[please sign] LL get rid of current traffic system.

I think it should be replaced by nothing just like the ratings system was. If someone wants to replace the traffic system on their own they are welcome to try.

How will they get rid of the ad farms? It would be great if they do. At the same time I don't want to penalize anyone who has a legit reason for owning a small or odd bit of land.

I read they were getting rid of traffic. Which sucks. I dont get why its so bad ..is it the camping issue?

I personally like a traffic count but it is sad people have to use certain methods to boost theres like its some ego hype or what not.

With no traffic it will be hard to justify renting vendor spot etc

I'm impartial about traffic and any kind of sorting and rating.

Why?

Because any rating system can be manipulated.

Be it 'rating by referrals' (Google and Google-Bots, keyword spam), 'traffic' (camping chairs), 'alphabetical' (using 'aaaa' or '! ' to get to the top), 'rating' (rating spiking, using alts to rate) or anything else.

...did I miss something?

It's very hard to think of a ranking system that can't be gamed. Google have never managed so I doubt LL can.

Couple of possibilities though:
Unique hits: number of unique avatars to visit in last 24 hours.
Picks: Number of avatars with this place in picks
Editor's choice: LindenLab goes around and manually chooses the good stuff
User generated: Get rid of everything and let those crafty scripters work something out. Leave it to The Market.

Regardless, I completely agree that we need to get rid of traffic. At the very least lets have a system that doesn't destroy the entire sim when people game it.

Are they replacing the metrics with something, or just dropping them entirely?

Well I could live with traffic not being used as a metric for sorting search results, but I'd like to see it, even so. When you subconsciously filter out the obvious casino camp malls it becomes pretty useful to see where people are going. It's also a super quick way to see how your store is doing- check the traffic number, then wonder if your sim was offline all yesterday

I think this could be a good idea, but it could give birth to the premium only camping chair which pays out enough to make it worthwhile to be a premium because the camping will pay for it.

Based on the amount of time it's taking to get it changed, I'd guess they're trying to come up with something new.

Id have to agree

Getting rid of stuff is quick -

Look at dwell payments, Personal ratings, Friends online on the website() ..

Guess I'll proceed forward then...

I have a NEAT algorithm that works, and doesn't fall for camping trickery or any kind of payment for it obfuscates any possibility of managing such a scheme quite well. Looks like that math degree is proving its worth....finally

Only issue is, when I finally release it I can't divulge the metrics, for although they would be very difficult to exploit, Id rather not give the community of cheats a chance. Then again, people may not trust an engine they do not understand.

Anyone have any takes on this?

It's really a matter of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. People don't like traffic numbers because they get gamed by people using campers for traffic, which causes massive lag and sims to fill up with people who aren't even active. If they would just outlaw camping chairs, you'd get rid of a lot of that.

Of course the problem with that is, it would be impossible for the Lindens to effectively enforce the no-camping rule with their limited resources. So it's much easier for them to redo the traffic, because that's a one-time fix for them instead of having to put their resources into policing camping chair use.

Traffic measures are worthwhile for business owners who want to know if their traffic is increasing or decreasing, as well as for people who rent in malls and want to know if people actually shop there (if it's full of camping chairs, you can pretty much tell that's where the traffic is coming from.)

Obscurity resulting in making it harder to game is superior to a transparent process, In my opinion.

Just say something like ..
"I keep the numbers proprietary to protect the accuracy of the system. You saw how Traffic got gamed when peopel knew how it works.."


Still, word of mouth is better than any metric. Works in real life. People forget SL is really only the size of a city. And not a particularily huge one.

I think that if you can test your system and demonstrate to people that it returns accurate results, people may be willing to trust it, even if you don't divulge the metrics. Of course, how you would test it and prove that it works, and convince people that your testing is accurate, is another matter.

It's not possible for a script (or a resident) to identify who has a Premium account, so a Premium-only camping chair wouldn't be possible.

