An Unfair Traffic Reform Proposal

Many of the problems with Traffic as it is calculated presently could be fixed by weighting the various types of SL accounts differently. Such as:

Basic Account (no Payment Information on File)-- Ignored
Basic Account (Payment Information on File) ----- 1X
Premium Account --------------------------------------- 5X
Concierge Level Account ------------------------------ 8X

(We can muck about with the multipliers, if needed, but the principle is sound.)

Yes--this is unfair, but I question whether fairness should be a goal of traffic. I believe the point of traffic should be to accurately measure the relative popularity of locations.

My proposal bypasses the problems of enforcement and of arms races between LL and the bot operators, by attacking the economics of camping.

It makes effective camping bots cost 72US$/year per bot. That's sufficient money to discourage the practice--or at the very least--compensate LL for the extra stress on the grid that LL (and the rest of us) have to pay for due to the presence of camping bots. My proposal also kills any incentive to maintain camping chairs. Few people who pay to play Second Life, are going to be camping for 5L$ an hour. If nothing else, having to attract premium accounts to camping sites will cause a huge upward pressure on camping rates, making camping far less cost effective as a marketing method.

Ideally, LL would just not count traffic from camping and camping bots. But there is really no good way of doing that. The world is too big for LL to rely on AR-based enforcement of anti-camping rules. It's too easy to gain an edge on competitors by just one or two camping bots hanging around at 1000 meters (or underground, or hiding in a wall, etc.). And technical fixes to eliminate bots and camping can and will be gamed around (for example, LL could alter traffic stats so non-moving avatars were not counted, but then the bot-operators would just respond with camping bots programmed to wander zombie like around the parcel).

Yes--this will suck for some people. Such a system will certainly do no good for NCI (as the overwhelming majority of our traffic is free account newbies). However, it will give a far more accurate picture of true parcel popularity than the current system and be very expensive to game.

I want traffic to tell me how many visitors I've had really and the system you propose doesn't address that.

However, there was a discussion not long ago regarding whether certain level accounts have more weight in relevancy in the new search, did anyone find any answers on that?

When you count the stipend, it's closer to US$12/year..

edit: maybe make the multiplier related to tier?
edit edit: up to a certain point or Desmond will be getting TP requests 24/7.

I like it. It does make more sense than the current system

That's a good point. That's a significant possible problem with my idea. Camping bot operators would still be forced to either pay 72US$/year upfront (or play a lot more on a month to month basis) but they could recoup some of that as L$ and sell the L$.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to minimize that as a problem? Or does it make the plan unworkable?

The current system doesn't do that either. I'd like to know number of unique visitors, too.

He doesn't already?

That could work.

Carl - I need to think more on your idea. On the surface, it seems like it may be a great idea

Playing devils advocate for a moment.....

Assuming that:

-There is a limit on the number of avatars that can enter a sim

and

-Venue operators will strive to pump their traffic numbers as high as possible



Wont this create a situation where an increasing number of venues ban people for having "No Payment Info on File"? The reason I say this - is due to the multiplier, people with NPIOF will take up a precious "Avatar Slot" in the 40/100 avatar max that's worth nothing towards their traffic. If venues ban NPIOF residents, they can make sure their sim is full with premium or payment-on-file folks only to maximize their traffic.

In the absolute worst case - Instead of lots of venues with camp-chairs encouraging new residents to visit like it is today - new residents could become a pariah that deflate one's traffic numbers.

If the above devils-advocate arguments have merit - I'd be worried that this could end up adversely affecting new residents. Or.... perhaps it'd encourage more people to go premium.... I'm not sure

I'm premium, payment info on file (and spending $500USD per month minimum) and leasing a full sim, but because I don't OWN the sim, I don't get Concierge service. I bust my butt non-stop to get people on the sim and any traffic I get is legit. But under this system, it wouldn't matter.

There's got to be a different way.

Actually, Honey - Carl's proposal is talking about the status of your *visitors* - not you yourself.

Pretty much - you'd get more/less traffic credit depending on the account status of each visitor.

