And 2D will help SL database scaling woes … how?
Reading the gamut of posts this morning about Linden Lab finally acknowledging they have some serious scaling problems. Remember Linden Lab CEO Rosedale comparing SL scaling to Google? Scaling is a concern several of our VTOR author group have been concerned about, myself included, since the beginning. It seems kind of strange to me that they open sourced the client before open sourcing the server which is where the bottlenecks are occuring. The server is the piece that needs the work along with some extreme database optimization. The more open source minds that wrap around the architecture the better off LL and the rest of us accessing the service will be.
Hey, let’s create a 2D version
In the same breath, they are looking to expanding a 2D web version of Second Life at my.secondlife.com. This doesn’t make any sense to me either. If the 2D services are going to be accessing the same database backend, it is only going to create more misery and bottlenecks. Perhaps the 2D services will be created separately with a one time sync or something to verify you are the same person? Or a daily sync with the 3D database to update stats?
The scaling problems intensified when they took away the requirement that anybody could sign up without a credit card or cell phone number. Move it to the web in a 2D format with the same lax requirement and the 2D world will fill up with even more numbers running out those syncs to the master database.
Restrict the unverified, ha!
The Linden Lab answer to restrict access to the grid to payment verified during peak times like the weekend is ironic considering this essentially reduces the policy change to allow anybody to register, yes, even minors. I’m sure a historical analysis would prove that the problems on the grid increased non-proportionally with an increase in members. In other words, it’s one thing to sign up people for free, it’s quite another to sign up people who paid something and put some skin in the game.
VTOR readers might remember me somewhat whimsically wondering how many paid the one time fee of $9.95 for each of their additional avatars? Second Tourist blogger and reader Ida Keen commented that she was “sure the majority of alts aren’t payed for.”
When I suggested that the numbers Linden Lab should be reporting and promoting are paid account numbers, some interesting responses were offered from those who don’t have paid accounts, reminding that there are plenty of ways that people who don’t have a premium subscription can contribute to the overall virtual economy.
Solutions anyone?
There are solutions, it’s not hopeless. There has to be productive ways for new and existing residents to make L$ in world. In MMORPG there are quests and perhaps a quest system with consequences would work in SL. I realize that Second Life is not a game, but if the ability to level up through experience learning different skills and gain L$ in the process, it could help.
Fellow VTOR author weirdharold offered an interesting suggestion this morning for getting people to stay at the initial orientation island longer. As mentioned at our last meeting, I spent some 2-3 hours clicking and exploring and learning with our new avatar. I wondered how many bothered. Harold mentioned 6/10 don’t which means at least some percentage of that 60% are first timers (not additional alts from experienced residents) who haven’t fully learned what can be done inside SL.
I like Harold’s suggestion but feel it should be expanded beyond the orientation island to other help areas inside SL and the sandbox scripting/building areas. In order to do this, Linden Lab would need to keep more areas for themselves to control these RPG-type quests. The problem with this is I’m not sure Linden Lab wants to be a content provider, they seem to want (or give the appearance of wanting anyway) the residents to make most the content and they make the god-like decisions on the economy and infrastructure.
Camping won’t go away
Harold also brought up camping which continues to be a source of scorn for mostly seasoned residents. Many thought camping would go away when they removed dwell L$ — which was money Linden Lab paid out based on the popularity of a place — but that didn’t happen. What did happen was the base camping rate paid out went from L$5 per 10 minutes down to L$1-3/10. The business owners with camping chairs simply adjusted the value the chairs paid out.
If myself or others want to pay people — zombie avatars or active avatars — to sit in a chair or on a dance pad to give the appearance our business is busy that’s our choice. Consider these advertising dollars of sorts. I wouldn’t want to see any Linden decisions that hamper business owner’s ability to offer whatever moneymaking opportunites for residents in a virtual world, illegal activities excluded of course.
Think of the real world for a minute and driving around have you seen people carrying signs or wearing ad sandwich boards? Human advertisers are paid positions. How is camping that much different than these RL paid positions? Yes, I do realize people can camp several avatars while sleeping and do increase the load on the server, but then multiple avatars in a sleep-like state should use less resources than someone running around accessing different lands, teleporting, moving items in and out of inventory and making multiple transactions. It isn’t very logical from an architecture standpoint to blame the load issues on campers who stay in one place at a time and don’t move (other than the animation scripts).
Whether you personally like or dislike campers, blaming them for Second Life scaling issues isn’t a valid concern. Blame for being human advertising, fine. Remember that it is business owners, the very people doing business transactions inside SL are the ones who have chosen to keep the camping chairs alive.
