Camping chairs - fight them with alts

I don't want to start another discussion of camping in general. I want to discuss an idea to fight casinos, as I am in the unfortunate position that I can't get to my home at times because of 'region full'.

I don't want to move, and I don't have the resources to buy the casino owner out. So my only option is to fight.

My idea is the following:

- Buy a number of alternate accounts. I thought of 20, for about USD 200, because I'm on a budget. 40 would be better.

- Log them all in using the testclient from libsl, which is, as of my understanding, very low on resource consumption on both the client and server side.

- Place the alts on your parcel, clearly stating your intention.Alternatively you could use the camping facilities youself, to cover the initial costs. But I think that would have the disadvantage of providing traffic for the casino location.

- If you or your friends can't TP to the region log out the alts, one at a time.

- Offer the possibility to log out your alts to your neighbors.To avoid abuse, I would use a stripped down libsl client where only the 'quit' command is available to others.

I know, my idea would do any good only for residents living in that region, but would do nothing at first for shop owners. But I think it is irrelevant if customers can't enter a shop because of a casino using up sim resources or my alts.And I think the casino owner would leave the region, as his profits are cut off.

A problem I have is that the number of alts seems to be limited to five, contrary to the knowledge base article at http://secondlife.com/knowledgebase/article.php?id=308.

Tell me what you think:

Is my idea against the TOS or CS? I know, it is abusive in some way. But I think no more than camping locations are.

Would it work?

Is there anyone out there that would help me by spending a few bucks and providing alts until the 'max 5 alts' problem is sorted out?

I dont think its against Tos to have multiple accounts running as you paid for them not even sure it can be called abuse people use alts to do camping as it is now

I'm just not sure how effective it would be also I would do it on my own land not someone elses might have misread that part

problem is though if its that hard to get into the sim by the time you log an alt out and your friend ports over someone may have ported in

offer him a teleport to your place and then log an alt out i'm pretty sure that even if the sim is at capacity you can offer teleports to friends and bring them in anyhow

But it seems a bit of an expensive idea to me if you can afford to buy the alts etc just leave yourself online in your house its easier then your there (or better yet move and let him have the sim must be horrible there anyhow ) and if i friend wants to come over port him in

the only good the alt thing would do is to limit his business which i dont think in itself is an "illegal acts" and drive him out because that is what he is doing to you I just wouldn't do it..

oh yeah and that alt limit is there as well ..
forgot that..

That doesn't work. You can't offer a TP if the sim is full.

To that what has already been said....

So you want to fill up the complete Sim so champing chairs cannot be taken? What about the other people who have land/houses in the same sim? You make it even worse for them to enjoy their SL.... and that places your idea on the same level as the champing chair owners.

So in my opinion a complete "no go"...

Edit: You talk about 40 alts.... that is 400 US$????? Another "no go". I have an family... horses... dogs... and another pets. You really think I can spend 400 us$ on something like this? "An me noi nie..." (thranslate that as a "forget it".

Morwen.

This is so reminiscent of "prim hoarding" which eventually caused LL to make number the of prims tied to land owned. Prior to that, players would rez thousands of prims - filling up the sim allocation - in order that they might have prims available when they wanted to build something. It was a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons as they were denying everybody else in that sim the ability to rez even one prim.

There is one and only one solution to the camping chair problem and that is to remove the single incentive for all the crap surrounding camping. Take away the traffic numbers and all the camping will end immediately. As traffic is used for the one purpose only - and is costly to compute - the reason it hasn't been removed baffles me.

Land owners should always have access to their parcel. Period. Even if that means the last non resident who landed in the sim has to get airlifted out of there. Paying residents should have priority over visiting guests.

My hunch is that LL plan to, eventually, remove the inworld search feature, and transfer it to a 2D website.

if you have $200 USD... to waste trying to "combat" the casino... while feeding him exactly what he wants.. traffic...

You know... $200 USD is like L$ 60,000.

You could buy a REALLY NICE piece of land for that kind of dough... on a private sim with a covenant that disallows casinos. Then sell of YOUR land in that other sim.

Really.. as much as it's fun to say "I shouldn't have to move".. The casino has no complaint having you as a neighbor. He's willing to stay right where he is, and has little need to "enter the sim" or even the grid, in order to make his money.

INstead of trying to legislate around a problem that really isn't an issue in most sims, or for most people.. enforcing zoning on the grid that would force nearly everyone to move. (who doesn't have a skybox in the sky over their store?).. just be a grown up. Find some nice land that meets your needs, and sell. From what I've heard, it's a GREAT time to be selling land. Take some of that 200USD you're willing to blow in order to fix this issue.. go out, buy yourself a nice house and some classy high prim furnishings, and go live on 1/8th of a sim.

Moving may be a pain... but spending months at war over access to a server that the casino owner has just as much right to use up (if needed) as you do.. that is NOT going to give you a satisfying, fun Second Life experience.

Personally.. given the choice of trying to out maneuver someone as an enemy.. or picking out furnishings and designing a new beach house...

Well.. I'll be at the beach.

