Camping chairs - fight them with alts

I'm just worried about what happens when you turn this into "anti traffic" and suddenly, and army of clones can "shut down" your competition.

Right now, an army of clones is, quite literally shutting down me. And that club owner is paying those clones to do so through camping chairs.

I'd like to hear what your solution is to the issue of one person on a shared server abusing the shared server resources. Increasing the number of people allowed in at a time from 40 is nice, but there is a practicla reason for that limit (processing power), and I rather suspect that with these people, the more you make available, the more they would take.

sounds like you got a neighbor problem. I'd ask them to stop it.. or tone it down. If that doesn't work.. I'd find a nice sim with a covenant that won't allow this to happen in the future, and divest myself of this piece of land. There are many people who would be glad to purchase your land, for the price you name.

I'd get on with my second life, and get out. Go have some fun, build a new home. instead of gritting your teeth and trying to "win" against this guy.

If you were in the "real web" and some massively popular website moved into your server, and was constantly lagging your site.. You'd find new hosting for your site.. not try and shut the other guy down for having the good luck of being successful.

I have no problem allowing one parcel to have all 40 sim visitors in it...

But if someone is trying to get into a different parcel in that full sim, someone on the over-populated parcel should be "booted" out of the sim.

40 avatars, 1 sim = 1638sqm per avatar.

A parcel owner should be guaranteed an un-"boot"able visitor on their land for every 1638sqm of land they own in a sim.

Treat it like prim quotas. A parcel can be over it's prim quota if you have other land in the region counting towards your total... otherwise the last prim added is the first returned/booted.

If a parcel owner is 'over quota' then up in the title bar next to the sim and parcel name should be a red warning *OVERCROWDED* and a clickable (?) that explains that you might get thrown out of the sim if someone tries to get into one of the other parcels.

Sure there are probably flaws.. like what if all 40 people on that parcel are in the land owner group, should they all be guaranteed access to the parcel? Imho: nope.

Kinda speaks to the goal of building a grid capable of supporting the enormous number of agents we can expect over the next several years.. but you're spot on with that last bit.

A quota system of some sort could be effective, but is it the ideal solution when scaling requirements are factored in? I find myself agreeing more and more with Malachi and others in questioning the usefulness of traffic scoring, at least in its current form. It seems to me to be better to remove the reward for doing bad things, than to mitigate the effects of bad things. I say this cautiously, as I'm not sure what all the consequences of eliminating it are.

Visitors are one thing; I've attended live music performances that had to split over two sims because the musician was drawing that much of a crowd. The problem cited over and over is not a sim overpopulated by real avatars, but by zombies with no person behind them.

Some have conjectured these zombies might even be run by the camping chair owner himself, thus fictional payouts. This would surprise me not at all.

Kill traffic calculation and its effect on the directory.

I'm certain that owners alt-camp their own area, as a way of boosting traffic without having to pay for it.

"Earning" traffic is something some folks pride themselves on.. and base the value of their rentals/land on it. Removing it could make as big of a fuss as removing telehubs did, maybe even a bigger fuss.

Even so, I agree. Traffic's day is long past, and now it only ecourages people to do crassly wasteful things in secondlife. We'd be better off if it were phased out.

I really despise when people say to just move. Why should everyone else in the sim have to uproot themselves because some rude resource hog moves into the sim? Most do not become popular by accident. If they want to be popular so bad then they are the ones who should have to pay extra for it such as buying up most of a sim or getting a private island.

I've been in the 'remove traffic' corner for a while because I hate that they encourage camping to game the numbers - but now that I have my own business I'm kind of excited every day to check in and see the traffic numbers for my store going up. It tells me I'm on the right track with my advertising and my products. So I'm torn. It turns out there is a useful reason to have traffic after all.

BUT on the other hand, the problems it causes are getting to be too outrageous - people should be able to get into the sims where they own property when they want to and they have little hope of that with camping chairs all over the place.

Maybe we can have the best of both worlds - keep traffic numbers to the extent that they can be viewed in the About Land tab for property owners, but take them out of the public listings so people aren't encouraged to game the system so much.

The best solution of course would be for LL to limit the number of camping chairs per sq.m. - but I don't see them doing that because it requires active enforcement, and they have a hard enough time managing Linden-owned land, let alone anyone else's.

Am I right in reading that ultimately it would be you that would control the total amount of players allowed in the sim, on the basis that you would kick one of your alts to make space for one of your friends? Does that then mean you will have to be online to do so? If so, what happens to the other residents when they want to do the same and bring one of their friends into the sim, do they have to wait for you to get online? Sounds kinda anti-social behaviour to me.

If others are experiencing the same problem, cant you group together and approach the casino owner and work out a deal? Maybe in the worst case senerio, buying him out would be cheaper. If you intend to leave alts all over the place, why not leave yourself logged in and camp on the chairs he owns so you can perhaps live in harmony?

One solution would be if LL would bring back the power of the vote box again and do away with the dwell/traffic situation currently used to 'prove' popular places in the ranking. They have done away with the '<mulitple spaces>!!!!AAAAAAnother porn venue' entrant into the classifieds, now they should clean up the dwell/traffic mess.