As a searcher, I may not necessarily care whether visitors spend more money in SL or not.

If I'm looking for a popular club, just to find a lot of people with whom to interact, the income level of the participants is meaningless to me.

If I'm searching for cheap products, I may actually be more interested in shops that attract lower-spending residents.

Your proposals suffers the same problem as every attempt by Linden Labs to fix search. It does not address giving the Searcher the results that the Searcher seeks.

Now, if there were an _option_ to toggle between traffic results based on paying account or all accounts, then that becomes a useful search feature. That's because it would give me, the Searcher, an extra option to help me tailor my search results to more closely match that which I want.

My plan assumes that businesses will not be stupid. Banning NPIOF people from your land prevents them from coming and looking at and buying your stuff. But if a business is concerned with traffic to the exclusion of proft, well... they aren't going to be around that long.

However, assuming people will not be stupid, may--in itself--be stupid

OH.

*twirls blonde hair*

nebbermind :X

I'm a big believer in options. In another thread on Traffic reform, I wrote:

I wonder if Payment-Info-Basic members should even be counted. I'll start by saying that's the account I have myself, but it has only cost me a one time Linden$ buy so far.

It's not expetnsive to set, and it's free to keep.

The only thing I see is that it would cause would be a increase of bots because they would need a 5:1 bot:real to be able to out rank the premium members. (=_=)

New search works like Google now, right? What about click through ratings? Score based on teleport per search term. It will be gamed by people using imaginative keywords in their descriptions, but has proven to be quite successful for many Google users every day. Even if every other search term results in a Wikipedia page somewhere in the top-5 results. (^_^)y

What about the rental business? This would really cut them out as lots of renters are No payment on file. I am concerned about how they will rank in the system.

But traffic is not all about shopping. It may become necessary to limit visitors to any type of sim (not just shopping centers). This could be a particularly attractive park that gets tons of visitors and can, therefore, charge entities to use the park for events... this could be media sims (sundance channel, etc) who may want to sell advertising space and charge advertisers based on traffic count.

Some advertising (especially out of world brands) may not need to be targeted to AVs with payment info, but in-world brands would definately want to target AVs WITH payment info, as qualified in-world consumers.

Yeah! I'm payment info online and USED buncha times and I wanna be worth more that 1X

As for going premium, I see no reason whatsoever to do that. $300L a week? Pfft....
The right to own land? Pfft...I'm a very happy renter. I will most likely end up buying more $L in a year than what a premium account will cost, so for me there is absolutely no incentive to go premium.

Oh, and I'm only barking cause I hate bots and the gaming of traffic.

Maybe there could still be a visitor count to support parcels like that without affecting search. I know NCI (Which happens to be Carl's) uses advertising and real traffic of no-pay and basic accounts to sell it's advertising. I'm sure he thought of that when posting his original question... Actually... He did mention it. (^_^)

And with each bot donating tier... then SL pays you to play...

Even if SL killed the stipend and the 512 tier bonus, a Premium account costs less than 20 cents per day. You can run 10 traffic bots for less than 2 bucks. Not counting the stipend and the value of the tier that can be used or rented out to someone else. Anyone with a significant business operation in SL will be able to afford $2 US/day. When you count the stipend and tier rental, the cost would be almost nothing.

Lots of people have good points on this thread about problems in my proposal. It does look that premium account camping-bots could be cost effective for some larger businesses. Additionally, there could be in some cases an issue with NPIOF residents being excluded from some areas. I really appreciate these critiques.

It's now clear to me that the "unfair proposal" (as it stands) would not be nearly as effective solution as I had hoped. As I see it now, the benefits would be 1) traditional "tiny amount of L$ per hour" camping would be made economically unviable, and 2) people wanting to run camping-bots would have to be paying LL for the extra costs they are imposing on the system.

These are not necessarily trivial outcomes, but my proposal would not--by itself--be an effective reform of Traffic. I do think that it may comprise part of an overall set of changes that could make Traffic a more useful measure.

I'm going to think some more