The Mainland Cannot Compete - Discussion to keep you busy during downtime

This has become a rather hot issue for me. Do I give a damn about the popular places list? Not entirely. But this has become a situation of wild inequality that the Lindens must address in some fashion.

Take a look at the following picture please, before going any further.

The Second Life World - Whats Popular? Islands Apparently

20 listings daily on the popular places list, every single one of them is a private estate, or multiple private estates, nearly every single one of them uses some kind of free money scheme + jacking up its max agent count to 100 to draw its traffic.

Now is that wrong? Is it right for me to say that you can't do whatever you want on your land that you bought and paid for? No its not right....however you draw your traffic is YOUR business entirely, if you can live with your business ethics then I can live with them also.

My problem is not with you, the estate owners, even while I may not agree with your ethics I cannot disagree that you do provide needed services in the Second Life world in the area of economic stimulation, entertainment and relatively gainful employment for new players in the game and old players alike.

My problem here is with Linden Labs, it is a problem I have kept more or less silent about other than discussions between myself and members of the Linden Concierge team, and it is a problem with the artificial glass ceiling those of us on the mainland are stuck under.

The Lindens made a hugely bad move by increasing the Island Estate pricing BEFORE they introduced large amounts of new mainland property into the game. The problem with that has largely placed thousands of SL Designers and Content Developers between a rock and a hard place. Our options are pay Linden Labs hugely exorbitant amounts of money or be at the mercy of the land barons, which is a pretty bad place to be right now because theres no advantage to either situation. Mainland land pricing is maintaining its level of extremely inflated pricing irregardless of the amount of land the Lindens are now flooding into the market on the southern continent at this time. The land barons are buying up that land in the south and maintaining the inflationary prices that came from the land grabs between October 06 and January 07. There has not been any depreciation of the land value due to the introduction of new land....so thusly there is no viable option but to Spend More Money!

What does this have to do with the subject? I think its obvious. But if you look at the map provided, you'll see that NO ONE and I mean NO ONE in Second Life will ever be able to reach their complete potential unless they're willing to pay Linden labs 2200 Dollars USD and 300 Dollars USD a month afterwards.

And why is this? Because the Lindens have seen fit to cap mainland sims at 40 max agents, but...its somehow okay for estates to have total control of how many agents they let in. Irregardless of how laggy a sim with 100 people in it will be, its not stopping the estate owners from compromising the sim performance to stay on that popular list to draw more traffic. More traffic = higher rents = more money = more traffic. Its a logical business model...but it is unfortunately a very unfair one that the Lindens have decided to encourage to encourage more estate ownership.

Overall I am severely frustrated, I run an incredibly popular role play sim called the City of Lost Angel's. Its stuffed with people all day long every day, at times when Second Life bugs have allowed it to happen we've had 80+ people in the sim....I don't give away a dime, I give away a content experience that people enjoy. For free, I don't charge a dime either.

But because I'm uncomfortable with the financial overhead an estate would cost me personally to maintain it, this community will never reach its full potential until I do purchase an estate. Because the Lindens feel that 40 agents on the mainland is the cap a sim can handle.

What those of us that the Lindens have so cruelly trapped on the mainland need, is an even playing field. Success in Second Life should not be determined by how much money you're willing to spend...it should be determined by the quality of your content. Is gambling and strip joints quality content? Sure it can be, but that shouldn't be determined by someones ability to foot a 300 dollar tier and give away another 300 dollars USD of Linden a month to maintain it...it should be determined by the quality of the content alone.

Give the main land a fair chance to compete. Give them 50 max agents...which mainland sims are more than capable of handling, my sim, which I own 2/3rds of the land in, handles 45 - 50 a night due to people logging out, other people TPing in as a space is available and then the people that logged out logging back in.

And its ALL DAY AND NIGHT LONG....and people aren't just sitting there either, they're shooting each other, running around the build role playing, fighting, dancing, engaging in deviant sexual pursuits and all manner of other things. If my sim can handle that load....so can the rest of them.

Give me 50 max agents....give me a fair swing to be able to let my content speak for itself. Stop limiting me.

