What sort of people are the camp site operators?

So I have a few educational posters near a few "mega" camp sites in an attempt to maybe get some of the campers to think about alternatives to camping (and also hoping to revive some Sims that have basically died due to some camp site moving in and taking up all the avatar slots). I was "given" today a modification of one of my posters which is clearly attempting to refute my posters (FUD anyone? ). Here is what is says:



Now if we ignore for a minute that the person who edited this clearly can't do maths (they seem to think that 10 US cents equates to less than L$1, if that's the exchange rate they are getting I want me some of that!) they seem to be advocating that people should camp, make their "fortune" and then cash it out of the game. How deluded are these people? And seriously when someone sets up one of these sites on a Sim do they really have an attitude that other residents on the same sim should just "MOVE"? Do they honestly think people *can* sell after they move in and still get a fair price? And they call *ME* an idiot? Why do we allow this to continue when it's grossly against community standards?

I have got a doc on one way to maybe sort this issue out in a "fair" way, but what do others think? My idea (http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dcfn9ft7_0hrv3vv) basically boiled down to not allowing "no payment info on file" people to be paid money in world, i.e. treat them like real world tourists where they aren't allowed to enter into money making ventures. Until I saw this in SL it never made any sense to me why countries stopped tourists from making money, now it's way clear to me why they do it Maybe we can go even further and ask people at signup the "purpose of their visit" and if they say "business" then get them to sign up as residents highlighting that saying tourist means they can't earn or be given any money (they can of course buy money from the LindeX).

Another idea I had was that "no payment info on file" avatars don't get counted in parcel traffic estimates. That however is grossly unfair to legitimate freebie places like the freebie warehouse but it does seem like it would be easier to implement. I don't really like this idea, but it's an idea none the less

Can people spot flaws in my Tourist idea? I'm probably missing something really obvious that will be bad for the community so please tell me if you spot it.

Cheers,
~Jeb

That runs into a lot of problems - most notably things like vendor refunds, and prizes from legitimate contests such as Show and Tell events. Also, if a user really does have the ability to earn good money by making things without using a credit card then why stop them? And how could a "tourist" buy money from the LindeX when being a tourist means they have no payment info?



That idea has come up a large number of times before but the problem is that it skews traffic just as much as camping chairs do.

One thing that possibly could help is offering different ways of calculating traffic. It is silly when shops have to offer things like Lucky Chairs in order to attract traffic because, if they have a convenient store which is low lag and it's easy to find what you want (and if it's not the kind of product where you want to browse, eg, not clothing), then they are penalised with low traffic scores because people don't stay there.

Sorry, I'm mixing up my terms a bit. When I say "no payment info on file" I mean people not paying subscription (i.e. basic accounts), so you can have payment info on file and you can have used it but you aren't a subscription payer that makes you a "tourist" for the sake of my document

I take your point on refunds, that is a tricky one. Prizes however, well they don't have to be cash esp. if you can by script determine the status of the winner Only residents can win the cash, others get goods to the value of that cash. Refunds could be done if there was "transactions" recorded in secondlife, when money changes hand a unique transaction id is created for it and can be "undone" by the vendor through the website providing the user initiates the refund? That would be a cool feature to have regardless of dealing with camping

Another problem with this is slot machines and sploders etc.
Although a prem account holder my First Land lindens actually came from a sploder.

If these items simply accepted $ from tourists despite never paying out to them, would be very bad publicity and ethics. Adding mechanisms so these devices polled the specs whatever to see if customer is payable to might compound the problem.

This is why gambling is bad, mmmm'kay Seriously I guess what I'm saying then is tourists can't gamble, is that really such a bad thing?

{added, after thinking for a it}

ooo! or it could open up a new social no-money casino where you get "credits" to gamble with rather than money and it's all just for the fun of it?

Split search into paid results and free results with paid results at the top. If it's cheaper to buy their way to the top of the list, they'll do that instead of paying it out with camping.

Less lag, more useable sims, less strain on the grid, new L$ sink and less skewed traffic numbers, everyone's happy .

hmmm, if they are doing it just to game the "popular" places and the various traffic sorted search results then I guess that would be a good solution too. All though ideally what I'd like to see is something more like Google, free results easily seen and not able to be drowned out with paid adverts, and then the advertisers can compete with each other in keyword auctions. Brilliant! Maybe Linden Labs should outsource their search...

If you put paid results out of the way where most people can simply ignore them, there's not going to be any incentive to stop gaming traffic numbers anyway. If you want to add 40k worth of traffic to your parcel through camping, that will cost you L$8k/day, some people are paying far more simply to reach the top of the classifieds.

Maybe not physically out of the way but it would seem right to clearly identify "paid for placement" search results and only list a few of them. Maybe doing something similar to AdWords where poor performing ads get dropped to combat keyword spam and ads performing well get run more often and use an auction to determine which (if any) of the ads to run (up to some maximum number so that free results can still be seen).

