sim lagging because of campers -- what can I do?

Traffic/Dwell has always been about as stupid a concept as ratings was. At first gamed for cash then later for popularity.

One issue however with doing away with traffic however is then we have a new game." How many non letter characters can I put in my property name so I end up at the top of the list."
We have seen this before in other places.

Anything they dream up can and will be gamed.

Best solution I really believe is a limit to script time allotted per m2.not just the scripts placed on the property but the scripts worn by the visitors as well.

How many badly done multigadgets and AOs does it take to crash a sim?

However, i think SL should have such peoples like campers to create the game and virtual world to be a more exciting places... There is always more than one solution to solve a problem rather than just said "banned..banned..banned.." If everything is banned, that will be your world already... hahaaaa I do frustrated when i got lag... well, that is life! second or first, u still faced traffics anyways... hope u enjoy my opinion and take it easy... Cheers!

Whatever the solution... I don't want LL in a position where they need to make subjective judgement calls about "appropriate content" any more than they do now.

That road leads to arbitrary enforcement, unfairness and angrier residents.

Campers don't make the world more exciting, unless your idea of excitement is balancing precariously on a ramp you can barely walk down thanks to fourteen zombies sitting with their arses in camping chairs, doing absolutely nothing.

lol...i do see your point... but that was wat the campers are all about... isnt that correct? decoration for the places... to attract people coming... blah blah blah whatever... and at the end of day, they do contribute the unique choice or excitement or creativity to the game as a whole. Whether u agreed or not or they benefit you? That is individual opinion... brother. Just image a world with only work, eat, sleep and sex... gosh! boring...

To most gamers especially noob, they do benefit a lots... by sitting there 5 minutes, they can get L$1 to buy some cheap stuffs or even to live happily/longer in SL. Not everyone is as smart as those who can write scripts... do this and do that professionally... and bundle of contacts... As for the worry of increasing numbers in camping chairs, i think that they will soon come to a point of time stabilised (economic supply and demand concept). Time will tell everything.

Maybe they should be called "beggars" instead... begging for 5 minutes get L$1.. sound better? hahaaa... Anyway, I just dropped by here to say... brothers and sisters please do not simply banned this and banned that... it will definately ruined/restricted the whole concept SL and the game... The idea is the same as banning smokers, just imaging the smokes goes around the screen... may cause lag and cant see a thing, u know... hahaaa

Cheers!

Boy, this topic really brings out my verbosity for some reason.. sorry folks...

NO.. campers aren't beggars... we HAVE beggars already...

"Can I have $11L for uploads?"

Stand around an infohub for a couple of hours, and you'll see them. ninja-suited, anime-haired, trailing a particle effect or a follower, or some other "effect" attachment.. and ususally armed with something impressivly out of scale.

Beggin for enough cash for "an upload". $11 for a $10 upload? You know they're trying to scrounge enough for the latest jedi mindstorm painbringer or whatever.

It's a racket, like anything in SL. Everyone is trying to make a buck. At least camping is honest about it. The land owners want your body on their land, and they're willing to pay you to do it.

Blame the capitalist market economy model.. blame the landowners, blame SL for leaving "popular places" and cutting actual incentives to be actually popular. Blame LL for not anticipating that "more than 40 people might want to inhabit the same location". Blame the community at large for being SO incapable of generating a better, idea that SLExchange has a "Recreation and Entertainment -> General Event and Traffic Aids" category!

But don't blame the scrubs at the bottom of the food chain.. who are scraping up the change dropped in the drivethru. If Bill Gates started handing out $100 bills... to literally anyone who would send him a Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope.. and offered to fill every envelope sent in, regardless of how many each person sent...

Who wouldn't buy a box or two of envelopes at least?

Camping works because there is little-to-no downside for the camper. If they can figure out how to keep their computer online, they can set their avatar on a camping chair, fire up winamp, background the SL client and watch a nice stream of MST3kEpisodes as they drift off to sleep. And when they wake up the next morning, Mike and the bots still prattling on about the monkeys or whatever... They find that they're often 50-100 $L richer. Fire up a computer on SL before leaving for work, come home.. another 50-100 lindens.

