Rewarding Hot Spots (a.k.a. killing the voting stations)

Could someone give me the actual meaning of vote farms in SL?


The only thing I see wrong with the current voting system is that everyone votes for their friends and only less occasionally for good builds.

The new system says screw builders reward socializers.

Ope said there is still the building rating... well when i see a great build I dont' just search around for that person so i can rate them and most people won't either. The booth is a great way for someone to instantly say yeah I like this build.

JV!

well Jon, actually if you like a build, you can right click it and see who made it and click the profile button, then click rate to rate them.

my definition of vote farms: a group of vote booths which are voted on frequently by a group of players, so as to create income for the entire group.

IMO most vote booths fall into this definition, and thats why I don't like them. they aren't explicitly tied to nice builds. ratings are. (supposedly)

oh an btw i thought of a mean way to exploit this new time-on-land system: we could just make a big ol' sensor pusher that sucks people towards our land, and then trap them there. would this be considered "social"?

of course i wouldn't do this, even tho i was in a vote farm before but this would just be malicious....others might not be so nice.

Again, just like with the voting booths, the critical question is: what do we want to reward?

Hunter, other Lindens, can you clarify?

OH I really like this idea.......

I own a 1/16 in Blue which I did not build on, however, Bonecrusher built this HUGE lovely Fanway ballpark on MY land. (Hey, isn't that what the Lindens encourgage the Themed Communities to do??)

I'm gonna be rich !!!! MUUHAAAHHAAAAAA

OH WAIT.....I have my Hippo Barn on someone else's land....and all of the items we sell to help build Americana are in MY name, but on someone elses land....and all of my T-shirts and Linden Freebies are on someone elses land!

Maybe it's time to start deleting all my stuff, kick the people who have built on my land off, and and every day give away something free right in the middle of my 1/16. OK, I feel better again.......I'm gonna be rich !!!

Can you please make it much much easier to give a building rating on a building? Move a 'rate' dialogue onto the pie menue somewhere for clicking on an object you don't own? I dunno.

Yep, I have a build in Venice and one in Gibson on other team members land. My build I NAV is too small to earn under the proposed plan. I do think there has to be something better than the vote booths but this system is also flawed. I wish I had a suggestion for a better idea.

Hm, lotta good points here.. perhaps another raiting for 'property' instead? Or would/should this all fall under build, were it to be considered for a rating slot? Where you have to spend a set amount of time on someone's land before you can vote for them?

Seems like there are too many ways for the proposed method to be confused, as interesting as population statistics in world are. Excellent proposal.. but probably not the most practical without some more tweaking.

Yea Tracey, make it really small so they have spend lots of time looking for it.

I will be in ahern hiring a few noobs to stand on my property.

MUUHAHAHHAHA....


fen-

I personally like the idea. I think something accounted for land owned in a radius around a person (1/2 the credit for the land a person is over, the other half divided for land around the person) would be better but prohibitively processor intensive.

Renters is a problem, and linden lab has been saying they want to implement renting in a more official way for a while. Perhaps now is a good time to bump the priority level on that.

If / when this gets implemented I do see a lot of land restructuring going on.

Here is an idea to help communities. First make land have a group like objects do. Then calculate the groups that have the most traffic over their land and give a reward to those groups divided among the members. Maybe divided proportionally to how much of the "Group Land" is land you own.

This shouldn't be a replacement of the proposed system, but an addition. A way to reward popular / good communities, which is something I thought / think the lindens want to reward.

I have nothing against votiing boxes either and I actually think they're pretty and easily redesignable with overlapping objects.
Pituca has her voting box in the middle of some stones, with only the green part showing and it looks awesome!
It's kind of like mailboxes:
I believe you folks in the USA get standardized mailboxes everywhere with a weird little flag thing attached?
Has there ever been anything incredibly wrong with them? No.
Hey, why dont you make the voting boxes into a mailbox design, wouldnt that be neat?

There's about as many styles of mailboxes as there are types of people in the US. Well, maybe not that many but darn close. LOL. Mine doesnt even have a flag.

Anyway, this just caught me as amusing. Thx for the chuckle.