I'm not opposed to keeping the calculation so that owners can review their numbers... but it should be a private thing, not something customers base their searches on.

"Traffic" is a meaningless indicator. Is it legit foot traffic? or is someone a master of alt-camping? Can't tell.

It's just a number. I remember being excited about traffic when dwell income still existed... and I miss the old ratings rankings.

As it is, traffic is one of the last of the completely arbitrarily contrived "game goals" left by LL. Used to be people competed for ratings, or votes, or most land, or money, or most residents referred, or whatever the rankings pages would show were the "Top Residents". Now they just compete for money.... and for traffic, thinking that automatically means more money.

LL should either create alternate arbitrary "Game Goals" for people to compete for... (and ultimately game to death). Or they should send traffic off into retirement with the other arbitrary and programmatical measures of success.

Hate to be blunt and say this, OP, but unless you OWN the sim that you're doing this on, then you and your 40 alts would have no greater right to be on the sim than anyone there camping. Forcing a "me and my friends only on this sim" is plain dumb. For one thing, it's probable that more people than the camping chair/casino owner live in that sim. They simply SHOULD NOT HAVE TO ASK you to let them enter their own land in the same sim.

I have always wondered why there arent sims that are strictly residential, I realize that certain sims are contolled by the sim owner, have a cov, and you usually have to pay some high priced weekly tier to them and follow a host of other guidelines, which for me is just not a viable solution, its the dif between renting and owning just like RL.

However, it would be nice if when you buy land it the sim could be designated as business/residential/open just as they have the pg/mature rating on it. Not sure how Lindens would enforce that though other than maybe some sort of anticommerce scripting on the sim. I am all for business, but just like in RL I want to be able to buy a house and know that a casino/business is not going open up shop next to me otherwise I would have sought that out in the first place. My only solution thus far is to buy just over 8k sqm and build my hut in the center of it with the extra land as a buffer zone around me. But still a casino has come in and bought land right next to me, of all places. Its not that I dislike casinos/other businesses or the traffic so much, its the massive amount of scripts that slow the sim to a crawl that really annoy me.

"I really despise when people say to just move. Why should everyone else in the neighborhood have to uproot themselves because some big family moves in that constantly throws parties and takes up all the parking? Most do not throw parties by accident. If they want to be popular so bad then they are the ones who should have to pay extra for it such as buying up most of a neighborhood or getting a private parking garage."

I lived next to a Mexican family in my old neighborhood. They had a huge extended family, and during the summer, they would often throw huge parties. Their families and friends would come into the area, loud mexican music, barbecues, etc. We lived on a cul-de-sac, and every weekend, if I dared to move my car.. when I came back, there was no place to park for me.

There's a few ways to handle this situation.

1. Have a chat with them, and get one of their friends to move their car.. BUt i'd do it privately, not by storming into the place and demanding it. That just makes you the "bad guy". This actually works.. but most often it turned out to be one of my other neighbors taking my space, since theirs was full. (first thing I suggested was to contact the casino owner and see if he could downsize the number of spaces)
   
   
   
2. Fight. Call in towtrucks.. which in turn they will respond by calling the police, or worse... getting violent. It's a huge hassle, with tempers flaring. No one has any more "Right" to park on the street than anyone else, so the police can do little to help me.. if I take the matter into my own hands... then I'm the bad person. (these casinos do not violate the TOS the way, say, a protest -DOS attack- does with the intention of denying people access to a business).
   
   
   
3. Block up my spot when I leave. Oh sure, I could go out and get some traffic cones or something, but that just makes me look like even more of a jerk in the neighborhood. (much the same way that camping an alt on your land would make you look to your other neighbors).
   
   
   
4. Move. That's true.. I could move. Of course, that's ridiculous in the real world. But I could easily move to a gated housing complex that didn't allow loud parties, or guests to park in resident's spaces... but then I trade away my own right to have a loud party and invite lots of friends. (private island.. covenant that disallows camping?)
   
   
   
5. Live with it.

Of course, this "real world" analogy just simply doesn't hold up.. and it's much more relevant to the website access issue mentioned earlier. If THEY'RE CONTENT to live with the downtime and inability to access their site.. and YOU 'RE UPSET that you can't access your own site.. then.. YES... you should find new hosting.

Basically... stop whining, find a new piece of land. Go have fun shopping for furniture. Look for land that disallows camping.. or possibly even business in any form. zoned sims exist, if you're willing to look.

Yes so after you have gone through the trouble of selling your land and possibly taking a loss on it, depending on the market conditions, and rebuilding everything only to have another camping chair pit move next to the new land you just bought. Also referring to your website example... If a website exceeds its bandwidth it gets cut off or charged more money. This has yet to happen in SL.

Because that's another step down the very slippery slope of "moderating content".

A reactive policy "if someone complains about adult/mature/obscene material in a PG sim" is one thing. The blurry line between "PG" and "M" is a little clearer then distinction between commercial vs. residential.

Can a residence have a slot machine in it? Would it violate a residential only zoning code?

