Burn the witches
The discussions on the future of traffic have raised some important issues, highlighted scalability and created a great new scapegoat: camping.
The discussions seem to suggest that camping is the most heinous event in the Second Life World. Forget griefing, forget obscenity, forget extreme violence, forget ageplay, camping is the number one evil.
I'm just waiting for someone to link camping to rising fuel prices or the subprime crisis. Really, this is getting ridiculous already.
Apparently if camping goes, all the problems go. The sun will shine, the birds will sing, Second Life world peace will break out, there will only be shiny happy people around and every single ill of the world will be magically cured.
Suffering from lag? Eliminate campimg.
Asset server issues? Eliminate camping.
Can't find shoes to fit your avatar? Eliminate camping.
What next, a rampaging mob on the hill trying to burn out the evil camping monster?
I welcome the debate on the future of traffic, I also welcome a discussion about ways to reduce asset server problems, crashes and general stability. However I'm not buying for one minute that everything will be solved by getting rid of camping. Just how many problems does camping cause?
Technically I don't see how a camper is causing more stress on the servers than someone teleporting from sim to sim in search of something. I don't see how a camper is causing more stress than people using scripted objects, sensors, networked vendors yadda yadda yadda.
There seems to be a bitter sense of entitlement amongst some premium members. I've never quite followed this logic of people feeling superior because they have a premium membership. A couple of important points here, estate land makes up the vast majority of the land in Second life. A resident does not need to be a premium member to live on estate land, indeed they don't need to be a premium member to rent mainland either. Whether everyone should have to pay a membership is an argument that was made redundant a couple of years ago.
Campers earn money to spend Linden dollars. There are better ways of obtaining Linden dollars, but campers aren't generally using their camping money to cash out. This is a revenue source. Personally when I tried camping I found it to be tedious but others have said there can be a social aspect to camping.
Spend some real money people cry, but the campers don't want to do it that way, they're happy to think that they aren't spending actual money. Energy bills make this a false economy but if they're happy to do things that way then I personally don't see the big problem.
Popular camping places can of course impact on everyone's enjoyment of a sim, but that's the same for any popular place. Popular stores, popular clubs, popular education establishments can all lead to frustrations with neighbours. Blaming campers is ignoring the real issue that the platform struggles with popularity, that popularity could be anything at all.
The debate should be centred around the performance limitations. That's the bigger issue, camping is just a contributing factor, as is any activity that takes place in Second Life.
Blaming camping for most of the ills with the Second Life world is just papering over the cracks. Camping is of course inextricably linked to traffic, so if Linden Lab decide to eliminate traffic, then that would probably eliminate camping. This would probably see an end to money trees too and then people would divert their money to other avenues to make their parcels popular, but will that improve performance and make everything wonderful?
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A huge problem with camping
A huge problem with camping on the mainland, is that sims have a 40 person allowence. When campers use to many of those spaces it prevents others who live in the sim from entering there land. I don't hate camping. With the set up of the traffic system theres not many other choices for getting on that popular list. So blame LL.
Road to a bigger debate
I agree that in particular it's an issue on mainland, any popular mainland attractions would cause the same problem but I'd imagine camping is the most frequent cause.
However that raises issues about the technical limitations and as you point out, traffic system itself.
So with you on this...
I've never had a problem with campers or places that allow campers. My only frustration would be on those slow days when I have nothing to do, so I go sim-hopping (map-dot-hopping) looking to meet new people and see what's up, only to find a bunch of campers. So what, I move on.
As for money trees, I used to have a couple of those out. But the problem with money trees is that the host who owns it also relies on gratuities from oldbies to donate - all in the purpose of helping out newbies. Unfortunately, the money drains far quicker than it gets replenished.
I have a trivia pyramid that is essentially a money tree. But makes it fun (earn money based on the number of correct answers) - I'm actually thinking of setting it back out. Just for kicks.
As for the whole camper issue - I don't have any with it. 30 bots all in a row for nothing more than generating traffic? Well, that's another story altogether.
I say let the campers stay. Anyone who disagrees, premium membership or not, is just a selfish 'world revolves around me and I'm entitled" idiot in my book.
Ari Blackthorne
http://commonsensible.net
Dunno.
What I do know is that the traffic statistic was completely useless, and removing it was a low risk, high reward issue for Linden Lab. As you rightly point out, it doesn't fix some of the harder issues... but in my eyes, it is one thing that needed to be done.
Second Life Consultant