I think rewarding hot spots is a different thing than being able to specify which in game buildings you appreciate. In my mind, this newly offered system doesn't overlap with the existing appreciation system, so shouldn't replace it. Perhaps do both

Well, I think this is a great idea, although it would have been an even greater idea if it were tried during the beta when everyone was complaining about the current system.

I sign on once a day to vote for my friends. I don't think there is anything wrong with this, but I also know that voting for my friends doesn't necessarily equate with voting for the best builds, or the best place to hang out for that matter.

Now I'll sign on once a day and make sure I "hang out" near each of my friends builds. Friendship is a valuable thing, as it helps to build community withing SL. What we SHOULD have determined during the beta is what set of "atomic" things best builds on the community that will make SL a success. It's pretty clear that the current regime left too many gaps in some areas, and at the same time had too many overlaps in others. It's a great thing that we are willing to change and experiment, hopefully we will come to expect a certain predictability, say quarterly, in the frequency of change. It will certainly be nice to do away with those $%^*() voting booths, although I'm sure some deserving people will suffer as a result.

Here are the things which I think are "atomic" (cover everything without too much overlap):

(1) Building
(2) Avatar design
(3) Congeniality
(4) Organizational skills
(5) Teaching skills
(6) Scripting skills
(7) Event planning
( Outside Marketing skills
(9) Ability to compose long winded bombastic forum posts

In no particular order of course.

Note, I didn't include ability to collect calling cards in there anywhere. Calling cards are a nice way to keep track of people you want to keep track of, nothing more. I'd really like to get rid of most of mine without hurting anyones feelings, or their ranking in the "leader board".

I look forward to more experiments!

The idea of letting residents choose one or the other system had occurred to me, but I think the goal was to avoid the abuses that occur with voting stations. (Assuming you consider vote farms to be an abuse.) Vote farmers would simply keep their vote stations.

It sounds like the Lindens have done some initial calculations about how using the traffic system would change payouts. Would the total pool of money remains fixed? (There was a line about total distributions being 33% higher.) If the total remains fixed, whoever gets more money would be doing so at the expense of someone else. One question is, do the Lindens feel the new payouts to be more fair? I certainly don't want any specific names posted, but do the Lindens have any sense that the people who'd be getting more actually deserve it? Likewise for the people getting less. Would the new payouts more closely reflect the types of behavior the Lindens want to encourage and discourage?

WooHoo! I gotta be in the top five of that leader board!

I like what Mac wrote. there are gaps and there are overlaps. great way to put it.

its a bit hard to understand what exactly theyre trying to reward with the ratings and vote system and such because of the flaws with them. i really wish they could clarify the goals more specifically. maybe theyre changing what theyre trying to reward. i dunno.

and i'm skeptical about these initial calculations. how were they done? on the current population? if so keep in mind that we were not aware that this system was in place yet.

but, i STILL am glad to see the voting booths go. and i'm sure since this is such a radical change that a lot of tweaking will be involved. i just hope good people don't get left in some 'gaps'

Although I have no idea how it would be addressed, people that have built in older "laggy" sims. or really remote ones, miss out on a lot of this. I've had people tell me the wanted to go to my house but left because Natoma was lagged so bad...and I could be wrong but every time I've visited Jessie recently there's nobody there. People might also hesitate to "traffic" a structure in a place they can be killed.

It would be interesting to consider if you could get votes/points/whatever for a structure in some alternate way other than people actually visiting the land. If a sim is laggy, you will never benefit from a "stayed for this long" alg and so on, as people will get just close enough to take a look, then bolt.

I like this idea of rewarding Hot Spots very much.

There are many reasons why people click voting stations. They may vote only for people they like. They may vote just because the person who owns the station voted for them. As long as we have voting stations, I do not think there can, or should be, any way to control who people vote for. However, the more this is done, the less the voting results indicate what the best places in SL actually are.

Even with the tracking system, there will be some who try to take advantage of it by making "I'll stand on your land if you stand on my land" deals, but I think this will happen much less than it does with voting stations. While clicking a voting station is done very quickly, I suspect relatively few people will want to spend prolonged periods of time standing somewhere if that place is boring.

As a method of paying people for building good-looking places, the tracking system does have some serious weaknesses. The biggest problem is that the best place to view any large structure will often be someone else's property. What this system would do very well is reward those who make enjoyable places to spend time. While people want their surroundings to pleasant, they also want something interesting to do while they are there. The tracking system would encourage people to make their places more entertaining, and I think that is a very good thing.

