Dancepad Bandits

Was wondering about dancepad activity in a shop near mine today.

Found out the owner had been paying out upwards of L$1000 per day to dancers.

After some discussion and investigation we determined that all the current dancers were robo-avs or zombies.

If a pad became vacant a zombie would appear right onto the pad and start to collect money. As the owner removed the pad the dancers just disappeared. None of them were real.

This shop owner was being robbed plain and simple.

The message is: If you have dancepads, be very careful that you are attracting real customers and not money grabbing zombies.

- D

With pay-out dancepads, money chairs and whatnot you'll ONLY attract zombies. Never customers or visitors.

lol how is that being robbed, the point was 'someone sit here and ill pay you' someone sat there and got paid......

This shop owner is one of the causes of camping bots and the lack of dependability of the search rating system.

Also, he chose to give away his money.

ON TOP OF THAT, those zombies still counted as people on his land which is the point of camping in the first place.

ALSO ON TOP OF THAT the money he spent is still going to someone!

He has no reason to complain. In fact he's contributing to this problem.

Thanks for ur suggestions, and What's the difference between robo-avs(robot-avatar) and zombies in sl?

Nothing as far as I know. The only difference is in the term used.

I have to agree. No theft here. The pads were there for a specific purpose and that purpose was met. Maybe this will encourage hime to do away with dancepads all together.

Zombie = Real life person found your camping pad, sat down on it, then went to bed/work/school in RL. Ie. he's not there, so his AV is a zombie.

Robo-Av = A camping bot (ie. controlled by software rather than a human) which monitors numerous known camping spots. As soon as one becomes vacant, it teleports in and sits down on it.

I don't mind people putting camping chairs down .. providing they own the whole £&$#ing sim.

Heh, yeah. At least things like money trees and lucky chairs attract people who are actually there while they are taking your money...

I believe money trees are targeted by bots too.

If he feel he needs dance pads, maybe he should turn to a lucky chair?

Ultimately, all our avatars are controlled by humans controlling software. At least, I know of no avatar which isn't, at a minimum, controlled by that piece of software known as the official SL client. And I know of no bot software that ultamately does not depend on a real human executing the program. This distinction defined in teh quote above is meaningless.

If the intent of the camping chair provider is to draw people who might conceivably buy goods or services or entertainment at his site, there is quite an important distinction. A "zombie" probably won't but just might. A bot certainly won't.

Maybe the shop-owner also owns the robo-AVs.

Um... isn't it rather silly to use camping chairs that way? Won't you just wind up attracting customers who only spend the money they've gotten from you?

The SL client requires a human to operate the avatar. The human must press the arrow keys on their keyboard, move the mouse, press mouse buttons in order to move the avatar around. All a third party bot client requires is that they double click an exe icon and click the login button. The program does the rest.

The human (zombie) going to work can't look for another camping chair after he's been booted from one for inactivity. The bot does exactly that. no human interaction required once logged in. so, big distinction. far from meaningless.

All this points to the fact that traffic stats are being gamed and they are not an indication of real traffic by real humans by any means. The system needs to be revamped.

Maybe Michael Moore will make it the target of his next documentary.

Agree .. but there is something quite beautiful about those who game the system being gamed themselves.

The irony is that those who sit their av in a camping chair while they go to work/school/sleep are probably spending more on electricity to run the PC than they earn through camping.

while exploring, i jumped on a 3/10 dance pad yesterday morning.... cuz the place was FULL of them. FULL. it was a HOTEL place. well, i thot i'd stand for the 10-15 minutes while i blew-dry my hair, and as i saw that MOST had been on with a pretty hefty L$ amount earned, obvisouly overnight. well, i came back and my pad was gone, and so were all the others but two.

the place was FULL of zombies standing on a floor just oblivious.

my bet is the owner set them all up, and when it got his traffic up, he just pulled the rug out. i did not get paid, and i betcha all those who had been there all night didn't either. dirty trick!

I am one who seeks the green dots. Floating around in a hot air balloon, scanning the map, looking for where the action is. I then land to check it out. If I see a bunch of zombies in camping chairs I dont even bother. Doesnt make me want to shop or spend any time there. Is a bot using your camping chair and not buying anything from your nearby vendors? Is so, pfffffft thats the way the cookie dries up and falls apart, errr...crumbles. Try selling something worth buying, try advertising, try something other than paying somebody with nothing better to do than sit on some zombie pad.

I met a relative newbie last month, but she learned quite a bit in a short time. Enough to set up a small shop. She asked me to please come see her shop and I said sure. After about 12 tries she managed to get me to her place of business. Turns out it was in a mall full of camping chairs and most were being used. Zombies or bots, I don't care which, but she didn't realize she was actually losing business because they filled up the sim. Sure it makes the list as a "popular" place, but no one was buying anything, and customers who would spend money, can't get into the mall.

Along a similar, but different line, I recently met another shop owner, and noticed all the green dots above his shop. I asked if he had a club up there. "Nope, those are my bots on camping chairs. It helps get my numbers up." Lol, I friended him anyway, he's otherwise a pretty good, nice guy.

I recently opened my own small place on my own land. Maybe in time a lucky chair...maybe. But no camping allowed. It screws with the sim, and I have yet to see where sitting your av on it's butt for hours is worth the effort.

Personally, I won't do business at a place that has campers of any sort. I hate them that much.

Here I disagree. The "human-run zombie" could be running a script which sets it to look for another chair as soon as it stands up. Customized bot client programs have only the same tools to detect and react to an inworld event as the regular client. A sufficiently complex script could, in theory, emulate a human sufficiently to fool a lot of people (Back in my IRC days, I managed just that).

An RL business user told me some years ago after conversing with a Seagate technician that a lot of business users and probably home users these days leave their machines on for long periods of time due to certain components' lifespans being drastically shortened by being turned off and on again. Fluorescent lights and CRT televisions are perfect examples. How many of these simply don't turn on after a while rather than just stop running?

If you're going to leave the machine on anyway, may as well rustle up a little in-world income

I investigated my power consumption a couple of years back. I cut my PC power down by half by turning off the CRT monitor. TFT's would barely make it worthwhile turning off now as long as you have a screen saver/blanker.