Land buying Bots are effecting EVERYONE

Yeah, hopefully it'll take out all those 12 year olds who keep threatening me with various forms of internet violence. In fact the newly created alt account threatening me last night had the first name "Karma". Coincidence?

Think Suezanne is right Cocoa - I run SL on a $300 computer (very low end) I got last July and I run in windows mode - with a browser open. Works okay.

So a new non low end computer should be a breeze to keep up with that.

Course me i dont look at my transaction history much. Just like my checkbook .. OOOPS.

=p

will the bots buy land they are banned from?

The irony is lost on you, isn't it?

I guess so. I operate a business that outperforms its competitors and they attack me, and insult and threaten my family. Why don't you explain how that's ironic?

*Edit: Not to mention the tedious, endless thinly veiled tirades on various forums.

Here ya go:
- http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/leech
- http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/karma
- http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/irony

I'll refrain from discussing semantics any further but I think you have completely failed to understand the meaning of one or more of those words. Feel free to get the last comment in on this topic though.

/me shrugs. Don't care about that. You asked and I explained. If you chose not to understand, I expect I'll get over it fairly quickly.

No matter how much you want to characterise the people who are opposed to your bots as spoilsports, it's not true. Some of the most vocal are other land speculators, but not all by any means. For example, I hold and develop all of my land, for my own projects. The vast majority of that land I bought long before your bot came on the scene and none of it has passed through the hands of your bot, so not only am I not one of your competitors, I'm not a disgruntled customer either.

And yet, here I am.

Get it through your skull: it's not that you "operate a business that outperforms its competitors", it's that your business model is fundamentally destructive. The people who are angry enough at you that they're making threats may include a few spoilsports, but the majority are just ordinary residents who are boggled by the idea that someone can be smart enough to create a bot like this AND stupid enough to actually do it.

The irony is that, after all that, you think the balance of karma is in your favor.

My god, man. You *must* be trolling.

They added a step in land searching today that will only allow you to search some many times in a given period. If you search to many times to quickly, your searching ability is blocked for a short period. Hopefully, this stops or at least stalls land bot use for the time being. Yay!

Im afraid to tell you this but.....

The new search regulation actually puts bots a head several times more.

All land bots are back online i believe .. as of a hour ago

Yep and they aren't disadvantaged like the human land searchers are now.

I don't buy it (and I don't resell land or run bots myself). Although people are psychologically turned off by greed, it doesn't make sense to characterize the bots as "destructive", because right now they have almost no visible effect whatsoever on SL or the overwhelming majority of SL residents.

As I posted in another thread, who is affected by the bots?

-- Not LL: they just throttle until their servers can comfortably handle the load. They probably throttle per IP address and per detected MAC address, so running 50 bots entails problematic hardware and bandwidth issues for the person attempting to do so. And if performance ever did become an issue, they also have the option of simply changing the ToS.

-- Not the hapless sellers: they keep losing no more and no less than before, regardless of whether it's a bot or a human that buys their underpriced land.

-- Not the general landbuying public: they never had a chance to buy bargain land anyway, even before bots arrived on the scene, unless they were prepared to join the ranks of the full-time land-search clickers themselves. They buy land at market prices, regardless of whether it was a bot or human that flipped the occasional parcel of bargain land and resold it. The price the general public buys land at is, almost by definition, the market price.

To the extent that there is public outrage over the use of bots, some of it seems to be driven by misconceptions, for instance that bots were supposedly snapping up First Land rather than underpriced secondhand land, or that land prices can somehow be single-handedly set by bots rather than market forces of supply and demand or LL manipulation of supply. Remember, the number of bargain parcels snapped up by bots is only a very small fraction of the total land for sale... the overwhelming majority of parcels for sale at market prices consists of chopped-up parcels from recently-auctioned sims, not flipped-and-repriced bargain parcels.

The real solution is to make land sales in SL more like land sales in RL. In RL, you set an asking price, but you also sit back and entertain multiple offers. In SL, anytime land is for sale to "anyone" rather than a specific user, clicking to buy it should automatically trigger a 24-hour auction. That would protect hapless naive sellers from themselves and remove financial incentives to operate a bot.

Thank you, Susanne!

Well that’s one good thing that came out of libSL that you know of, Stephen. I would certainly hope that they would report such an exploit rather than use it to illegally gain money themselves.

Suezanne, I don’t have the new Dell computer yet. First, Dell started with Vista, and that put me off, but now I have an August wedding to pay for.

Elanthius, I’m not a land dealer or a disgruntled customer either.

Something Something, you are wrong about that. Regular people could find and buy low-priced land. That’s just a fact. Perhaps you haven’t been around long enough to know that.

And yes, I already said that one would have to bypass the built-in land-selling system in order to evade these bots. However, that is not only a lot of trouble for the individual, it still leaves the vast majority of land for the bots, because when players see the built-in system, they tend to use that. They don’t realize that it is now a bot program.

Getting the word out to everybody not to use LL’s system would be impossible. So I figure at least if I personally want to sell some land, I can do it the way I suggested above. That is not a solution to the problem, though.

coco

First of all, the thrust of my comment was that Elanthius was targeting the wrong people with his aspersions.

Yes, the general land-buying public.

Before the bots, the market price for oddball lots was lower, because actual humans are smart enough to avoid buying an odd shaped lot or a lot with odd neighbors. You could get lots quite a bit below "market" if you weren't looking for "mature green flat in a class 5 SIM".

Not only does this hurt entry-level buyers, buy eliminating the chance for a newbie to find a "fixer upper" lot, but it means the bots wipe out the tail of the market which increases the average price by removing the tail from the market.

This effect is significantly bigger than the pure volume of lots would suggest, because the tail of the market is an important signal TO the market.