Remember services like All Advantage (defunct in the dot com bust in 2000) which used to pay people to browse? There is a new service called AGLOCO that is trying to revitalize this generation. How is something like this any different than camping? There were also many ad-supported ‘free’ ISPs. Google has built their business on ad-supported services. The list goes on.
Where do we go now?
I remain fascinated with what Linden Lab is trying to do, but don’t see a 2D version being the answer to their scaling problems. If they do the 2D version completely separate from SL it should have limited impact but then I don’t see how that will happen. Linden Lab would be wiser to open source the server parts ASAP and let other great minds around the world solve the scaling problems. Opening up the client was a start, but the client isn’t the bottleneck, so it’s like allowing the world to create screen doors on a submarine.
The restrict unverified users might provide some very, very temporary relief, but look at the screenshots at the top of this post. In one month the number of online now residents has doubled. We’re still talking about relative small number of concurrent residents. Meanwhile, more and more real life businesses are setting up presence creating yet more ghost towns in world while most interested, non-building residents are heading for entertainment-oriented areas.
These real life businesses could help solve the “how do residents make Linden dollars” problem by creating quests for residents that generate L$. Either do something like that or setup camping chairs, dance pads (or walking billboards). Pay for people to stare at company logos. Advertising might be unpopular with some/many, but it’s the financial vehicle that continues to fuel most of what we experience online ‘free.’
February 19th, 2007 • 
TD Goodliffe • 
comment | February 19, 2007 at 14:26 | individual comment-link
Campers are not to blame for performance issues on the Grid overall (there aren’t nearly enough of them, it’s the sheer number of users that is the issue) but they _do_ degrade individual sim performance whether they “should” or not - utterly unfairly when someone runs a popular campsite on a shared sim, degrading performance and even blocking entry for people who actually own property there. They aren’t advertising either, really. Campers don’t advertise the place - one can take or leave advertising and one has to see it. Paying campers is more like payola by record companies on radio stations; it creates artificial popularity ratings and tops the search for any common term with mediocre establishments that having nothing going for them except camping.
If campsite owners want to run their own sims for camping and would be happy to have the traffic numbers reduced to those actual people who visit the sim and do stuff - or have their parcels placed on a separate “camping traffic included” search - then fine, there’s no problem.
comment | February 19, 2007 at 14:46 | individual comment-link
Ordinal - There are a number of camping chairs and pads that work in conjunction with machines. E.g. you make more camping $$$ by playing the machines. From one of our other VTOR group members that actually ran a casino for awhile (but doesn’t any more) I learned that the camping was used as advertising and bait for real customers. It’s a loss leader not unlike what supermarkets do with coupons. Segregating the campers from the “real” people as you said would be like putting the loss leaders at a grocery store at a nearby, unrelated location, which completely misses the point.
As for the architecture of SL, it’s poorly designed that any avatar in a “sleep” state is using the kind of resources that say you are building a new object that does fireworks in the sky or somebody else uses simply driving a vehicle around.
The bottom line is if you ask the business owners who have camping chairs, they will tell you they are useful. I don’t have any at my script store in SL, but I will continue to defend the rights of those who do. It is an advertising decision.
comment | February 19, 2007 at 15:33 | individual comment-link
“If myself or others want to pay people — zombie avatars or active avatars — to sit in a chair or on a dance pad to give the appearance our business is busy that’s our choice.”
If you own the entire sim, it should definitely be your choice. However, if anyone else owns land in the sim on which you have your parasite chairs, I do not think camping should be allowed. Sims have a finite amount of room - usually about 40 people. If you own say 1/8 of the sim and have 20 camping chairs, you are using up half of the sim’s population, usually 100% of the time. Do you feel you’re entitled to that too? How is this possibly fair to anyone else who owns land on that sim?
Seats in front of gambling machines - that’s a little different. At least the zombie is in front of his/her computer, actively participating in SL, and I can’t fairly say this should not be allowed. But when your zombie chairs are full of sleeping people, you’re limiting access to that sim. There just may be people who want to… oh, I dunno… ENJOY Second Life and they will not be able to get into that sim because of the parasites.
Campers are, to me, at the very bottom of the Second Life totem pole. Even below griefers, who are in front of their computer and at least having fun.
comment | February 19, 2007 at 16:38 | individual comment-link
Chronic - not sure where you are getting your data from but a sim can hold around 75 people before things start to go badly. And it isn’t the people paying for land that need to figure out how to divide the server avatar limitation, it is the people selling access to the land on the server (the hosting company, or in the case of the non-private sims: Linden Lab).