Find "real" employment opportunities in SL.. and make them seriously viable for realistic sums of money.. and camping, like money trees and money balls.. will eventually drift away. BUt take your head out of the sand if you beleive that there are currently real employment options in SL.. you're either a self starter, or you're someone else's wage slave.

I recently was told by someone that their 'club' (not naming names here) was the best paying in SL.. for dancers. Here's the thing.. she stated that I could clear the "amazing" sum of $L1200 a night. For 6 solid hours of sitting in front of my computer, not allowed to even get up and go to the bathroom, make a meal in the kitchen.. nothing. Live, constant interaction.. for 6 solid hours.. for less than $5 USD a night... 3 girls walk home with $5 each. Meanwhile, that club owner takes home $15.

Now it's very possible that her club IS the best paying. But come on people, that's not even close to minimum wage.. and we're talking about 3 interactive sex workers, giving 6 hours of work.. for less than $5 each a night?

This isn't "employment".. it's "game employment".. your pretend character that owns a pretend club is hiring my pretend character to take off her pretend clothes for your pretend customers, to earn you some pretend dollars. And that's great and all.. but aside from stripping, and rare positions "DJing" and the like... most SL in-game employment is essentially "camping" in some form. (I'm not speaking of someone, say, hiring me as an artisan, to develop his land, and build him a custom environment and home, or to write a custom script or something).

Most of these "real" employment opportunities are pretty rare.. and it's hard to go from gig to gig to gig. Luckily you can buy lindens.. and luckily LL is selling lindens into the market constantly.. or the constantly increasing population, (and attrition of people with money in their accounts) would eventually deplete the economy, or make lindens so expensive that no one could afford enough to buy a shirt.

Find a way, a real way.. to hire people in SL.. that's practical and reasonable, and employs 16 people a night. One that pays a decent wage, and is enjoyable enough that the players will WANT to be at their keyboards... and find a way to keep your business profitable at the same time.. and hopefully (for all of us).. it will catch on.

Now, until something better comes along.. there's a chair someplace out there with my name on it.. and some MST3K that needs streaming.

I think campers are an important part of the learning curve. No-one's gonna get rich by camping but it can give newbies that first taste of wealth to start them on the hopefully upward spiral. And for the few minutes I'm off getting the tea/dinner it's so much better financially to sit somewhere earning than just hanging about 'away' like I see so many do.

Tonight .. I start my new job .. no more camping for meee!!!

I would ask a Linden Liaison to come restart the sim every time I log in and it's laggy. This throws the campers out of the sim, and it really helps sim performance.

But the same people willingly pay $15 each month for a MMORPG or $30 for an adult paysite (I believe that MMOG-players and "sex tourists" make the largest part of SL newcomers). They only need to be told that SL may be free, but virtual wares require a small payment. The typical MMOG subscription fee of $15 will buy them L$4000, more than enough virtual money for a month.



I'm usually searching the classifieds when I'm looking for a product. I believe that quality content will be honored by enough customers to pay for some land, a store front (everyone who is able to design a vendor should manage to build a shop too) and sufficient advertising. If I happen to pop up in a giant mall I usually teleport out right away. Not only does it take ages to load all the textures, the teleport routing sees to it that I arrive 30 meters away from the vendor I'm looking for. I don't want to search around between furniture and animations when I'm looking for prim hair.

The walk-by trade is a lot less important in SL, since you can easily teleport around. It's quite a rare case that people who aren't looking to buy anything happen to walk past your shop and are tempted by your displays. Usually a customer specifically searches for a product, and the search options transform the whole SL world into a giant mall. I believe that fast loading vendor textures and a lag-free shop environment is more important than everything else. No customer wants to stand around for 10 minutes, while a mega-mall slowly pops into existence.



I don't find it that difficult. You have a lot of text space available for classified ads, enough to list the whole range of your products. You don't need to pay more than the highest ranking ad found under the keyword "clothing" or "hair", for example; it would be madness for a small shop owner to pay a weekly L$30,000. Try looking for specific keywords, like "kimonos" (11 hits) or "business suits" (4 hits). A clothes designer can be on page 1 for a mere L$50 weekly.

