Land buying Bots are effecting EVERYONE

Well yesterday I heard from many people about landbot hax and I lost a piece myself for one of the very reasons Sarah outlined on her first post. I think LL needs to step in if they want to avoid a resident to resident dispute over these bots.

I agree. An inworld CAPTCHA will do the trick and LL shouldn't have hard time implementing it.

Another way, share the darn bots with as many people and crash SL for good with all the traffic so LL will wake up one day and realize that bots have taken over the residents. IMO their GRID can't handle hundreds of bots like landbot hax. So let's get together and create a bot and share it. Let's teach some young'n what the real masters can do.

then heres a potential answer for you.




If for example 1 bot buys land as fast as your OCD person with a fast computer does - then multiple bots give an advantage the OCD person doesnt have.

If you include zombie campers in the "pilotless" avatar camp of bots - its not hundreds its tens of thousands.

Wonder what other kind of bots could be used. Its intriguing actually - Adding to poor SL performance is of course annoying.

So it's unethical to log in twice at the same time? Doesn't that seem kinda arbitrary? Or it's unethical to give yourself an advantage over your competition?

Either way you're clutching at straws.

Of course, I wouldn't have thought those camping bots would be querying the land for sale list too often, which seems to be one of the frequent complaints about land bots. Nor would they be buying land faster than humans, which is the other complaint.

Apples and oranges spring to mind.

*grins*

Yes, it's possible for ripoffs anywhere. There's no safe haven against either greed or stupidity.

My guess, though, is that all the bots will be shut down soon due to yet another buy mechanism modification; this sort of thing goes in cycles.

You asked why using bots was unethicical over a human who is a fast clicker with a fast computer.

Well a unpiloted bot can run 24 hours a day. Multiple bots can increase workload. Why is that not an advantage?

It basicaly means someone without a bot cant compete.


Being logged on twice is meaningless if theres no bot as far as how fast someone could flip land.

Other than being affected by any lag (I have no idea if there is any cuase by the land bots) I have no stake at all in the land trade - The most Ive ever owned was 2500M.

You may feel im grasping at straws. Your entitled to your opinion. I may think your ducking criticism however if you cant see why multiple bots are faster than your example of "someone with OCD and a fast computer"

But you're saying having an advantage is unethical. That's what I'm disagreeing with. I don't disagree at all that bots are going to be better than people in any number of areas (but worse in others remember)

then the fast computer and OCD had no bearing on your previous question.

Since - how fast and long and compulsively the human works wouldnt matter if your bot can win in land buying every time.

I was answering your question in which you framed the situation.

Anyone - can potentially compete with a OCD person with a fast computer the bots widen that gap to the point where no one could.

Basically the end run of an uncontrolled land bot system means that the average land buyer has no chance to get a bargain. At some point the bots will bring the land up to whatever level the bot owner has decided the land should be.

Whether were at that point or not I dont know. It seems wrong somehow for people to be unable to find bargains becuase of automation.

I dont know if its truley unethical to buy land faster than other people - But if it is than being able to buy land faster than any human would is more unethical simply as a matter of scale.

On the flipside, if land prices start to crash, bots would quickly buy up land that looks like it's on sale, but then as more and more people begin repricing their land lower and lower as the crash is progressing, the bot is stuck with land it cannot sell quickly.

Exactly! That would be a wake up call to LL. Maybe they should be popping up CAPTCHA in the inworld every 30 minutes to see if you are a bot or not. Yes this will annoy residents but will help keep the GRID stable.

Anyone can compete with bots too. The subset of people who can program a bot is probably about the same size as the subset of people who are prepared to click on the search button every quarter second for 8 hours a day.



Residents With Parcels for Sale 3,794
Total Parcels For Sale 17,737
Total Square Meters for Sale 12,634,416

Seems to me as if there are plenty of opportunities out there to buy land. Oh, wait! You meant buy land for significantly less than it's worth? a) that's hardly an inviolable right b) trust me, you never had a chance of buying that land anyway unless you decided to become a full time land flipper.



Since I started using this bot in January prices were at 16/sqm. When Zor started using his bot prices suddenly fell from 13.5/sqm to 12.5/sqm. However, correlation is not causation. Truth is land prices are controlled by LL at the supply end. Also any idiot with a lot of money could try buying up all the land and raising prices. You don't need bots to do it. They better be prepared to lose all that money though because moving the market is impossible in my opinion.



If it's unethical then it is unethical? I guess I can't argue with that tautology.

You don't need an actual full-fledged bot. It's not the tp'ing, buying and reselling land that would add terribly much to load, you just need to fetch the land sales and all the code for that is already present, it just needs continous looping.

Well this is clearly a BUG in the SL code then: As soon as a dialog has popped up showing a sales price, there should also be a lock set on the database record to prevent writing it until the transaction has been either committed or rolled back.
This is no longer a matter of fair or unfair but a case for a Problem Report. And an important one, because I would say LL has a legal problem if their software does something else than it says it will.