In the real world if a person on a virtual server uses too many resources, the hosting company will move that person to their own or a beefier server or force limitations on their usage. In the case of Linden Lab they are all too conveniently transferring that burden to everybody else using the same sim (server).
The anger, if any, should be directed to Linden Lab, not the land owners with camping chairs.
The fact that the number of avatars is so ridiculously low is the primary issue here, not camping. Nobody would be complaining about campers if their impact on the server was 1/1000th that of an active avatar, which is what they should be.
Trust me on this one if LL doesn’t get their act together somebody else will duplicate what they are doing but be able to scale to thousands of avatars on a single server. I read about a company from Australia who already is claiming they can do exactly that. I’ll be writing more about that shortly.
pingback | February 19, 2007 at 17:09 | individual pingback-link
[...] Linden Lab is starting to admit they have scaling problems they will soon have competition claiming — and possibly actually having the ability — [...]
comment | February 19, 2007 at 23:36 | individual comment-link
Casinos with automatic payouts use them as loss leaders, but there isn’t that excuse for, say, texture shops. I suppose perhaps one or two shoppers might be attracted by “free money!!!” not knowing what it is, but you won’t get any more sales out of someone sitting there for six hours than someone there for half an hour. Increasing the number of green dots in an area is sort of local advertising but only affects people who are exploring, and most people TP directly to places they know of. No, the primary purpose of these is to game the search, which is something that harms the usefulness of the search, unless one is searching for camping chairs.
As you say, nobody would have camping chairs if they were restricted to appearing on a “camping” search, because it would remove the point.
I’m not sure precisely where you the grid you are that there can be 75 avs before things start going wrong, but it’s nowhere I’ve been; mainland sims are usually physically capped at 40, with nobody else even being able to enter, and lag starts to become noticeably problematic after 20 or so in many.
It’s all very well to say “idle avs should use up some tiny proportion of system resources” and “sims should be able to handle more avs” but they _don’t_ and everybody knows they don’t; that’s not an excuse. If sims become more efficient at handling avs and nobody notices the impact of campsites then other residents wouldn’t mind them so much. Until that point, running campsites in populated sims is increasing one’s own profits at the expense of other people.
comment | February 20, 2007 at 05:47 | individual comment-link
I agree with Ordinal: what’s wrong about campers is that they are using resources that they aren’t using… they limit the ability of “live” avatars to use a sim, when they are really not in world at all, just plugged into a camping chair.
I do have a problem with camping: it’s dishonest. It’s distorting the results for the popular places too. About seven or eight new people have told me in the last week “Oh SL is all about sex, isn’t it? All the popular places are sex - or gambling.” Well I dunno about you TD by *my* SL isn’t all about sex. It’s presenting a disorted view of the community in SL, it’s tricking people into think these places are fun or good places to be, AND it’s using up resources at the same time.
That said, I don’t know what the answer is. Private sim owners can do what they please… and that includes having lots of zombies in chairs to bump up the traffic.
As for your figures…LL say that you shouldn’t have more than 50 avatars on a sim, and certainly shouldn’t plan on having more than that for an event. Of those you will only be able to see 30. For most people, that means that they only want to have 30 people on their sim, because life gets too damn complicated if you can’t see some of the people at an event - especially if the invisible people happen to be the host or performer etc.
I have always said that I feel that the scaling limitations are both a strength and a weakness. They are a strength because it avoids what would be happening - get thousands of people on a sim and I don’t see how it is different from a webcast or chatroom - and it would be impossible to be heard above the noise. It IS a weakness when you have a popular event and only a few people can attend…but it does also mean that SL retains a personalisation which isn’t found in many places including the real world.
comment | February 20, 2007 at 09:45 | individual comment-link
Ordinal I never said this: “As you say, nobody would have camping chairs if they were restricted to appearing on a “camping” search, because it would remove the point.”
What I said is a business/land owner isn’t going to want to put the camping chairs in another location away from their store. You are requesting a segregated search which makes no sense except for the people who are upset about stores with camping chairs. It’s the same as Google sending a visitor to your site about widgets because you have an article on anna nicole smith. They are looking for anna nicole smith and they found it — search successful. If as a competing widget store you have no anna nicole smith articles and expect Google to send that visitor to you then you don’t understand how search engines work.
Bottom line: people searching for camping chairs should always find exactly that: camping chairs.
