Canceling Premium due to 300L stipend base

NO im asking to Lindens to STOP doing something. Theres a difference.

The only thing WE the people could do to make camping less attractive is either pay people not to campe (through jobs, etc) or boycott places that camp (so it becomes less attractive) neither suggestion very feasible long term.

And we can search by alphabetical order. Worked for the yellow pages.

why do traffic numbers need to mean anything - if the place is Actually worth visititing it wont need them.

Right now we have a skewed system becuase the traffic numbers pull people away from better done content.

Couldn't traffic numbers just be reported to the owner of the land, and left out of the search? This would seem to satisfy both needs. It would supply me with the number of visitors to my site (of course there are scripted things out there for this as well I've seen) and make people stop going to the more "popular" places by default.

Sure.

But give me meaningful and precise numbers, not a mystical aggregate "traffic" number. Just tell me how many people visited my parcel, what their average length of stay was. Of course, it isn't necessary for Linden Lab to tell me this stuff at all. I can script a device that can provide me with all of this data and more.

The most important thing is that traffic is eliminated as a means of ranking search results.

I think there could be more creative solutions than that. There has to be a better way of getting new players into an "incremental progression game".



The classifieds used to be searched by alphabetical order.. until every single business started putting 1111AAAAAA in front of its name in order to get the top slot.. and then someone worked out how to get ASCII code 1 characters in there.. and so on.

The search ordering has to be something people don't have a free choice about or you'll get gaming of this kind.

thats already done in the phone book now - most of us recognize it for what it is and skim down to where the real names start. I simply am unable to see places with inflated traffic numbers as preferable to places with names with a lot of 1111AAAA's to them.

altenatively the find places and classified could simply not work unless the ad starts with a Alphbetical character. then at least youd limit it to the A's.

The only way to get new players involved and to ignore free money (even in small quantities) and promissed free sex -

would be to build stuff interesting enough for them to bypass that. Right now thos that interesting stuff is lost in the Sea of inflated traffic numbers.

In addition, relatively simple algorithms are well established for determining when somebody has entered a nonsensical name, such as those beginning with long repeating character runs, and these algorithms can be used to reject these names, requiring the advertiser to enter something more appropriate. If somebody wants to call themselves "Able Textures," more power to them.

Even though I thoroughly hate camping, when it comes to the alternatives, I far prefer it over shouting lucky chairs or sudden huge lag spikes because of those awful mobvends. At least zombies don't interfere with my shopping, while constant green chatter and shoving crowds are far more annoying.

I've noticed that "display models/bots" run by the store owner have become popular as a new camping technique as well.

One thing that might possibly work is to base how much traffic you contribute based on your avie's age. This isn't meant to put down newbies, but I'm assuming that most older residents aren't going to be swayed en masse to get a few pennies worth of L$, and need something actually worthwhile to come spend their time there.

If having a 2 year old resident on your parcel for 1 hour gets as much traffic as 10 newbies for an entire day then at worst nothing changes, but the real hangouts would get an immense boost, bridging the current gap; or at best all the "popular" places change to make their business/club more appealing to the older resident, focusing on offering quality rather than the persuit of quantity.

The phone book doesn't let you search by keyword, doesn't scroll, and you see the entire advert for everyone at once.



What sort things do you mean by "interesting stuff"?

you remind me of an English professor I had in College - you want me to quantify everything.

and ask "what can YOU do" a lot

Interesting stuff -

A dozen places that used to exist but were shut down becuase no one went to them-

Becuase no one heard about them

Becuase they were lost in the sea of Traffic numbers.

Theres some now - but Im not try to sell people on places,
Im trying to express the general concept that reenforcing a strict popularity contest over substance negatively influences creativity.

Ask not what Second Life can do for you, but what you can do for second Life.

whoa your signature - so YOUR the voice?

wow

I understand, and I'm sorry - I don't mean to offend anyone, and I acknowledge that what I'm saying probably isn't very popular. But the problem is that there seems to be this constant refusal to entertain the suggestion that maybe camping is what newbies want, maybe it is popular with good reason, and that maybe they aren't in fact interested in the things you think they should be interested in.

I know it's sad and frustrating. There's plenty of times when I've thought "I wish people weren't so interested in (something), because if they weren't they'd still be looking for things to do, and maybe they'd find me". But if my reaction to that situation was to complain they were hurting me, or to call for the (something) to be banned from SL or made useless by changes to the system, then I wouldn't expect to get either of those - it's just how life and business work, and if I have to go without what I wanted then the system doesn't really care that much.

We've already seen on this thread that people agree that newbies want an MMO style incremental progression, and at the moment the only one they seem to be offered is camp (small money) -> buy avatar items -> win avatar contests (medium money) -> buy even better avatar -> dance/escort/model (big money), etc. All the cries for camping to be banned seem to be ducking around the question: why can't all of the creative minds on SL, and there are lots of them and many are exceptionally talented, come up with a better incremental progression experience than this?

Now it's certainly possible that newbies are forced into camping because it is all they can find, and that they'd like to go to other places but can never find them because of the traffic gaming - but do you have any actual proof of that, from interactions with people? Beautiful builds are a wonderful thing to have around, but maybe the new folks want to be the magicians, not the audience.

Boy am I glad my name is Annabelle! True, though. I see people pulling out dictionaries for words that start with A if this ever happens.

