Help end the camping

On the technical side of things, campers needlessly waste server resources because the sim needs to keep track of them and send them updates of whatever happens within their draw distance, and anyone new arriving has to hit the asset server to download textures and prims of their attachments (and vice-versa), and possibly (depending on where they are) render them.

On the mainland, the majority of sims are limited to 40 people, so when one parcel consistently draws 30-40 avies, that will have an impact on not only that sim, but the surrounding sims as well, depending on their draw distance. But the main problem there is that the people who own land in that sim are either unable to even tp over to make use of it because the sim is full, or because the sim is just lagging too much.

Grid-wide, the concurrency number would drop by a few thousand, providing some relief, especially during high load.

Camping also promotes laziness and the "everything and more for free" mentality, needlessly waisting resources that have a RL cost associated with them by people who don't share any of the cost and most likely never will.

Why would Lindens want to get rid of the traffic when those who provide camping chairs pay 40k in lindens and up? Which around 160 usd, and there are places who pay a whole lot more.
There are people who think if they dangle the carrot of lindens somebody will come and shop.
I found at least one great place. It looked wonderful but the only people who go there are campers.
Last three places I rented, two of them had campers.
I didn't make hardly anything to nothing. Didn't even cover my rent.
I won't rent anymore.
Up to this point I have been supportive of camping but I have changed my mind.
It basically throwing money very little money in hopes someone will come and enjoy your shop and land.
In the long run it basically creates a place filled with zombies, lag and no real interaction.
Basically its equivellent of the The Sims Online when I was beta there those training houses. It was incredibly boring. To create place like that and spend 720l or more a day to get people to remain there isn't really helping anyone else except the Lindens.
Yet even in long run it will effect Lindens, people will become incredibly bored who do nothing but that activity.
Better bet is finding way to create real jobs and interactions that add to SL.
Creating the same or zombie towns or clubs there is no real creativity or way to promote interest in long run when you create business like that either.
Evemtually people will get bored or tired of only earning few hundred lindes for camping 24 hours.

Thanks, Kitty. That all makes perfect sense.

I wasn't aware of the limit on connections per sim (guess I usually hang out in less crowded places), but that's definitely a problem if camping is preventing legitimate users from traveling to their own land in these locations. And of course, they would be adding unnecessary lag, just by being there and having the server send out constant data whenever anything happens around them.

People have pointed out that the camping issue probably won't be resolved because it benefits Linden, but I'm not so sure about that. Making money is one thing, but is it worth it if it's enraging massive numbers of your own paying clients? I think they'd do better to address the issue as much as they can, so they can maintain a sense of responsibility in the eyes of their customers.

I have one last question, though. How are these people even able to camp for so long? If I walk away from my computer or Alt+Tab to another window for more than twenty or so minutes, the client reports that it's about to log me out. Do these campers have tools that allow them to stay connected despite not being at the controls for hours on end?

Seems pretty silly to me.

There are anti-idle devices freely available in world or u can switch it off from the Debug menu CTRL ALT D im not sure of the correct path to it as im not online atm. HTH

The answer is simple. Create one big Sim, where people can sit on their asses all day, do nothing and drain resorces from the citizens. And call it Congress.......

Wealthy people dont need to camp and for most other things it still gives a representitive view of the proportion of people who visit different places.

If they based it on premium members only they could even bring back dwell since the locations are keeping paying members entertained and in SL.
For example each premium member could have 100L$ distributed amoung the places he visits each week in dwell.
Dwell on premium accounts should increase SL's profits as more places would be built to entertain people so increasing the number of premium users in SL. (premium account holders being people who like SL so much they are willing to pay to be here)

Actually that would be silly... just search once and add the place to the list, if not already in, otherwise count one for that
Or am I thinking too 'non techie' there?

If one changes his picks in between the counts... well... ah... so be it, nobody is perfect

Then run this daily at a random time and update the traffic... well... seems simple to me... but yet... I am not really sure

You could increment a counter from picks added, but then it would be a measure of how many have been added since the counter reset and would ignore all the existing picks.
If you don't reset the counter, it would be a record of all picks added that were never removed, even if the user of that account has not been online in 60 days or more. Possibly it would include banned accounts if the cleanup is not done correctly (get the list of picks, reduce the traffic count on each pick, remove the account).
To not reset the counter and to decrement the traffic based on when a user was last online requires checking the last login date of everyone with that pick, which still causes a massive amount of searching.

From the database load POV, an army of bots adding picks to their profiles requires an insert/update of the database, which is more load intensive than simply reading the data that is already there. Also, the bigger the picks DB becomes, the worse it gets as that DB stops fitting in memory and must be worked on from disk cache. If the picks DB is using indexes, then insert/update/delete will cause the index to require recompiling, which also adds load.

An army of bots TPing to various locations only requires reading of some records from the database (which server the sim is currently on, whether the AV is banned, etc). The database mapping sims to servers only grows as more sims are added, not as a result of the gaming. It's also unlikely to expand outside of usable memory for a long time yet.

well yes:

Since Popularity is bought not earned -
Traffic numbers are meaningless.

As long as Popularity is bought , not earned -
Traffic numbers will be meaningless.

As long as people are allowed to pay people to show up to their venues -
Traffic numbers will be meaningless.

Therefore - wheres the intrinsic merit?

Yes, but many newbies don't know that. Also took me 1-2 weeks to see through that scheme when I joined.

yep - so if Traffic is gone - Less noobies will be taken advantage of.

Imagine that.

Browsing through JIRA, I find SVC-63, a feature request saying that the "number of camping chairs should be controlled according to size of parcel owned."

Torley comments...

You don't need to know "traffic" to find out if anywhere is actually any good - in fact, excessive traffic usually a sign that somewhere is using camping. To me, having camping chairs or equivalent is an admission that where you are really *is* no good, hence bribing people to be there.

The best way to find out if somewhere is any good is to simply go there. If you land, everything is (and remains) grey, nobody is talking despite lots of dots on the map, and it's as laggy as hell, then just go somewhere else. Most keywords give you a variety of options to go to, and is it really the end of the world if you spend 10 minutes visiting 4 stores before finding what you want?

Broccoli

Eliminating ranking by traffic would eliminate camping. The purpose of camping is to increase traffic score to get higher on search list.

My proposal for the "what next?" after elminating traffic score: Allow more room for a better description of an entry in Places. Implement a search engine that ranks by relevance. Allow wildcards in search queries. That way, it will be easier to find what you are looking for and the results won't be skewed by inflated traffic numbers.

I'm just going to put out this quote from dandellion Kimban of Anshe Chung Studios (as written in the slherald comments section) without comment...

"A week ago a professional goldfarming corporation approached us to cash out several million Linden$ that they made from camping chairs. They used a multitute of robots on a whole PC farm. This was money resident businesses donated to support thousands of newbie players. The robots took it all."

Losing ranking won't cause camping to go away. It would likely decrease but there's still plenty of people in the world who believe that a shop with some green dots is better than one without. This is certainly true for clubs, too - nobody wants to be the first person at the party..


See my sig (edit: and VOTE!!!) and the comments Torley posted there. They're working on it..


/me is not convinced that the money was donated to help newbies. I would bet that it was more to help their traffic scores and make it look like people were at their places.

This is completely unsurprizing.

How many remember before the general forums had closed that there were conversations about Chinese MMOG money farms having come to second Life with their job description to find a way to make 2$ US a day?.

Obviously it is too late now as many have a lot of real money invested in SL, but in hindsight perhaps making the inworld pofits removeable from inworld may have been a mistake.