If people are searching for widgets and the widget person with camping chairs ranks higher than you who doesn’t want to have camping chairs, that’s your business decision.
If someone is paying for land then trying to tell them what they can and can’t do there — outside of illegal activity (and can we all agree that camping isn’t illegal yes/no? You may not personally care for it, but it’s still legal) — then I think that’s very, very wrong. If LL takes a position to outlaw camping, then watch competitors like Outback Online (see separate post) saying: “camping is fine here!”
So that will take more potential customers away from your non-camping chair store. How does this help your business?
And Caliandris you seem to be making a distinction between those who get a private server vs. those of us who pay for tier — I don’t. Not any more than I make a distinction between virtual hosting customers being treated like managed dedicated server customers. Yes, one gets more capacity than the other, but they both are customers and should be treated equally. Not the case here at all.
And how did we get from camping chairs to sex? LOL. There are lots of non-sex places that have camping chairs as Ordinal pointed out.
The reason there needs to be more people on the server is the same reason virtual hosting customers want there to be adequate capacity to handle when they have a burst of traffic. If the limitation is 40 people, that’s even worse. That means if you are paying for a part of a sim but if neighbor B has an event that draws 40 people then your business is down and inaccessible. And people are paying for that … why?
As someone who has been programming for 20+ years, I can tell you there is no, no, no, no way that idle campers should be anywhere close to the draw on system resources in a well designed system as live avatars. We all seem to agree if they weren’t a draw on resources they wouldn’t be treated like the scum in SL.
It’s one thing if it’s free or ad-supported but the minute you start taking money from people you need to provide a service with reasonable expectation of uptime. Linden Lab has failed to do that and it’s a wide opening for somebody else to come in and take their business.
I’m not saying I want that to happen, I’m just saying.
comment | February 20, 2007 at 09:53 | individual comment-link
As for camping being dishonest, I totally disagree there.
Business owner says: “hey, here are these chairs I will pay you for to sit in.”
Customer says: “Ok, I’ll do that.” (and sits and gets paid)
Transaction done.
“Dishonest” would be using some sort of script to cheat the business owner out of money and not sitting in the chair or using the dance pad the way it was intended. Dishonest would be stealing or cheating objects to pay more. That’s dishonest.
It’s not dishonest camping. Some people might dislike it in SL because it impacts their business, but it’s not dishonest. I return to what I said before: it’s an advertising decision left to the individual business/land owner.
Business owners spend lots of money on advertising for things that don’t return. Heck, we spend thousands in our offline business buying tyhings that we give away. What is any different than giving away linden dollars?
comment | February 20, 2007 at 10:02 | individual comment-link
“If you own the entire sim, it should definitely be your choice. However, if anyone else owns land in the sim on which you have your parasite chairs, I do not think camping should be allowed.” - Oh I disagree 200% there Chronic. If you are a paid member, weather you own 512, or an entire SIM, you should be able to do whatever you want on your land. Thats the point of having your own land. Otherwise we may just call it CommunistSL.
Yes, sometimes bad things can happen. A neighbor could buy up the land next to you and put up all kinds of nasty ugly for sale signs all over the place. But this is the bad side of capitalism. But on the flip side, you can open a business, create objects/ textures, have IP rights to anything you create (except if LL deems they want it- see TOS. Off subject), put up camp chairs, open an escort service, open a banking service….
comment | February 20, 2007 at 10:13 | individual comment-link
I don’t think camping is anymore dishonest than handing out free textures. If someone wants to hand out free widgets, and I take one, is that wrong? If I know I can get more and more widgets or L by sitting in a chair whats the difference?
Being a prior casino owner I did run into sim lag. I was blamed for all kinds of lag for my 8 campers in my 512 parcel. However the complaints came from someone running a horse ranch, with incredible prim usage. Did I truly need to care? Nope, it wasn’t my fault that the technology wasn’t up to par to what SL was what it said it could do. However, as a good neighbor I did try not to get too out of hand with events.
I don’t think camping is criminal at all.
comment | February 20, 2007 at 13:16 | individual comment-link
> What I said is a business/land owner isn’t going to want to put the camping chairs in another location away from their store.
Ah, sorry, I thought you were replying to my point there about different searches.
> You are requesting a segregated search which makes no sense except for the people who are upset about stores with camping chairs. It’s the same as Google sending a visitor to your site about widgets because you have an article on anna nicole smith. They are looking for anna nicole smith and they found it — search successful. If as a competing widget store you have no anna nicole smith articles and expect Google to send that visitor to you then you don’t understand how search engines work.