As far as I can tell, the kind of people that run camping chairs are the kind of people who aren't afraid to admit that, without bribing people to visit, what they offer isn't sufficient to attract people otherwise.

They're also the kind of people who don't care that they're using far more resources than they're actually paying for, and aren't worried about trying to get on well with their neighbours.

I'd much rather visit a place with 500 traffic of people who are there because it's a quality place, than a place with 5000 traffic that's full of zombies.

$5 - less than a McDonalds meal - gets you about L$2700 of 'play money'. That's 60 hours of vegetating, on L$3 per 15 minutes on an average camping chair.

Broccoli

I just saw some guy on a L$2/15 chair and he'd been there for 16 hours! o.m.g. I felt so much pity I had to pay him some spare change.

I have tried to gather up all the info regarding the camping false economy and put it into a webpage: http://jebediah.brown.googlepages.com

Please give it a read and let me know if you can think of any improvements/changes that can be done to it to make it easier to understand. (I'm probably too wordy and use the wrong words/tense in places, my tech writers always tell me that, so any tech writers in the forum who want to give me feedback, please do ). We can then just send people there when they wonder what it's all about.

Cheers,
~JB

I guess that makes me a "tourist": then.

Since I originally bought $60 US worth of lindens.. and now have 3 successful business ventures and am taking about $200 US/month OUT of SL.

Why should I be forced to pay for mainland land ownership priviledges that I have no use for... and risk having my entire inventory seized and deleted when one month I can't make my membership fee?


To your larger point.. there's no way to make that work. Lindens can be purchased through many outlets. SLexchange being one I like a lot. You can pay them via paypal, and they send you lindens. But in order to transfer you lindens.. someone called "Exchange Street" transfers them to you. Just like a camping chair, or anything else.. in the end it's a person-to-person transfer of lindens. You can't stop some people from receiving lindens from some people, and not others.

Many freebee accounts (no payment info) use money trees, freeplay gambling machines, lucky chairs, and camping chairs. Many a freebee girl stumbles into dancing for tips. There are treaure hunts, and all sorts of ways to get lindens.. including getting paid to cybersex. I did not have to put info on file, but I liked the idea of free lindens. Had I known then that the user database would be hacked 2 months later, I wouldn't have given my info, and would have instead probably bought lindens through SLX. Within my first 3 weeks I had made 2 sellable items (one of which I am still selling). But I did buy lindens for operating capital. (it was actually not until my second month that I found out about camping and found a decent list of places to go).

As I said above, I've got a successful business running now.. enough that I actually evaluate real world purchases in terms of linden value (Large double pepperoni pizza at domino's... $L2000. BUt you know what? I still camp. I still play those stupid $1l word guessing games. I still go in for the occassional jag of freeplay blackjack.

But the inevitable question is "why do I camp?" the answer is simple. Because my computer is going to be on overnight anyways (performing other tasks).. and if it's on, why not leave it on SL.. and find a chair. I give the land owner what he wants in terms of "someone" to sit on the chair, and when I wake up in the morning, I have 50-200 L$ more than I had before. It's not a lot.. that's certain... but pizza is only $L 250 a slice.

Very interesting idea. It worked for Google.

There are very simple fixes that would erradicate camping chairs:

any of these options could work:

search result priority should be based on popularity, not traffic... people's 'picks' in their profiles would be the factor to make listings higher in the search.

search result priority should be based on uniqueness, not traffic. each avatar gets counted as 1 per hour after they stay for 5 minutes.

search result priority should be based on average traffic, not traffic from the day before only.

NO POPULAR PLACES TAB IN SEARCH

I assume you only count those with "pay info used" for this, in order to prevent someone creating 100 alts all with their place in the picks tab?

Ok, so in order to get traffic, you just have to persuade as many random people as possible to stay on your parcel for 5 mins? Wouldn't that encourage place owners to simply pay people $15 or so to stay on their parcel for 5 mins?


Average traffic for how long?
If the time period is long, what is to prevent someone buying a parcel, putting camping chairs on it, then selling it.... and charging a fortune for the parcel because it has high traffic, safe in the knowledge it'll be awhile before it goes down?



Nice idea, might help clean up SL's image too. Problem is... anticipating what the traffic-kings will do next to pull in traffic. Litter their descriptions with all the common keywords maybe?

Personally I'm more in favour of the idea of limiting traffic in some way so as to discourage people from gaming the system... AND to provide them other ways to advertise where they can simply spend money to get to the top of the search results.
Classifieds do this though, and they have *not* stopped camping chairs!

How *do* we allow people to 'rate up' a location, without opening the system to being gamed? Is there a way?

My version of a camping chair:

http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=152680

All valid responses.... honestly i dont know the answer to stop from gaming the system... but im an average joe schmoe, and i can think of plenty to adjust the traffic tally system.