This is MY world. This is MY Imagination. Stop limiting me because its not fiscally sound to pay you 300 dollars a month. The sky should be the limit in SL, but its not...the limit is your credit card limit.

And that....frankly...is bull-hockey.

No, really, why the hell do you care about showing up on the "popular places" list? Does anyone really think traffic means squat? ANYONE?

If you want to be able to abuse mainland sims as badly as that, when the people in the next sim over or even other landowners in the same sim are getting reamed by it, then I wish you well on your new island.

I own 2/3rds of the land in my sim. The other 1/3rd is owned by land barons attempting to gouge me for money.

The next sim over is full of ads and trash parcels? Why? Land barons.

50 users is not abusing mainland sims. 100 16sqM parcels of ad spam is abusing mainland sims.

50 users is USING mainland sims.

Oh and why do I care about the popular places list? I don't as I said, I know the traffic system is heavily flawed and easily gamed. My problem with that list is it is the content that is presented to the new user in SL as the "best" content the game has to offer. By and large that is a highly debatable assumption.

It unfairly minimizes excellent content in the game and gives people with less creative ability the ability to present their vision of Second Life as "superior" to the inexperienced user.

I mean if its "popular" it must be good right? Thats the natural assumption people make unless they've got a little time in world and actually know the difference between freebie textures and purchased objects and custom designed content.

You want to present a sim full of camping chairs as "superior" to something designed by say...Lukos Svargas or Baal Zobel or Obscuro Valkyrie or even myself? I sure don't.

Hell I don't need 50 max users if they do something with the stupid camptraffic system they're running. But they're not going to change that.....so I need a fair swing as a mainland concierge tier premium account to compete with the people on estates.

Equal access. Thats all I'm asking for, thats why ALL mainland sims have the same max agent limit.....equal access. But its not so equal when it doesn't apply to islands.

How about this. Instead of giving me 50 max agents to "abuse" my sim with as you call it, how about we just limit ALL sims in the game estate or not to 40 max agents?

Frankly I don't give a damn either way, all I want is equality. All I want is to stop being limited by my credit card limit. Thats not what SL is supposed to be about.

Far as abusing sims....Estates abuse other sims just as badly, every class 5 server has four sims assigned to it, estates or mainland, you get 4 sims to a server and an unknown about of sims per regional cluster. Telling me my 40+ people a day/night in a mainland sim is "abusing" it is about as logical as saying estates with 100 people on them aren't abusing other sims too. Which goes back to my point, either stop limiting me or start limiting the estates.

God forbid someone do something with a mainland sim other than play virtual monoply with it and flip parcels for profit at the expense of others. God forbid someone design some real content around here....what a crime.

My experience with casinos in Noonkkot is that more than 20 avatars can easily grind a sim to a halt - and it's the avatars, the sim was fine during slack times. So while I agree with you on ad spam parcels (a friend and I have managed to get all but half a dozen segments of the ad spam on Noonkkot and turn 'em off) I don't see how you can say that mainland sims can handle 50 users.
What makes you think I don't agree with that?

I will note, though, that LL has been increasingly moving estate sims to the Dallas colo and keeping mainland close to the asset servers... so most likely those islands are abusing other islands only.

And, again, what makes you think that traffic numbers mean anything anyway?

You should be pushing for the elimination of traffic ratings completely if you want to level the playing field.

I'd love to push for that, but then theres no effective way to rate content at all. And without some visual representation of content rating new traffic has no idea where to go...then it all becomes a game of who can put the right first character in their parcel description to make sure they end up at the top of the list.

I'm not saying there has to be competition, I'm just saying there has to be a reasonable way for people to search for content that serves their interests and without the traffic rating system....there isn't one. And I don't see any viable alternatives to it and I don't think Linden Labs does either which is why I'm frustrated and asking for equal access.

