Bot Farms for Traffic?

They should simply remove the traffic count all together - we can discover what the best stores are by the same means as in RL. Word of mouth, or random wandering.

I've been a reading about this problem for a long time now, I have to admit that it's a little discouraging that LL haven't done *anything* about it. At least remove it for the time being.

Over the last year LL has only been worried about numbers. Bot farms and campers make the grid look good to investors that don't even get in world to see the reality. All they see is population numbers and currently on line and think "wow, something going on there we can take advantage of that". However that sad reality is most of the "currently online" is bot farms and campers. The rest of us that actually try to enjoy SL or make a business IN SL that benefits SL are left to deal with the added lagg and lack of "real" people.

I noticed the SIM in the pictures I posted just happen to jump up a few spots in the Popular list today and the farm is still there in all it's glory.... Pretty lame. If the damn map would load up in a reasonable time I would spent my time in SL hunting down Sims with bot farms and making a list of places NOT to go.

Yes, that's what he means. It's a quick and dirty solution but seems like it would work. Nobody's going to be stockpiling premium accounts to cheat the traffic system, that would cost too much. Even limiting it to 'payment info used' would be effective, but I'm not sure if somone could load up on info-used alts or not.
I voted for it... I'm tired of getting lagged out at my house because some nob decided he should have the right to.

Yes, but just ONE premium user. That one premium user buys a SIM and then registers a large number of alts (not premium users) and sets up a server farm that auto logs them in. All the alts make the traffic numbers for them. So most of his traffic is coming from non premium users in the form of his alts and the other campers. Premium users really do not need to camp as they can buy $L and they get a stipend. So premium user traffic numbers should be a lot more realistic. However LL seems not to want the investors to have "realistic" numbers or they would not invest in SL.

If I go to a shop and see an alt farm (And yes, the alt farm you have in the sky with the eject if one comes too close to it is easy to detect) I leave. I don't tolerate it because it is deception, it is a form of lying. If someone is willing to decieve a potential customer, what does that say about their product?

You don't have to be premium to own and island.

lol. I said MAINland.

Ah ok, now it all makes sense.

That`s a pretty good idea actually.

attack of the alts!
What happens when they all get crazy minds of their own o.o
lol

Linden Lab uses the numbers generated by these sorts of activities to promote and sell their platform to businesses.

Until they figure out another way to promote their product, don't expect any change to "traffic".

After all, it's second grade math.

They could eliminate all the rampant bot whoring and advertise it as being playable? I mean; the worst kind of advertising is false advertising, because all you do is disillusion people to everything else you say by breaking their trust. If you promise, or a person uses your product with realistic expectations of what it should do, and find it does not live up to these, then they are only disappointed and avoid it.

For example, Nokia mobile-phones were terrible for a while, as a result I don't know any of my friends who would actually buy one anymore. Even though they may in fact be perfectly good phones now

Hee hee, some while back we had a terrific thread. No idea how it started but it degenerated into our usual fantasy hogwash and ended up with many alts actually posting like they were rising up against their mains.

I think true traffic figures must be an utter minefield. I mean at a local level, I go into a club and there's a row of dancing campers. Who's to say they aren't sitting there sorting through inventories or emails or away, cooking dinner? How could LL tally for this?

When I log in any of my four avies, I'm still only one account holder. If I flip from one to another and hence go through another log, how can that be accurately noted as *not* another account holder logging in?

If I run multiple clients .. yes. I can *just* do it atm .. it's how many accounts?

Any refinement to eliminate these inaccuracies will only reduce the number LL can put on the brochure. Heck! I can see why they're not falling over themselves to do that .. much prefer them to keep on sorting out the bugs!

A lot of those "bugs" are caused by excessive use of resources by these bot farms.

Pie actuallly had it right; I think you may not see exactly what is being advertised.

It is no secret that LL is making a push toward corporate customers. Although LL is trying to position it - in part - as a cheap global conference room there are plenty of more stable and more useable solutions for that. So the other prong of marketing to businesses is "see, look at all the consumers we can bring to you" which is very dependent upon concurrency numbers, much as it is with magazine circulation numbers. You can't quantitatively measure "playability" in the same way. So they are counting on their corporate customers to be so stupid that they don't realize that between 20-50% of "players" aren't actually there.

Oops, I think I just proved that Linden Lab has as much supercilious contempt for their corporate customers as they do their players.

I foresee this bitting LL and the rest of business owners and content developers in the ass sooner or later.

As much as I bitch about LL, I hope somewhere deep in my little heart that this isn't really true... the contempt part anyway.

I'm not sure it's that LL is contemptuous of their residents. I'm a business owner of 13 yrs in a sort of niche industry and I am conscious of the enormous effort it takes to maintain one's integrity and vision while also trying to make a buck. Very often success looks like selling out to the people who helped you obtain your success.

I think I get so mad at LL because I see them making really stupid mistakes while refusing to take a breath for a minute to re-evaluate what it really is they are trying to do, what they want Second Life as a platform to BE, because what's being sold to people today is very very different then what I was sold as a premium resident almost 4 years ago.

We've been an experiment, us long-term residents, and we've paved this world for Linden Lab thinking it would be a path into something unique and more lovely then the meat world. Instead, we've been lead to a new way to engage in commerce, which is hugely disappointing to someone like me and to many of the people who first walked into this world/platform/game/whatever-you-wanna-call-it.

Does the series of pictures at the top of this thread show Linden Lab's contempt for its residents? Or does it just prove that they aren't any smarter at business then to rely on this ridiculous exploit of their product to generate a sellable commodity?

Well, I just voted for the proposal... the intent of the traffic system is to try to put some number on the popularity of locations. The bot farm and camping grossly distorts that to the point that any semi-experienced resident knows that.

