Camping Chairs are relied upon by some

Isn't this moot?

I mean, if the land owner finds value in the person being there...in fact enough value to pay them to be... then it's a job. Sure, it's a shitty job and pays practically nothing, but I myself use camping chairs for when I'm sorting inventory or writing notecards etc. If there was not camping chairs, I'd sit at home and do it.

Each side is getting something, and that's what ANY job is about.

It's not just cashless Basic Membership folks who use camping chairs. I'm not naming any names, but I've seen several business owners and at least one sim owner (with chairs in their own sim) camping out in other peoples' chairs on a regular basis.

i'm new to this game,
i have used the chaires and in doing so i have noted the places that offer them. now that i have plenty of L$ i will take my buiness to these places first. sounds like good buisness to me help a noob early on they will come back if and when they make money. a good buisness stategy is to bring the costomers to you because the majority of the limited market that is here is going to be an impules buy. it just seems to me they are not being used enough. most of the chaires do not have any advertisements around them this makes little sence to me. if you want to sell things bring the noobs in give them eye candy and something to read while they sit there. sell your product and they will come back. just some thoughts of a noob thanx

her think of it this way,

since i loggin for the first time 2 weeks ago over 20,000 new accounts have started.

the first thing i did when i herd money grows on trees here was ask around about where they were. guess what i got a list of about 20 businesses that had them.

a lot of business is about oppertunitys (how ever you spell it) it seems to me if you do not have these trees or chaires in your business you have missed 20,000 oppertunitys to tell a noob why your product is better then the other guys. to bring someone in and have them sit down for how ever long and sell them a product makes perfect business sence.

why when i first logged in to this game i didnt run right into a sign that says money grows on trees here i cant understand. but i do understand this. no matter how much better your product is. the one who gets the customer wins. yes word of mouth is number one but a missed oppertunity is a huge loss in my books. are they using these chaires to try and sell a junk product or get better ratings yes i'm sure they are but if you have a better product and have not stepped up to the plate to sell it then shame on you because you should be able to put them out of business.

yes i am a noob but these charies are a fantastic marketing tool. use them because the way i see it you cant afford not to.

just some food for thought thanx

So is cold-calling people and trying to sell them "broken boxes" of cleaning supplies for 10 times market rate.

See, there's more than two people involved here.

Camping chairs lag the whole sim they're in, and the casino owner doesn't pay the other landowners in the sim for their loss. Camping chairs funneled DI and dwell away from the people who were creating the builds that paying customers were interested in, and now we've lost DI and we're losing dwell.

Camping chairs have irreparably damaged Second Life. They're no more a legitimate job than collecting protection money or running numbers is.

As soon as I joined SL, I found camping chairs and warned that they would kill SL in exactly the same way as 'money for nothing' payouts had killed Sims Online. I was ridiculed and attacked for saying it.

But it does look more and more like I was right.

Lewis

How does it look like you were right? Has SL been killed? Have camping chairs caused loads of people to quit? All camping chairs have done is cause loads of people to complain in the forums. If that's a sign SL is dying, then it's been dying for years.

If the camping chairs attract people who _aren't_ "paying customers" to begin with, what is exactly the complaint, here? That you are not getting bonus payment generated by people who aren't the marketing target of your service?

The "paying customers" still are likely to go to places which they are 'interested in' rather than places with camping chairs, since they have no need for the tiny handouts. Unless it's the camping chairs and the handouts these 'customers' are actually interested in, of course...

The whole point of chairs is to attract people who aren't just interested in chairs. That should be obvious. What's the point in having chairs to attract campers, who just cost you money? They want paying customers.

They do this by bumping things artificially on the Find with fake "traffic" that's down to chairs, so that people come to the place expecting that it's top because it's good, or simply because they see it first.

They won't "kill" second life, but they sure messed it up really bad. And killing DI and dwell is going to mess it up even more.Well, I didn't say "kill" and I didn't get quite the same reaction... but, you know, you're not the only one to suggest that camping chairs were and are a huge problem.

I think this aspect was covered a bit earlier in the thread. There's some sort of unreasonable belief going, attached to the whole "more visitors = just the place _i_ am looking for, so this is where i should go" ... that's used in the "omg camping chairs are stealing my customers, if it wasn't for them they'd be at my place and generate money for _me_ because i offer better service" whine.

But ok, taking this for a moment at face value... what's exactly the problem with people going to some other place first rather than one's own, because of the higher traffic rating? If your own place is indeed relatively better and offers things people cannot get in the popular place, then in the end they'll still come to you and shop at your place. And if they can get what they're looking for at the place with camping chairs... then it simply means someone investing more in advertising is reaping more benefits, and your own business despite your belief to the contrary isn't offering them anything interesting or unique enough to make them actually find you.