Those camping casinos DO put a lot of lindens into circulation. I know one casino owner who has 8 locations. Each location has 24 3/10 camping chairs and are always full. So let's do the math:

18L an hour x 24 chairs = 432L per hour per location

432L x 24 hours = 10,368L per location per day

10368L x 8 locations = 82944L paid out per day

That's about 2.5 million lindens paid out per month, or about 9 grand in dollars!

Thats a lot of cash for newbies to pick up to spend in stores and whatnot.

Assuming the Alts on the chairs aren't his own alts of course , in which case get together with your neighbours form a group and get them all to login a couple of alts each...........

It's crazy to think someone with only 16m of land could lock out a sim like this if they wanted to especialy if they already had the alts.

How would they make money anyway only way to make money is to have new people come and put money into his machines, if I enter a club and find it only has campers, I consider it empty anyway, I'm looking for other people not zombies.

Do the math.

65,536 Square Meters in a sim. (256x256)
Mainland Sim capacity: 40 agents.
Parcel needed to support ONE agent: 1600 Square Meters (40x40)
Most stores couldn't even have a single visitor. (mine's on a 32x64)
First land would be even more of a joke.

The simple fact is that as the grid gets more and more users, there need to be more and more servers in order for everyone to be able to have a chance of going where they want to go. Sadly, I think it's going to be a while before processing power costs catch up, and make it possible to add more agents to a server's capacity.

In the meantime.. the numbers are irrefutable. You'd have to own a sprawling 3200sq m parcel.. just to have a friend over.

That assumes a direct "meters per av" calculation. However, it could be beneficial to have a simple population limits system in place, something like at most 10 avs on your land unless you own more than a quarter of the sim, and 20 unless you own more than half.

Instead of tying the total avatars on the parcel to the land area, how about tying the total traffic on the parcel to the land area? So once a parcel hits its daily traffic allowance, only the parcel owner may enter it.

Let's see... a sim that is permanently fileld with 40 avatars would generate (at 1 traffic point per 5 avatar-minutes) 11520 traffic daily. Such a sim is basically unusable anyway, so let7s base the limit on about 3/4 of that... 8000 traffic points daily. Suppose I own a 512 sq m plot. 512/8000 = 128 points of traffic I can have in my land daily. Once that amount of traffic in my land is exceeded, no one can enter my parcel except myself (as the owner). This traffic based access limit would of course be in addition to the normal maximum of 40 avatars (modifiable on private islands) at a time.

Thoughts?

so your solution then is to PUNISH people for having popular builds? It's not bad enough that popular builds used to be subsidized by LL and now aren't.. forcing the owner to bear all the costs of making an attractive entertaining build, with only the nearly meaningless "traffic" score as compensation. Now let's make it a crime.

What a great way to improve second life.. "Build an exciting build.. even on a small piece of land.. and if it attracts too many people.. we'll just lock them out." Oh! You wanted to sell a popular item? well too bad.. go buy a sim.

At that point, the grid becomes a bunch of meaningless, featureless boxes. Can't be interesting.. can't draw attention to my build.. otherwise penniless noobs might come in. Those "No Payment info on file" banlines start going up EVERYWHERE... People start building walls 768m high to keep passers by from crossing their land "on their way somewhere".. using up their allotted "hits per day". Stores become utterly agressive in their marketing... every visit must equal a sale, refuse to hire staff of any kind, store owners never come to the store for technical support calls. People are ejected from stores after a time limit...

Malls close, all the wonderful "conversation" areas get shut down Those great dance clubs, coffee shops, and such. people start building scripted ejectors that will kick people off their land if they stop and have a chat with someone... walk and drive by traffic is discouraged, and builds are made so you can only TP into them via an ad.

Anywhere, and everywhere you go, you're kicked after 5 minutes. And suddenly, only Linden land, public sandboxes.. will be free for people to do the chat thing. Then all the penniless noobs coming to SL because they heard they could have cyber sex in 3d... will be doing it in public sandboxes.Assuming of course that those public sandboxes don't suffer the same "sharing" plan. Imagine.. you have the bad luck of being European.. and try to log into a sandbox "sorry, this region has used up it's allotted traffic for today".... every day, in every sandbox.

All this... so some random guy with a tiny little 512 piece of land, who never logs in to SL... can have up to 10 visitors a day on his undeveloped parcel. Now who's hogging Server resources?

And you think those 16m squares are land extortion NOW??? 10 extra visitors a day.. only L$62000.

No.. sorry, your "solution" sounds a bit too fascist to me.

How about we leave it the way it is.. and just like in RealLifeTM, the few people who have issues with their neighbors.. move.

How about we increase the number of avatars per sim then, what exactly does cause the 40 avatar limit anyway? And the priim limits too? Will they ever be increased or do we all need to just own heaps more land.

Umm, my suggestion is not punishing the successful sites on a sim any more than a very popular website on a shared webhosting server is throttled back by its hosting company is being punished.

People building websites in the real world have the cheap option of buying space on a shared hosting server (conceptually equivalent to the mainland sims), and as a part of that they accept that their bandwidth will be throttled if their website becomes so popular that it reduces the service quality of other websites being hosted on that same server.