Any corporate person that investigates SL as a platform will be able to read posts in forums like this talking about campers and bot farms.

I don't believe there will ever be a perfect way of "ranking" locations.

I think that the idea of using Premium customers only to gauge popularity is about as good an idea as I have seen so far (and I'm not premium). The bot farms are killing SL in the interests of greed.

In our business we just got rid of the camping chairs - we're sick of the bots coming in and taking all of them while the legitimate campers had no way of earning a few Lindens. We have replaced it with a registration-only system - only registered campers earn money there. it's more work on our part, but it means we get real people, at least. While we feel that having people hanging around adds atmosphere, the main reason is because of the traffic, to try to "level the playing field" a bit.

So until a better solution comes up, I am supporting this one.

many non premiums do upload money or make money inword which they spend.. rent houses, islands, add to SL economy.. they add a lot to SL economy.. just aren't premium.
theres a lot of people who are no premiums for a reason.. not owning a creditcard (several euopean countries have their own cards, no creditcards, and creditcards require a certain income to be able to have one, so many people don't)
Some people are no premiums because they rent instead of buy (if you rent an island you don't need to be a premium).. some are because they are dissatisfied with the service in general

making only premiums count would make places wanting to be popular just change their service.. since they still would be doing anything to get high up the search..
probably create something to attract premiums.. and ban or eject non premiums (since they only would create lag and not add traffic).
It wouldn't make secondlife a nicer place really for those who aren't premium.

Plus bots would be still there.. 10 US$ a month isnt that much money to pay for a bot, considering what an average camper costs.. the big commercial places which earn a lot of money would still have them.. it would just make it harder for a non commercial place

I'm sorry, but limiting traffic to "premium only" is just as discriminatory as limiting building and scripting to "premium only". I'm an avid profile reader, when sitting in my store. I like to find out about my customers. And it's a fact that many of my customers are No Payment info. I know several very successful creators who are No Payment Info. To suggest people who don't have payment info included in their profile are in any way lesser or not as worthy to be in or use SL is simply unacceptable in my eyes. If nobody will speak up for them, I will. Seeing how they can't do it for themselves, not being allowed here in the forums.

I think you are completely wrong. Business owners try to get anyone that wants to buy something. If premiums only counted as traffic that would not stop them from taking non premiums money.

I highly doubt they will pay $10USD a month for 50 avatars. Thats $500USD plus the cost of the sims. Then again they get a large stipend back and off sets that but it would be a long painful process to transfer a stipend every week from every account.

The bigger problem though other than traffic is misleading potential business in SL. If they spend a lot of money and find the traffic numbers are complete BS they will leave and never come back and try to tell everyone they know not to bother with SL. This is already starting to happen.

Note this is not a thing about premium vs non premium accounts, it is about the well being of Second Life in general. I am not currently a premium account either but have plenty of $L on hand.

The longer the traffic numbers are misleading the more damage SL is going to get. A large enough company could probably file a law suit on false advertising also. They look at the numbers expecting that amount of people only to find 20-30% are legitimate users.

That is not a very good strategy for long term success.

You are not wrong but something has to be done about the ridiculous camping and bot farms. It is making SL look really really bad. Even if you disagree with the vote that is fine don't vote for it, it at least makes LL know we are concerned about the fake traffic numbers that hurt all of us.

As Sara Nerd said newbies come to SL and the first thing they are told is use the search, they use the search and always go to the popular list or the top results of the search and they are all full of non responsive bots and campers and they wonder what the hell is with all the SL hype. It is already having a negative effect. Even the padded LL numbers show people just leave after they visits. Just having less than 1% of all registered accounts on at any one time shows some serious problems.

You are sort of preaching to the choir on the stupidly squandered possibility of SL. You and I are of roughly the same vintage and held the same hopes.

However I think the zombie farms do show contempt for their customers, and here's why. LL knows the adverse impact that 20-50% of their concurrency numbers as zombies has for the grid and the "experience" of actual players. They even went so far as to say that they were removing traffic and then didn't. Why? Because they love the higher concurrency numbers even if it is has real costs to them (not to mention the huge externalized cost of wasted internet bandwidth).

If a magazine wanted to artificially inflate their numbers they could buy all their copies off newstands and burn them except they can't because they are audited by a trade group and have to account for every issue printed. The trade group is not run by the publishers but by the advertisers to keep things honest for the advertisers. LL is not audited. They could make up numbers and they have done so. In short, they lie repeatedly and egregiously until the lie tangles them and then they change it.

They said that SL was a world "imagined, created, and owned by its residents". Then Bragg v. Linden challenged the ownership bit; now it is only "imagined and created by its residents". They used to show the "total number of residents" on their homepage then the Yankee Group issued a negative report that may have been based on that absurd 10 millionish number. Now you can't find that number anywhere. They used to have an archive of past Terms of Service which disappeared when the VAT annoyed tried to say that the terms they'd signed up under changed without notice in violation of EU law. I find this pattern to be far easier to explain by malfeasance than by accident.

They are still reporting their concurrency numbers and will likely continue to until it gets them bad press after which traffic will be immediately removed and camping made a bannable offense for all avatars on the same account.

Those pics remind me of some ancient scifi movies ..."soylent green is avatars!!" )

I wonder if it would be possible for some of the more statistically minded on the forums to come out with monthly "adjusted" statistics, based on LL's.

One would have to list the assumptions used to create the camping "model" used ... which would cause healthy debate, but I think any respectable effort to provide numbers corrected for camping would grab people's attention.

The bot farm makers and users are creating their own nightmarish version of SL which LL must endorse or they would hurry up and eliminate traffic numbers forever once and for all. Does anyone really think that an experienced resident goes to places based only on a high traffic number? Duh.

This whole thing reminds me of scenes from Bladerunner or maybe even Soylent Green.