LL to Players: Stop Gaming Search Results With Camping!!!
by Jessica Holyoke on 23/05/09 at 9:43 am
Low-skill entry-level jobs threatened by policy change – "model" bots left untouched
by Jessica Holyoke
Camping for L$s may soon be banned in Second Life – a move that will prevent entry level players from being paid to park their avatars in place for hours at a time to skew the Search results. Yesterday, Jack Linden posted a clarification of the upcoming anti-camping policy on the Second Life blog. The policy limits methods of artificially raising traffic numbers for a parcel – but exempts self-identified bots acting as models from the ban. Businesses using techniques such as camp chairs to enhance traffic will receive a warning on the first violation and removal from the Search results for repeated violations.
To gauge resident reaction to the policy change, I went to several popular camping spotsto talk to the people most effected – the campers. I was faced with alot of silent, empty faces and blank stares as news sank in that this could be the end of their livelihood inSL. As one camping resident put it, "It Sucks."
This policy may have some unintended consequences. The impact on the Herald's measure of the health of the economy, Quarterly Profit per Capita (QPC) is hard to predict.
The QPC is based on Positive Monthly Linden Flow (PMLF) divided by Number of Hours Logged In (NHLI). Fewer people camping and staying logged in would mean lower NHLI. While the Lab is not likely to report this measure, the use of self-identified "model bots" would at least present the possibility of identifying bot accounts, and allow the Lab to adjust the NHLI statistic for the hours the bots are logged in. But will they?
For the PMLF part of the equation, it is also difficult to predict the effect of the policy changes. We don't know the source of L$ spacebux for the business owners who use camping. For businesses using in-world generated L$ profits, there could be an increase of PMLF for the owners once campers are not a cost of doing business – but will profits hold up with falling traffic due to camp-free Search results? If the source of L$s for the campers was off grid, the PMLF may be unchanged, but the Lindex transactions could drop — unless the campers start buying L$s at the Lindex currency exchange.
If the campers will be earning less money, what will happen to the distribution of wealth in Second Life? Will the ex-campers spread what money they have across many smaller merchants and increase the small business PMLF, concentrate their spending on large merchants — or flee the game entirely?
With traffic being more or less equal, businesses may need to spend more on advertising to promote themselves. However, camp chair expenses are already part of many in-world business plans, so once the chairs are banned, the money spent on camping expenses will go somewhere. We may see more varied advertising opportunities gain popularity, including the increasingly common "pay for picks" ploy in which merchants reward players for putting their stores in the player's profile picks.
It appears the Lindens are willing to risk fewer hours logged in and shake up smaller merchants who do not adapt as the Lab drives the in-world Search closer to a popularity contest. Meanwhile, look for the players to game the Search results by other methods.
How will the community react to the enforcement of anti-traffic rules by Lab staff who sometimes can't tell the difference between a game of chance and a game of skill?
bot hater
May 23rd, 2009
LL isn’t going to be too happy with their “hours logged” numbers if they manage to kill the bots. But it will finally bring the numbers to HONEST levels.
I’ve wanted to ban the bots for a long time. And I’m no fan of places that use 30 bots hanging around to game traffic.
I have one lucky chair on my lot, yes, to help with traffic. But it pays $1L per visit, and you can’t really camp it. I hate campers, but chair-chasers don’t annoy me as badly, because I know it’s a real person visiting, even if they only show up for the $1L and leave. It’s an actual “live” visit. I won’t pay botters to sit on a chair and then log out for 12 hours. That’s lame.
So honestly, anything to help kill the bots is good by me, even if LL will be destroying their own numbers in the process.
Wanna clean SL up? Require a $1.99 payment per month. Not $15 like other MMO’s, but just enough to make runnings bots unprofitable.
And this 20 avatars per e-mail account is retarded as hell too.
LL set themselves up to be bot-heaven, and NOW it’s a problem.
LOL
Little Lost Linden
May 23rd, 2009
This is a good thing to happen. Camping has been a problem for a long long time. I will be happy to see it go away. Finally!