(on the lag issue -- if someone else's joint with camping chairs is generating lag that affects your own business then vote with your money and take your business elsewhere... perhaps to place where land owner is running a clear 'no camping chairs' policy? Heck, someone could probably use this sort of policy as extra leverage to attract business to their grounds, if lag is indeed such serious issue as it's being made, and if camping chairs are so widely despised)

The complaint is that they're attracting people who aren't paying customers. That is, that they're encouraging people who are almost all not paying Linden Labs one red cent to stay logged in and waste resources. And they're doing it in a way that was cheating people out of thousands of dollars a month in earned bonuses.

Resources?

Resources like Linden Labs' bandwidth. Resources like the simulator's computing time that other landowners on the same sim are ALSO paying Linden Labs for.

Cheating?

The purpose of the dwell bonus and Developer's Incentive (DI) programs was to reward people who were providing content that was valuable to Linden Labs but wasn't conventionally "sellable", just as the rights system and associated tools are there to reward people who are providing portable content. It's Linden Labs' fault that they screwed up in the design of the dwell counters, having them count paying customers and free riders alike, but that doesn't in any way reduce the culpability of the people who took advantage of the loophole.
That many of the places that paying customers are paying Linden Labs for access to have been going away, to be replaced by more camping chairs, as the camping holes first siphoned away dwell and DI, and then led Linden Labs to decide that dwell and DI were a bad investment.

That is the least important reason camping chairs are evil. I'm not a businessperson, and I have no interest whatsoever in the "find" results... they have never been particularly useful for me. The problem with camping chairs is nowhere near as subtle as that... the problem is that they have poisoned Second Life, and the results of that dose of poison are just beginning to be felt. Even if someone magically solves all the rest of the problems with the chairs, every Linden or US Dollar anyone has earned from them up to now is the result of fraud, and that is never going to be paid back to the actual victims of the fraud.
Here you are, you've bought a plot of land in a residential sim, and someone drops down a camping casino in the middle. You know what that means? It means you are out the US$40 or whatever you spent on your land. They just made it worthless, because you can't move, and nobody's going to buy it. This is plain and simply theft of service from everyone else in the same sim.The casino operator is the land owner for the part of the sim the casino's sitting on.

If LL was seeing this as issue, i'd expect them to address it in the simplest manner, i.e. reducing the free access to their simulation. Seeing how they aren't doing anything of the sort... perhaps they are seeing it differently than you do, and as long as it's their property, it's all that matters.

Incidentally one could argue that people who 'aren't paying one red cent' are in the indirect way supporting the existence of customers who do pay, but wouldn't otherwise. As well as add their own bit to the economy (content generation) which might make others purchase invest in Linden currency to get that content. It's hardly ever as black and white as one would want to paint it.


If the purpose of these programs was to reward content valuable to Linden Labs, then rewards should be granted "manually" by Lindens selecting what _they_ indeed find valuable. Leaving it instead to people voting with their feet... well, it simply brings the rewards to people who will cater to the lowest common denominator. It's like this in RL, and should be no surprising it's the same in SL.

To call it cheating? That's like saying a seller handing out free samples and this way attracting more customers is cheating because the money should go to another seller who can't be bothered with such publicity stunt, but has all time in world to instead complain about their competitor...

I was thinking rather along the lines of full sim ownership (be it as group or individual) and then allowing rental there under strict condition of no camping chairs etc. Surely if camping chairs _were_ such big and annoying issue someone shrewd would already be running this kind of venture, and had arm-long queue of customers dying to set their business in the land free of lag and the camping nonsense..? Or is that not feasible? ^^;

It's not at all an unreasonable belief - it's the main reason people have camping chairs. Campers, rather by definition, rarely have much money, and them being on your chairs costs you. The only monetary reward is a tiny piece of dwell and even that's going - it was never enough to pay for the chair. What other benefit does the landowner get? They're hardly doing it as a public service. If the Find stopped working on traffic, chairs would vanish.

And the point is that they game the Find. Experienced residents don't use the Find much, in my experience, except when searching for very specialised terms, but a lot of people do. It's also well studied that when using any search engine, people rarely look far beyond the first page of results - they give up after checking out the first few places, and it's particularly true for SL I should imagine, where visiting a place is more effort than just clicking on a link.

And the Find is not an advertising space (or not meant to be). There's a whole Classifieds tab which is an advertising space, which has a bidding system set up so that you can pay more to get your place to the top. The Find is supposed to rank places by traffic as an attempt to create some sort of quality metric. Camping makes sure that that doesn't work, because it's lumped in with every other reason that anyone visits and overwhelms them. Therefore, either people are deceived or you make the Find useless for them. Great.


