Offline dwell to prevent camping

Depending on whether the cost is still economical for the advertising value of being on Popular Places and coming high in Find.

My logic here was that since dwell comes from a fixed size pool, the problem isn't that camping chairs get dwell per se, but they get too big a share. The answer could be to make the camping chair ops get less of a share, but that as has been discussed before, that either results in lots of other people getting hurt, or in a new way of getting a big share to emerge. So the alternate solution is, give everyone the ability to get a big share, so that the benefit of getting one cancels out. Yes, you can game offline dwell, but everyone can do it, and it doesn't cost any sim resources to do so - and since people are going to game whatever's put in place anyway, it figures to minimise the impact of it.

Offline dwell would only encourage unethical dwell hungry mongrels to create bunches of alts, and encourage other newbs to create bunches of alts... and have them all point to their parcel. Who needs multiple computers to create dwell income anymore, you can multiple your dwell income with just one! Ugh.

It then becomes a contest of who can get away with creating the most accounts, and the balance of power shifts to reward people who encourage alting.

There's enough schitzophrenia out there already.

Dwell is just an ugly problem.

Popularity and dwell/traffic income have value. Where there's value, there's theft.

Personally? I'd like to see a form of endorsement where folks can more safely donate a few sqm of their unused land allocation to places they appreciate. Aka: You're bring cool stuff to SL! Lemme help reduce your costs a little!

I think your attacking the problem from the wrong end - or perhaps not seeing the problem.

The problem isn't the chair owners getting a big slice of dwell - thats the system working as it should.... more avs for more time -- they get the big slice.. thats what dwell or traffic is.

Making everyone get a bigger slice doesn't do anything to fix the prob - all it does is take away what little use the traffic score on land actually has to some people (like myself) - to see how well used it was that day.

The PROBLEM is caused when it gets a big enough reward to be gamed into the ground... and the USD check for DI provided just such a reward.. high place on find I can live with - as now find shows nothing until you type in a word or actually search.

i must have missed something. did the rules change again? last i heard dwell was being phased out as a monetary reward system and going to be stopped. has this changed and they are keeping the dwell = cash thing?

if not, what is the discussion about? dwell is leaving and thats that.

Of all the truly asinine ideas, that takes the cake. Dwell is supposed to be generated by avatars/members who are logged on and actually PARTICIPATING IN SL DURING THE TIME THEY'RE LOGGED IN.

The morons who hog server resources by logging on and putting their avs on "autopilot" are abusing the resources of everyone else in the particular sim. When one location/business effectively locks out all other owners of the sim because of this abuse, and prevents the normal traffic of other SL-ers who want to visit that area's homes, features, and businesses, that is monopoly of the server resources, and they should be forced to pay tier charges for the use of the sim resources they are monopolizing.

Dear, did you put your brain in a box when you logged on tonite?

However, it isn't working. What's your idea for fixing it?



Whereas, if we abstract this out, so that they can get exactly all the benefits of camping while not logged in, then no such resources are consumed and traffic can flow freely!

I don't think that is "the system working as it should". I understand - and it makes sense to me - that Dwell (and DI) were designed to provide some reward for people who created appealing locations that did not make money by other means, so that SL could have some content for users to explore for free without the people providing it being forced to pay full tier for entertaining others.

The problem that camping chairs show up is that since the average user does not spend the majority of their time playing SL, they will have more inactive time than active time, and thus appealing to that inactive time will always be more effective in terms of dwell gain than appealing to the active time. So the "more avs for more time" rule results in sites that encourage inactivity being the most popular. Again, I really don't believe this is "the system working as it should".

Nobody yet has come up with a way of fixing this, so I'm proposing that we give every site a bite at a user's inactive time, and also remove the rule that avs must be online (thus taking up resources and account slots in the sim) for that inactive time to be counted.



That is true - although it would indicate how many people had nominated the site as the beneficiary of their offline dwell, which provides a kind of quality voting system. The old votebox system, as I understand it, only failed because every user had an unlimited number of votes. Here they have one.

Of course there's always going to be other ways of getting a big share of dwell.

Just like there's other ways of getting a big shared of Lindens.

Economics exists because letting people get a big share of stuff works. Anshe has a lot of Lindens, but that works.

The trick is to make "getting a big share" of whatever it is involve doing something that benefits whatever it is the economic system is supposed to benefit.

In this case, Linden Labs.

Base dwell on the value of the dwell-shedding-avatars to Linden Labs, make paying customers worth more, and whatever turns out to get a lot of dwell will be something that paying customers want to see.

It may not be what any of us expect, but at least it won't be camping chairs.
Lots of people have come up with more likely ways than this one.

I've already noted in other posts that it's not freakin' working, son. So have many other people. THAT'S THE POINT OF THIS ENTIRE DAMNED DISCUSSION, IN CASE YOU'RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.



How about they just DON'T get credit for playing zombie at all, and traffic can flow freely ANYWAY?

THEY'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO _BE_ PLAYING ZOMBIES, YOU MORON.

Now if LL will simply require avs to be doing something like chatting while logged in, or actively DOING something, instead of the same repetitive zombie shit (like chewing gum), then the zombies won't be able to make their lazy lindens, and everyone else will be able to use the server cycles the zombies would be hogging uselessly.

