What's your opinion on camping?

I have a question to ask you, the residents of SL. What do you think of camping? My opinion, I hate it. I never really cared much for it but now I can't stand the fact that it is allowed in SL! I've complained about it in other threads but have had nothing done but LL tell me there is nothing wrong with it or keep filing reports about it. What is the point of filing a report about it if nothing is going to be done?

Let me give some back ground. I own about 1/2 a sim that has 2 places in it where people camp. No, it wasn't like that when I started getting the land in that sim. There was a small shopping center there that was faking their traffic with a couple of fake av's but that was it. Now that person is up to 11 fake av's sitting on their land 24/7! Another person who had a small store there followed suit but when bigger and put a ton of camper devices on thier land. At any given point their are usually about 32 people in that sim. Which really ticks me off since I own so much of the sim but will not get the us of it that I am paying so much for per month to LL!

Why is it that this person is allowed to blatantly abuse the right to have an av and put 11 fake ones out there for everyone to see? To fake their traffic trying to doop sellers into thinking they will make money where they will not. In my opionion treating sellers like idiots. Why isn't there a rule against this? Why is it ok for this to happen? And what is the point of campers? I can't see that the other person is making any money off of them since what she sells in her stores is campers. Why would people camping want to buy a camper for themselves?? Of the 25 people that are usually there only about 3 of them are really at their computer.

Why am I so mad about this? Because of the amount of land I own there and am not really able to utilize. The sim fills up and closes people out at 40 av's. When it starts to get that high it's like trying to walk through molasses! And LL won't do anything about this unfairness and injustice!

What do campers really do? They fill up space that the rest of us could be using. They create lag, not economy. They don't buy anything, they don't sell anything, they don't create anything, they don't contribute anything at all. They sit there taking up space and someone's money. They fill the space in a sim that a live person could be using.

Camping is like a baby's bottle. Eventually you need to get weaned away from it and eat some solid food. Unfortunately more babies are being born every day and some babies don't want to stop.

When Linden Lab removed weekly payments based on dwell, they removed half of the incentive for land owners to install camping chairs. Eventually they will change the way that parcels are ranked in search results, removing the second half of the incentive. When this is complete there will really be no reason for a store to encourage camping. Linden Lab should do nothing to disallow camping. All they can do is remove this incentive.

In my experience campers are ignorant. They are ignorant of just how little money they make for their camping. And they are ignorant of just how badly they hurt the Second Life experience for others ... from the resources they consume to the unfair impact on parcel rankings.

In my opinion stores that use camping as a means to boost their rankings are exploiting a poorly designed feature of Second Life because the quality of their product or service would otherwise not warrant a higher ranking. In my opinion stores that use camping have no respect for their neighbors and are parasitic.

So, as a mentor, when a newer resident asks me about camping, I take extra time to tell them why its not good for them or Second Life. And I give them better ideas - ways to obtain money that is more respectful of their own time, and the experience of others.

As a designer and store owner, I want the quality of my products to speak for themselves. I respect my neighbors and would never consider gaming a design flaw to promote my business. I consider competitors who use camping to be unfair, and to be less than confident in the quality of their own work.

And as an avid shopper, if I find a bunch of campers at a store or a mall ... I teleport out of there before the textures even download. I take note that this designer has little confindence in their own work, and that they are probably right.

Of course, all of this is just my opinion ... but then again, you asked for it

Heather, I would recommend fighting fire with fire. Run 40 copybots in a skybox way up high on your land. Then whenever you want to enter your sim, log one of the copybots out. As soon as you log off or leave the sim fire up another copybot. The resourse-sucking clubs can piss and moan all they want. They don't care about their neighbours so what else should they expect? If these leech venues are affecting other residents in your sim as well as yourself then you may need to come to a working arrangement with the other residents so that they also have a quota of copybot dummies that can be logged on and off as and when they want to enter the sim.

LLs do not care about the campers i have the same problem with some residential land i own here there is a casino that regularly has 40 campers in it and i have been told there is nothing they can do about it and now we have camp bot im sure that will fast become the griefers tool of choice jamming sims as they know LLs will not do anything about it. I also run a plot in another sim for the support fund lottery and yes i have 6 camping chairs there as i need exposure for the Support fund and lottery, but i do not allow afk campers and they are always playing trivia games and as im in an almost empty sim its never a problem but if and when people buy the grossly overpriced space in the sim then i will drop the chairs, but whilst LLs encourage campers and camp bots to enhance traffic ratings this problem will continue and i imagine get worse until the way traffic is rated is changed.

Peace

Totally agree with what u said. Campers are parasites of SL.

I disagree with this approach. In general, what I see in RL and SL is that trying to work out agreements and cooperating often works, whereas warfare tends to lead to escalation where everyone loses. Instead, I suggest talking to the owners and trying to find ways you can work together to improve their attractiveness and profitability in cooperation. Who knows, you might make a few friends! Of course, the owners might say it's their right to do what they want and camp as they wish. At which point you can say it's your equal right to run so many scripts and create so many prims that the lag will keep anyone from even camping at their store, but you certainly you wouldn't want to have to resort to that!

I will admit I'm not above wanting to fight back this way, and might even succumb to it in some situations. I just don't think it's the most effective way, and it's definitely not the best way to enjoy SL.

