I believe that the traffic numbers cause the abuse. Camping exists to artificially boost the traffic ratings. Furthermore, this abuse causes traffic numbers to be nearly meaningless. Therefore, get rid of the numbers and the abuse will go away, and we haven't lost anything of much value.

I focus on what I think is in the best interest of myself and the community, and have to let LL decide what is in their best interest.

I'm not against camping, I am against ppl who use bots to it's own gain. And that's for camping, buying things without giving the others a possibility, and all that.

The google example is not a good one. To go up in the Google listing, you have to have links to your page from outside your site. To do this artificially, you'd have to have a lot of sites, and you'd be paying for those resources. The other way is to cooperate with related sites to cross post, which is perfectly legit. In both cases, the resources are paid for. In the case of SL, camp farms on non-private islands use common resources (the "tragedy of the commons" problem).

"Be careful what behavior you reward, because that's the behavior you'll get". I suggest we change the reward system to stop rewarding what we don't want.


Second, we simply point out that your activity causes us harm. We have every right to do this. It's a very selfish attitude that says it should be how I want it (because it happens to be that way currently) and I don't want it changed even though my activity causes you harm. This is the same argument businesses try to use when the are confronted with the effects of their pollution. "It's legal!" they would say, and we had to make it illegal. We had to raise grass roots support to force politicians to do the right thing and make the activity that was bad for the public good illegal. While we could blame the businesses for doing what they were legally entitled to do, even though it may have been morally reprehensible (certainly more so in the case of pollution that this little quibble over camping!), that isn't very useful.

What *is* useful is to change the system so that the undesirable behavior is not profitable.

Of course we expect those who profit from it to object, and this shows us where their interests lie, in profit. Profit is a good thing, so we should do our best to see that the activites we want to encourage are profitable, and that deceitful and harmful activities are not.

Two things: First, I attended Meta's office hours early-on when they were still soliciting ideas for the "new Search" and I can assure you that merchants were *very* vocal, and nobody in the "searching" user base was saying a word if they were in attendance. And second, it's really important that sellers understand that if we cash-out profits above tier, we're taking money out of the economy, not putting any in. The tier that we pay is just "cost of doing business" funded, ultimately, by those who pay us for our goods and services. So, I'm dealing three-card monte. Wanna play? Okay: Each card is a low-prim furniture store. Both you and I want you to pick a card. The difference is that I want you to pick *my* low-prim furniture store, and you want to pick the *right* low-prim furniture store.

The cards of in-world Search are stacked in favor of the unscrupulous dealer.