But that's very difficult. No matter what method is used for detecting zombies, if it's automated, it will be beatable by an macro that automates responses. Other MMO games generally have to have live customer service people go around asking intelligent questions to suspected zombies. And I think we'd all prefer the Lindens were spending their time developing and improving SL rather than hanging around camp chair sites quizzing people. I suppose you could use a "distorted letters" image, as used on some web sites, but that would still be rather awkward for users who were legitimately idle.

Oh, god, this proved to be not at all amusing. That's what I get for necroposting.

Dwell was created to prove a metric of how popular a place was. The only objective way they could work out to do that was by calculating what percentage of time an avatar spent there.

The system, in theory, works - thats exactly what it does do.. it gives an objective look at how well that parcel was trafficed. The system in practice is gamed.

Voting also failed - but due to 'vote rings' where folks would fly around once a week and cast their votes on the same places.

Offline Dwell as you describes it breaks the former with all the disadvantages of the latter. Taking away any use the original had as a usefull measure of how much your parcel was 'used'.

The problem ISN'T the traffic calculation - the problem is that there is a big enough incentive to game it.

And any system will be gamed - yours will be gamed like the old voting booths were.

So don't "detect zombies".

Just don't count Basic accounts to the same degree in the dwell calculations. Why should Linden Labs care how popular a place is for people who aren't paying customers?

Hell, don't count them at all. Just count dwell for Premium accounts.

Because a Basic account might be a paying customer. They might buy L$. True, their US$ for that don't go directly to LL, but they do indirectly because the person selling the L$ might use that money to pay tier. Or they might notice they're becoming successful and therefore buy more land, which they wouldn't have bought if it wasn't for the Basics around to buy their stuff and make them a success.

Also, because of the relatively low number of premium accounts, you'd wind up skewing the popularity results. Landlords couldn't offset rent with dwell so much any more, so rents would go up.

It's nice that this is being discussed, but that doesn't justify leaving an obvious feature suggestion thread in teh General Forum for a whole week.

True. In fact in previous versions of this proposal I made that point and suggested other definitions for "paying customer" that might be included. Unfortunately. that seems to have been too complex... I had hoped that this would get your attention this time around.
The point of this is to skew the popularity results.

Skew them in a way that represents the kind of popularity that Linden Labs needs.
The total dwell payments would be the same, they would just go to different people, so some landlords might need to increase rent, and others will find they're actually making more.

The biggest difference is that "buying dwell" with camping chairs wouldn't work, so you'd get a larger variety of places getting the income.

Argent- You Are Genius!

In one swift move this would turn the people gaming the dwell system into a marketing force promoting the merits of upgrading to premium... in ways I'm sure no one has though of!

It would be a a huge benefit to LL and at no extra cost!

Absolutely mindbogglingly brilliant!

Good lord, I was just thinking "this would be a way to promote development that was interesting to paying customers"... but... damn... that's a huge effect that I never thought of that actually makes it a better idea.

maybe the answer is in having som kind of offline dwell based on distributive processing. I mean my computer at home is on 24/7 even when I am not using it. Why not let me take over sume of the duties of the asset server wwhen I am not using my machine, and give me lindens for it.

There'd be negative results, though.

For example, places such as the Shelter that are devoted to helping newbies would see a massive drop in dwell and traffic because most people only upgrade to Premium after they're done with the newbie thing. That in turn would increase their costs even further and lead to them dropping in the Find list and becoming harder for actual new players to find.

What appeals to people who are Premium already, and what makes people want to switch to Premium, might not be the same thing.

I think entirely removing dwell from basic accounts might not be the way to go - as Yumi's said there's lots of newbie sites that I would suggest deserve (as much as anyone deserves) to have a decent dwell rating, since that's our existing metric.

Weighting them differently so that a premium account carries more dwell might be well worth consideration however, so that clubs etc. tend to fall a bit unless they have long term appeal, but some odd places do show up deservedly that are currently swamped.

Like a lot of the others I think dwell is bust. I kind of hope that LL doesn't phase it out though (I typically receive the princely sum of L$50 or so in dwell/group dwell a day, so it's not making a huge difference to me personally, but I know people for whom it does make a difference).

OK, maybe this should be in feature suggestions, but I caught it here. I'm sure it's not 100% original either.

Land owners get dwell over their own land. Face it, if I spent hours at home each day (which if I'm scripting I pretty often do) and I wanted to game the dwell I'd set up a little group, deed some land to it and call it my workshop and get the dwell. It's easy to do.

This changes the 'reward for cool places' concept, but that's clearly not working anyway, there are lots of ways it's broke.

It changes the fiduciary rewards since the pot doesn't change size but the amount earned per point of traffic will. If you're doing camping purely for your direct gain you'll probably give up. If your gain with some other stuff is the mix then you might well give up. If you're genuinely doing it as a method of putting something back into the community (get a life, choose something more fun dammit!) but you can continue.

From a different perspective I have a strong suspicion it will also help scaling SL. Remember a few weeks ago dwell didn't get paid on time because it was taking more than 24 hours to calculate? If you look at your transactions I tend to get group dwell (easy, no owner calculations) at about 0130, individual dwell takes until about 0430. I'm not a huge landowner, and it seems to take the same sort of time for the others I've talked to about it. I'm assuming (possibly wrongly) that a big part of that extra three hours is calculating out the traffic that owners give to their own land so they don't get paid dwell for it.

It might not be the answer of course - but it's a little tweak rather than the more normal huge hammer, and it might just work a treat.

Then how about my original scheme?