My thoughts is that it should be an algorhythm that none of the residents are aware of.
Something along the lines of: basic members don't count.... the more someone pays in tier and fees, the more they count.... a person that visits more locations in a period of time counts more... a person that chats more counts more....

Or another option quite simply is that locations must register to be counted in the traffic tally. To register, you must declare that you are not paying people for their presence only. If you disobey this, you're breaking the TOS...

This person obviously believes anyone camping is an idiot. I REALLY wanna see a computer that can stay active and online WHILE in standby mode!

(I don't mean to imply that Jebediah Brown is a liar, he was only quoting them)

i think this is nonsense, isn't secondlife built upon being able to do things within the laws and create what you want?
If residents want to camp for money, isn't it up to the individual?

i know it may cause lag, but i think you should be asking the question, 'why cant the servers handle this and what are lindens doing about it?', not, lets stop camping its ruining ppl's experience in sl.

you can get rid of camping but there will always be something else around the corner, the system needs to be able to cope with it thats all.

ROTFLMAO, are you serious?

I'm not totally against camping, but you can't say "It's servers fault" and get away with it.

First, LL has no obligation to meet the resources demand for each and every whim of yours.

What when I want to run a gazillion, heavy load scripts, because I feel a need for them and because it's "up to me to be what I want to be"?

Could I tell everyone to STFU because it's not my fault if LL doesn't provide me with better servers?

There are technical limits you may not be aware of, but ignorance is not an excuse. At any time there is a finite amount of resources and if you're alone using most if not all of them, now you STFU and take out your camping chairs.

The short answer is 'Thieves, Parasites, Bullies and Blackguards'. They move into a sim, set up their camping emporium, suck up all the sim resources and render it useless/inacessible to the rest of the legitimate residents who are paying tier for the upkeep of the sim's server and processing power. Residents who complain routinely recieve volleys of abuse from camp-club operators.

I have seen sim after sim ruined by this parasitical breed of low-life who are too selfish, greedy and cheap to go out and buy a sim of their own to provide the processing power for their camping clubs. I presume the camp-club operators' real motive is to drive the residents out and snap up the rest of the land cheap. Land that has been rendered worthless by their camping club. Then, once they've succeeded they turn round, close down the club, sell the land, set up another camping club with an alt and repeat the process screwing the residents over again. A nice little earner for amoral low-lifes.

Having experienced the typical Linden Labs 'non-interventionist & even-pawed' response to camping-club operators (defending the camp-club operators' rights as well as the residents' rights), this strikes me as an issue ripe for community 'pitchforks'n'torches-style' direct action across the board to drive such parasites off the grid forever.

Angel, the answers to your questions "How *do* we allow people to 'rate up' a location, without opening the system to being gamed? Is there a way?" are unfortunately:

1) No known way
2) Not in any practical form that could be implemented

Any system no matter how well thought out is open to abuse and gaming. However all is not lost. The answer is education, information and knowledge. Make it plainly obvious to residents that every aspect of Second Life is not only open to abuse and gaming but is being actively abused and gamed, the ways in which it is gamed, how to spot such gaming and also how to counteract and defend oneself and ones' interests from abuse and gaming.

Basically what your saying is to get rid of basic accounts all together - that's what it boils down to. If a basic account could not be paid L$, then their is no point them being in the game in the first place. For the record, most of the worst trouble makers in SL are subscription payers in my experience. Of the, apparently, 2 million users of SL, only about 40,000 people are subscription payers.

Ultimately what you suggest would result in about 98% of SL residents being prevented from enjoying the SL experience - and just so you can have a little bit less lag - to me that sounds even more selfish than the camp site owners.

Not at all.

If camp site owners had to pay the % of the sim resources they use up, then they'd soon find they can't afford to run.

How can it be fair for one 512 sq m plot to hog all the resources, preventing use of other 127/128 of the land in the region?

How can it be fair for one 512 sq m plot to use up all 40 places in the region, preventing anyone else using it?

Camping offers NOTHING to better the experience of SL overall, in fact by simply spending $5 on Lindex any player can have much more fun with much less stress and causing much less disruption.

SL is not a basic human right. If you can't pay to play, or be bothered to, don't complain about being treated like 'second class citizens'. Just be grateful that you can play at all - because it's clear that free unverified signups was one of Linden Lab's biggest dumb decisions in their history, opening up SL to grow at an exponential rate far outpacing the ability of development and investment.

Broccoli

What about camping on a private island, where the operator owns the whole sim? Surely you can't have a problem with that...

"We all notice it in-world when the number of concurrent users reaches a certain point, subtract maybe 1,000-2,000 campers all over SL and things would be better for everyone, not just the people who are unfortunate enough to share a sim with them."

I posted that on another thread but seems relevant here. You can argue that camping provides someone with a few L$ to go and spend, but while they're actually camping they're nothing but a drain, whether it's on the sim they're on, or adding to load on the grid as a whole.