Linden action against landbots?

I was just browsing search for land for sale, and flipping through the pages rather fast to look for a certain price range, when I got a dialogue (something like it anyway) "land search blocked. You performed too many searches in a period of time. Try again in a few minutes."

While not being very handy for me, this feature would seriously cripple landbots' abilities to outspeed humans in buying and flipping cheap land. Way to go Lindens!

Oh, interesting.... I will have to try that myself when I am in-world next time


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Fraid not. Landbots use as many alts as they need to get what they want (fast searching).

That would mean creating a lot of alts. If this affected me, searching at human speed only, the effect on a bot trying to search fast would be far greater. I still hope this will have an effect on landbots.

Orf course it's a lot of alts probably running 50 or so landbot alts each to cover the 6000 odd sims out there plus a swaggle of camping bots, no wonder we have lag

It doesn't stop the bots..sorry. I lost 290K's worth of Sim to a bot last weekend as I missed off a zero in pricing it. Have to say though, they gave me it back no arguments and no delays even though it was my stupid mistake. There are still good people about.

The rate limits have been in place a while, and yep, they use a lot of alts.

Bots can be extremely lightweight clients, depending on what features are needed. I don't know how the average landbot works, but it's possible to setup 10, 20, 30 bots (each with an alt) and flip between them for conducting searches. The only thing they would have to interact with is login and search (extremely lightweight). Once a plot is found that matches what they are looking for, the coordinates can be passed to a purchasing bot which would have the necessary functions to TP and buy land.

Hee hee, if the account holder had enough bots, they could just give up SL themselves and return to their 'failed first life' LOL

While this may help slow down the landbots a little...it's also slowing down those of us looking for land for personal or business use. I missed out on my opportunity to purchase some first land by waiting to long, trying to find a parcel I liked....and now that I'm finally willing to bite the bullet so to speak, and buy myself a nice little plot, I can barely search for land at all without the little search blocked message showing up, or the search results returning a "None Found" message.

Oy.

It reminds me of when in TSO they tried to stop the cheaters by making it so that if you won the little games too fast or too well, you were financially penalized.

All that did was take the thrill out of it for regular players; the cheaters were playing by bot anyway, so they didn't care.

All this does is make looking for land less efficient and far more annoying for those of us looking for land as an actual human.

coco

I've seen TSO mentioned a couple times, but I don't know what that is. Sorry for the tangent, but I'm curious to know.

The Sims Online. The little games were things like Pizza, where four players worked together to use pizza ingredients to create the best pizzas possible and get a financial reward. (I had some of my best fun playing pizza there!)

coco

Although LL put it in to disrupt the bots, it actually helped them because they were set to search at a pace that would not bring that message up, whereas humans kept getting the message.

The mention of 6000 bots slugging it out to make an itty bit of revenue for its owner showed me that so long as there is the slightest chance that a bot will get someone to "buy viagara", some people will run scads of them at virtually zero cost to them. Of course, just like spam, we all pay the price of bots because their actual cost is externalized. Adding delays to searches only increases system load because of the extra bots needed to work around it; the solution is to internalize the external cost.

You want to search for a parcel that may cost L$15k? That will be L$1 for the search, please. Will it take some gamesmanship out of land? Yep. Is that a bad thing?

I love your avatar, Raymond!

coco

Thank you . Look familiar? Please pardon the delay while I bang on things.

Yes - and I love that bang on things screenshot, too!

coco

Hey - I was just looking at another forums and realized this is the SECOND of your avatars I've loved! The other one, well I just love and adore it to total pieces and bits and want to take it home and love up on it (it's a hampster, I believe).

Raymond . . . I think . . .

. . . I think . . .

I THINK I LOVE YOU!! *blushes and runs away*

(jk)

coco

Awww, ty! Sadly, my in-world avatar is just a devastatingly handsome homo sapien.

Reminds me of when I was so disappointed to find out that Eggy wasn't really an egg avatar.

coco

I have seen pizza advertised in SL too but have never tried it.

Is this the same thing or something else?

I tried that once some months ago, if we're talking about the same thing. It is a version like the TSO pizza game, thing, but really not the same thing, and you played it without teammates. I wasn't too crazy about it.

coco

Meanwhile I couldn't easily find what I needed in the in-world land search, but by using a third party website listing Mainland for sale was able to find the sweetest 512 plot for reasonable price.

Actually LL put it in to ease the overall load on their servers. They don't give a rat's nether parts about landbots and the problems they cause. Overall, it ends up hurting human players more than landbots ... a human can only refresh search once every five seconds now. Landbot users now run mutliple bots with staggered refresh times so they can bypass the five second limit. What LL really needs to do is throttle searches by IP address rather than by account. That would put everyone on a slightly more equal footing. I won't be holding my breath waiting for them to implement that, however.

This would make having thousands of bots pointless as in any 10 minute time period they would always return the same results.

This will dramatically reduce load on the servers as bot makers will have no reason to run multiple bots doing searches, and no reason to search more than once per 10 minutes.