Where does one draw the line between 'night club' and 'never ending house party'?

What about a commercial sim? Can a shop owner make a home out of their business or not?

How would residential zoning be inforced? Forbid all L$ transactions in that area? (except, perhaps, land purchasing?)

Only a little OT... How do you view the UUID of a prim to tell the alt to sit on or touch a particular prim?

Perhaps we should focus on educating the campers about the problems that camping causes. We know the person that owns the camping pads doesn't give a rats ass. Lets list all the reasons camping pads are no good. Then we copy it into a notecard that we can hand out whenever we see campers.

Campers wil only read it if you pay them L$2 a minute while they do.

yes its not the actual chairs that are "evil" its how they are used if they enforced a limit per sq meter then things would calm down problem is these guys using like 2 bazzillion of them when realistically they probably only need 3 or 4 for an entire sim ...

I am mystified by the economics of the camping scene. If LL is not now actually paying people for having a high traffic count (according to an earlier post), it looks like a moneyloser to me.

I camp myself, being new and not in business, and I think I know the 8-site casino operation mentioned in an earlier post. I hardly ever see more than a few non-camping avs in those places, and often enough not any, and have NEVER seen one using the various gambling machines festooning them. So it doesn't look like artificially running up the traffic count does that much if anything for producing revenue - at least not in a casino. (A "club" where people tip pole-dancers and hire escorts might be another matter.) Meanwhile, the owner is paying his land costs, plus all the campers who are not his own zombies. There has to be a buck in it somewhere because there is so much of it, but darned if I see where. Whatever the profit is, take the profit out of it and it will disappear overnight, for sure, if that is what you want.

Can anyone enlighten me?

The trick may be, that the casino is a money loser, intentionally.

There's advertising revenue to be had, if you traffic counts are high. Especially if you can guarantee that the campers are not afk. There's also the simple fact that someone, occasionally.. DOES drop a few grand on the gambling machines. A number of malls use camping, as a way to boost the traffic scores. Remember, the higher your traffic score, the more likely you will be seen on the broken "Search Places" tool. It's definitely an edge if you can be found via search, and your competition can't.

Malls occasionally use them, to increase the liklihood that their rental spaces will fill quickly. And in a mall, it generates a sort of brand loyalty. if a camper can sit near the lucky chair, and get paid just to hang out and announce the letters.. then the traffic scores start bulking up fast. But I know that there are a number of places that use them, purely to "give back" to the community. Money trees are old, and not well understood (and I don't even want to BEGIN to explain them to non-english speakers).. Many people are leery of "money for nothing".. with a camping chair, it's obvious that you're giving something in trade. There are many borderline builders and such, that a couple hundred lindens earned overnight" could mean the difference between building the next great widget.. or playing WOW.

But that said.. I have seen a certain camping casino pay out thousands of lindens on it's slots.. meaning it's surely taken in more than that. Internet gambling is a HUGE business... and you may not be able to see the big picture by looking at one casino.

It's possible (though I think unlikely), that it's a way to launder RL drug money. And that 90% of the campers on the pads are just alts.

What's the REAL income behind it?

Try asking one of the casino owners. They may be more than willing to explain their business. People with a winning system ususally like to show off a lil.

So, while we wait for Linden Labs to implement a solution, I've created my own notecard that I am starting to give people I see using camping pads (in areas with a lot of them). Here is the text - copy, modify and use as you see fit.

===================

DO NOT USE CAMPING PADS!

Camping pads are popular among new Second Life players because it allows an easy way (or so it seems) to make money. The fact is that most people do not like camping pads because of the problems they create.

Camping pads, which you sit/stand/dance on, and get paid a certain number of linden dollars every certain number of minutes, encourage people to park their avatars in these places for long periods of time (using anti-idlers) without even being at their computer.

Each sim has a maximum limit of 40 avatars that can enter it. When a single casino/club/mall owner puts in 40+ camping pads, they can effectively shut down the entire sim for everybody else because nobody else can enter it. This is very selfish on the part of the owner of the camping pads. The only reason they set them up is to get higher traffic numbers in the search results, in effect making the search result ranking by traffic useless. Camping pad owners are the equivalent of email spammers in real life.

The more avatars that are in an area also contribute to lag in that region. People that camp are not contributing anything to game and are only collecting very small amounts of money. This money could just as easily be had by shutting off your computer when you are away and using the money you save in electricity bills to buy lindens directly!

So, until Linden Labs eliminates the avatar limits on sims, please do not use camping pads and boycott the lands/services of owners that use them.

Pass this notecard on to any camping pad users you see.

====================

I like to check the police blotter every so often just to see if anyone's ARs actually get results.

Glory me, could it be?!? I've never seen one like this before:

Date: Thursday, March 8, 2007
Violation: Community Standards, Disturbing the Peace, Land Use
Region: Soulgiver
Description: Overabundance of camping chairs in a region.
Action taken: Warning issued.


For some reason, this gives me hope.

This of course is the best solution ..

If actual people are the reason a sims is too busy then soon that business will be able to expand. Since real people who actually visit are paying you.

Camp Zombies are basically an advertizing expense.