Should bots be allowed?

I am exactly with you on this Chris. Just because Chip is a nice guy who goes out of his way to be fair to people who make silly mistakes doesn't mean that suddenly being nice is manditory.

Yes, being nice is great but you cannot legislate morality or you end up with which hunts and people who are 'holier than thou'.

I've done a tons of stupid things in SL, I bought that stupid 5k dance floor I never use, I bought the wrong size (the giant) VRR room, I bought a plot of land in OHNO back in the day (Prok is laughing), but I dont yell at LL for allowing me to be a dumbass, I don't want to have my hand held here, and I'd rather be called a dumbass if I am one than to not be allowed to fail once in a while, it makes the victories that much sweeter.

Perhaps we should just remove all rules then an let people do as they please, maybe we just get rid of land ownership and make it more, "you got a big gun and on it you own it"?

The elephant in the middle of this room is the existence of Arbitrary Authority that ultimately must rely on force. In the case of RL that usually means various governments. In SL that means the owner of this virtual ballpark, LL. What everyone is dancing around here is not the frigging landbots, it is the question of, Who is responsible for assuring our existence? So hey, let's grapple with that, so we can then look at landbots as something other than a proxy for a fundamental debate about the appropriate basis for civil society.

There are two schools of thought on this phenomenon (well, all right, there are more, but there are basically two that are still viable in the marketplace of ideas in Western civilization).

1. A Power greater than our vulnerable selves is needed to protect us from those hateful Others who exploit us/designated additional victim categories/"everyone" and that Power must not only have its total power but must use it to make us as safe and secure-feeling as we were in our mothers' arms. That Power is responsible for taking care of all of us. It is responsible for our existence. That power is: Government in RL, LL in SL.

2. We are personally responsible for ourselves and our own existence, and no-one else is. It is useful/necessary to have a Power with a moral monopoly on the use of force to deal with the violent and exploitive elements in the world who are able to overwhelm the defensive powers available to individuals or small groups. That Power needs to be carefully delineated and controlled, because it can (and all too often does) pass into the hands of people who are themselves power-hungry/corrupt/determined to force unwelcome rules on everyone else. And hey, mofo! Don't Tread On Me! In SL, that means we should turn to LL for redress only when we absolutely have to, because they control the Code and, as Philip Rosedale famously said, "The Code is God." Each of us is personally responsible for his/her/its existence.

So look, let's forget about "fairness," because of this basic problem: Define Fairness. There are plenty of definitions, but guess what? They contradict each other.

And since human beings are known to be fallible, we need to also get beyond the concept of, You didn't protect yourself against a danger you did not know existed because you didn't frequent this forum so you are stupid and a Darwinian failure, so go away and die.

Full disclosure: I am of the take-responsibility-for-yourself school. I also apprehend that I do not have God powers (as they are called) in SL, and other Residents don't either, and the Lindens (some of them, at least) do. So we need to deal with this SL reality.

I think Residents can deal with the bots we know of today, provided Residents know they exist and what they can or cannot do. But LL writes the Code. At the very least, LL is responsible for the Code and for dealing with problems springing from the Code that demonstrably hurt LL. I think there will be bots we don't know of today that will be far more dangerous, but that is for the future. For today, we have bots that exploit the Code, and drive people away from SL for that reason. OK, when people leave, there are indeed newbies to replace them, but why should the newbies be REPLACING them? Why shouldn't they be ADDING TO them? Doh. I mean, we do want SL to grow as rapidly as feasible, right? Or do some people have other motives?

So I think LL needs to build into the Code devices that will at least warn people that they may be about to make an all-too-human mistake and should they really be doing this, and should be warning newcomers of at least the most egregious of the exploiters in our midst - here, the predatory ones among the landbot owners. I think that is the least that a responsible pantheon of gods should do to promote the growth of the little universe they control. Because, you know what? Us mortals can walk away from their universe and go deal with RL instead. And some do.

So warn people what they are getting into. And after you are sure they know what they are getting into, THEN they are responsible for their actions. Otherwise, we will soon get to the point where the responsible thing for people to do is not put a penny into SL, and maybe to go do something else with their finite time on this Earth.

If it's obvious that the land was priced in error and the buyer doesn't give the seller a chance to change their mind, yes, I think so. The people we're talking about here aren't those who priced a dollar or two per meter less than the going rate and then realize they could have gotten more. The cases I'm talking about are where someone obviously made a typo or intended to sell to a specific person for a pittance but messed up the checkbox for it. If you know up front or are made aware after the purchase that the seller made a mistake and you don't give the land back for the price you paid then you're taking advantage. This isn't exactly a challenging ethical dilemma.

Your question is disingenuous since the entire point of landbots is to buy the land the second it goes up for sale, not after its been on the market for a day or three.

I never said I was for theft. The land is question is always placed for sale by the owner. The owner may have been careless in how they did things, but they still put it up for sale. The bot owner did nothing wrong in buying it.

So are we to ban anyone who buys land at the wrong price and won't give it back?

yeah, when you can have a bukakke photograph show up as the number one search for keyword erotic and it is not even labeled mature I wonder if there is anyone bothering to even check.

But this 'boo hoo I shouldn't be allowed to make mistakes' thing is a little cheesy in my opinion.

how do we know what the fair value for our land is anyway? I tried to price mine before I sold it and everything in the land search was 0$, should I ask for my money back because I priced it cheap because I couldn't find any prices? how much is 'obvious'? 1k 2k 3k below market value? who decides this?