I already got a lot of traffic when I first advertised for L$150, with a shop on a small 1024 sqm parcel. By now I run a main ad for L$7600 and announce new releases with an additional L$1200 ad for two weeks, after that I re-post the ad permanently for L$120. Those ads easily pay for themselves. The traffic is directly affected by the money spent on advertisement (more than 7000 visitors atm). How many more customers could I possibly reach with, let's say 10 small rental stores in various malls, where I can only display a fraction of my wares? 20 people who weekly run into my wares by coincidence? 30? 40? Even if it were 100 or more, mall visitors will likely not look for my specific wares and visit the mall in search for a totally different product.
Instead of investing the work to keep 10 rental stores up to date, I'll rather invest another L$2000 in ads and get another 2000 main store visitors who really want the advertised product. Even if the product costs L$2 only, I'd make profit that way.

There are really nice products out there, made by talented builders, who could easily sell ten times as much if they'd only set up their own store and advertise it. Something genuine, a L$50 ad and you're starting to earn money. There's a demand for almost everything. I looked for things like swans and ducks for example and was unable to find them, simply because no one advertises these products. I ended up crafting my own prim animals.



Mass events are a problem in every 3D online environment. The more complex the graphics (Everquest 2 for example), the more lag you get as soon as 20 people gather at one spot. The few MMOGs that manage to display up to 200 avatars more or less fluidly have rather ugly low-polygon models with a very limited set of textures - textures which are stored on the user's HD and don't need to be downloaded. Given the high level of avatar customization in SL, it's a miracle that we can display as much as 30 avatars plus environment and still get around 15 fps. Under these preferences the idea of a massive club is more or less incompatible with SL, especially in mainland sims.

If I have a roleplayer's job in SL, like dancer, hooker or bouncer (nothing against these jobs, I've been a hooker myself in several online worlds), I can hardly expect the big RL money. If you play SL like a roleplaying game, please view the money in relation to the RP environment. You can buy a decent car for L$1200. I once bought a helicopter for L$800 only; a helicopter for 6 hours of work. In Everquest (1) I needed to "work" months (yes, it was work, not pure fun) to be able to afford a horse.

Btw, you can hardly ask for employment opportunities for everyone. Where should the money come from if no one has a reason to buy L$? The whole system only works because content creators earn enough to invest a lot of time and work, while most of their customers buy not only land but also Linden dollars off them. SL would be dead if the money just circulates around.
It isn't unfair that you need to buy L$ if you don't sell content. You can get a monthly L$3000 for less money than you'd have to pay for any other MMOG. In a MMORPG, you pay your subscription fee and have to work for virtual money in addition - in SL you can concentrate on pure entertainment, no one really needs to work here.

That really varies since each sim has its own processor core (4 sims to a server) the load isnt unbearable to do it. You have scripts and the buildings in the sim as well as the people. This is why i always recommend to a newbie to take up slingo. While it is slow paced they can make more in a day doing that then they would in a few days camping and they are actually at the keyboard doing something.

Being a club owner that was involved in the club scene in SL before me and my partner started to make Club Republik I kind of learned from my experiences in a few places that to much flashy stuff was a degradation to the experience of people in the Sim. Tons of vendors and things that really have nothing to do with the clubbing experience are abound in many of the SL clubs.

Most club owners on the mainland do need to look around the sim see if its mainly residential or shops and stuff. Find a fairly empty sim or a sim where the people that live there are not really active and that dont own alot of land. Talk to them see their plans and by no means put out camping chairs. If your club cant survive on its own merrit as a club there is something likely wrong with how your doing things that you feel you need camping to make yourself look popular. You know Republik ranges 5-10K and we arnt the highest traffic club but the people are actually there to dance and have a good time and basically the entire sim was for sale when we went up but it was split up. People come there for the music and a good time and we kept stuff low lag people can actually fool with their own particles and stuff without a huge degridation to the sim or causing people to lag massively.

We lag when SL is having problems like everyone else does but we do our best to keep things low lag .

But in exchange for that US$15, they get the chance to potentially become the ArchWizLordHero of Wondershire or whatever. In SL, they don't - they can possibly buy some clothes that make their av look a bit like an ArchWizLordHero, but because they and everyone else knows they just bought them, they don't "count". If they want to strive for a goal in SL, probably something to do with content creation or community building, they don't necessarily need to pay for that - and indeed, if they manage it without paying, they'll be seen as a greater success than if they do.



