Expanding the Popular Places list

Often times when I check the popular places list, I get frustrated, because it's almost always the same 20 places. Once in a while, it changes, but only by one or two. There are tons of other places in SL that are popular, but some people may not come across them, because they may not search for the right terms. Also, there are many places that are popular or cool, but don't get the exposure they could because their traffic might be 500 less than the 20th place on the list.

I really wish there would be pages ranked according to popularity. When you do a search in Places for something that fetches more than 100 places, there is a Next button on the bottom. I think it would be a good idea to give the Popular Places list that function, with 20 to a page. What do you guys think?

Unfortunately, "popularity" is simply measured in most cases by the amount of camping chairs or equivalent someone has on their plot. Quality rarely comes into it at all.

Looking at the top 20 right now I don't see ONE place that isn't either gaming or a mall, and honestly little to attract me to stay - once they finally rezzed, of course.

Essentially, they are all unusable to the genuine player who actually wants to go there and do something, but they're fine for the afk player who's just sitting on a camping chair.

Not my idea of what even vaguely constitutes 'good'.

Broccoli

I agree Broccoli.. which is another reason why the list should be expanded. If you wanted to, you could just flip past the first 3 or 4 pages or so.

What concerns me is the amount of 'new player' locations offering camping and other 'easy money' handout schemes.

This doesn't encourage new players to learn how to play the game, how to actually contribute to Second Life, learn how to do something - just to rely on handouts.

As the old saying goes, "give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach him to fish, he feeds himself for life".

We at Stratics pride ourselves with our Headquarters on not offering any of the common lame ways of attracting traffic. Our throughput may be comparatively low - but it's all genuine.

The biggest way that Second Life will be improved, and the curse of camping chairs removed, is for those like us who genuinely want to help new players to teach them, istead of seeing them easily exploitable.

Broccoli

AMEN!!!!!!

Not everything in popular places is camping chairs.

Some of it is and often times a lot of it is, which is why I agree there should be an option to scroll "next" and go down the line of high traffic places. That way you can skip passed the campers and onto other high traffic areas of interest.

I've been thinking lately that the camp chair phenomenon could be all but eradicated if idle time didn't contribute to traffic ratings. There's probably a flaw (or 10) with that logic which I'm missing, though.

It is a shame there is not some way of a voting system or something to show popularity.

This list would be so much more useful if it contained places of interest for new (or old) folk to go check out and DO things.

Places like Apollo and Svarga for example.

Or someway people could submit their locations - places that have things to do or see, not just malls, gaming centres, stores alone. Then a selection displayed in this list.

Many new people have asked me 'what is there to do here?'

Well, perhaps it is about time it was easier to answer that question, there are so many wonderful places to explore and have fun in SL, but most of them are only findable by word of mouth.

Since there is a topic on this issue of popular listing i like to add a remark.......

I wonder if lindens themselves play games with the popular listing, like resetting sims of clubs that are slowly reaching the top of teh popular list . If a linden reset a sim or island he break the dwelling pattern right? I say this because resently there are a few lindens resetting personal island club sims without promission of those owners. Now this is very strange because not all top ( say 15 sims ) privite island owners are asking for island reset ( thats for the owners to make not the lindens right? ) Why give the island owners the right to control their own business on thier island, then turn around and reset the island like its mainland? This is totally stupid and leaves a bad taste inthe mouths of owners taht pay $195 Not including external server spaces and web hosting outlets.

I can think of two.

1) If "idle" is classed as "no keyboard or mouse activity", there are apps that get round this fairly easily by simulating this. Of course, these are ToS violations simply because they are stopping a game function from working as intended, but nobody seems to care about that.

2) If "idle" is classed as staying in the same X/Y/Z position, then various things like the "cleaner" - where someone is actually scripted moving around a small area and being paid for it, then that won't work either.

It's clear that Linden Lab don't want to pursue a technical, ethical (512 plot filling and lagging a region to a halt) or legal (ToS) prohibition against camping - so the only way left is education from those of us who actually care.

Unfortunately there are many more new players than experienced players who understand the damage camping can do, so it's going to be quite a struggle. I always boycott anywhere I find that offers payment for nothing as soon as I realise I'm there.

Broccoli

This would likely be gamed with pay per vote, votebots, and the like.

I wonder if folks would support using the open-source client to try and manage this - the most obvious way being that the client unsits you if you're idle for more than 120 seconds or so while seated.

the very same decision I've come to. I spent a good while yesterday sitting stationary on a wall with a beer, chatting and answering newcomers questions. One was actually there on her first day and a charming lady too. So much more rewarding to help her with 'how do I kiss?' than 'how can I make easy money?'
OK .. mebbe an ulterior motive but you get the gist?