That would be going a bit too far, but it would be entirely reasonable to implement a system where when someone purchases land the sale has to be confirmed by the seller, thus giving them a chance to refuse if they screwed up. There are very simple ways the system could be changed to prevent predatory land purchasers from taking advantage of honest mistakes without negatively impacting anyone but the land flippers. Since they provide no service and are out only to enrich themselves at other's expense, any inconvenience to them would be a welcome addition to the software.

You searched mainland and estates at the same time which is why the 0$ land came up. If you had sorted by mainland, you would have seen the going rate for land (right now the lowest is about L$10 a meter). By looking at the mainland search, you can see what the cheapest land is selling for. This is decided by market factors, the number one factor being how many sims LL is dropping to auction on any give week.

That's another instance where a UI change could make all the difference. If when setting land for sale the average per meter price for land currently for sale was displayed then people wouldn't have to make a wild guess. The fact that you couldn't find prices is the result of bad UI design which should be improved.

This whole thread is amusingly retarded.

Everyone is against landbots, I get that. They don't level the playing field, this is true. No one can possibly compete with a landbot in purchasing other plots of land. That isn't what I am on about though. When someone posts land for sale, they get crosseyed and dyslexic for a brief moment and time and neglect to hit zero a few extra times, and then post it, and magically find themselves without the money they thought they'd have. Oh no! They've been screwed by the landbot again! People make mistakes, this is true. Big ones, little ones, middle sized ones. Ones that cost them hundreds of dollars, three dollars, twenty dollars. Ones that even land them in jail, or in court, or in community service. I've made a fair share of mistakes in my life. Some that will haunt me for a long time. Some that I don't care so much about. Some that are somewhere in between... Mistakes to learn by, you could say.

Do I want people to feel sympathy for me? No. Should people say "Well, it's okay... It was just a mistake, we'll let it go." No, I don't think so. Maybe when I was like ten, but truthfully no one learns from their mistakes if they think that everyone is just going to pat them on the head and say "It's alright. You just made a mistake."

Linden Labs. I saw when I was reading the pages of posts that had been added since I stopped posting this morning, and I saw someone post about responsibility. How Linden Labs should take more of it in this issue. No. I am so sick of this hand-holding mentality that everyone seems to be advocating. Call me a heartless bastard or whatever it is you want to say I am, none of which is really true, but I don't want someone babystepping me through everything. Yes, SL has a steep learning curve. That's exactly how I like it. I see more idiots than I care to in it already. I like that Second Life is complex, I don't want them to dumb things down so that people who can't be assed to read wont make mistakes thereby costing them hundreds of dollars. I don't need my hand held through this. I didn't need my hand held a year and a half ago when I first signed up, either. My first plot was bought within my first week of playing. I remember it, because it was a particularly strangely shaped plot. It was relatively flat, but the two parcels diagonal from it were raised oddly... Anyway, when I went to buy it, the land sales window was quite black and white as to exactly what I was doing. And that was a year and a half ago! The window is blatant! You know what you are doing when you sell land, and if you can't be bothered to check and double-check everything, then maybe you shouldn't be buying and selling land in the first place.

Take responsibility for your own actions. Learn from your mistakes. And stop crying because you screwed up. It was your own fault, not the landbot that swooped in and bought your land.

They already have the chance to confirm the sale, after you hit the sell land button, you get a pop up listing the area and price. You then have to say yes or cancel. How many hoops do you want people to jump thru?

How long should adults have their hands held?

thanks, Ray, oh well my bad, I guess if I had played around with the options I'd have hit on the right combo, I'm going going to blame anyone but myself for that though. I do still remember the days when I couldn't sell my land at all, that sucked a lot worse than now.

yeah and with our technology it should be possible to have the current fair market value be the default price for a particular size plot of land that way you'd get at least that.

I'd say long enough until we don't see a thread every week about someone losing their land to a landbot by accident. Since you make it obvious that we can't depend on people to be kind or forgiving of mistakes then we obviously need a better system. You can pat yourself on the back all you want for being so much smarter than someone who'd screw up setting their land for sale, but the fact remains that they're LL's customers and it's in LL's best interest to make the system easier to understand and use so that these things don't happen with such regularity. Contrary to what you seem to believe it's not all about you.

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Why is it in LL's best interests? Someone is owning the land, someone is paying tier. If not them, then someone else. I think this is just a fight LL isn't prepared, ready, or willing to fight.

It's not about being smarter either, it doesn't take someone who is smarter to pay a little extra attention to what you are doing.

No it isn't all about me. But like it was said by another poster, if you can't read and understand the Land Sales UI, then maybe you don't need to be buying and selling land.

Chip here is an idea, you can start a business advising people how to sell their land, hold their hands and wipe their noses until they can get it right. Make a little profit and use the free market to your advantage.

Because it costs them customers. The only reason landbots by land is to sell to people - lost land sales to people are lost land sales for LL, ultimately. Landbot owners aren't going to just keep buying land if people start to leave, they won't be able to sell it.

I dunno about Chip, but I'll stick with "lobbying for change", thanks.

There will always be other customers. There will always be someone who wants to buy or sell land. If it's not you, or your friend, or me, or anyone else here, it'll be someone else.

For a while.

SL already is getting a bad rap for other reasons. Every nail in the coffin is one step closer.

As long as you have the most landbots it's not a problem, being the winner and biggest money earner is the name of the game, when SL grinds to a halt, because there are more bots online than residents, you just move on to it's replacement knowing your opposition were all crushed.