Who is really abusing resources?

I am afraid that this post may contain whining about openspaces, although that's a side focus for this entry, I thought I should warn you in advance.

I'm still miffed about what has happened about openspaces, indeed I feel cheated. However let's look at some of the core reasons given for the price increase. Apparently openspaces have been using twice the expected resources and are causing additional load on the network and database infrastructure.

Anya Ristow has been running an interesting, albeit controversial project, called green dots.The aim is to examine whether the social interaction in Second Life is declining and the effect that bots and afk campers have on the world as a whole. For example you pull up the map, see an area heavily populated with green dots and tp in only to find there's nobody to actually talk to depsite there being lots of avatars around.

Now the issue for me, isn't so much what those bots are doing, it's what sort of load are they adding to the overall infrastructure. If active residents are going to get shafted for their use, then what about inactive residents? Who at the end of the day is paying for their resources?

Now I should point out at this stage that I'm not exactly in the anti camping camp. Camping whereby avtars get money to then go and spend inworld adds to the overall economy. However camping (and I use the term loosely) that doesn't spread money in that way is nothing more than a resource hog. I fully understand why people do it, raising their traffic counts to get increased visibility in order to sell their products. However there's an infrastructure cost to this and it needs to be addressed.

There will always be arguments as to whether such artificially inflated traffic figures are ethical. Let's be straight about this, traffic wasn't designed to be inflated this way.

So to this end I decided to visit a few places to see what exactly is going on. The first place I visit I see there are seventy six people on the sim, the traffic count is 110,033.

The next place I visit I find seventy five people on the sim and a traffic count of 105,300.

I go looking for somewhere a little less busy looking in traffic counts and find fifty seven people on the sim and a traffic count of 60,279.

I decide to try one more place and find forty two people on the sim and a traffic count of 55,709.

I could go on but it will bore both you and I. However the point is that all of those avatars add to the database load, they have to, they're having their traffic counted, they have profiles, some will have inventory. Who on earth are they? Some are campers, some are models, some are bots, but who owns them and more importantly, who is paying for them to be here?

Generally it's not recommended to have more than forty people on a sim, the sims above seem to consistently have above that number. Now if they're money earning avatars who spread the love around by spending inworld this means that indirectly they're paying their way. However in most cases they're not. Many models and campers are put there by the sim owner to do nothing more than pad out their traffic count. Why should one person be able to cause such overload on the servers?

I've never been a fan of multiple logins but you don't even need to do that, you can rent a bot from other people. Why shouldn't bot owners pay extra if they want to run multiple avatars logged in at one time?

I'm not against free or basic accounts, I rent out estate land and you don't need to be premium to own an estate, let alone rent on one. Many basic accounts put a lot of money into the economy but these bots and false campers, they're not adding money to the economy and they're leeching off those of us who do pay for the upkeep. At a time when I'm being shafted because of use by genuine accounts, why are these artifical accounts allowed to go around unhindered using resources above and beyond what is reasonable?