Well, I agree with your frustration with malls - but I have a friend who makes thousands of Lindens a day and ascribed a lot of that to the fact he at one point (and maybe still does) kept 11 mall locations, script tracked to optimise which malls they were in. He still sells most from his main store, but the other locations count. Those figures don't lie. Myself, I also sell most from my main store but the amount from other locations isn't to be sneezed at (although the best of those are other, similarly-based stores).

Oh, and I don't know why you think "anyone who is able to design a vendor should manage to build a shop too" - a vendor can just be a single prim with a texture on it and For Sale set (and in most clothing stores that's exactly what they use), or even a purchased scripted vendor. That's a far cry from building an entire shop building, especially at the risk that someone will complain about your "boxy shop" and start negative publicity against you. At least if it's a "boxy mall", it's the mall owner who'll get attacked, not you, and you can move your vendors out while saving your own face. I had to hold off having a main store for several months because I wasn't confident I'd be able to create a building that wouldn't reduce the percieved value of my products.



Searching is great if you're making a product that a) is clearly identifiable (so that searches can be precisely targeted, thus giving you less other hits to compete against), and b) is something with a real world or common knowledge parallel (so that people will know to try searching for it - if you've just invented the "quirkafleegie", no-one will know to search for that). Even in the case of b) it's easy for there to be too many ways to express what something does - several times I've seen people who've wondered if there could be a way to go back to the place you last visited in SL, and are surprised when I tell them I make such a product; it's advertised, but how would they know what short string to search for to find it? (The keyword I used in my ad was "back button", which is what most people seemed to refer to such a thing as, but evidently that isn't that popular.)



If you're able to pay US$112/month for a main classified, and raise 7000+ traffic, you're already an exception. Of course, in this situation having a single main store is enough! But not everyone manages to do so well - especially when they're starting out.



Perhaps so. But in my case, I can hope that someone will visit a mall, possibly after a totally different product, see one of my vendors, go "hey, that exists?" and buy it.



Well... that's still something that needs to be fixed, since SL is basically a social game after all. And my understanding was that a lot of the lag when many avatars is on the server (scripts slow down, which they wouldn't if it was just client graphical lag)

I agree, the back button (a great idea btw ) would be hard to advertise. Something completely new without any RL resemblance... hm... my personal attempt at an ad text would be something like:


It's no clothing, no hair, no furniture, no poseball and no camping chair. It's just a button. A button for everyone - for goreans and furries, dancers and business people, dominants and submissives, escorts and SLingo players.
It doesn't make you sexy or successful. It won't attract girls and it can't earn you money. But we promise, you'll be taken aback.

The Back Button. Teleport back to any previous location.
Visit our store today and check it out!

We also carry:

I'd combine it with an image that reminds a little of Apple's successful ads... a light-gray, shiny back arrow button on white ground, with a slogan like Wherever you go, we bring you back.

The text should cover many popular keywords, without anyone being upset about a wrong search hit. They're more likely to smile about the ad and honor it by tp'ing to your store. It's a simple commercial trick - if your product is for everyone, try to attract everyone.

i like the idea of asking ofr a sim restart i should try to own 16 sqms in a few major camping places and ask a reboot very now and then XD.

I think you're taking your role play a bit too far!

sound more like RISK

I wouldn't mind campers if they wouldn't cause any trouble to me.... but they do. Some times is just hard to move because of the lag and stays the world "gray"...

Maybe LL should make it like this: If an avatar hasn't had any "command" from the computer that controls him/her for 30 minutes (talk, movement, whatever) the avatar should be logged out... and I mean a really action of the keyboard/mouse... no matter the avatar is on away/busy or alike. I mean if I have moved or said something for 30 minutes I have fallen asleep most likely anyway.

Morwen.

In that case people would just use GhostMouse or Hot Keyboard or any other mouse / keyboard macro recorder to simulate clicks or movement every few minutes.

Ohh... didn't know something like that exsisted... Ahh well... *drops the idea in the waste basket*



Morwen.

asking for a discrete password every 30 minutes would work though right?

I agree that we should limit the amount of avatars based on land size and not what the sim can hold. This would be fair. If a person owns 3/4 or a sim shouldn't they be able to have 3/4 of the sim resources? I created a proposal in the feature voting section a few weeks ago requesting this very thing. If you agree with this look up Prop: 2178 and vote yes!