The Alphaville Herald

Playing in Traffic

by prokofy on 25/10/06 at 9:48 pm

By Prokofy Neva

Argggh! Walker Spaight warned us we’d all have to sharpen our keyboards!

I was just putting my notes together, hoofing it around the world to follow up on a story idea I had, checking on the actual traffic numbers of all these hyperventilating Big Brands with the giant builds and MSM-saturated events in recent weeks. I figured they’d contrast greatly with indigenous brands.

I got the idea when I peeked under the hood at the Sheep sim the other night while we were pushing the hapless Destroy TV gal around, and realized that the traffic on this mega-metaverse enterprise was barely above that of Prok’s Sea Food in Coney Island of the Mind (!). Prok’s has been doing pretty well these days with all the newbies streaming in but it never tops 5000 because there aren’t any camp chairs. The real avatar-magnets in SL other than the obvious sex joints like Barbie’s are breath-taking places like the Lost Garden of Apollo or helpful places like New Citizens, Inc.

Imagine my shock to discover that Hamlet had already beaten me to the story of the untrafficked lots! His blog sponsor Millions of Us reported a paltry 1451; the much-touted Reuters sported only 2578. Scooped! Possible reasons for low traffic after the fold.

Traffic in SL is one of those arcane and much-studied and most-heatedly-debated topics that used to matter a whole lot more when the Lindens actually paid us for showing up and sitting on parcels. That gave casinos the idea to create pay-out camp chairs that Herald reporters were quick to go plunk their avatar asses on while they did interviews.

The Lindens got wise to the scheme and cut what had become known as the “dwellopers’ awards” that had originated as an idea to provide incentive for content-creation and land development — so named for the “dwell,” or payout each day in Lindens for the amount of traffic achieved on your land by avatars staying more than five minutes.

Dwellfare queens sprang up everywhere running clubs with money balls which they figured would pay out to campers less than they could take in from the Lindens. The program was phased out; today poverty-stricken content-creators have to wait for a company town builder like Pontiac to come along to have a chance at incentives.

The camp-chairs and dance-pads add way more traffic to clubs and casinos than they would naturally get on their own, critics claim — and land-owners surrounding these establishments have lobbied to have the Lindens either charge for the CPU draw which effectively serves as a veto on everyone else’s FPS, or move the clubs to more powerful servers. There are signs the Lindens are listening to these complaints more lately, yet they may be inclined to go for a simpler solution: simply remove the popular places listing. That is identified as the culprit by many who are annoyed that sex joints with artificially-pumped visitation stats are consistently the face-forward shown by SL to newcomers.

Let’s hope the Lindens do something different: simply increase the “popular places” list showing beyond only 20 entries, so that thousands can watch how they are doing in the under 10,000 arena. However gamed, traffic does remain an important indicator of how a lot is doing and when it dips too low, is a sure sign that something is wrong with settings, a build, or lack of activities. Businesses in SL really need the feedback traffic gets them; otherwise they might believe their own press released. If traffic figures are removed merely because some camp and game them, we will have lost a very important window into our world.