Conversely, it is possible to pay for a dedicated host server (conceptually equivalent to a private island) which will host your website and only your website, together with more bandwidth (usually) and all the other frills.

When you can explain how a business model that is accepted as standard in the real world is suddenly fascist when applied to SL, I will begin to take you seriously. Until then... what is that squeaking noise?

yes this is how I look at it as well unfortunately somehow when it comes to SL this is somehow inappropriate. If you have x space (land) which when divided by say 512 will allow you to have y amount of visitors without affecting other "sites" and you exceed that and you are sharing the sim with others measure should be taken to only allow them the bandwidth they are entitled to so the others paying for bandwidth get their fair share. I"m sure its doable, but then if it was done it would force all those club owners with clubs on too small amount of land to move to parcels that would be more appropriate to the amount of people they deal with. Since this would cause some great amount of controversy and anger I'm not sure how it would be done. It would force club owners to either limit their visitors or move.

I dont think people should be squeezing 50 visitors on 3k of land when the sim only has a certain capacity they should have 10 or 15 max which is probably the outermost limit of reasonable but when they start eating other people's bandwidth its rather unfair as everyone is paying for the same amount of bandwidth per dollar

some private sims are doing this with camping chairs if they allow them they only allow certain numbers per 1k of land or so in order that everyone else who uses the sim can get in as well. Its only fair everyone is paying for a certain amount of service if you pay 25 bucks a month for sim "hosting" you should be entitled to use it the moment someone takes advantage of the extra bandwidth available on the server and deprives others from using their bandwidth as a result they should have the tap shut down so they receive the bandwidth they pay for and not everyone elses

nothing fascist about it its done all the time on the internet everyday ..

Maybe traffic should become a function of both footfall and time dilation. It could then become both a measure of popularity and quality.

Multiplying traffic by time dilation would mean that maxed-out sims would get less credit in their over-loaded space. This would not only help guard against irresponsible mainland owners squeezing in excessive numbers of camping chairs but also encourage the, so-called, 'Popular Places' to run their sims at more realistic avatar limits.

On a side note, increasing the Popular Places from the top 20 to the top 100 would also acknowledge that SL has grown a lot and give more locations a look-in - which in turn would help to spread the load across more private sims.

I can't help thinking that spaces that can command good traffic with a decent sim performance would actually be more profitable than the maxed-out lag-fests we currently see.

You might as well throw out the Popular List as a gauge of mainland popularity. The (mature) list is made up of almost all Islands now. And you don't see as much advertising for camp in their descriptions.

It is much easier for people on Islands to now buy their own program for bots/alts to fill their Islands with multiple alts they own to climb up the Popular list.

That same program is being used to fill camp areas on the mainland with their multiple owned alts to gain lindens to purchase their own Islands etc.

As long as people can use this program to fill SL with the truest of zombies, all will suffer except for the few owning the program and using it. Hell you can buy yourself an Island and purchase expensive dance animations with the profits.

I'm not sure if your rant was directed at me or Warda, but I just want to clarify that I didn't mean 10 a day, I meant 10 simultaneously. None of your (quite correct) horror stories about people protecting their own traffic limits would apply, because I'm not talking about a traffic limit, just a limit to the number of avs you can have at any one time. This still allows a good traffic flow throughout the day for any parcel in the sim, but also prevents any one parcel from blocking out the entire sim.

If necessary perhaps there could be a voting system whereby neighbors could allow a smaller parcel to fill up the sim for events in designated time frames, but I think that would just be overcomplicating things.

If you weren't reacting to my post, could you? I'm curious what people think of this suggestion. Now that it's on my mind, I'm thinking this is a great solution. It's simple and effective, with no downsides that I can see.


Technical considerations mostly. The more avs on a sim, the more strain on its server. 40 is the most that can comfortably be run simultaneously (although of course "comfortable" is a relative term.)

Is there a concensus that unattended "campers" are for the most part at the root of the problem? I'm looking at a casino right now, and count 28 camping chairs, all of which are occupied. 2 or 3 active agents wandering about, not one of them engaging any of the "games"..

I like Johan's idea, at least conceptually.. but I still think I would lean toward some way to remove the camping incentive altogether. Good arguments have already been made that the current traffic system is meaningless, due to the camping problem. I don't have any personal stake in traffic numbers.. some day I might. But for now it's easy for me to say just eliminate what clearly isn't working as intended, and clearly is creating more problems than it solves.

The number 40 is an arbitrary cap placed on sims to keep them from computational overload. They can and have increased this number on certain sims for special events; you don't want to be in a >40 AV sim unless you really dig lag. The prim limit is also just an arbitrarty cap for performance reasons.

Oh, and get rid of traffic computation.

"No Camping Chairs! No Lagbots!" (trying to come up with a rallying cry but failing)

LOL...that was my first reaction too.

Baffles me too. I've been anti-dwell since its inception. Linden policy on most things baffles me. Actually it not only baffles me, it continues to piss me off. I regularly defecate inanimate objects (steamy turds) that have more common sense than all the Lindens combined.