(Shameless plug for my new business Annabelle's Garden and Home Decor)

I am not sure I follow your logic Yumi.

There is only one reason camping exists and that is the artificial construct called "traffic" that Linden Lab created and has tied to search ranking. There is nothing natural, intrinsic, or freemarket about traffic. It is a contrived notion that that no longer serves its purpose and imposes a very artifcial and negative impetus onto the market dynamics of Second Life. No matter how well intentioned its original introduction, like so many "government" imposed controls, it is eventually exploited beyond its original usefulness.

Once traffic is removed from Second Life, camping will disappear. There may be a few places that continue to provide camping chairs or other free money fountains as a way to draw in new residents, but by and large, camping disappears with the removal of traffic from search ranking.

I don't want to spend any time or energy finding something more appealing to new residents, I want to spend my time and energy appealing to Linden Lab to remove this "feature" from the game.

While I agree that as a community we should find ways to nurture and encourage new residents (and I have a project underway to do exactly this), this is an entirely separate conversation.

Traffic needs to go, and it needs to go now.

*looks up*

I think we may have all veered just a bit off topic

Since camping is purely a way to game the traffic system - I cant see how it is anything other than related to the fact that we have a traffic system.

Im not complaining about sex, or gambling or anything that people "normally" lump in with camping and newbies as complaint items. Im all for letting people do what they want. (Although some things like ageplay deeply disturb me)

Im simply stating that the traffic system benifits places that are willing to spend large sums of money to keep people on their land in a popularity snowball effect. It hurts places that want to stand on the strength of their concepts, builds and quality of their entertainment (even if its adult content)

Do new people want free money ? Of course - IF I handed out free money in Real life my driveway would be blocked and so would the street - Kinda like sims filling up in SL.

The distinction is I wouldnt benefit from my house being that crowded. IN Second Life , you do.

Now In real life i dont hand out free money. I dont get people pounding on my door asking me why I am not handing out free money and that life sucks becuase I dont hand out free money.

I remember SL before camping chairs. The Dwell/traffic still was the most important metric and thus money was handed out by clubs constantly. People would /afk dance much liek they /afk camp now.

This whole mindset eventually needs to change, or else social venues by and large will never even be self sustaining.

LL eliminated Dwell payments - I think its time they followed up on that and eliminated traffic numbers.

Is there anything I can do to eliminate camping chairs - NO

Becuase places want traffic numbers - and they will pay to get them.

He, He. I couldn't resist.

Um, yes, it is a free market. No matter how many camping chairs someone puts up, nobody is forced to come sit in them; and if no-one did, because they were all busy doing other things they found far more interesting, then camping wouldn't generate traffic anymore.



And it's apparant they don't want to. No matter what method is chosen for ordering Search results, it will always be gamed somehow. At least the camping method for gaming traffic has the side effect of increasing new resident retention! (Of course it has lots of negative side effects too, but..)

But does it last? one complaint you often hear from resisdents who log on less and less is they cant stand the lag

But you and Persephone are just writing as if somehow, magically, the moment you rez a camping chair an avatar is conjured from nowhere to sit in it, or maybe prodded there with sticks by the Camping Patrol. They aren't.

People are choosing to camp. If they weren't choosing to camp, camping wouldn't generatic traffic anymore.



Do the visitors get to be the magicians or the audience?

Why will people camp for 10 minutes to earn L$4? It's because once they have that L$4, it gives them control of what they do with it. All of the lag, and technical problems and hitches with SL are all tradeoffs for one simple thing - you can make it your own world. L$4 is a tiny step towards that for some people. What does your build do towards that?



Really? If you handed out 4 cents to anyone who hung around your house for 10 minutes? You'd maybe get a few local homeless people but most people would rather spend their time a different way.

Okay your being combative now - look 100L is worth more in game than 100L is out of it - you using it to nastily rip on my example is absurd. Besides the fact that you use the OPPOSITE arguement earlier in your post that $4L is worth somethign to new people.


Also of course you are aware of the snowball effect but you are choosing to ignore it.

Once you get some people camping - traffic numbers rise - which brings more campers - which brings higher traffic, etc.


as i see it heres the basic run down -

**Camping **

Pros -
It lets new people get money , especially when AFK - even though you are supposed to be logged out after a certain amount of inactivity. They can even get money on more than one account at once if their system can handle it.

It lets tacky, downright poor builds charge more for services.

Cons-
It leads to an entitlement mentality.

It lets tacky, downright poor builds charge more for services.

It contributes to lag in a myriad of ways.

camping isnt the only negative in Traffic numbers - but its the big one that hurts SL performance.

Just a thought, if you get rid of the traffic numbers, how would you find the most popular places?


I would goto the map and see where all the green dots are. If there are a lot of green dots somewhere, I would wonder why and go check it out.

It makes the camping places rise higher in Search, that's true. But again.. even if they get more people visiting them as a result, nothing obliges those people to sit down in the chairs. They could visit a place, see it was a camping place, and then leave. I did that quite a lot, not so long ago!



I think it only supports a mentality that's already there. And that mentality is about "entertainment", not "entitlement".



I don't see the connection between how good a build is and how good the services it provides are.



Absolutely agreed on this one.

I never even bothered to look at traffic numbers. I use the green dot method sometimes but usually I just pick a place and go. It could be empty, but if I like it, that's all I care about. Many of the "Popular" places I wouldn't be caught dead in.