Someone should move and have to go through the procedure of selling land and rebuilding and updating all their landmarks and likely lose money on tier, just because someone else feels like abusing sim resources? Sod that.

In actual fact I don't sell much at all, don't impinge on the Find, and don't have a problem with camping chairs in any of the areas I have land. But it's not about me.

They are. Caledon for instance has a no chairs, no casinos policy, and is backlogged with demand. But I don't see why people on the mainland should suffer or have to rent.

Well, in this case people who find what they experience on mainland unaccetable have option of banding together, getting themselves a sim, setting the 'no chairs' policy there and maybe even getting part of the backlog you mention as way to make this whole investement cheaper on themselves..? Getting rid of already owned land might be a bit of problem but then i doubt literally everyone is extremely picky about the place they want to buy ... and even if land is sold at loss, the benefit of lag-free new land one will get instead can be enough of carrot in the long run to make the short term loss acceptable.

(yes, it will mean some land becomes 'better' than other, but then the prices will reflect that)

If I were in that position I would refuse to move. Out of sheer bloody-mindedness. People don't force me off my land. Maybe I'd also start doing some of the high-intensity physics experiments that I usually restrict myself from to avoid excessive use of sim resources, too. Sauce for the goose...

I'm sorry but basic free members don't pay to keep SL operational. We welcome free members and hope they will find SL enjoyable to decide to help support it with a membership. Free membership is a great way to explore SL and see what it is all about but free members were never meant to sit AFK in camping chairs preventing paying members from even being able to get to their own homes in a sim with camping chairs. If free members only want to sit in SL afk taking up bandwidth for the paying members, then I fully support their elimination. This same forum is littered with threads crying about how Lindens are getting cheaper and cheaper. You can buy 300 of them for a lousy buck. There is no valid reason for camping chairs.

If this elimination of camping chairs is a hardship, you really had no place in SL to begin with. Sorry... Your choices of totally free on line multi-player games are extremely limited.
I paid SOE 15 bucks a month for many years and I couldn't do half the stuff I do in SL. In reality you actually need very little to participate in most SL activities but if you want the luxuries, its gonna cost you a few buck a month and even at the premium membership level, its still cheaper them most of the on-line games out there.

Sure, that's a way to deal with things as well. Some people will insist on staying for years together with person they no longer feel anything but hate for, going out of their way to make life miserable for both them and themselves. Others can get over it, cut their losses short and eventually find happiness elsewhere.

But that's personal choice as far as i can see. I.e. it's not that one is left with no option but to be 'bloody-minded', but they just choose this way for whatever reason.

Mostly because I don't like being pushed about.

It wouldn't be much bother anyway. I have land elsewhere. It would actually be quite useful - it's always good to know the exact point at which physics scripting crashes a sim.

That would reduce the membership numbers they're touting to investors. They want as many members as possible.
I'm having trouble parsing this paragraph. Are you saying that a significant number of people sitting on chairs are creating content, or what?

I am usually, and probably will be again, a "Basic" content creator. That is, a basic account holder who creates content for premium members. I can tell you right now that when you do that you have no time to waste on camping chairs.
That costs money, and time, and isn't scalable. They have done that in the past and changed to using dwell.

And yet it works in real life... but in real life people don't all shed the same amount of "dwell equivalent" [1].
No, it's like saying that payola is cheating. It's like saying that kickbacks are cheating. It's like saying bribes are cheating. In some cultures all this stuff is considered normal, but it does distort the market and that's why it's a scandal when it's discovered in most.

The only reason it works is because LL didn't think "you know, we really should only count paying customers in our traffic calculations", so that people shed dwell whether they could be expected to "afford it" or not.

[1] And I've explained this about 50 zillion times, look it up yourself.

And I'm talking about real camping holes that really exist in the real Second Life.
Er, there's lots of people who rent sims with restrictions, and they're very popular, but most land in SL is in the Linden Estate and "owned" by the parcel owner, so a camping hole operator can always find a 2048-or-so chunk of land in a sim somewhere they can buy and lag to hell.

And before you tell me that the people in that sim should all move to an island... they can't, because who's going to buy their land from them? They're out of pocket no matter what.

Even if they only paid L$5 per square meter, that's something like US$1000 spent by the other people on the sim down the drain. Even if you just count tier, that's a minimum of US$200 lost per month the camping chairs are there. You can't justify that with any kind of fancy footwork... land in SL is computer time, and the camping chair operator has effectively stolen the computing resources represented by that land.

Regardless of whether "over the long run" it would all even out, that person has still unfairly benefitted, and the other people are unfairly harmed. Can you honestly not se why this is wrong?

How do you feel about people forced out of their homes by the actions of a polluter in real life? Do you think they should just adapt, that they're not entitled to compensation? This is only different in scale.