Camping should never have been allowed in the first place, and yes, when I was new, I did camp for a small bit, but I could take it or leave it. There are plenty of freebie items for newbies to stock up on. Once they are in sl for a while, they’ll learn to get jobs, or just be happy with what they have, or god forbid, learn how to make things themselves. Some of the freebie items out there are just as nice as some of the overcost goods anyway if they can’t handle the learning curve of making their own items or finding a real job. BTW, the job center areas in SL, have you seen them lately? There are tons of inworld job opportunies now. The job center doubled in the past month alone.
Camping just throws off the search results, tricks people into going to useless, worthless simes with sim owners who have to cheat in order to make their sims look like they have anything worth visiting, and wastes valuable real world energy when those real world servers could be used for something far better in the form of actual ingame performance boosts. Also, a truly good sim, useful sim, doesn’t need to have fake numbers because it will generate it’s own traffic if it is worth visiting. Just like in the BBS days when the popular BBS’s were determined by true BBS users, true numbers. They were real, and now the SL numbers might start to become a little more real, and the maps can now be real as well.
Camping is nothing but trickery that should have been caught years ago. SL could actually become interesting again with this new policy move. As a former camper, I am all for it! Even when I did camp way back when, I thought it seemed like a waste, now that is confirmed.
Another thing that bothers me though. The Herald could have posted this as postive news, which, I think, and many others agree, is truly good news, however, the Herald has spun it to seem like it is bad news. Shame on you Herald!
imho
May 23rd, 2009
I feel that they should give those with “no payment info on file” 90 days to try out sl as a trial period and after those 90 days to lock out their account if they don’t use a credit card or giftcard.
We
May 23rd, 2009
@imho
I don’t think that free accounts should be “trial accounts”, I do think that free accounts need to be limited somehow however. Limit inventory, limit resource usage, etc. Something. Right now the only difference between people who pay for SL and people who get it for free is that the people who pay can buy and pay for land directly from Linden Lab (if you can even find some), people who get it for free can still own land from one of the many renting companies, who often times are preferable to buy from anyways. That’s it.
And yeah, finally they do something about camping chairs, they’ve been a problem for so long. There’s nothing positive about them, people who use them sometimes try to claim that they “help newbies” but really? Even taking out the whole idea that teaching newbies to make money by sitting in one spot not actually doing anything isn’t “helping” them, the money they give couldn’t do much to get anyone anything, and over time it’s gotten steadily less and less. When camping first started I remembered it was something like 1L$ per minute. A few days ago I saw one paying out 3L$ per HOUR. That means if they sat on that chair for 24 hours straight (if you even could, without the sim crashing or the chair kicking you off like some of the scripts do), then you’d have 72L$. You couldn’t buy anything with that really.
So I don’t really think the economy will be taking a hit from this.
dongs
May 24th, 2009
Yeah, camping has lost its value anyway, most pay 1l per 15 minutes, and that is pathetic, but I can see why the payout has dropped because of all the people using bot accounts to multicamp them.
I say worry about ending bots first, then sum up the damage from campers and seeing if its worth sacking it as well.
Jessica Holyoke
May 24th, 2009
While finding people who would talk to me about camping, I visited, to me, one lagged out sim after another, so doing away with camping would be helpful. And when I search, I usually skip down to sims that have traffic of less than 20,000 simply because the odds are high that above that the sim has a number of campers.
There is a down side to this policy though, one is the effect on the numbers the Lab uses to tout its ability to reach people and how much money is spent. Each of those campers when they get paid registers as a Linden transaction. Then those campers go off and spend the money somewhere else, to other business people.
Here’s another way to look at it. In the past, there used to be money trees. Residents would donate money into a tree and other residents would pull that money out. Then the recipient residents would spend that money somewhere else, supporting a different business person and the cycle would grow off of that. Money trees are pretty much gone now. Camping provided a similar starting out revenue stream. Large businesses in order to build their traffic offered rewards to participants, but the part that I am saying is sad is that the businesses the participants spent the lindens on would lose an income stream. Its fine that the campers can find freebies or bring money in, even though I have problems with some of the arguments being put forward. (If you are in a relationship where money is tightly controlled, and the suggested solution is buy a pre paid Visa card instead of using a credit card, wouldn’t the money spent to buy the pre paid Visa card be noticed?)
