Prevent automated land buying!

The genie is out of the bottle already, there will be no going back now. I sure there is several people now working on how to do this themselves, the problem with this a two bladed sword.

1. Its going to create more drag on the database
2. Land agents will totally control the land market like never before

Before there was a chance for the average person to score up on a decent priced piece of land, atleast if you had the money and you where quick you could get a peice. It was a level playing field for everyone. Now there will be absolutely no chance for the average person without skills to build a bot on thier own, to aquire a peice of land below market value.

I have noticed more than one post with some misplaced cheer saying the land barons are getting a taste of their own medicine. its not the land barons alone that are feeling the effect of this, this trickles down to every person looking for land now and in the future

Um, what the heck was I thinking? Must have been that crack I was smoking


According to http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnchangedJustBinary, if you distribute a binary, modified or not, you must distribute the corresponding source code also. Upstream might go away, retire the version you are distributing, etc...

YAY now if only 1 or two million more people quit the grid will be back stable

well
or MORE stable anyway

LOL

Well, the effect for me was cheaper land. If that effect continues I am all for every player having the functionality of the bot in the standard second life client.

Of course it is more likely that the price drop was due to all of the new land coming up. I would like to know how anyone can say with any authority whatsoever how much influence the bot had on overall land prices. Several new sims came online and he only grabbed around 1 sim of land total. What I find particularly hilarious is people stating that he was driving prices up.

Even if the bot never existed, those holding large amounts of land purely for speculating are at risk at any time of losing considerable value when linden labs brings up new land. As far as I am concerned they have been exploiting a land shortage that is now being corrected by Linden Labs. I mean really, we are talking about speculating on a market that is controlled completely by a 3rd party, can the payoff from speculation be expected to go on forever?

From the GPL Licence itself:


This clause allows you to pass the offer off onto the person who gave it to you. It's implied that this only applies if you have not modified the source - if you have then your modifications are also covered by the GPL, which upstream would not be able to provide the source for.

Again I will say the land prices going down has nothing to do with landbot, there is no connection at all. Land prices going down has everything to do with LL releasing more land.

Certianly you don't think that land agents will buy land then release it for anything less than market price? what you paid was market price. As a real life Broker, yes i am, and i can actually call myself a Realtor as I pay annual dues to the realtors association I can say with 100% garantee that market price is what people are willing to pay for a property. which in SL as of recent times was as high as 8500 per 512m2 sounds to me thats what Bad Penguin bought at, currently prices are around 7400 per 512m2. I honestly cant see any connection at all to the landbot, and see every connection to the influx of new land. You dont need to be a speculator to see this. Prices rise and fall with the trends of supply and demand(less land = more money, more land = less money)

Lets not confuse that simple, simple equation

Let's just wait for the bot that waits until it sees a landbuyer bot coming in, and then raises the price just before the landbuyer bot sends the buy message...

I think we need generally to stop bots engaging in any economic activity because there's just way too much potential for abuse.

Yeah, that is quite true. I was running bots to buy land as far back as last June, it is just extremely easy to do. I gave it up because I had no interest in it beyond the technical "how to", and there were just too damned many plots being put up for sale by people who didn't know what they were doing and I couldn't feel good about it.

I have to admit it was great fun to see the reactions that the barons had when I, a complete newb, started to get to plots before them

I don't know about this new bot, but the one that I wrote would be crippled by captcha, and there are all kinds of other ways that LL could stop it if they chose to.

And I will argue that it is not simply supply and demand that are setting prices. Several times I wanted to buy pieces of property that were adjacent. Before I had a chance to buy them, land agents came in, bought them up, and jacked up the price. Sometimes this happened 3 or 4 times with the same piece of property. So you tell me, was it the lack of available land ramping up the price, or rampant speculation? Did someone like me really have the option of buying at the lower price? Is it any less fair that a bot beats a land agent to the punch as opposed to a land agent beating a newbie to the buy? I was trying to buy for a group, trying to consult with other group members before making a purchase, fat chance.

Someone with a bot can buy less overall land, price it lower, turn it faster, requiring less financial outlay and allowing a lower profit margin (lower prices). This can also allow more competition since it requires less real money to be tied up in overall land holdings, encouraging more speculators to get into the market and actually start competing on price. In my experience competition drives prices down, not up. Less competition almost always drives prices up.

Perhaps I am just too much an optimist, but I see more people using bots as a way of equalizing the playing field and bringing overall land prices back down to a more reasonable level based on actual supply an demand, as opposed to speculators driving prices up.

Personally I would love the abilty, in the 2L client, to be able to say - go get me 2048 adjacent sm for such and such amount in an area with a max of X amount of traffic on a flat piece of land with very little commerical activity and without a covenant.