>
> Bottom line: people searching for camping chairs should always find exactly that: camping chairs.
>
> If people are searching for widgets and the widget person with camping chairs ranks higher than you who doesn’t want to have camping chairs, that’s your business decision.
No no no no, hold on there.
I have no issue with people wanting to find camping chairs being able to use the search to find camping chairs; at the moment that’s pretty much what it is good for (also for finding clubs, since clubs generate huge traffic by their very nature).
The point about gaming the search with camping is that it boosts your level for EVERYTHING in your keywords, widgets textures guns clothes clothing skins scripts blah blah blah. The relevance of the fact you have a campsite is absolutely zero for me as a searcher who wants widgets. This makes a community resource - the search - much less useful, and increases the possibility that it will just get removed, which would be awful.
Google themselves realised this a long time ago and prevented their engine from giving high search results just because someone had lots of irrelevant popular terms; they still constantly tweak their algorithms to make gaming-type SEO as useless as possible, because it doesn’t give searchers what they want to see. The result of this is that they are now the primary search engine on the planet.
> If someone is paying for land then trying to tell them what they can and can’t do there — outside of illegal activity (and can we all agree that camping isn’t illegal yes/no? You may not personally care for it, but it’s still legal) — then I think that’s very, very wrong. If LL takes a position to outlaw camping, then watch competitors like Outback Online (see separate post) saying: “camping is fine here!”
Well, no, just because something is legal doesn’t make it right; outright fraud is legal in SL, cheating people on rental deals, reneging on contracts, selling fake goods, all that sort of thing, as well as non-fraudulent but exploitative practices such as land swooping. I would rather see LL make camping irrelevant by putting avs into a “shutdown” mode when they’re not doing anything, or increasing sim efficiency, or improving the way the search ranks things, or whatever, but until they do my sympathies are with people who can’t get into their own property or find it lagged horribly to make someone a few L$, or who want to find stuff on the search and can’t. These are perfectly valid paying customers as well.
comment | February 20, 2007 at 13:41 | individual comment-link
Ordinal -
You lose me — and I think most rational business people — when you start comparing camping chairs to fraud and in Caliandris case when she called it “dishonest.” Come on, it’s a legitimate business transaction between a business and a customer. You don’t like it, fine, but don’t compare it to truly dishonest dealings. That’s some kind of fuzzy logic.
And again it’s not the business or camper’s faults that the sim goes laggy, it’s Linden Lab using cheap hardware and having lousy programming. That’s not your or my fault or camping chairs.
My final word (hopefully) on camping: you and some others may not like camping, but it’s a LONG way from “selling fake goods” or “cheating people on rental deals.” If you honestly, seriously are comparing it to that type of activity, then that’s where my train leaves the station.
I agree that Linden Lab should fix and refine the search so it’s not based on traffic but that’s the system and blaming campers (if that’s what you’re trying to do) is the wrong focus. In fact, LL should just buy a Google search appliance and plug that in because the inworld search is terrible.
comment | February 20, 2007 at 13:48 | individual comment-link
I see where your comming from that camping can cloud your search results, however so can escorts, and pr0n, and ‘free anything’ as well. I agree that the search engine needs a bit of refining. I too was thrown by the ‘dishonest’ remark on camping chairs.
comment | February 20, 2007 at 14:03 | individual comment-link
TD: My last paragraph was not a comparison; it was a response to your suggestion that just because something was lawful, it meant that it was “very, very wrong” to say to people that they should not do it. They were examples illustrating that this was not the case, that there are “lawful” activities which should be criticised.
Lestat: yes, in theory anything can do that, but in practice escorts and porn don’t result in so many people spending the hours in one place that they do on campsites. They do, after all, have to _pay_ to spend hours at such places, rather than getting money for free for doing so
As far as I am concerned, any clubs and casinos which do the same, have lots and lots of avs there for long periods, restricting the sim performance out of proportion to their size, should get their own sims or stop as well. It is interesting to note that many rental agencies explicitly ban these things and enforce zoning because their customers demand it. This is one of the reasons I spend most of my time on private sims, as I am sure there that someone will not just move in and start a casino, campsite or whatever - not that most small operators survive for very long of course.
comment | February 20, 2007 at 15:07 | individual comment-link
Lestat: “If you are a paid member, weather you own 512, or an entire SIM, you should be able to do whatever you want on your land. Thats the point of having your own land. Otherwise we may just call it CommunistSL.”