Also: monthly premium fee (assuming you pay for a year): US$6
Monthly stipend L$1200 = around US$4.50
Amount to make up = US$1.50 = L$399
Camp 8 hours a day = 240 hours/month = 14400 minutes/month
To repay Premium in full, camping needs to earn L$1 every 36 minutes
(As far as I know it already earns more than this!)

Or maybe you do not want to pay for a year, US$9.99 monthly
Monthly stipend, still L$1200 = still around US$4.50
Amount to make up = US$5.50 = L$1463
Still 14400 minutes/month
To repay Premium in full, camping needs to earn L$1 every 9 minutes
(that's about right, isn't it?)

Of course many campers will probably not want or be able to cash out, but you see how it works.

this is solvable by making it so you can retract a vote given. Basically you'd be given 1 vote per place that can be set to any value (say 1-5?) at any time for each person. That makes it so you can redo your vote later, this doesn't let you game it as each person only has 1 vote at each palce. Add a timer, say 1 month, between changes if you feel it's needed.

Well, as it stands now, my system employs votes that "arrive" in the system at random intervals. If an avatar votes (avatars on a plot of land are selected at random at a predefined rate), their vote wont show in the system until anywhere between 1 and 7 days after the vote is cast. Furthermore, their name isn't tied to the vote. So if 3 people vote per day, the votes can arrive in any scrambled order.

This essentially makes it impossible for a landowner to verify that an avatar has done what he has paid them to do. (unless everyone votes positively of course, but Im hoping that there are enough decent people out there who will give a 0/5 to those landowners that offer them money) Ive also got a blacklisting feature where I can axe any locations if I have transcripts (collected by myself) that prove meddling is occuring, however I have yet to decide if such a feature would be too controversial....

For now, the rolling vote system is working well.

As for camping, Ive found a neat way of detecting it through scripts. I did do the calculation once, that if you had 50 virtual machines running on about a 10 node cluster, you could supposedly maintain connections and camping status accross the grid to pull in some 25k of US dollars, seeing how some of the sites pay 5L/10 minutes. Problem is, most of these camping systems, I have noticed, do NOT pay the rate advertised. Those of you considering using them should be wary. The rates of pay will fluctuate diurnally, and is at its lowest point long after your avatar first stepped on top of them. This makes leaving your machine dancing all night fruitless.

They also use some pretty sleezy mechanisms that kick you off at random intervals, making it hard to maintain the state. Scary eh?

We should start a Zagat-type rating for different categories of SL. I like and trust Zagat and TripAdvisor.com and all those of the like. Anyone know exactly how Zagat works?

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my thinking has always been that "traffic" should be replaced with a figure repesenting "money spent" on a particular land plot. either total money or average purchase or whatever.

for a retail site, that would surely tell ME whether people are going to a place to just look or if the merchandise there is good enough to "buy".

of course, it would make no sense at a non-retail site. but most non-retail places are discovered by word-of-mouth anyway.

People go to these places and try them out. They employ a ton of people to do this.

I'd be down for a zagat-esque setup, though. I think it would have to be a bit more diverse...like having different sections such as "weapons/combat", "sci-fi", "scenery", "art", etc. and would have to be managed by people that know about those categories.

It would be a lot easier and more intuitive as far as technical stuff goes, but it would be super time consuming!

I'll write for "sci-fi" and "scenery" if someone decides to roll with this idea!

...heralding the age of the "money spending bot." It ports. It spends (on items your main is selling). It ports again...

and has to pay sales tax every time it buys

gah so this plan is just a sneaky way to add a sales tax?!!

mains have alts with money? won't they ever learn?

i used to give mine spending money and then i found him in a club ... throwing it away in sploders, tipping dancers like a drunken sailor, etc.

i sure put a STOP to THAT!

hi! <3

At first i thought... wow very good idea!

Then I thought..nevermind. Because I wouldnt want people to know the money spent on my SIM, kind of confidential. but for those who did not mind it.. Why not?

There may be always that temptation though.. Greedy people wanting to get into the accounts of the high-money places.