Try it if you like but I think you'll be sorely disappointed. The land sales search (IMO) does nothing more than return a cached copy of the list which basically represents zero load on the server. You'd probably have better luck rapidly changing the price of a for sale parcel or cutting and rejoining a parcel over and over again if you really wanted to overload the servers.

Either way, I think we all agree that anyone actively attacking the grid should be stopped. I also agree that anyone using an overly large share of resources should be limited.

People would game that by leaving the Buy Land dialog open. Better to have it check that nothing has changed when the user commits to buying.

This is a false arguement- by definition if a special skill (the ability to program a bot) is required then ANYONE cant do it.

It might be factual to say "Theres many who could compete" whether that number is the same as people who can handle clicking 8 hours a day - thats just a guess on your part.

My guess would be you're wrong.




I mean finding a bargian - If you claim having an advantage is fine why is finding a bargain is somehow less important? If bots are faster and more numerous than land flippers by definition the window for oportunity to find a bargian is reduced.



I mean that all parcels under the price of the Land Bots setting will be raised to the land bots settings. Becuase if not the land bots will go buy them and fix it. Enough will LEVEL all land prices eventually. Since the bots wont go and buy over priced land on purpose they will buy up any land below the "floor" and raise it to that level.

I wasnt speaking as to whether or not land bots change the market price.



No -

IF being able to buy land faster than others becuase you have OCD and a fast computer is unethical.

THEN being able to buy land faster and work more hours than any human with OCD and a fast computer is MORE unethical

in that
- the automated bots can do more harm than that person you theorized.

Land flipping itself is unethical. Using a bot to increase the speed with which you can acquire and jack up the price on land parcels that you have no intention of using or improving takes an already unethical practice and magnifies the insult. Land flipping adds nothing of value to SL. Quite the opposite. It extracts value from SL at the expense of every person who hopes to buy reasonably priced land. You do not provide a service. You do not add anything of value. You simply leech off the system at other people's expense.

People feel bots are doing exactly that. There are dozens of ways continous polling could have a "legitimate" use.

There is no way a human could keep track of all the sales, see what's been sold and resold but an automated process would have no problem doing just that. Given enough snapshots it's easy to give an estimate of how long it will take to sell parcel of size x for price y, or at what price y a parcel of size x will sell the fastest; or have it account for things such a sim class, new continent vs old continent, or other land for sale on that sim etc.

I don't think LL should be catering to bots at all, least of all those that add significantly more load than any average - human - resident. Throttle land sales - per IP - once every 5 minutes and no average resident is going to even notice it's happening.

I suggested a lock on the database record while the dialog is open showing a sales price, but Meade replied:



What is there to gain by leaving the dialog open?
And we can always add a timeout to the dialog to prevent it to be open for too long...

Of course your suggestion at least prevents people from buying at a different price than they have been promised. That is true.

Well, I'd argue that anyone can learn this skill by simply going to a decent university for four years and then spending 10 years programming in their spare time. You might disagree.

Besides my main point still remains that having an advantage is not in itself unethical. If being smart and using your intelligence is unethical then I think a lot of us are in trouble.




This only works in the case where the bot has a near infinite amount of money. Unless you can afford to buy 8 sims a day then you have no chance at all of controlling prices. Not only that there's no guarantee at all that anyone would buy your land afterwards. My opinion has always been that controlling the market is impossible. Predicting the market is impossible. It is only possible to react to it.



Ahh, we misunderstood each other. My point was that both the old style OCD clickers and the new style landbots are ethical. Neither are unethical in my opinion and both are big advantages in this business.

I happen to loose a 512 sqm Parcel to a Landbox Hax too. Right after it happend i contact a Linden via Live Help and he told me that these Landbots are not allowed to be used and suggested to wirte a Abuse Report.

Shortly after i lost the Land to that Bot a Landdealer showed up and put up a "For Sales" sign.
I questioned him if its his Bot but he denied. The Fact that he showed up not merly after 1 Minute after the Land was sold to the Bot tells otherwise.

I hope that he gets a serve punishment for the use of this Bot.

There's no need to "feel" anything about it. This sort of thing is easily measurable and I suggest LL does so. I'm not at all against the throttling you described. It might represent an advantage to me to be honest.

It wouldn't be the first time Live Help were wrong about something...

I always seem to get the same Linden when I contact them who insists she can't help with what I'm asking, on every occasion if I resubmit it other Lindens have no problem answering me.

The Linden was wrong. It is allowed. That is why there are more bots every week.

And yes, while "old school" land brokers buy land fast if it's still available when they tp in, I have seen them wait around after they got a bargain to see if they needed to give an unusually low-priced plot back because it was set as a mistake. I have done it. I have personally witnessed Sarah do it. And I know Skye Whitcroft did it too. Ever heard of her, Elan?