And yes I've seen sims with less than six people grind to a halt. Its not the sims, its the builders. SL is full of alot of optimistic, creative and bright individuals that have no clue how to design 3D enviroments in the platform. Its a sad fact but its true. Are the agents part of the problem? You're damn skippy they are....but if I've designed a 30ksqM build that can hold 40+ avatars all with heavily scripted attachments running around with guns shooting each other and not have it grind to a halt every night (we get a crash every few days, most of them are largely due to physics spikes in OTHER sims or virtual memory for OTHER sims affecting us)...then its not just all agents thats the problem. Its the builds. Its the poorly scripted equipment.

Satellite runs 40+ users at nearly all times except between 5am PST and around 9am PST where the traffic dips down into the upper 20s. Our peak Active Scripts run somewhere in the 13 - 15,000 scripts range and our daily average active scripts is around 9k. Total objects in the sim is around 6,550, around 5,000+ of that being my build, another 300 - 500 of it being random stuff people have placed/dropped in my build and maybe 1,000 of it is the combined total of prims on the few properties not owned by me in the simulator.

Now I know that all sounds insane. 40+ avatars, 15k active scripts, 5000+ objects all crammed into 30k sqM of land....but I've done it, and not only have I done it but my community has been more or less the #1 roleplay community in Second Life now since last October.

So why is it my sim with 40+ people in it runs better than the sim just to the south of me that rarely has more than 6 people in it at any one time?

You tell me. Largely I'm banking on efficient building, efficient scripting, and attention and help from the Concierge team....who I really can't say enough good things about and I wish they were allowed to enact policy rather than just deal with problems because they're all very in touch with whats going on in the world.

Actually I like that idea...What we might need is something like Yahoo and Google for SL places Then that popular list can be eliminated ;p

There is no effective way to do it now... Traffic numbers are 100% shite, and it is truly unfortunate (as you point out) that new users are not yet aware of that fact.

Given that traffic counting is not at all useful for it's intended purpose and that it is so easily gamed, I would fully support it's elimination from any kind of "popularity" statistic. For that matter, I also believe "popular places" should be utterly eliminated.

When I look at the estate land prices I see monthly rates that are equal to or higher than mainland tier costs, plus in many cases you have to give paypal infor and billing authority to some individual you don't have much reason to trust. And you don't get the stipend. Plus the land search for estate land is nearly useless for price shopping.

So to me the mainland does seem to be able to compete against the private estates.

I see the same thing, rental prices are just as much or more than I would pay for a mainland parcel. I'd have to pay 25 bucks for a 4096 for a month of mainland. Is there private estate land at a lower price for a 4096?

You mean it isn't already?

The search tool is pretty damn lousy, for sure, but that's still not a good reason to encourage more overloading of mainland sims.

That'd be a good point in another discussion, I guess. But here? I didn't say 'having few avatars in a sim makes it fast'. I said 'having too many avatars in a sim makes it slow'.

...if you've done that you deserve the Nobel Prize, the Fields Medal, and the Heinlein-Hemingway-Kipling Superman Award. I really really really find that hard to believe. Not unless you've got special support from LL or you're not telling us everything... like, most of the avatars are non-physical almost all the time (sitting on prims or not standing completely still enough that they get turned non-physical) and all the guns are custom chat-based taggers.

That question isn't all that interesting, because I know lots of ways that 6 agent sim could be sucking... not to say I wouldn't still like to know your side of the answer. The more interesting question is what would happen to folks everywhere else if all the casinos around us got another 25% agents in them.

I haven't seen a simulator handle more than 16 or so avatars without beginning to lag horribly. And I'm talking a real simulator, with real avatars, not an empty sim with vanilla human avatars. With scripts heavily controlled you can push maybe 30 if you're real lucky and still get decent frame-rates.
But 50 avatars on any simulator is just not going to happen unless LL starts offering a machine where you can dedicated all four processors to a single sim (and software to take advantage of it) for $1200 a month

Its been done. Its been going on since last September now. 25 - 40+ people in the place at all hours of the day every day.

All the avatars are physical. All the guns are well designed guns from some of the best designers in SL but not specifically designed for our combat system. Our combat system is self designed and its more or less the most advanced safe zone combat system in Second Life. And I get no more support from LL than any other mainland concierge tier account.

Drop by and have a look, City of Lost Angel's...its not hard to find, its right at the top of the list for a search for roleplay or vampires or demons.