Well, there is, it's just not run by LL. http://slpopularplaces.com Their voting boxes are all over SL.

They are changing the way the popular listing is measured soon right? Have to sit and wait.

New player help places have to do the best they can to help new people get involved in Second Life as it is right now. I've seen many people who'd react with extreme anger to any suggestion that new player helpers were pursuing any particular political agenda in doing so.

Right now, new players can get a few L$ - which is often very important to them - by camping. I don't particularly like camping and neither do many other people I know, but I don't think it's right for me to then decide that, just because I personally don't like camping, I'll hide it from new people or try to stop them doing it even though it might be beneficial to them. That seems to me to be the start of a very dangerous slippery slope.

Nothing has to change, just penalize high traffic with extra fees and the problem solves itself. All hosting providers factor acceptable diskspace and bandwidth into a monthly price, so far LL is only factoring space, not bandwidth, or extra load on the grid as a whole.

Just one L$2/10 minute camping chair costs $20 US/month to operate, so it seems everyone in popular places could easily do with paying more to LL to compensate for the extra load they're causing.

What's more beneficial? Joining SL as an unverified, getting told to "play" zombie for over 20 hours and walk away with L$250 and not a clue about anything; or providing payment info on sign-up and having L$250 before you even walk off orientation island?

By the time a newbie meets any other resident to ask for help, it's already too late for them to do that, so advising them to do so isn't much use.

And I'm not saying that people should be "told to" play zombie. What I'm saying is that I don't think it's my place as a newbie helper to omit to inform newbies that camping chairs exist, just because I personally don't like them. If people are actively being told to go and camp, then that's a different matter, but the vast majority of help notecards I've seen don't do that; they list camping chairs together with a number of other options, usually including content creation.

I was dismayed when I first started in SL to see just how dreadful the "Popular Places" tab was.

That's why I started SecondSeeker.com, web site that reviews interesting places that don't involve casinos, camping or escorting. It would be great if Popular Places actually listed places that were fun to visit.

(Note, this is an ad supported site, so if that bothers you, please don't visit, and no, I've not quit my dayjob yet...)

"Tired of sex? Is clubbing boring? Slingo leaving you unfufilled? Let Second Seeker be your travel and cultural guide to the “no-sleaze” parts of Second Life."

Your gonna lose alot of people with that first question....

That would put a lot of non-camping chair places out of business. I run NCI (New Citizens Incorporated). We average traffic in the mid 30K range for our main location in Kuula--and that's after moving 90% of our classes to NCI South and NCI International. We regularly fill the Kuula sim.

Your solution to the "problem" would put us out of business. Period. I've rolled with all the "punches" that LL has dished out over the last year, but I can't see any way I could generated the extra money to cover a big charge for higher traffic.

If you think about it, its kind of a perverse incentive--antidwell. You penalize the most popular places in Second Life.

Jumps over a post to look at the next one......Sex seems to be Second Life is aimed at. Look at the content...Look at the players..... Well thats all good and said about newbies. But sad facts are most jump right over help locations right into the game.

What if ----

Instead of "Popular" Places the listing was simply a random, revolving list from every listing - so that if I look today I see names/descriptions and can visit those I think I'd like, but tomorrow the list is different. That sounds interesting, to me.

I love NCI, it's where I started to learn the ways of the SL'er. I remember when i had to do a search for it and started reccomending people go there to end their confusion, now I can't seem to go anywhere w/o someone mentioning it! Hats off to you and your team Carl, what you guys have to done for the SL community is invaluable.

The lowest ranked mature popular place has about 54,000, far above a mid 30K range.

40,000-50,000 seems to be - very loosely - the top range anyone is going to achieve with legitimate traffic day after day. That means 35 people on your parcel on average throughout the entire day.

I never suggested that LL start charging for every last point of traffic, just that it can establish a reasonable limit that comes as part of the normal tier fee, if someone is intent on going well past that limit, then they can get hit with an extra fee.

If you don't want to pay the fee, split your land into smaller parcels, each of which would get a share of the traffic, but each individually would remain well below the limit. The only trade-off would be loosing your rank on popular places vs paying to remain there.

Is the webhosting business perverse? SL seems to be about the only place online where everyone is so dead against paying for what they're using.
It just doesn't make sense that people who are filling their sim to the brink with 100 avies 24/7, causing the sim to crash multiple times a day with very likely the resultant manual technical monitoring, costs as much as a sim that just sits there unused most of the day.