Only visitors who stay on a property for at least a minute should count in the ratings. People should not get any reward just for having people fly over their land on their way to someplace else.

It would be great if a person who owns land could designate that a percentage of the visitor bonus for that land is paid to someone else. This would be useful when one person builds on someone else's land or when somebody feels their neighbors are helping them attract visitors.

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Sometimes I think of clicking voting stations as the SL version of "killing rats". For some people, they have become a fixed routine they keep repeating to make money. What is unique is that we can only use them to make money for someone else . So even what could be considered the closest thing to routine drudgery in SL, helps to build sense of community.

I think that this new method of rewarding the time spent on plots is flawed in some very basic ways:

1) It discourages the creation of, and the rewards for creative, artistic builds.
Explanation: What is the point of building an artistic build, or a build that has no real 'functional' purpose under these new guidelines? And as a person who likes to vote for creative builds, does Linden Labs honestly expect me to go AND STAND ON A BUILD THAT I LIKE for minutes at a time to reward them?? I'm sorry, but to me this is not only a waste of my time, but a waste of the communities time overall.

2) Themed communities are doomed under this new system.
Explanation: There are many points that have been brought up about how the themed communities will suffer (renters and the like) under this new system already. Here are a few more: Since the new system depends heavily on how much traffic your area draws, the new themed sims are terribly located, and at a great disadvantage. We're through a 'bottleneck' off of the mainland, next to a closed welcome center, and are forced to hold events to get anyone to visit the sims as it is. Now we're almost being forced into holding more. Better close down the amphitheatres and Stage 4- There's no chance any events are gonna be held there under these new guidelines.

Another point: Themed communities get no tax breaks, no income boosts, and no support from Linden Labs whatsoever- and now it seems like they are content to lower our income streams EVEN MORE by messing up a flawed, yet dependable system. Yet the themed communities are one of the things that are consistently used to sell the game to new users (don't believe me- read all the interviews given by Linden Labs staffers over the past few months and find one that doesn't mention at least one of the themed builds). Why does this make no sense at all?

Ama made the suggestion that maybe the profits of a 'group' could be distributed equally to each group member. On paper this seems like a good idea, but unfortunately without having the group 'kick member' feature enabled this is a tricky situation. I know from personal experience that while Americana has 31 members, no more that half of those are active contributors to the sim. Should all 31 members be entitled to the share of the cash, even though a good portion of them do nothing to help the sim?

3) The system is easy to beat.
Explanation: It took me all of 5 mins to think of a way to potentially beat the new system. Get your group of pals, have them log on before they goto bed at night. Get them to stand on your land during this time. Oh yeah, don't forget to use your favorite keystroke generator so that you won't be logged off after 30 mins. Wake up the next morning, confident in the fact that You've had people on your land for 8 hours overnight. Wow, that must be one heck of a high traffic area you've made

The sad thing is, if I could think of this, I'm sure there are already alot more better ideas floating around out there

Bone's Rant summary: As a 'Lifer', I am very unhappy with both the way this is being implemented, and the unfortunate impact it is going to have on the themed communities. A feature with the far-ranging implications of this should have been tested in Beta, since Linden Labs had known about the issue of voting farms for quite some time.

-Bone

Our every move, chat, and visit will become calculated. This could easily become a reward for the "popular kid". I think that it is much more open to ways to "beat" than the booths. How about a script that causes an av to do random animations with a timer?

It might work if there is better group "sharing" of profits, but this is also flawed. How many members of a group work and contribute evenly? I am sure many groups have no shows or once in a while shows. Why would I want to split my work's profits evenly with them if I spend hours attracting a crowd and I havent seen that particular member in a week?

Bone has labeled the booths correctly as "a flawed, yet dependable system". If people think they are such an eye sore, the change them. They also remind me of mail boxes, everyone has a mailbox of some sort, let's make the mail boxes.

