SL
24 April 2009 by ElanthiusGay for Jack!
The long awaited bot blog has arrived and it’s a doozy. I don’t want to gush about Jack Linden too much. I’m not Gay for Jack just yet but this new policy does seem to be very close to satisfying the maximum number of people possible.
Boxes o’ Bots are now banned. Great. No matter what Phil and others say they were a pointless drain on resources and served no purpose other than to violate the search mechanism. To be fair, I’m not against search engine optimisation. Of course I’ve done work on my own parcel to help it appear as high as it does in search. The difference between the other usual methods, paying for picks, keyword stuffing etc etc is that they don’t negatively affect the grid and people trying to visit the sim.
The devil is in the details though. The policy seems wise and fair but the implementation is where it gets a little messy. I’m a big fan of the other new policies Jack has been responsible for. Ad farming and land cutting. With land cutting though implementation has been somewhat wanting. Theres time for Jack to bring it around but we still see land being cut all the time and it’s laughable to suggest that the mainland might be “healing” any time soon. Hopefully LL will do something simple like run through the parcel with the largest traffic and give any bot users the beat down. It seems pretty simple.
There are some grey areas to consider although they shouldn’t concern us too much. Obviously now bots are banned people will go back to camping chairs. But what happens when (not if) the chairs fill up with roaming camping bots? It will likely be impossible to find the owner of the bots and banning them is pretty pointless. More can always be made. If you turn a blind eye then whats to stop land owners putting their own bots on their own chairs? I suppose the only solution is to make the land owner responsible for keeping bots away. He chose to put the chairs there, he chose a model of chair that allows bots, he is the one in violation. This might seem counterintuitive to some and I can see some whining to come but it might be the best way forwards.
But then what if the campers are not bots but real avatars that are afk for hours or days at a time? Is it a violation to go afk for too long? The policy doesn’t say. It seems like this should also be a crime. In my opinion, again, the land owner is the one at fault. Who can blame the hapless noobs for sitting on a chair that gives them free money? But if the land owner hasn’t put in some mechanism to ensure that the campers are actually at their keyboards such as asking questions regularly then the land owner again should be warned, suspended, whatever. Of course I’m not talking about punishing people for going afk. I’m saying if you have a massive camping farm you are skirting the letter of the law and need to go to extra lengths to prove your legitimacy.
These are minor points though. LL will work through the issues and gaming and whatever else the same way they always do (badly, hahaha).
The History of LandBots Part 1
Well, I always figured the day would come. LL are considering taking action to curb land bots. See the latest blog for more details. For the first few years I ran my landbots I always figured LL were going to ban them within the next few weeks and yet it never came. We’ll see where the blog leads us but this seems as good a time as ever to post…
The History of LandBots Part 1
It was September 2006 when I first decided to give land trading a try. I’d been in SL a few months and played around with this and that so I was already very familiar with getting around and land and everything else. I’m generally a pretty cautious guy so I started by flipping 16s. It was amazingly easy to make money. You’d just buy the cheapest 16s you could find. Stick them up for sale for L$4 or L$10 or some nominal amount higher than you paid and people would buy them within a day or two.
Of course the land-landscape was much different back then. The market was totally opaque to non-land traders. All estate and mainland sales were mixed together in the search and there was no way to separate them luckily the search was also one big page. You’d have to hit search and then scroll past tons of sales for L$1 and other bits that looked like they might be estates. You really only had the name and description of the land to go by, and maybe you had memorised the names of some sims. As a result no normal person had any idea what land was worth and land traders would regularly miss certain types of parcels.
Well after a few weeks of hunting through the crappy search I soon got fed up with that and wrote a little bot to search for me, filter out the estate stuff and present the data on an automatically refreshing website. I was apparently the first person who had ever considered automatically filtering land sales. I knew I was the only one doing it because some days at work I’d see an awesome deal and then 6 hours later I’d get home and buy it. That’s not to say there weren’t other land flippers. In fact there were dozens but they just weren’t that smart. They would scramble and fight over every 512 that came up such that a 512 that was 10% cheap would be gone in seconds but massive sims or very tiny parcels would just sit idling forever.