So you are saying that if you owned all but 512 of a sim, and the person on that 512 had 40 camping chairs which were perpetually full so that neither you nor your friends could access your own land on the rest of the sim, you would be totally cool with this? You would think it was fair?
I know that LL needs to be able to design a system that can handle this. But that’s not the point. The point is that UNTIL THEY DO, we should be considerate to other people, given the current limitations. Camping is everything but. There is a big difference between reasonable enjoyment of the land you pay for and the abuse of resources.
comment | February 20, 2007 at 15:16 | individual comment-link
Ordinal - I don’t see where anything you mentioned in that last paragraph compares to camping either tangentially or directly. Was your only point to compare to something we weren’t talking about? Sorry, I’m confused. You can make this and easy yes or no thing. Are you going as far as Caliandris and saying camping is “dishonest” or not? Yes or no?
I understand that just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s ethical, but I don’t see any ethical or moral problems with camping, I see it as an advertising expense for business owners and a legitimate business transaction. Neither you, Caliandris or the hundreds of anti-camper comments I’ve read from others have convinced me otherwise.
It would sure help me understand where you are coming from on how your paragraph related to camping, if it even did. It’s entirely possible I’m missing an contrarian angle to this that is worth considering. I’m not completely close-minded to the subject but so far all I’ve seen offered are arguments that don’t make any business sense in the virtual or real world.
comment | February 20, 2007 at 15:23 | individual comment-link
I think the example you gave is kind of absurd, Chronic. And likely an abuse report type of situation wouldn’t it be? (yes/no?) I mean, I don’t think you could fit 40 camping chairs with avatars on 512m and do any other type of business, could you? They’d need to own other land in the sim to be able to fit more prims up in the sky or something.
Maybe 40 would fit on 1024m or more likely 2048m.
Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen 40 camping chairs in any one area.
comment | February 20, 2007 at 15:56 | individual comment-link
But the “it’s my land, I will do whatever I want” attitude seems to me like you WOULD put 40 chairs in a 512 if you could, simply because you feel entitled regardless of how it affects anyone else on the sim. You call it advertising, and I suppose it is. So is spam. I believe people should strive to make their business actually worth visiting instead of inflating their numbers with zombies.
comment | February 20, 2007 at 16:09 | individual comment-link
TD, it’s quite simple. Running a campsite which is even moderately-sized on a shared sim dramatically reduces the performance for everyone else. Camping also distorts search results to favour places with camping over places without camping _irrespective_ of what people are searching for - as long as they hit a keyword the campsites will appear higher for no other reason than that they are campsites.
I very much agree with Chronic that until sims can handle that sort of load, to run a campsite in the knowledge that you are harming other residents is immoral. People _do_ get shut out of their own land because of camping. They complain about it frequently.
I’ve also laid out my reasons for saying that camping is not advertising, in that, well, people sitting on a parcel is not an advertisement; I’m not sure how I can be clearer, but do advise if there are any questions.
comment | February 20, 2007 at 17:21 | individual comment-link
Ordinal - “to run a campsite in the knowledge that you are harming other residents is immoral”
Immoral? Come on. Definition of immoral:
This whole discussion is becoming silly, don’t you think?
You really feel that way? And what do you consider a “campsite”? A store with a couple camping chairs is a campsite? A casino like the one Lestat used to have with 8 chairs? No need to answer these questions I’m being rhetorical now. The point is that this is a very slippery slope.
Chronic -
I currently pay for an $8/mo. tier and prior to that owned $25/mo. tier for nearly a year and never put even one camping chair on it, so please don’t tell me what you think I WOULD do unless you actually see me do it or I admit that I WOULD do it.
The reality is I would NOT put 40 camping chairs on a 512m property and as I said in my last comment anybody else who did would border on something I’d think was “abuse report” worthy, but strangely you ignored my questions about that (that wasn’t sarcasm, those were legitimate questions)?
As for your comment about “business actually worth visiting” — you should ask some business owners if they think that having the camping chairs makes their business worth visiting. The vast majority of them will likely tell you that they are proven loss leaders. The same thing countless retail and grocery stores do through couponing every day across the world.
If they didn’t work then why do you think they still exist?
In the console video game sector the hardware is commonly sold at a loss with the hope of making it up in games. The world goes round with loss leaders and it’s a very real part of business. I suppose it’s possible the virtual world could or might be different, but I think most virtual business owners treat the basic business the same, for better or worse.