But from the Lab point of view, it might make their user hours realistic, but it will bring them down. It might be a way to encourage more people to use the Lindex, so that the Lab can get fees from transactions, but campers as whole don’t appear to be saying, I can’t camp so I will use the Lindex. and if the Lab is buying that new users will simply be used to the Lindex and stop expecting camping, then there are issues to market saturation and growth to take into account.
I’m fine with no lag, but there’s more to doing away with camping than just the lag.
galt
May 24th, 2009
“Wanna clean SL up? Require a $1.99 payment per month. Not $15 like other MMO’s, but just enough to make runnings bots unprofitable.”
You under estimate how much real money you can pull with a large enough botnet. Early in the bot game I knew of people pulling atleast $100 USD a month from their small botnets. I’d imagine they’ve pooled themselves a nice little nest egg in the time since.
But for LL to try to strike down camp casinos now seems pointless. How do they expect to enforce some odd tens of thousands of bots idling across the grid. It’s rare I pull up the map looking for dots to talk to only to find anything BUT bots camping in some shitty looking casino and or bot farms herded into sky boxes.
This is why the only places you’re likely to find people in conversation is the infohubs. All three of them. Of all of the really fucking awesome builds and sims on the grid the most socially populated areas are shitholes like ahern, waterhead, and korea.
There is little incentive to go exploring the grid as most of the time you find sims bursting with avatars but vacant with life.
Cleaning up the bot mess is crucial if LL want to see the grid thrive. What good will having a large NHLI be when new users come in only to find that there isn’t really much to talk about and with anyone for that matter? For a platform that is at it’s most a 3D chatroom you’d think this would be paramount to their business. Making it easier for people to find one another so that they can communicate and harass with the least effort.
Jeroentje Jansma
May 24th, 2009
I agree with the anti bot subject, but find it difficult to judge on the camping subject.
Why? My girlfriend and I (and lots of others too) like the splash fishing games, gone and match fishing. You can win little money prizes, by getting 1, 2 or 3 in a fishing tournament.
Your AV is then for like 2 hours in the same spot. Will this also be considered as camping? Will the Lindens forbid to have fishing tournaments (or any other game / tournament) with money prizes?
We
May 24th, 2009
@Jeroentje Jansma
I think you misunderstand the definition of “Camping” here, it’s not against anyone “standing in one spot for a long period of time” that’s still fine, you don’t have to be constantly moving or anything, it’s specifically against a specific kind of chair where if you sit on it for a set amount of time, you’re paid a bit of money, you’re not required to be active, do anything, or even be there at all, all you have to do is sit. That’s the only thing the definition of camping here applies too.
I would say money prizes for events are absolutely fine with the Lindens, what is illegal (now) is money prizes solely for sitting in one place for long periods of time for the specific interest of falsifying traffic ratings, and gambling.
Although they don’t seem to be cracking down hard on Gambling AT ALL. Zyngo is pretty obviously a gambling game and is freaking everywhere, often times advertised in a sim that don’t attempt to hide that it’s gambling at all, (They call it “Las Vegas Style”, “Gaming”, and even sometimes outright use the word “Casino”).
Alyx Stoklitsky
May 24th, 2009
LL: BAWWWWW! HURPADURP DIPPADIDDLY DERP!
Users: DURR DIP DERPA DERP!
LL: HURRRRRRRRR!
Users: Ok.
Anon-y-mouse
May 24th, 2009
@galt
I’ve also wondered why ppl choose to plant themselves on the steps and benches of the infohub they tp’d into their first day and never move. So many beaches and bars they could be hanging out in and doing the same lame chat they’re doing now, but at least pretty scenery or authentic surroundings.