I ain’t gonna lie, we CLEANED UP for the next few months. Flipping massive amounts of land. I distinctly recall very early on buying an entire sim for US$1000 and flipping it later that day for US$2000. That’s probably still the biggest trade I ever did. Now don’t forget although we had automatic searching I was still looking at a website, waiting for something to come up, teleporting to it and buying it manually. Many of the things we bought were invisible to everyone in SL. Other people wouldn’t even see this stuff because it was totally hidden in the crappy search window.
Things stayed like this for a while, until late January in fact. During that time I had improved things a bit, I was receiving IMs about parcels that came up instead of using a website with slurls. I had invited a few of my friends and family to have access to the website so we were all chasing each other and collectively printing kizash. No-one had any idea what we were doing and nobody was even close to coming up with a similar solution.
In January of 2007 LL upgraded the search so you could filter out estate parcels. It was a catastrophe for me of course. For a few weeks I muddled along chasing other land flippers. We’d still win often because my system was more efficient but once or twice we’d see a great deal and miss it. The situation was totally unacceptable. That was when the first landbot was written. It was pretty primitive, just a single bot searching and teleporting around trying to buy land. I always jokingly said that LL had forced my hand. I couldn’t possibly put up with these button mashers beating me to MY parcels.
Unfortunately since the market was a little more transparent and my bots were very slow many land flippers could see what I was doing because something would come up in search, they’d teleport to it and I’d always beat them. Yet somehow I wasn’t even on the parcel. It wasn’t entirely clear at the time whether landbots would be illegal or not. I always represented that I was confident it was legal but you never did know. Really I felt like LL could have decided at any time to outlaw landbots and destroy my business. I felt like I was one or two weeks away from being banned for the whole of 2007.
Everyone knew what I was doing and it wasn’t even that clever. To me it was the obvious move. Why sit around hitting search, search, search, teleport, buy all day long when you can get computers to do that boring crap. Yet no-one thought of doing the same thing. Other land flippers knew how much money was in the land market yet they were all too clueless to create something similar. Of course there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth during this time. Several land flippers were driven out of business by my new system. It was all very sad and everything to hear Sarah Nerd complaining that her livelihood was destroyed or Joy Iddinja complaining that she couldn’t afford to visit her sick mother or whatever. I mean sure, that’s sad, but welcome to capitalism ladies. They all seemed to think that land trading should be like some sort of collective commune where everyone shared the profits equitably and competition was somehow unfair or something. Some of these people were highly regarded by the general population and so they succeeded in drumming up a great deal of hatredduring this year. Bot threads on the forums were a vitriolic bloodbath for me during 2007. I always stood my ground and argued my case, probably to my detriment to be honest but it’s not in my nature to take that kind of shit lying down.
In January of 07 Landbot Hax gained notoriety as some kind of evil demonic landbot from hell. I’m not sure why everyone hated him so much, he had this trick of buying land and instantly setting it back for sale which caused a few people to accidentally pay the higher price. For us it was no big deal though. He beat us occasionally but he mostly focussed on very high priced parcels we didn’t care about anyway.
Somewhere around March of 2007 Zor Zeddmore started his operation which was a touch better than mine. I think it was about April of 2007 when Chikaa Masala, Instant Voom, Bot Hax and maybe a few others started up. This was really the beginning of the Great Bot Wars. I couldn’t believe I’d got away with it for so long so I wasn’t too upset when competitors started challenging me. I had been so heartless towards the other land flippers when I pushed them out of the market that it would have been quite hypocritical to complain about these newcomers. Up until this point I had hardly bothered improving my bots at all there had been no point in it. As I recall I was generally on top during 2007 but never really won 100% of the land I was going for. Besides we all had different parameters. Mine tended to be the most cautious. i.e. I’d only buy 90% under market value. There were other bot runners buying land that was marginally cheap so they’d get plenty of land to keep them busy that I was ignoring. For the next two years various bots came and went some better than others. I kept improving my system, sometimes I was on top, sometimes I cearly wasn’t. Overall we did pretty well keeping up with the competition and the title of “best” went back and forth amongst us all on a fairly regular basis. As far as I know we’re the only name still going from this time.