Then again, maybe Ordinal would thinks this is immoral too for the hardware companies to do this to each other. Ha, it’s business, and they all do it to each other and plenty of people support this “immoral” behavior.
Promotion. Get people to the store to buy your goods/services. If camping chairs drive them there, I see nothing wrong with that, even if I personally choose not to employ this type of promotion in my business, I don’t begrudge others who do.
As for there being some point where reasonable promotion becomes unreasonable, I think the example above of 40 camping chairs in 512m crosses that gray line. It’s not up to you or I to define those rules, it’s up to the hosting company — Linden Lab — since they are the ones selling the hosting services.
It’s really no different than any hosting on any website anywhere. You use too many resources, the host takes action on you. I can get behind that
It’s not immoral though.
So many severe words being tossed around in this thread. ‘Dishonest’, ‘fraud’, ‘immoral’ for what, camping chairs? LOL come on.
Linden Lab needs to get their shit together. That means buy better hardware and really go through their code. It would make discussions like the one we’re having moot.
I’ll let you folks have the last word on this, if you want. Thanks for the discussion.
comment | February 20, 2007 at 17:57 | individual comment-link
Sorry, my “entitlement” comment was more directed at Lestat, who seems to think that just because he pays money, he can hog any and all resources in any manner he chooses. Of course you would not put 40 chairs out, but at what point does this become abuse instead of advertising? What percentage of the sim’s maximum population do you feel entitled to use 24/7 per your percentage of land on it?
I never said camping chairs did not attract people to a business. But it’s pretty sad that they have to exist in order to solicit visits as opposed to having something unique enough that people don’t need to be sucked in by camping chairs or by the drooling-zombie-inflated traffic numbers that put your business at the top of the list. As for the “loss leader” explanation, OK… it would be like McDonald’s offering their sludge to the masses for free. The camper would be like the fat guy who elbows everyone out of the way to eat all of the free food himself, leaving nothing for anyone else. I’ll go get a nice steak at a place that relies on quality instead of big spammy promotions, thanks.
When I started SL, I would visit a lot of the businesses at the top of the list. Almost all of them had zombies, and almost all of them were not worth visiting. I learned very quickly that these numbers were not generated because the business was a good one. I consider it cheating your way up to the top, which is just my opinion. Now I avoid all of the top businesses and tend to go for the ones with a bit less traffic. And what do I find? No parasites, and excellent merchandise.
I am wondering - do the campers actually BUY anything? If they are so broke that they have to sit there for an hour to make $10L or whatever, I am thinking that it’s not likely. They are simply pawns used to falsely inflate the numbers.
comment | February 20, 2007 at 20:00 | individual comment-link
OK. My best example of camping chairs in real life is let’s say you start a clothing store. The first day you invite your friends and their friends to look around the shop for money. The store looks popular because all the people inside looking around. This goes on for weeks. Your friends never buy anything. All they do is walk around and look at stuff making others think they are customers. Your friends make money for tricking other people to visit the store.
It’s borderline dishonest in my opinion. If you had a rafle and contest to get people inside the store then that is a way of advertising but paying people to actually inflate the look of your business is not a very honest way of doing things. When I started in second life I looked for camping chairs and made some money from it but started not liking it because I found it boring. So I started visiting the places that had events, games and contests. I made more money from that then camping. Because I was having fun I bought more stuff too.
Now get back to the real life clothing store example. Let’s say all these friends that you are paying to look around your store all day have cars. Each friend has to park their car in front of other businesses making the other businesses not able to get customers in. In real life a business can restrict cars for their business only but camping chairs take resources away from neighboring places in second life. To me that is big problem for businesses and regular people who mistakenly bought land near a camping site. Yes someone camping in a chair does take resources away because the servers still have to send lot of info to that person who is doing nothing.
So with all that said I am not a big fan of camping chairs. I have made money from them in the past. I might use them in the future but only if there was something to do at the same time like play a game or slots. There still shouldn’t be a rule against a business who uses this advertising technique but the neighbors should have a way to fix any problems that they are having.
comment | February 21, 2007 at 00:15 | individual comment-link
TD: What a peculiar turn this has taken! I had expected that you might say that you did not think that such activity was actually wrong, or that it was justified by other things, but I had not expected sneering at the entire _concept_ that something could not be right, whether it is stealing biscuits from the jar, throwing litter on your neighbour’s lawn or shooting someone dead. Clearly under such circumstances there is not much discussion to be had.
comment | February 21, 2007 at 05:19 | individual comment-link
Umm sorry, couldn’t resist a follow-up Ordinal, again way too many generalities in your last comment attributed to something I didn’t mean or say. I never left focusing on the ball — camping and camping alone — and wasn’t talking about (nor interested in) the elementary concept that “something could not be right.” Suggest a thorough re-reading of everything I wrote, not what you oddly kept thinking I wrote throughout this discussion. Your repeated efforts to try and make this about something other than camping are what I’m labeling silly, not the concept that “something could not be right.”