I'll take cash, I don't really have an impressive enough wall for all those awards.

Ok I don't usually do a "suck up" but for once I will in this instance. Suzanna is correct in what she claims for City of Lost Angels. As a player there the action is generally smooth even when hitting peaks of up to 40 AVs. Usually when there are severe lags it is across the grid as a whole and we all have our contentions and arguments about what's causing that and how to solve it.

On the original subject of popular places I entirely agree with her. When I first joined I took the logical (I thought) route of wanting to go where most SL residents went, as one would presume something good/interesting would be happening there. Well for the first 2 hrs what did I see? People sat in chairs doing nothing, saying nothing. People stuck on dance pads shaking their booty for 2 bucks every 10 minutes and finally people filling out web surveys for businesses to earn a couple 100 bucks so they can be hit with spam for the rest of their RL existence.

How is that any advertisement for what's possible in SL or any true representation of what is truly popular in SL? But I will guarantee that any noob with a logical thought process will use the popularity ratings to search out interesting places. She is also right that there is an inherent advantage if you are allowed more agents onto your sim thereby generating more traffic whether it is dubious or real. Whatever she does there is no way she can compete against any slightly lesser or equivalent business or service unless she ups sticks and moves to an island herself. So the answer is to either increase mainland limits (but that might cause problems as others have noted); bring the islands back down to 40 (yeah like that's going to happen!); allow a peak time usage extension up to 50? And somebody come up with a more credible popularity rating and I have no idea how you might do that. Anyway suck up and rant over.

Regards, Sy Beck

Thanks for your input Sy, its hardly sucking up, its just the truth.

Investigated an estate that proclaims itself to be a "role play" sim today, there were 25 people there this morning at 5am PST but I couldn't find a single one of them anywhere. Turns out they're in a skybox at 200m getting paid L$4 per 10 minutes to camp there to drive up traffic.

I have never given away a dime, I've never asked for a dime. Yet all it takes is agents set to above 40 and a "Camp Ma$ter" system and voila....you're "better" than someone who is pouring their lives into their design.

The traffic system is bogus and I need the fair chance to let my content speak for itself. Theres only a few ways to do that and the easiest way to do it without completely overhauling the current system is to up mainland max agent limit to 50...sure its not 100 users, but its at least a chance to play on a slightly more even field.

And before you tell me that someone thats paid for an island has a RIGHT to such and such because they pay more money than me....if someone paying 10 dollars a month bought a 512 lot in my sim and plopped down 40 high paying camping chairs on it and started locking up the sim I own two thirds of....you'd tell me they had just as much right to the sim resources as I do.

The "more money" argument is one sided and false too. If I've got as much right to the resources of my sim as someone who owns 1/64th of it does...I've got as much right to a fair chance at generating the traffic an estate can generate WITHOUT owning an estate.

This is the inequality.

Bump the mainland to 50 agents, or cap all sims irregardless of location at 40 or 50 agents, or completely overhaul the traffic system to eliminate camping and free money schemes as viable methods of traffic generation.

One of the three needs to occur.

Just a note here,
because I run a train around my yard, I am contstantly watching sim performance as it determines if my train will stay on the track or not. I wear a device that gives me three script run times concuurently, The fastest, an avr. and the slowest script run time. Watching my sim Sammamish (whicjh I own close to half of), struggling with only myself in the sim one day last week I decided to check out some "popular places" see how they were running. I visited club extreme and arrived there so see maybe 40- 50 avi's a 100 or so slot machines and a sim running fully 3x as fast as my empty sim. I continued and every "popular places" Island I went to, all regardless of the amount of occupants and accessories were running 2-5x times faster than my empty sim.

Even playing field, not even close. My train wouldn't hold the track, live help Lindens refusing to see anything wrong with the sims performance and even went so far as to tell me my device was not accurate even though the Linden who uttered those words never inquired as to what the numbers indicated or where or how they were ascertained. I wear it everyday and watch the numbers like a hawk and funny I can see and correlate the effects of bad numbers as they happen.