Re: Only infohubs; where is everybody? Let’s say on a typical 60k night an incredible 50% or 30k are bots and campers which means 30,000 people are somewhere doing something. Ahern, Waterhead and Korea each have about 30 max; let’s make it a few hundred scattered around those sorry sinkholes. So where’s the other 29,500? Obviously, some folks have left the nest and are out doing something.
galt
May 25th, 2009
@Anon-y-mouse
I mean as far as people talking on voice are concerned there are few places outside the infohubs where you find a group larger than 20 speaking to one another. I’m not talking about the vast wasteland of voice disabled roleplay sims. Ideally you could teleport into any handful of sims and find some intelligent life but that doesn’t yet seem to be the case. This is from someone that has spent hundreds of hours chasing dots. It’s very rare you find anything but bots or idle chat between two or three people. WHERE ALL WHITE WOMEN AT?
Bluegum
May 26th, 2009
@IMHO
LL *are* doing something about restricting new accounts. They’re preventing them from seeing/visiting all the pron , ahem, Adult content. Which is what a fair proportion of them came to see.
So then our pron hunting newbies will be told that the easiest solution is to buy some Lindens and so get “payment info used” (or some such) on their file – which will have the effect of boosting the number of $L transactions and so boost LL’s economic stats. Plus of course the bigger boost when those Lindens get spent as well.
What
May 26th, 2009
What does it matter? I will miss having my campers.. not for the traffic, but they are not bots, but real people.
The new Search All that is supposed to be NOT game-able is already game-able.
All you have to do is name everything on your parcel something that is searched often for. Like Sex. Name everything that isn’t necessary, like your walls, floor, lights, what have you “sex clothing fashion bdsm” and mark show in search.. Up the list you go!
Jeroentje Jansma
May 26th, 2009
@ We :
Yeah, I see what you mean, lol.. With fishing you are active, in the game and usually in IM.
Cheers!
imnsfho
May 27th, 2009
@imho who said: “I feel that they should give those with “no payment info on file” 90 days to try out sl as a trial period and after those 90 days to lock out their account if they don’t use a credit card or giftcard.”
So those of us who have “no payment info on file” should be discriminated against and treated like some kind of second class resident.
I’m proud of the fact that after two years in SL I own my own island and house, paid for by my shops and other work – I have a turnover of 20000 L$ a month and it’s cost me nothing but some time and creativity – and I still have “no payment info on file”.
Thank god the bots are going, a couple of clubs I used to visit were lagged to hell because of the skyboxes full of zombies they had to drive traffic up.
However as @What points out there are ways around this – and like anything else to do with SEO technology, this will always be the case – but at least residents won’t have to put up with sims that are lagged out by bots.
As for camping, yes, been there, done that, but in my experience a conversation at a camp site is about as welcome as objective journalism at the Herald.
We
May 27th, 2009
@imnsfho
“So those of us who have “no payment info on file” should be discriminated against and treated like some kind of second class resident.”
Second Life isn’t a country, and “no payment information on file” isn’t a race. You can’t be “discriminated” against for being a cheap ass. Linden Lab is a company that’s trying to make sales, if some customers are paying them money and other customers are free riding it, then LL is going to and should give preferential treatment to the former category.
imnsfho
May 28th, 2009
@ We
Maybe you should get a dictionary and check the definition of “discrimination” before spewing your hate here.
Collins English Dictionary: “Discriminate (vb): To single out a particular person, group, etc, for special favour or, esp, disfavour, often because of a characteristic such as race, colour, sex, intelligence, etc.”
Translation: It’s not just about “race”.
So you CAN be discriminated against for having “No payment on file”, as you have so amply demonstrated with your offensive posting.
How much else did you get wrong in your post?
You called me a “cheap ass” and said I was “riding it” – well maybe you should go back and read my original post – my creative work has contributed to the overall economy of SL, and I spend the proceeds entirely in-world – I have to, since I have no payment info on file, I CANNOT cash out either.
Just because I don’t pay directly to Linden Labs doesn’t mean to say I am not contributing, and it’s frankly disgusting that some people are willfully ignorant and therefore too stupid to recognise that fact.
Ranma Tardis
Jun 2nd, 2009
Camping is just stupid. Why don’t they go out and get a part time job to support their habbit? Almost anyone can get a job that pays 5 euros, 5 dollars or 500 yen per hout. That is over 1400 Lindens an hour with the euros being almost 2000 lindens.
you might even learn some important job skills!
I agree camping needs to be stopped with progressive stronger actions. To sum it up kids get a real life job