Townhall Question: Will LL be getting rid of traffic numbers?!

Traffic numbers are evil... they are the cause of all kinds of hardships in SL. Get rid of them, and you also solve many "server is full" problems and lag problems, because setting up of camping pads will not be used to abuse traffic numbers anymore.

Cory did mention during his last townhall that changes were being made to dwell. "more later" may have been the gist of it. Well, it's later now, so what's the "more"?

Traffic/dwell is being obscenely abused, and something's gotta change here.

It is my personal mission to get this question into the town hall

The abuse ended last year when LL stopped paying for dwell for high traffic. Now people game traffic to get retailers to pay higher fees to rent space on their property. Or casinos use it to attract more casual gamblers.

Making the number go away won't stop this. My traffic is listed on a resident-run website. Everyone will buy a little scan box and capture their own traffic and display it proudly.

The sooner Traffic is removed, the better. It serves no useful purpose any more as it is so abused.

Broccoli

I agree. I used to look at it to avoid high traffic places that lagged like crazy, but those numbers are so fake now. Get rid of it!

Mandy C

Traffic is heavily abused, yes.

But if it is removed, what else do we have? How else to rank search listings. If done by keyword relevance, we will just see even MORE keyword spamming in the description fields

I can think of no system which wouldn't be open to heavy abuse.

How about just plain ol' common sense?

It isn't the end of the world by any stretch of the imagination to spend 5 minutes looking for somewhere to go, over a few different locations that turned out not to have what you wanted.

In the end, word of mouth will get round as people find out the really good places to be, and the zombie infested laggy hellholes that pass themselves off as 'popular' will actually have to work hard to get the traffic and people there.

Broccoli

That's true but at least abuse could be checked. Putting camping pads could result in account suspension or fine or anything. It may be impossible to check automagically wether high traffic results in use of camping pads, but "live" agents could check it. Yeah, that's cops but it's a mean to enforce policy.

Search listings are currently useless. There are other fixes necessary to end keyword spamming, but traffic numbers have to go.

I've been renting mall space as an adjunct to my main store in Imjin, and one type of mall I will refuse to rent from is one that has camping chairs. As I've looked at camping chairs, and knowing some friends who camp to earn L$, all it does is insure that you have someone using resources without contributing while they do it.

It's a false traffic number, and if I see it, I look elsewhere. In fact, my favorite places to go clubbing and shopping in SL have no camping chairs, nor do they NEED camping chairs.

Camping may also be used by a owner of a big land that is planning to extend his property in the region, to force in some way, a closest land owner, to leave his land, because lot of people and friends can't come in, for the hight traffic and the camping making the region full;
Does increasing traffic in this way result in a kind of abuse?
More, not allowing new people to come in the game in favour of others
that are only camping for hours and hours and not really playing the game itself
do not match one of the big rules of Second Life aswell, in my modest opinion.
I've got a bad experience about that.