The Winner of Bots Vs. Barons?

There is a clear winner in this war over the Mainland. Ready?

Private estate owners.

Go to any sim and it looks like a battlefield. The carnage is rotating signs and plots cut into pieces. Then you notice something else...the Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggggg. You see, LL has foresaken the Mainland. There will be no air strike, no ground support. Performance has been getting steadily worse. And the new recruits keep filling the pipeline fresh from their training on Orientation Island. Ready to take their position in those camping chairs.

The Mainland will be continue to be divided and conquered. Bots will get the lion's share of cheap land. Barons will sniff out the rest. I was one of the hyenas, begging for scraps until I realized it was not worth the grief anymore. I am out of the land game. I sleep much better these days.

What do I do now? Well last night I spent a mere half hour browsing the estate listings. I tped to one gorgeous, waterfront sandy low lag beach sim after another. There were no eyesores, no 16m. ads, no campers, no clubs, no casinos, no corporations, no land bots and no land barons. Just waves and palm trees and tiki torches.

Oh, guess what else? You don't need a premium membership to take residence on a private estate. Just a paypal account and Swimmer 1.0 so you can do the backstroke past your tropical villa.

I am coming up on my one year anniversary in world. I'm celebrating by selling my remaining Mainland. Today I got a plot on a private estate paradise for my second year in SL .

So I raise my pina colada to you, Mainland warriors. Keep up the good work. The estate owners surely do appreciate it.

Ah Raymond, you haven't seen my sim yet. It's not fully developed, but when it is, it will be quite pretty and mostly quiet residential. I have a plan to block out ads, although at the sim edge that will be tricky. I'll guarantee that no large clubs will crop up in my sim, other than a small, no-sleaze lounge that sits in one corner, that *I* own and will run for my pleasure. And even that lounge is sitting next to a garden that will be dedicated to my late brother who just passed away last week. It's a planned community, and although some plots are for sale in it, it should stay under control. So far, a few plots have sold, mostly to end users.

I think it will end up being quite nice, especially for being mainland.

My mainland home sim of Carlisle is lovely too. I guess the subtext to this is that I mourn for the mainland. It's like Mother Earth...there is still time to save it, if enough folks care enough to try. Groups like the Arbor Project and Greenpiece are doing what they can. Hopefully if can be saved from the Killer Cs: camping, casinos, clubs, crashing and carved up ad farms.

Back to the good C's: coconuts, chatting and cat-napping on my waterside hammock.

EDIT: I was so self-obsessed I did not read the whole second paragraph. My heart goes out to your for your loss.

I second that!

Sorry tohear about your brother, Cristalle. I went through that myself.

coco

I agree with what you said, and feel pretty much the same way about much of it.

But if you are out of the land game, you may wanna change your sig

Here's a bit of trivia for you, Raymond... I was running land bots (as an alt) back in June '06. I only did it for about maybe a month (mostly as an excersize in making bots), and made a killing for a noob, but I felt I had to quit shortly before LL made changes to make it less likely to accidently sell your land for $1L. I just couldn't stand it anymore, I absolutely hated it when people would IM me all upset because they never meant to sell it to me, and frankly it made me feel like s**t. I did really enjoy when the "land-swoopers" of the time started wondering how this blue noob-looking avatar started getting there first all the time, though

People think land bots are new because Elanthius and others are open about it, but it is not so new as everyone seems to think....

I am sorry for your loss, and send my best wishes to you.

Is there anyway we could capture one of these bots, reprogam it and send it back in time with a new mission, to protect the mainland?

All it would need is some prim boots, some clothes and a freebie motorcycle. We could make the time machine out of some sort of semi-transparent blue prim sphere with a llSetTimeAndSpace script in it.

"One of your attachments is trying to send you on a one way mission to the past, do you want to allow it?"

Vale

Yet your signature says otherwise...?

Broccoli

I must have had "view signatures" off in preferences because I couldn't see my sig or anyone else's. Thanks for the head's up.

I don't know how anyone can steal. Not because it's "wrong" but for me, the crappy feeling just isn't worth it. I still think about poor Mr. Copalo and how me and Larry Rich would pocket his ice cream money when we worked the night shift at Carvel.

My policy was to give back mistakes when I was trading (My land biz hero is Sarah Nerd and I witnessed her do it before I started dealing). I would rarely win races so I only got to do it twice. It just isn't worth it to profit off of others' mistakes for a few real world dollars.

I did it more for the fun of the hunt than for the money. When the bots took away that little bit of hope I had that I could occasionally get to a cheap plot first, the fun stopped and when my tier flipped I was done. These days I do a lot of hang-gliding and post here because land fever still runs in my tired veins. *Logs off at 3am*

If you are who I think you are, then I am reminded of an incident in Honister last summer, where a huge plot of land (10k if I'm not mistaken) was swooped and resold for 100,000L. The owners were deeply traumatized by that incident.

Much to my suprise, around Christmas, the former owner IM'd me and reported that you had refunded them, the full amount of the sale and you had expressed your apology and were guilt ridden for some time. I was really happy for them and respect you for coming to your senses, albeit way too late.

We have a mixed bag of bots now. Some care, some don't.

To this day, people are being traumatized by bots, mainly because the operators are offline, hidden or don't care. Sometimes they come online later and fix it, sometimes they don't. The anger, self-admonishment and distress cause by bots taking and repricing people's land is not likely to change any time soon. In fact, expect it to get worse. The more bots that get into it are going to get greedier as opposed to better.

This thread should be called Bot vs Bot, because thats what's happening now. Putting a handful of greedy people with an exclusive sense of entitlement together into the same business gives creedence to the saying "no honesty among thieves".

And yes, I am aware of bots before open source. Why LL didn't possess the cajones to do something about it, is beyond me.

Where can I buy some of these bots?

I thought they closed this forum down.

It's beyond me too. Could have at least slowed them down dramatically. And I posted about it in the forums a great deal. And people thought I was being disingenuous by posting that LL should do something about the horrible land dialog

I refunded a lot of people (if not in time to give the land back), including someone that you contacted me about. So many people were calling me a crook (or worse), and that wasn't what I was trying to do. I wasn't trying to steal from people, I was trying to learn the protocols and such and nab some great (and legitimate) deals in the process.

My theory has always been that the Lindens (and a number of residents) are so in awe of anything that is coded, that they get cowed in the face of it.

If it has been coded, if it is a clever bit of coding, then it MUST be good, surely!

Fact is, some coded things are wonderful for people and some just hurt people.

It's also not true that the only way you can ever do anything about something that is coded is to code something even more clever. Sometimes you can just say, no, this is wrong, and you can't use it.

I'd say landbots are in that category.

Thanks Coco, and Robby.

It seems that bots are the natural evolution of the open source movement, and they won't be banned - but LL needs to make the land purchase system more sophisticated so that the buyer always makes a conscious choice in purchasing land. How hard that is to do, I don't know.

The winner? Linden Labs.

Customers who are upset with Linden Labs' regulation, or lack thereof, of Second Life have found two sources of scapegoats: Barons and Bots. Linden Labs didn't even have to suggest the scapegoats. And Linden Labs continues to make money as well. It's as big as a win gets.