Are my $ as green as Island owners?

What part of "this can't be done without making every casino and camping hole an extra 25% nastier to everyone around them" don't you get?

I haven't had a chance to check your location yet, but even if you've pulled off some kind of miracle it doesn't matter because:

1. The folks with the camping holes on estates will just bump it up again, you can't win the arms race.
2. There's only one of you, and hundreds of camping holes on the mainland, and none of them are run by miracle workers.

Personally, I'd rather see the mainland avatar limits reduced, and the traffic system eliminated. It serves no useful purpose as it is.

Sure this sounds logical, lets force me to spend double tier to maintain land in two mainland sims to get the current amount of users my sim currently holds and not do anything about estates who have full control over that.

You don't seem to understand or comprehend, my community is popular because it is a content experience. Theres 40+ people there a night because 40+ people WANT to be there a night. If mainland max agents was 100 agents there'd be 100 people there a night. If you reduce current mainland max agents that just screws me even further because even if theres no traffic rating at all, it still forces me to maintain multiple mainland sim communities to provide my content to the users that wish to be a part of it.

Which is more or less no different than having to get an estate in the first place.

Effectively you're saying that no one on the mainland should be able to provide a service that attracts alot of foot traffic. And all of us, irregardless of the tier level we pay, are more or less artificially regulated to small time stuff unless we want to hop on the island wagon.

What happened to Our World, Our Imaginations? My imagination blew past playing house a long time ago...is that all we should be allowed to do?

There is one point nobody has addressed.

Nobody is going to want to live/work/play/shop or do anything else in a sim that has 90 campers in it, no matter how high it's traffic is, assuming they even care about traffic. It WILL be laggy as sin, and most reasonable people will turn right back around and leave (assuming the TP works). If your sim is well managed, well built, and has something to offer, you will get real traffic. 40+ in your sim? you are doing everything right. Be happy. Let the 90+ campers sim owner shoot themselves in the foot, in their quest for traffic. In the end they've gained nothing but a sim full of zombies.

I think it could be successfully argued that there would be at least 90 people who wanted to be there.

Ignorance and Desire are not the same thing.

Not to mention a while back someone in the forums explained how he was able to have up to 10 clients running on 1 PC. So if you don't believe that someone, somewhere, isn't willing to get 9 of those going to fill their sim, you would be mistaken.

I love the traffic systhem, it tells me always where to NOT to go.
Just dismiss all sims with more than 10k traffic and you have a exellent SL time!

10 clients is pretty impressive. My dual core machine (~4 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM) can handle 4 at an almost playable frame rate (6-9 FPS) and things start going bad at 5 or more (they start crashing and trying to start it back up causes at least one other to crash).
My Dream Machine (by Boxx Tech) is a 16 core PC with 128 GB of RAM--talk about running 16 clients and still having power left over (based on how many my current machine can handle, you'd be able to run 32 concurrent instances and each one would have just under 4 GB of RAM).
$30,000 for the box though. *drools*
Sales guy wasn't happy with me when I called wanting to know how much it cost.

You were talking about traffic ratings, so I was talking about traffic ratings. Now you're talking about potential customers being turned away, that's a whole different problem, with a whole differnt solution. Who says you have to buy a whole sim? Spread your build across two or four sims... that doesn't mean buying more land, that just means distributing the land you DO have across more sims.

Come up with a way to do it that doesn't screw over more people than it helps. Just increasing the number of people someone can cram into a sim is going to increase the number of people the jerks out there can cram into a casino... and lag the folks around the casinos more and more.

What, namecalling now? I'm not "playing house". I don't even *have* a house.

This is one of the key problems with SL in my opinion: Its a grid of distinct simulations, and when it comes to computing social dynamics and other "human" problems, it falls short.

As far as I can tell, simulators are not parallelized; all simulators have their own CPU and memory resources that are incapable of being handed off. The bare simulator with 1-2 agents and a minimum of scripts is basically idling, while a neighboring simulator with 30 agents in a club is straining at maximum load. Basically, a legacy architecture flaw in SL that we're stuck with, given that in 2003, it was the best technology available.