BP Ask's - was it the lack of available land ramping up the price, or rampant speculation? Did someone like me really have the option of buying at the lower price?

A. Yes you had every option to buy the land, regardless of who bought the land while you where taking your time deciding on the purchase. everyone had the same opportunity. End of that answer, lets hope it dont get brought up again


BP Ask's - Is it any less fair that a bot beats a land agent to the punch as opposed to a land agent beating a newbie to the buy?

A. Is the bot just beating the land agents, or is it beating everyone, Its totally clear you have a big problem with land agents, and your reasoning is impaired by this blind hatred. The land bot beats everyone NOT JUST AGENTS
End of that answer, lets hope it dont get brought up again.

BP Say's - In my experience competition drives prices down, not up. Less competition almost always drives prices up.

JR Say's Yes Competition does bring down prices, but is landbot competition or is it an end to competition, As i know business, obviously much better than some others, real competition is when everyone has a level playing field, when everyone must follow the same rules of the game, for example, lets look at sports competition. would it be considered competitive if there was a 3 mile run, 9 out of 10 competitors had to run the full 3 miles but one competitor was allowed to start 25 feet from the finish line? is that fair competition?

IM not trying to flame BP here, but this kind of thinking is flawed to the point that its silly, thats why i questioned whether BP was an acutal person, or a incarnate of the landbot. Now i would like to direct the attention to title of the thread "prevent automated land buying" it wasnt "support automated land buying". Your reasoning is flawed, because your basis for reasoning is flawed. Your basis for reasoning is flawed becuase you arent looking at the issue, you aren't looking at the issue because.......?

Landbot is wrong, everyone is effected, dont forget it was land agents that made all the media hype that made YOU join. Funny how your inspiration becomes your nemesis

What you know about economics, I could put in my eye.

IRL, realtors buy cheap land and resell it to build condos. Retailers buy cheap goods in volume to sell to customers for profit.

If what you say is true, then everyone should have access to manufacturers and producers directly, Forget WalMart or car lots, just go to the source for your products.

Afterall, who needs truckers, clerks, managers and accountants. They just cut into your costs. Do you have a cheese factory in your basement? I doubt it. Can you just plug your computer into a pole out on the street. No, you can't. Our lifestyle and economy is based on others providing services, whatever they may be.

Goods and services are what makes the world go round. SL is no exception.

The PRICE the bot uses as the limit price is set by the owner of the bot. This is a very significant difference between bots.

Nobody has given ANY evidence of a monopoly. We can buy land from more than one agent. That's evidence that there is NOT a monopoly.

Careful watchfulness and vigilance is important, but we all have to carefully consider the facts, and not just our fears.

hmm, yes, this is disturbing. Hopefully it will be fixed soon!

I'm convinced this is correct.

Someone made the point that factors other than supply and demand affect the price. I doubt this, if we include speculation as part of the demand. The good news is that in the long run, speculation can't spiral prices up without limit. Those who buy land and set a selling price too high for the end users will lose money. This is true regardless of whether bots are involved.

We should keep in mind two things about those using bots:

1) They're great when land prices are rising, but dangerous when they're falling. A bot-based buyer can very easily lose his prim shirt.

2) Bots are a boon to anyone holding turkey properties that are otherwise nearly worthless due to location issues. This is another risk bot-based buyers have to accept and deal with.

Overall, I'm still against them. But we need to consider the pros and cons carefully. So far, most of the arguments against the bots aren't very convincing.

How is the playing field not level? Everyone is free to develop their own bot. I'm sorry if you don't have the skills but since you know business so well you'll realise that's hardly a reason to hobble everyone who does.

It's still too early to say.

The economy is driven by confidence. When buyers and sellers alike are confident, prices rise and the the value of currency strengthens. When land values drop (even slightly) confidence wanes, because individual investments have become devalued, if the price drops to 10/sq, then alot of people will have lost 30% of their land value, esp those who purchased recently.

Without question, prices have dropped since the Ninjas hit the grid (incidentally they operated in shadows for months.... (I thought the TOS didn't allow for reverse engineered clients and surrepticious data aquisition...but thats another issue)

Sims which once sold for 3500 will now drop significantly. Hence less profit for LL. The drastic reduction in service fees on LindeX will also greatly effect Linden Lab and the employees who depend on the service fees to justify wages. Then there is those who will be tiering down. At the time of billing, often tier is not filled, so LL was collecting bonus fees from speculators.... that will also dry up.

LL understands the need for a vibrant economy and land barons, (love em or hate em) are an integral part of SL.

I wonder what people would think if there was a rentbot. Renting at cut-throat prices, provding no services and arbitrarily returning your objects the second your rent is late. Once a landlord could not meet expenses, the bot buys your island at your loss, only to create another bot island.