Lots of people tried stupid stuff to get back at bots during 2007. A popular move was to shoot them or ban them or whatever. All very yawn. There were two attacks that really stuck out in my mind though. Seargent Crossair in May wrote, or paid someone else to write a small bot that would rapidly change land prices between something that was cheap and some ridiculously expensive price. The plan was that bots would see the cheap price, try to buy it and instead pay the expensive price. Unluckily for me he rolled it out while I was asleep and succesfully tricked my bots into paying L$200,000 each for 2 16s. It was a pretty massive loss for me, well it would be for anyone of course. I think I sucked it up pretty well though, although I did write a number of snotty emails to Linden Lab for not giving me my money back. Seargent got a few other bot runners and a couple of real people too with this trick. Eventually he got banned I believe but I’m sure he kept his ill-gotten gains. At least I never saw my money again. LL eventually patched the issue but not before a number of people got ripped off.
The other attack was much more serious and I still suffer from the effects now. Weedy Herbst and perhaps a few other crappy scripters freely distributed “anti landbot” devices. Several land flippers placed them under the ground in tiny invisible prims on every parcel they bought. Many of these things are still around now transferring from land owner to land owner and never getting auto returned. Some are even quite close to my store in Steamboat. The goal of this script was to just teleport home any bots or bot runners whenever they came on the parcel. Unfortunately if a script tries to teleport you home while you are not on the scripts parcel then it throws up a dialog box in the viewer that says something like “Teleport failed”. The pernicious scripts will hammer my viewer with these boxes multiple times a second and the dialog boxes queue up. The result is I either need to shut the viewer down and log in somewhere else or quickly close all the boxes so I can teleport home, then close many more boxes that are still in the queue until I can finally continue about my business.
On the upside for me 2007 was the year when LL adjusted their TOS to make it explicitly clear that modifed clients and therefore bots were absolutely allowed. They practically codified their legitimacy in law. People refused to believe it and put their own little spin on the TOS but I felt like I could relax a little if not completely.
23 March 2009 by ElanthiusLL Reduced To Begging
I haven’t seen the text of the email but apparently Linden Lab have been sending emails to every estate owner who doesn’t own a Homestead. The email apparently reminds them of the wonders of Homestead Sims and kinda begs them to buy one.
Lately Linden Lab seems more and more prone to spamming, I’ve had my own little forays into targetted spamming but the resounding feedback was that it was unwanted to the point of making some people quite angry about it. Fair enough I guess. I learned my lesson I won’t try it again. It looks like Linden Lab aren’t going to be learning this anytime soon though since their spamming increases in frequency.
I suppose the reason for this particular effort is the complete drying up of the Homestead market. There’s no doubt that estate owners are nervous about Homestead sims. Personally I’m quite sure we would have continued expanding into Homesteads sims at a slow but steady pace. Instead for the last few months there has been no consideration whatsoever of buying one. For sure the ones we have are still profitable but who knows what crazy thing is going to happen in June if they raise prices again. The risks are too high and a wait and see strategy is prudent. My colleagues and I have even been talking about our exit strategy from Homesteads if it comes down to it and I’m sure many other managers are taking the same attitude and making the same plans.
This, of course, is the problem with dragging out the price increases like this. It has frozen the market. If they’d gone ahead with the $125 pricing immediately then sure, the suffering would have been greater but it also would have been briefer. Like tearing a plaster (band aid for my American readers (as if I have any readers at all!)) off quickly instead of slowly.
Of course it’s not just the Homestead market drying up. Tyche reports weekly on SLU about the number of sims coming online and going offline. There has been a slow and steady decrease in sim count every week this year. Not massive just a hundred or so every week. There is a lot of turmoil in the full prim estate market too. Every day there are lots of people desperate to sell their estate sims, even (barely) profitable ones filled with renters and at the same time plenty of people willing to buy them. At this point only a fool would buy a sim from Linden Lab when you can easily get a proper estate sim for $700 with 20-25 days worth of tier remaining. Turnaround times are quick as well, a transfer can be done in just 2 or 3 days now. Of course Linden Lab still get their pound of flesh in the form of $100 transfer fees but it can hardly be satisfying swapping sims around between all the different land barons instead of printing new ones.
Overall I think the problem is that most of the incautious, barely profitable estates run by estate managers who flunked mathematics 101 are shutting up shop and only the prudent guys are left. They’re not interested in wild and unrestrained expansion right now. And neither am I.
