Prevent automated land buying!

Land ownership is an important part of life here in SL, but for over a week now the ability of an average player to buy land has been turned off by avi bots belonging to one player. These bots can tp to a sim and purchase a parcel within a second after it has been listed for sale, far faster than any human can react. This player has been running his bots 24 hours a day whether he himself is online or not, and has been buying every parcel that is listed for sale at a price lower than the current going sale price. Sure there have always been "land swoopers", but in the past anyone who spent even a little time searching land sales had a chance at finding and procuring a decent land bargain. This is no longer the case. The player in question has created a complete monopoly on the land trade, and is now in a position to dictate land prices single-handedly by setting his bots to buy all land under whatever price he decides to set, forcing people to buy at his price or higher if they want land. So much for a free economy ...

I propose that Linden Lab, through code or policy changes or both, stop such automated buying of land and return the ability to buy land to human players. There is currently a proposal (#2783) up for vote on this very issue here: http://secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=2783

Let Linden Lab know that you want to see an end to automated land buying.

How 'bout posting the name of this landbot person in a resident forum like secondcitizen or sluniverse or sl-forums or such?

I haven't seen any evidence of this, I'm tempted to set some land for sale to see if I can make the bot come, what kind of price are we talking?

Hey guys, I'm the one running the land bot. It's no secret because it's not against the rules and in my opinion not in any way morally wrong. This isn't WoW, this isn't a game, this is a platform. It's not cheating to use bots. It's practically encouraged. What do you guys think open source means? What do you think LL's continued support of libSL means? It means that people are given tools to programmatically solve problems in SL.

I'm not exactly sure how you work out that I have a land monopoly. My average land holdings at any time are around half a sims worth. It should be prety obvious which plots are mine just by looking in the land sales search. Why would I buy all the land in the game and keep it? I may be a cheater cheater pumpkin eater but I'm not an idiot!

Also, if I have such an awesome power over the whole grid how comes prices have fallen instead of risen over the last week?

Fact is, unlike some, I don't fool myself into thinking I control the market. No. I follow the market same as everyone else with common sense. If the market falls my prices fall if the market rises my prices rise. My pitiful amount of land is a drop in the ocean compared to the 3-4 sims a day LL is releasing.

I'm sorry to hear that you aren't fast enough to buy land for a third of it's value anymore perhaps you should try to make yourself faster? Build yourself up instead of just cutting me down.

To reiterate my earlier point. Sure, I could buy all the land under 15/sqm and set the price at 16/sqm. IF I WAS AN IDIOT! How fast do you think I'd run out of money doing something that stupid? If it's such a cunning idea why didn't anyone do it manually already? You don't need robots to lose all your money on a market crash humans are perfectly capable of doing that on their own.

Hehe, cool.

Now I don't have to put up some land for sale.

Personally I don't care if you do run a bot, I was just curious about it.

I think running a bot for this is disgusting, I'd suggest putting a confirmation code on land purchases, you know the kind of scrambled images you have to read and enter the text of. This would be generated server-side and sent to the client which has to send the code back as text to confirm they are not a bot.

Open Source is not to allow people to exploit SL, it's to allow SL to be improved in stability, performance and useability.

Don't be intentially obtuse. The human brain and nervous system forces a 5/8ths of a second delay between sight and finger action, and that is at its fastest, most focused state. A bot doesn't have such liability. No amount of 'building yourself up' can counter the poor building of nature or god or whatever you believe created human beings.

Actually I meant build a better program. Obviously people can't be faster or more accurate than computers.

If you wanted to sell your land why would you choose to arbitrarily restrict the number of people who can buy it? This kind of nonsense is bad for sellers and only serves to prop up a bunch of unskilled mouse operators in their desperate bid to save a dying business model.

Look around at the only people who care about this stuff and you'll see it amounts to a tiny core of about a dozen people who used to be able to make money by basically doing nothing all day long. Everyone else in the game will be entirely unaffected and the market will float up and down with supply and demand just as it always has.

Oh yes. Everyone who uses SL has the knowledge and ability to mod the client to do that.
*Rolls eyes*

So nobody should be allowed to.

Elanthius has created an advantage that anybody can duplicate with the requisite skills. That you don't have those skills shouldn't stop others from using theirs.