In my opinion, store owners that install camping chairs are the parasites. Campers are just ignorant. In my experience most new residents will figure out within a couple of weeks that camping is silly. Unfortunately there is a never ending supply of new ignorant residents upon which those with little regard for others can feed. Soylent Green is noobs.

/me nods in agreement.

This has amazed me ever since I learned about campers in SL.

They are ONLY used for the abuse of the system, for making more dollars in dwell and now for artifically inflating "popularity".

Why are things allowed that have no purpose other than to scam allowed at all?

I just don't get it.

My opinion about them: If I enter a business and I see camp chairs, I immediately leave. I refuse to do business with people who don't run their businesses honestly.

It's not really a question of allowing, or not allowing. The problem is that Linden Lab is providing an incentive for this behavior, by way of an ill conceived means to parcel ranking. They don't need to ban campers or camping chairs. They just need to make them useless by changing the way parcels are ranked.

I totally agree they are parasites. It was mentioned to do the same to block up the sim but I could never do something to someone else that bothers ME so much. And I have a mall that flows over into this sim from my other sim, so doing something like that would only be hurting myself. I would much rather deal with it in the right way. I just wish LL would pay attention to it and do something about people abusing it. Someone said they use campers in a good way, I honestly never thought there was a good way to use them. Since they first came out I thought they were a silly and lazy way for people to make money and have stayed away from them. My mall doesn't get tens of thousands of traffic but it gets enough business to the vendors that they continue to stay there and renew over and over and some want more space. Because of that I am now on my 4 expansion. I feel that is more a sign of success then fake numbers to trick people into renting a space from you.

I will put this as succinctly as possible:

Camping is STUPID.

Traffic figures have nothing to do with how long someone stays on a property, EXCEPT that they have to stay there for five minutes to count--period. (Yes, percentage of online time spent at a parcel has an effect too, but that's hardly something a casino owner can control, or even track.)

What it comes down to for me is that Camping preys on newbies, tying them down to a specific parcel for a long time, which deprives them of time to explore the SL world and make money DOING things. Add to that the resource drain (Resource usage should be allocated by parcel size--they do it for prims, why not the remainder of system resources?) and I'm actually quite stunned that Camping hasn't gone the way of telehub marketing. For me, Camping is the SL equivalent of TSO's Pizza making machine--boring, time consuming, and ultimately counter-productive. I'd love to see LL do a study to determine how many new residents who quit playing because there's "Nothing to do" spent more than an hour in a camping chair. I suspect the numbers would be quite revealing.


Kam

To be more poetically precise,they are leeches sucking the precious blood of SL

I know I keep beating the same drum here, but I think this is important: each individual camper is a tiny temporary problem. The real leeches here are the land owners that use camping chairs to gain unfair competitive advantage by preying on the ignorance of new residents and by unfairly consuming the resources of their neighbors in an attempt to make themselves appear more valuable than they really are.

Do not give them your business.

Camping can be fun, but you should make sure to check the weather report for the area before you go. Check your tent for even the tiniest of holes if there's any chance at all of rain. If you're taking teenage girls make sure there's access to a shower and a place to plug in a blowdryer. Take clothes for a wider range of weather than you really expect. Make sure you have a cellphone and first aid kit.

Here here. What of the mountain men (and women) of SecondLife? How soon until we will see hoardes of protesters descend on an outdoorsman in the Snow sims simply trying to "rough it" for a weekend?

Rest assured that with this sort of reaction, L.L. Bean will -never- establish a presence in SecondLife.

And I was *really* looking forward to a nice parka.

Make up your own camping chair, except when a user sits down pop up a notecard explaining why camping is so bad. You'd probably want to write the agent key to a web page somewhere and reference back to it to make sure they only get paid once - or just don't mention payment in the classified listing and pay them nothing.

Love the Toasted Marshmallows, Hate the Bugs.

Angel.

Actually, someone is selling chairs on SLexchange that boot the person out as soon as they sit. It then delivers a message that says something like, "Get a job you lazy bum!"

I think, camping will never stop. It is a direct consequence of free markets.
Camping chairs are provided to increase popularity of a place.

Isn't it the same when in Real Life some shop gives away chocolate for free? You see a lot of people standing around and you think "Wow that must be a great place".

One thing that LL can do is ZONING. Some sims should be declared for business only, and others should be for residental stay. Linden Labs could do this very easily by restricting the amounts of money which can be transferred between avatars in some zones.

Camping: a good way to mark leeches for future reference.

No, exactly the opposite is true. Camping is the direct result of a "government" designed program that no longer makes any sense and should be discontinued because it actually gets in the way of the free market economy. Camping WILL stop, once this incentive is removed, and I have every confidence that Linden Lab will eventually fix this. In fact, I imagine that one day LL will actually stop providing search capabilities entirely and let the community provide these services for themselvs. Now THAT is an example of a free market.

No they are not. Camping chairs are used to artificially increase the apparent popularity of a place by gaming a poorly designed ranking system.

Again, no. Real life stores have give-aways and sales because they want to draw people into thier store in the hope they will buy something else. SL stores with camping chairs know full well that campers will not buy their products. They install camping chairs for one reason only: to increase their position/rank on the parcel search directory.

Eeeek! We need less goverment control not more. Let Ansche and others like her provide zoned locations for that wish them. How in the heavens would restricting commerce in certain areas solve the camping problem?