13 March 2009 by ElanthiusAdult Ghetto
In a flurry of publicity LL have announced in not one, not two but 5 forum threads and 1 massive blog post that they are going to be forcefully evicting all adult oriented businesses and herding them onto a new continent built specially for the purpose, presumably with a non-stick coating and plastic sheeting over all the couches.
Firstly though, I firmly believe that the decision is made, the plan decided. LL have shown on several very significant occasions that they are really only pretending to listen to user input on significant policy changes like this. Indeed, they’re a business they have to do what they can to maximise profit and the mob mentality of the forums is not a great place to get your business strategies from. Besides, they’ve already defined and described everything in the past tense in the knowledge base. Why put this in place if the whole thing wasn’t a done deal?
The implications of such a move are so mind boggling that it’s hard to get your head around. Certainly predicting the future is going to be an exercise in futility but I like to try anyway.
Land Market
Of course this is just a side issue to most people but to me it’s the most critical factor of all.
Short Term
Prices on the new continent will be absurdly high as speculators and businesses buy the land up hoping to flip it for a profit. The whole continent will be very well landscaped and so will have a high value like Nautilus or Bay City. Mainland prices will drop sharply in the first week or so since people will be abandoning their land and getting the hell out of dodge. Printing new sims will cause panic in the mainland market that will crush prices. Eventually we could see prices drop below L$1/sqm if there is significantly more land than people.
Medium Term
The collapse in mainland prices will start to negatively affect the estate market as mainland starts to look more attractive due to super cheap prices. Of course at the same time mainland prices will start to come back or at least stabilise. At this point it will be hard for mainland prices to rise but they can certainly stop going down. Prices on the new continent will begin to fall and equalize with the rest of the mainland.
Basically we’re going to be looking at a long period of extreme volatility plus two totally separate mainland markets where the prices won’t correlate well at all. There’s going to be a lot of gouging and speculating and all the other fun stuff that capitalism brings.
Adult Industry
It’s not just that all adult businesses will have to move, lose all their picks, adjust their classifieds, fix all their notecards and landmarks, rebuild their entire stores from scratch etc. It’s also that the entire porn ghetto and all adult estate sims will be unaccessible to anyone except Payment Info On File/Age verified accounts. Presumably people selling sex toys and clothes will be able to rely on XStreet to sell but clubs and hangouts will have to clean up their acts and stay on the old mainland or they will end up being almost entirely empty. What I suppose will happen is that only an elite few adult businesses will even be able to own land. Most will resort to selling through websites, either XStreet if it continues to allow adult goods or some other site that will be sure to spring up if they don’t. In my own case I suppose we’ll have to evict a few residents who engage in adult behaviour. I certainly can’t afford to lock any of my sims to payment-info-on-file residents only. I’ll resist it as long as possible of course but if LL are serious about enforcing this then I woneventually ‘t have a choice.
In The End
I suppose SL will survive. As has been stated elsewhere this is certainly the end of LLs dream to make SL the new internet. The internet has grown and thrived and expanded /because/ of the adult industry not despite it. I suppose this is all part of LLs plan to attract big business to SL. I’ve explained before why I think this plan is doomed. SL is still utterly worthless for all business uses and even cleaned up and Disney-fied it will still be just as useless but a whole lot less popular. Let us not weep for the adult industry though. Those guys are some of the most innovative people in the world. Porn will survive.
Posted in Adult, Land, SL | Comments (1)
Small improvements to land
Jack asked here for some small improvements he could make with a weeks’ worth of coding. I posted my favourite but I thought I’d list the others here because then people would see the track back and come read my blog and maybe pay me money for stuff.
- Ability to move, rename. change estate on sims via the land.secondlife.com page
- Top Scripts on mainland sims, open to everyone who owns land there
- Ability for groups to hold more than 1,000,000sqm of tier (right now very bad things happen if you go over that number)
- Ability for group permissions to be linked to different parcels. So, OK this group has 3 parcels, people in this role can do this on parcel 1 but not on parcel 2 etc
- Ability to donate tier direct to a person instead of just to groups
- Objects deeded to groups are returned to group founder when auto returned
- Group transaction history. OMG group transaction history please. Currently if someone buys land from me I have no serious way of knowing what they paid or even if they bought the land at all
- Make parcel property lines easier to see, especially underwater
Really it’s a crying shame that Jack even needs to ask, there are so many things broken about SL Land that anyone should be able to see at least a couple of things to fix right away.