I agree. Bots like this ones should be stopped.
Imagine SL with a docen of this vampiric bots buying the land and reselling it at a higher price all the time.... I don't like the idea.

Aren't vampiric bots a contradiction in terms?

OMG can you imagine how much worse that would be than the situation last week. i.e. 2 dozen vampiric land flippers (including myself!) buying land and reselling it at a higher price all the time.

*edit: Oh, and you guys should be thanking me. Land prices have dropped L$2/sqm since my bot started trading.

Yes, and "bot resident" is not?

I don't recall anybody saying otherwise.

You misunderstand the purpose of Open Source. The purpose of Open Source is to provide a means for the broader community to be involved in developing, fixing and improving the software product, for the benefit of the broader community. What you are doing is modifying the software in such a way as to give yourself an obscenely unfair advantage over others. What you're doing is not "problem solving". There is no problem which would require this as a solution. You want to buy and sell land, you have the tools already to do that in the official viewer, like everybody else. What you have created is clearly an exploit, and your use of such software is clearly a violation of the Terms of Service.

I think is actually creating a problem becose this bot searching lands 24/7 must be generating lots of querys to the databases aggravating the database load troubles that we are experimenting in the grid.

The TOS clearly discusses software like mine as being completely allowable until LL says otherwise.

Trust me, most of the complainants are hitting the search button at least as frequently as the bot generates searches, causing a higher db load than the bot. I know I do when I look for cheap land to buy. The bot won't need to search as often because of its raw speed in getting to the parcel for sale and buying it.

Check out and vote on Proposal 2783 at http://secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=2783 calling for an end to automated land buying. We have over 800 votes from over 120 users already, but desperately need your vote as well.

That's exactly what needs to change and the reason why a lot of people is voting.

I'm certainly very aware of the possibility of overloading the servers. You should all give up on your fairness arguments and your TOS arguments and focus on this one instead since it really holds water.

My bots hit the search once every two seconds and I have two of them. That's much less than a single land flipper would do, but on the other hand I'm doing it 24 hours a day without sleep. On the upside my bots don't do all the things that other people do to create load like flying around and looking at stuff and interacting with people so it's probably a wash.

As it is I think it's fair to say my bots use more resources than normal people in some areas but much much less in others (for example none of them have hoochy prim hair!).

I can imagine if bot wars start to escalate that it will be very tempting to hammer the servers harder and harder to gain microseconds of edge and I hope LL is active in preventing problems caused by anything like that.

I voted for this but think it could be worded better. Kinda came off like an attack against this guy, making it less likely to be taken seriously by LL.

Personally, given the number of times LL has shut down search in the last few months (implying that search is a big source of datebase misery), I would rather have a proposal to limit the number of searches a user could do - smack down this genius who has 2 bots doing searchs "only" every 2 seconds 24x7 and be proactive against the next bot that pounds on the system like this, whatever it is.

It would have to be a little clever, tho - just saying "no more than 1 search/minute" wouldn't work well. Maybe something similar to the LSL energy stuff..

Okay, lets say a skilled Open Source programmer or team of programmers released a "Real Estate Helper" version of the client. Ostensibly, this new client fits your definition of an improvement to the product and benefits the broader community. At what point exactly would this improved client cross the line into the realm of an obscenely unfair advantage aka cheating?

Suppose the client had an improved search tool that let you filter by < and > L/m2 instead of just by < $L asking price. Would that be unfair?

Suppose the client had an improved search tool that automatically reloaded the search results every 20 seconds. Would that be cheating? Would you use such as feature?

Suppose the client had a one-click buy feature, where you simply clicked a button on the search results, and you'd automatically tp to the parcel, and the about land window would automatically pop up. This might give you a 5 second advantage over someone who doesn't have this tool. Would that be cheating?

What if the one-click buying button also executed the purchase?

What if instead of displaying the results on the screen, the new client could dump the results to a text file or database, which you could then open in Excel and manipulate?

What if this new client had offline alert features, where you didn't necessarily have to be staring at the screen in order to be aware of good land offers? Would that be an inpropriety?

What if the client had all of these features? Would you use it? Would you be mad if others did?

Where, exactly, do you draw the line of inpropriety regarding the use of the code that LL has intentionally made available to anyone who wants to modify it?