What about Bots?

I wonder what you think of Bots .....

I have two of them from Sinewave and I run themonline all time , as scenerey people ....

one is the welcome and information giver in my shop , the other instead is a Old Fisherman , from the Old and the Sea who fishes in my Las Rocas Bay .... to give scenographic presence...


But so far I seen a misuse of them ......

I been to a sim where in sky there whas an army of bots all there standing to make the traffic go up plus I know they are used for copyboting stuff , if I am not wrong ...


Now What could be done to prevent misuse of them ? becouse they not only give false indication of Presence and trafic in Sims and in all SL , but they are used to copy stuff....

I like my bots but I do not abuse of them since I just use for what theyare supposed to be , actors .... but other instead use them in a more subtle way ....


Is there anything that could be done to stop this behaviour?

Now I see at the number of people online , I see 43401 so givan that in that sim ..... I saw more than 12 bots I wonder how man of those people are rel human beeing or bots.....

maybe in SL we are no more than 10000 ppl and lall rest is bots?

now my personal suggestion would be :

1 allow no more than one or max 2 bots per sim

2 they can only be placed in your own possessed land .

would this help?

Typical! You wait for weeks for a bots thread, and then 3 come along together.

feastor famine Phil.. the way of the world.
anyway for weeks the grid was fairly stable... the server updates werent going well for LL.. and when they finally roll one out... it borks everything up...

i think that has a lot more to do with not being able to log in and the nightly frightlies of things just not working right..

LL can say what they like .. but after every single server update .. theres a week or two of downright borkedness.. until they come along and fix that and break something else..

the fact that they couldnt get the server update right for weeks and weeks and kept rolling it back gave us some sort of stability for a while..

now that theyre back to fiddling things again.. bots get the blame.

traffic bots are not the problem, bots that interact, like your "actors" are the problem.

Traffic bots don't use up bandwidth or resources, the software they run off of doesn't downbload textures or prim information or anything else that a regular SL client needs.

Your "actor bots" however are interactive right? Like the welcome one welcomes people? if so, that means your bots need to download information, like who is around them and what people say.

So really, traffic bots don't put stress on SL. Yours do!

Not at all I am very aware of lag and stuff sO I checked the lag that they do eventually and its actually the script making 0.003 on the land debug control , and anyway I am talking of trafic faking not about performances here!

Oh come on!

I don't know what "the problem" is that traffic bots are but it's ridiculous to try to discourage people from actor/scenery bots or bots doing helpful tasks.

I wish there were more bots acting as fishermen or sweeping floors or whatever useful thing it is they can do. Traffic bots /are/ the problem because the whole system of traffic encourages people to overuse resources to the detriment of themselves and everyone else.

Only count premium accounts in traffic

The whole traffic system needs to be eliminated but that is very difficult politically for LL to do right now. As soon as they eliminate traffic concurrency rates will drop in half and sign ups will significantly slow down.

The press will see this as Second Life beginning to die which will be bad because since SL is already actually starting to shrink they don't want to encourage the rumours.

Possibly it would behoove LL to do a short sharp shock now to avoid having a bigger one further on down the line but it will take someone high up with some serious balls to take a risk like that. More likely LL are a bunch of short sighted cowards and we're stuck with traffic and we're stuck with traffic bots.

Why is that?

If you did only count premiums in traffic, it would give an approximate indication of which areas are truly popular, since the premiums visit those places more than they visit the unpopular ones.

So as far as I can see counting premiums is a better than not counting traffic

Only counting premiums also needs to be extended to search ratings from peoples picks.
This would prevent people making dozens of bot accounts and putting their location in the picks to try to cheat the system.

1. Create dozens of premium alts on stolen credit cards
2. Charge business owners to have them log into their parcel
3. Profit.

*coughs*Land bots*cough*

Which would become the new "traffic bot," in that they'd be premium anyways, so they'd count. Land sellers using them would be able to double their profits from these kinds of bots by having people "rent" space in their profile picks. Thus, the gaming continues.

If they have to keep the traffic number around, it should only be viewable by the land owner. Otherwise, it should be gone.

2 and 3 would make stolen credit cards unnecessary. Remember that a premium account almost pays for itself in stipend.

2 and 3 would make stolen credit cards unnecessary. Remember that a premium account almost pays for itself in stipend anyway.

Ok here we go......
Premiums are not the only ones that go to these places, they are not the only ones to spend money. Get over yourself.

Cap(not premium for sometime now and proud of it!)

Counting premiums only doesn't mean that you're assuming only premiums spend money, rather it means you're assuming that premiums are *not* special and go to the same kinds of places and spend money in the same kinds of ways as everyone else.

Think of it like the Neilsen families. Nobody says "only the Neilsen families watch TV". The goal is not to favor premiums, but take advantage of the fact that premiums are less likely to be traffic bots and use them to get a better measure of the actual human traffic to locations.

Best one I've seen yet is in the pic below. I didn't actually *go* there (hell, I wouldn't have been able to get in) but I think it's safe to assume that with its massive traffic rating and the two huge piles of green dots most of those were bots and campers.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/skelldagger/3170011083/

I didn't know whether to be impressed at their dedication to obtaining high traffic numbers, or to facepalm at the stupidity of packing a sim SO full that nobody else could get in!

I think I might make it a project to try and visit this week. See if I can get an actual screenshot of 'em

Lol ...

May bve he just logs them at a certai n hour of the day and then logs them out so when he is offline all others can go there and use that trafic from the boots to get above others inthe search I guess....

May be in SL we are just 1000 people and the boots make the difference with the other 40000 ....

That is very true and the basic accounts who spend money and rent land are just as valuable to the economy

But that is not the point

What I was trying to explain (not very successfully evidently) was that a popular place gets both more premiums and more NON premiums than a non popular place
So even if you only ever count the premiums you still correctly know which place is more popular as it's the ratio of people between the places that counts.

Maybe someone better at explaining mathematics can word it better.

Oh yeah, that's been a giant camping place even since before the bot explosion. They've been stuffing the sim that way for a couple of years now, so it must be working for them.

how do bots copybot?

LOL...I have to ask this though...don't you get tired of saying the same things(asking this in a nice way, not sarcastic)

Ashe

Having only Premiums count traffic would be best combined with an llIsPremium function for scripts. That would enable residents to create objects which would bring premiums in or encourage regulars to go Premium, thus adding value to Premium memberships.

Without this it would be kind of silly, imagine a club owner having to tell visitors to... buy mainland... even if they had no interest in it, just to increase traffic to the club.

Land bots are actually useful, IMHO. Yes, sniping land out from unaware sellers is bad, but allowing AWARE sellers to sell their land instantly at a near market rate, reduced for the convenience, is good (and what land barons classically did)

Probably a silly question for the longtimers, but... do bots count against the max av count for a region? I.e. mainland is 40 max; if Joe Shopowner parks 20 bots in his store is that counted against the sim max?

If so, what do land rental agents and business owners in that sim do about it?

hey!

bottime again

@Jupiter Schmooz
yes a bot will count as mainagent no matter if its
a good scenerybot
or
a bad trafficbot

premiumbots also will add traffic to the system
+ with anual memebership you will have stipend and no tier for 512sqm per bot, set all to goup and get the 10%percent bonus.

Yes I do. That's why I'm not joining in the discussion much. It's just that the forum has been a bit boring for me lately. At least with a bots thread I can chip in if I have something to say, or if I just want to post something