Reply to comment

Based on an anonymous comment, I decided to poke around after a few days and see if there were actually 'bots' hanging out over the ANCAPEX exchange. There were avatars - whether they were bots or not is indeterminate - but they most certainly were camping over the exchange. While a common tactic in gaming Second Life's flawed traffic ratings, these wisely seated avatars might be there for some useful purpose.

Maybe they're counting traffic, for example.

As I commented in this post, AnCapEx is also putting their competitor's names in advertising - something which others reported to me anonymously. One user said that someone named 'Eclipse' kept pestering them in IM when they mistakenly landed there on the way to VSTEX. She said that when she told them that they should take the name of VSTEX in the advertisement, and that the reply was along the lines of 'we don't fix their ads'.

World Stock Exchange, SLCapEx and VSTEX do not have advertising, with good reason: The classifieds in Second Life are of dubious value, and WSE is, of course, still closed.

All of these things are... grey. They don't break any laws or the Terms of Service - unless you consider [w:Trademark] law - but it is funny to note the disparity in advertising tactics by AnCapEx.

Does gaming the traffic and advertising system give them more benefit than the tradeoff of upstanding and respectable behavior? Is it really beneficial for all of those alts to be logged in? Is it really worth it? It seems that they think so...