Maybe there needs to be a way to track hot spots. Maybe the residents need to create ways to occupy other and new residents. Dunno, but this is fine if it is the case. What the problem is tho, the majorty of the world was built on a different system than "time spent on property". I am not just refering to the $ gained from the booths. This new rewards system will change the way we all function in the world. I don't think it will make it a better place tho.

fen-

i agree this new system will be a poularity contest .
"who can draw the largest crowd and keep them entertained for the longest amount of time"





i agree with bone and fen very much.

if this new reward system is implimented,i will not be able to contnue to build as i do rely on votes to help fund my habit.
especially with the large tax burden .this newly proposed system does not seem to take into account group builds ,right now all of my builds in "blue" are on other group members land so with this new system i would not benefit from it .

This new system is heavily flawed.

How do you account for those who host events on land owned by other people?

For example (using my experiences in Blue): Crowcatcher Valen held two events back to back on July 3rd. Both events were held at Fanway Park, a build created by Bonecrusher Slate, on property owned by Tracey Kato.

Now, with this new system, who gets the benefits? The person who hosted the events? No, they go through the event support system. The builder? No, because without vote booths, that person gets nothing other than the "oooohhh" factor. Under this new system, the person who gets all of this bonus money is Tracey, who only did one thing: buy land.

People say that this becomes a popularity contest, and in a way it does... but it also isolates groups from affording group sims and bringing in people to see these builds. If you want to incorporate this new system, then Linden Labs would have to cut a huge tax break on people who work on themed communities within those sims to compensate. Without voting booths in themed communities, the taxes would become too high for many of the people involved and they would either have to delete their builds and/or sell their land in these communities and make it public... thereby negating the reason and functionality for themed sims.

Also, this system would completely negate even having the Stage 4's and Ampitheaters... people would be wanting to host their events at their homes/builds and not use Linden resources for events because of this.

If anything, this will bring in more money for the popular recluse... all they would do is hold events at their builds and never go anywhere, because it would benefit someone else.

This also hurts newcomers, because they do not own any land and may not be proficient in building inworld yet... heck, I have been inworld 4 months, and I can't build worth anything. The current system rewards the more creative people who have the hang of the inworld build tools, and they should be rewarded. This new system rewards the people who own large tracts of land and hosts tons of events on their land... or even people who just own large amounts of land, let others build on it, and those builders hosting events at their builds. The builder gets nothing in comparison to the person who owns the land, who can just sit back and collect all of that free money.

This new system creates a land baron system, where he/she with the most land rules over all and gets rich off of it, especially if they get very popular people to build on their land. This system also rewards shop builders, who would now get two sources of income... one from their products, and the other for just their customers being there. It would be akin to a department store getting paid for each potential customer that walks through the door... and not even have to sell a single item to make money.

There have been complaints that the current system rewards clique-like groups... the new system would secure that statement.

Maybe it can be worked out that they have to have a build there owned by them to qualify for this... but then again, the themed communities suffer.

Just sitting here typing this, I have figured out several ways that I can meta this new system to my advantage... and that is even before it has been introduced. That's not good. The sad thing is that most of them involve me not even having to lift a finger.

This system needs a major reworking before it gets put into place... or else it will hurt much more than help.

Bye bye for now,
Alexis

As a builder of furniture but a renter of property there is currently no way of rating my works. I'm not allowed to have my own voting station and I don't see how this new system would have any way of rewarding me or those like me in similar situations.

Where's the love for all of us in these proposals?

Implementing this new system would illiminate my ONLY STEADY SOURCE OF INCOME. I put a voting booth in front of every building I have, that's not an unjustified farm. If someone like's it, they click, if not, they don't. It's pretty simple.
After, because of taxes, not having recieved a stipend in 3 weeks, if this was too be implemented, I would have less than nothing.
The tax system is the only reason, I have yet to sign up for a life membership. Why pay for the game, if I don't have the resources to play? And none of my complaints to the Lindens have been answered. Now the only monitary resource will be gone, and I can stand around and chat? Sounds like alot of fun.
Please don't implement this, you'd be putting a halt on the themed sims that you like to use so much to sell the game to the world.

After reading the forums this morning, I have noticed that one or another Linden has responded to the other hotly contested threads except this one.

Hunter, are you going to respond to our concerns, or is this new proposal going to happen no matter what the current residents feel about it ??

I fully understand that this is "your" game, and you can do whatever you want. But, there are some VERY valid reasons NOT to impliment your new system. I know the few people I've spoken with would love to hear your thoughts on this.


-TK