And there are yet even more examples of things that are clearly not right that have nothing to do with camping (will you retort again that you didn’t intend these as camping comparisons?): “throwing litter on the neighbor’s lawn” (wrong) and “shooting someone dead” (wrong again). This is silly, Ordinal.
Chronic - yes, campers buy something (keep reading).
JohnnyRS — good to see you weigh in with a pensive response. Although I must respectfully (and I am respectfully disagreeing with everybody taking the anti-camping position in this thread and elsewhere including Caliandris, Ordinal and Chronic — which is another reason that I made this follow-up comment after I said I was done) disagree that camping is “borderline dishonest.” Your comment, JohnnyRS, assumes (yes/no?) that the whole point of getting campers to the property is to make it look like the place is busy.
I realize I specifically mentioned that as one possibility and as it is echoed back and I think about it more if it is for that reason alone, it does seem a little questionable (and “a little questionable” is the best I’m going to offer, lol) to me. Like bringing in shill customers and calling them real customers. Then again this is the virtual world, and most residents learn quickly what campers are doing and aren’t the same as somebody that is at the site and not camping, whereas outright deception would be having people milling around the store not camping, giving the illusion of shopping.
However from what I’ve heard a percentage of campers do spend money, so it’s not a total loss leader. I don’t know what the percentages are though since I’ve never had any camping chairs. Mostly loss leader from what I understand yes, but there are some non-zombie shoppers in the mix. Also it remains advertising because with all the times that SL crashes, these campers still need to physically login, return and resit (or stand on dance pads) at the place where the chairs/pads/etc reside. Something that draws people to a location is by its very nature advertising. It is possible that while the campers are rezzing back in that they see something else, stop, and buy something. There is a sale opportunity, however brief, and I’m sure that is calculated into the mix.
Interesting comment though that you indicated that you started spending more when you stopped camping (as much), JohnnyRS.
Thank you again for sharing your thoughts folks, I have enjoyed this conversation, even though it veered almost completely away from how 2D would help, or rather not help, SL database scaling woes. Please keep the conversation going if you like.
comment | February 21, 2007 at 06:41 | individual comment-link
You don’t like the word “immoral” for some inadequately explained reason, despite then going on to quote a definition which includes “deviating from what is considered right or proper or good”, when I have repeatedly said precisely the things which I do not consider the right things to do (and why). One might think that it a perfectly appropriate word to use in such circumstances. Instead of actually addressing any points and arguing why they do not apply, you just call the whole idea of using the word “silly”. I therefore concluded that you must not actually like talk of things being right or wrong, if the basic concept offends so. But hey ho, I’m sure nobody else cares.
comment | February 21, 2007 at 07:47 | individual comment-link
Interesting thread. One of the neat things about it is that we are not getting heated or so it seems none is getting completely miffed
As far as buying a 512 and plunking 40 chairs on it… I like the absurd example. I dunno if prim limits would allow so many. But if LL says I can do it, I would. (I don’t own my casino anymore so don’t worry). However, if I noticed that the Sim was getting too laggy, or the neighbors were complaining I would certainly oblige them and cut back to a degree. What would make my business any more important than the neighbors, or visa versa? This is where having good community comes in.
However, who are my neighbors that can tell me how or how much income I can make in my business. Just because say, yours is a clothing biz or whatever. Not that I wouldn’t come to a mutual agreement. But to say that my biz is any less important because I have a different mechanism to bring in the monies.
All that said, maybe the Lindens need to reconsider prim limits or tier fees. It seems we all agree that the search feature could be revised. Or better yet scaling the servers to where they should be so we can ALL do what THEY say we can do
“Immoral” - Strongly disagree.
“Dishonest” - Strongly disagree.
“Fraudulent” - Strongly disagree.
“Ruthlessly one sided” - (No more than the SL TOS is hehe)
pingback | February 22, 2007 at 10:15 | individual pingback-link
[...] to Second Life. The second, one that a rather interesting debate in the comments section of And 2D will help SL database scaling woes … how? highlights, is how the search results in Second Life are [...]