25 February 2009 by ElanthiusThis week in bots
The base land market peaked again this week and firmly flattened at 3.7/sqm. Part of that is caused by ex-adfarmers dumping their land. The rest of it is just that there aren’t that many land flippers anymore. Back when the market was careening up towards 15/sqm the grid was riddled with my fellow vermin. Desperately clicking Search as fast as they could and racing around buying land and selling it ten minutes later for a 10% profit. Now it’s just the old hands doing it manually plus a few bots. The problem for the button mashers is that now you need contacts and schmoozing to buy cheap land. You need to have a sickening gaggle of cohorts who always sing your praises like Sarah Nerd so that people think of you when they need to sell land and have no idea of the value. Or you need some kind of secret spy network like Rockwell Ginsberg appears to have. God knows what he’s been doing lately but I’ve seen him flipping 4 or 5 full sims in the last week or so and not always crappy ones either.
Ad farmers continue to dump land despite anecdotal evidence from the Arbor Project fanboys to the contrary. Even the notorious Cytherea Eagle has started dropping small parcels to the bots and donating many more to the Arbor Project. It’s kind of sickening to see her at the Arbor Project meetings all helpful and concerned about how best she can heal the grid by using her ad farms for good and not evil. The Arbor Project people are good enough not to bitch her out the entire meeting and I guess you take what help you can get these days. Unlike Cytherea who was treated with kid gloves those snippy buggers couldn’t resist the urge to make a few nasty comments about how bots are destroying the world as we know it. I don’t know if they just don’t realise I’m standing right there or maybe the fact that I’m there is the point of bringing it up in the first place. There’s all sorts of defenses for bots buying dumped 16s. The main thing I’ll say is that if I didn’t buy the parcels some other professional land flipper would and so eliminating me would just open an economic gap that would be filled by someone else.
People ask me why I bother buying tiny parcels, in fact most other bot runners don’t even buy them for various technical reasons (technically they all suck). The main reason I go for tiny parcels is because it’s free money and I like money. I need to control how many square meters of land I own but I really don’t care if it comes in one million square meter parcel or a million 1 square meter parcels. It’s all the same amount of work for me and my bots really. Besides, it’s probably best for everyone. I essentially sell land to the highest bidder. But the difference between me and, say ROBO Marx or Cytherea Eagle is that I have a limited time span in which I insist on selling the parcel. Say 30 days, or sometimes closer to 14 days. This means I can’t afford to set land for stupid prices and wait out the entire market. I have to find a price that people are willing to pay and get the land out the door. Otherwise my tier fees would rapidly approach infinity as I buy more and more and sell less and less. The result is that scammers don’t buy my parcels because they are slightly too expensive and real people in the sim who need the land do. Let’s not be under any mistaken impression that I think I’m running some kind of charity or anything. It’s a business that I run for profit, but I try to be nice about it where I can.
There’s no big surprise that the third land cutting blog entry or maybe the trafficbot blog (I forget which we are waiting for) is still delayed. It seems like everyone is now waiting for the new blog format to come out. Everyone else seems to be all-a-twitter about how awesome it will be but I’m cautiously pessimistic. It seems like they are planning on ditching the forums and replacing it with multi blog, yahoo answers thing. Who knows what it will look like but I really feel like it will destroy the community and debate I enjoy so much in the forums. Of course most “debates” devolve into name calling and idiocy but that’s cool. We enjoy it anyway. The problem with the blog right now is you can only talk about sanctioned subjects. No off topic chat allowed! It sounds like soon we will have more topics but they’ll all be officially sanctioned, handed down to us like tablets from Mount Sinai by the Linden Gods or “bloggers” as they will otherwise be known.
I wouldn’t call Blackwood an actual success yet. By volume it’s only 22% full right now but by parcel count over 50%. That’s pretty good for the first couple of weeks. As per usual all the small parcels have been snapped up and the larger ones languish in emptiness. It’s a tough balancing act. Small parcels are more popular but they’re also a lot more work. I generally try to attract people who want large parcels even if it means leaving a sim a little empty. It makes the place look tidier and probably causes less lag and less crowding.