Sure, you'd be getting a cheaper deal, but would you really be getting a better deal?

People appreciate customer service. Have you ever approached a land baron for a reduction in price or custom order? I think you will find most of them helpful, all you need do is ask.

You can help by voting here: http://secondlife.com/vote/get_feature.php?get_id=2788
don't stand on the sidelines while he gets away with this.

Sorry flagstaff I dont know how you justify a level playing field, don't give me that "well I could build a bot why can't you" line
point being that although you may have the skills to make what you wish it's not supposed to affect the community it's supposed to contribute to its development. You have clearly gotten some SL'ers very upset.

Elanthius, you keep saying other people can do it too, besides the technical aspect you lightly disregard, the fact is the Database cannot support bots doing this. YOU are to blame for why the land sales search isnt working, you and Skye, what if all land agents had one, and we are all pounding the search like you are, what happens then...

Answer is quite CLEAR Elanthius, stop what your doing, STOP skye from doing the same, Stop all your groups bots.

As long as you run them, you are the problem and not the solution. I see your comments on this thread nothing more than boasting and bragging, I for one, am not hurt by your bots as so little of my land comes from the land search. but dont think what your doing is right, or fair, or even smart, your having your day right now, im proud of you, but everyday will have an end. and yours will end. Me and all the others will be there to wish you a goodnight

Steady now. It's quite obvious that updating the database and querying the database are two entirely separate things. If querying the search list is such a terrible load on it then how comes the results are returned immediately for everyone? It's pretty clear that LL are caching the search results so that they can delivered quickly and cheaply without any load placed on the core DB at all. Some other load is causing the delay in the cache being updated. Most likely related to the core DB handling millions of queries from 30,000 people.

Also for the record there's no need for Skye or anyone else in my group to run more bots. A single bot beats all the mouse pushers easily, probably even having two is a little overkill.

By Elanthius's own addission of runinng two bots making a query every two seconds each, that totals 86400 queries by a single accountholder in a 24 hour period, over the 10 days or so that the bots have been running thats 864,000 queries by a single user.

These numbers can only be a base, if you beleive 1. Elanthius is running no more than the two he says. 2. no one else is using these bots but him, as he says.

Now im suspicious alnog with many others that hi is not running merely two bots but, 5 or more. That would change the base numbers of database queries to 216,000 queries to the database every 24 hour period, or 2.16 million queries over the past 10 days. by a single accountholder.

Its taking 15-20 minutes or more for the server to refresh and get sold land off the seach, I would think that these queries are whats doing it.

Now what if we took Elanthius's advice and made our own bots. make fair competition again. lets take the numbers again and multiply it by 10 again, now we have2.16 million queries in a 24 hour period and 21.6 million queries over a 10 day period. What if fifty land agents had these bots? 1.08 million queries in a 24 hour period, and 10,800,000 queries in a 10 day period

What if it was every single land agent with thier own army of bots, how many are there? The answer isnt to make our own bots , the answer is to stop Elanthius from eploiting the system, and as others who have been cought exploiting the system, they have had thier IP address banned and are no longer alloowed to hook up to the SL servers, Elanthius is no better than the makers of copybot, what happened to those that where using copybot?

I don't pretend to have any great depth of knowledge about how LL has set up the grid, but I do know a little something about databases. On a properly configured (cached and indexed) mysql server, cached queries are over 200% faster than non-cached queries or updates. Databases, at least well implemented ones, are amazingly good at efficiently using resources. Bots probably use much less cpu on the server side than actual players, the servers don't have to do expensive physics rendering etc... So actually, by your logic, the bot is doing us all a favor by insuring a higher cache hit ratio by the remaining players

Of course, all of this is largely speculation since I have no clue one way or another how resources are utilized or what the performance deltas are on the server side.

Heh heh.

They've obviously started caching the results in the last few days. However, anybody with an ounce of common sense knows that DB issues have been a problem for months now. They've changed how People searches work (not returning online status), they've changed how Place search works (full text searches) etc, they changed the land sale search to return only matching results, and in pages (the server used to return all land and the client did the filtering previously), all to reduce load on the DB.

I wouldn't put it past the Lindens to enable caching with the intent to hobble land buying bots merely on principle, however I think it's ridiculous to state that they did it because of the additional load created by them. I'm willing to bet many land resellers hit the DB at least as often as the bots do.

errr No.

There is no requirement to give the source to anyone other than the people who have your binary.

Your confusing the GPL with some of the other licenses used by commerical entities.

SELECT queries, especially cached ones, are pretty painless.

You think there are real people that sit in SL hitting search once a second? 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?