I’m a big fan of the fancy rental boxes in the center of the sim that automatically update to show the image from the parcel. I think it makes a pretty good looking center piece to the sim. Plus it’s absurdly complicated behind the scenes which is one of the hallmarks of anything I create. I’ve been thinking of adding one new feature, some kind of automated classified for the sim. It seems like it would be possible to take the parcel descriptions from every rental parcel append them all together in order of size and then create a classified based on that. It seems like it would be pretty practical. People adjust their parcel descriptions anyway so that search places is optimized. The same prose should be appropriate for a classified. I could even link the price of the classified to how much of the sim is rented. That way the more full the sim is the more expensive the classified becomes.
SL Needs To Change Direction
The latest blog has amandalinden gushing about how wonderful it is to use SL for business, for virtual meetings or some nonsense. It’s really quite laughable. I spend a huge amount of time in SL and unlike most people I have very few complaints about stability or problems teleporting or all that stuff that people usually whine about. It’s probably because I have some pretty hard core equipment on my desk, 3GB of Ram, quad core 2.4GHz processor, 20Mb DSL connection. SL runs great for me and I spend a fucking ton of time in there but I still find it absurd that anyone would try to use it for business meetings or in any kind of serious business at all.
Take that cute little picture on the blog where some smart alec has recreated a RL conference room inside SL where avatars lounge around with their feet on the desks and their hands behind their heads. How exactly is that better than video conferencing? And don’t give me some crap about leaning backwards because people seem too close. At best meeting in SL is slightly better than talking to someone on the phone but when you take into account the ridiculous amount of technology required to “meet” in SL that meagre benefit withers away. Think about it. What is the point of it all? Surely the only reason you want to see the person you’re talking to is so you can see their expression, see which way they are pointing, what their gestures are when they talk. The sort of visual cues that help you understand what someone is saying. You get none of that in SL. It’s not possible for people in SL to smile when they make a subtle joke or to wave their hands around when they are feeling animated (pun totally intended!) so there’s nothing valuable to be gained from looking at the screen.
Further, there’s absolutely nothing whatsoever about SL that encourages cooperation or joint projects or whatever. Google Docs, now that is a great way to collaborate but you can’t do any of that in SL. What would you do? Pass notecards back and forth? Some might argue that you could do collaborative modelling (no, not the L$10/hour shoe store kind) in SL but realistically the modelling tools in Sl are embarrassingly primitive. I don’t know shit about modelling but I sure as fuck know no professional architecture firm is going to use SL to prototype their stuff. Unless, of course, it’s for PR purposes or cheap news cycles.
There is no hope whatsoever for SL to be a popular business tool. None.
Education is nearly as bad, I know SL loves to think of itself as some kind of amazing tool for educators but I really don’t see it. Sure it has some small possibilities, you can do some fun things and I concede here there may be uses for it in the classroom.
I 100% agree with Skye’s comment on the blog but for different reasons. And not just because we’re married. SL should refocus its efforts on attracting gamers. Things like improving physics, making scripts go faster, making scripts more complex, improving the building tools, improving the overall speed and stability of SL - these are all things that LL should be fucking doing anyway. Not screwing around with IBM trying to have virtual meetings. And if LL did those things then we’d have a gaming platform on our hands. Something like Neverwinter Nights is tantalisingly close to being possible in SL, but maybe not quite yet. Something like Crysis but perhaps with much much shittier graphics, it’s quite believable that someone could create that. We have semi intelligent bots, we have guns, we have scenery, we have gangs of griefers who love running around blowing shit up. Mix it all together, start throwing grenades at it and you’ve got yourself some fun. What’s more, gamers will take crap and give it a shake. You don’t have to do a 6 week business risk investigative study before you pick up a game and try it out. Especially in something like SL which is kinda free. If only things were slightly better everywhere you’d have players, sorry, residents creating proper games for you. And not just idling games like that crazy fishing game or Tiny Empires, both of which I think are totally awesome. BTW the main reason they’re so awesome is they work around the major technical failings of SL and deliver something that works with SL, not against it. No, not just those little toys but really serious kick ass games.
Games. It’s so much smarter than trying to get into business. There’s billions of gamers out there, there’s billions of wannabe game designers. Fix SL, mash those two groups together and you’re gonna see SL explode.