Pop Bots of Second Life

e-Business demands bots!

by Idoru Wellman, e-business consultant

 

bots done right - a stylish addition to any business

A flair for witty and artistic placement of population boosting bots -- pop bots -- can enhance not only your in-world shop’s traffic, but is also crucial in projecting a professional image. The Herald visited several shops to illustrate pop bot does and dont's - a vital part of your e-business success formula.

Why Pop Bot?

The traffic enhancement game of Second Life has leveled up to dizzying heights over the last year, and with bots now making up about half the online players, can you really afford NOT to use bots? With search results ranked by traffic, and casual players attracted to hue piles of green dots on the map, this is a game you have to play as a serious e-business owner.

The economics are favorable, because bots are a one-time investment. The alternative - paying human-controlled avatars to camp in place - brings with it the headache of customer service for players that are just to cheap to actually go buy L$s with real money. Do you really want to argue with someone who was shorted L$10 (about $0.04 USD) because a sim crashed? I didn’t think so.

 

identical boy bots at Star Ray Yachts - serious business personified

Then there are the aesthetic considerations - a tidy flock of bots parked in a bot box at an altitude of 800 m2 gives you all the benefits of campers with none of the muss and fuss. Even better, you can arrange your bots as if they were camp chair sitters and claim you are supporting the in-world economy. If you take this approach is best to mix up the avatar looks a bit.

 

Oops! It's raining bots! - Palm Sands Resort has no  guard rails -- bots can be pushed from their platform

The Latest Trends

One of the newest approaches to botting your business involved mobile bots that act like real shoppers browsing your virtual storefront - while these bots can be pricey, they can give the illusion of activity at your business 24 x 7. You’ll be amazed at how much your real customers enjoy visiting your business once it is filled with faux customers that follow the same path over and over - while saying the same thing.

Pico Money Exchange - tacky plywwod bot box looks totally unprofessional 

Bots FTW!

You may hear that some people who are think that Linden Lab will ban bots - but this seems unlikely. As long as LL touts either a total population figure or an online concurrent users number, bots will remain a staple of the in-world business promotion toolkit. Remember, bots help the Lab keep their numbers up, too.

The importance of keeping the apparent resident numbers high also means that the traffic system is unlikely to be discontinued anytime soon - because without traffic there would be less need for bots and the online population would almost certainly fall.

So join the crowd! A resident without a bot flock is living a second-class Second Life. Bots rule, OK?


 Harlots High Class Brothel oozes style and grace with smoke bots discretely encased in a closed cube

Comments

[LOL]

"....With search results ranked by traffic...."

Actually Popular places was removed from the search page the last time I checked, so what is the point to hafing high traffic #'s?
Top spot on search still goes to the highest bidder, not the place with the Most popular tarffic, or most bots.

That being said, bots do still serve a purpose I suppose, Not paying noobs, and giving them free wardrobe to model in your store is one good thing. another is bots can be programed to Eject SLURL spammers from groups you own.

My only question is, of the 57000+ users online right now, how many are bots, 50% 60% 70% or more?

[this isn't cool]

Bots are the cancer that is ruining SL.

Don't condone them.

[We]

@LOL

The in world search engine still pulls up searches according to traffic, though "popular places" thankfully went the way of Old Yeller. Classifieds pulls up by price (and what absurd prices people pay to be number one on that, last I checked, almost half a million L$ for one week on the number one spot).

So people still see value in bots for the search traffic ranking, and for having lots of green dots on the map, to make it look like it's popular when it really isn't.

One "study" said about 50% of online users were bots, but the results there are probably questionable, either way, a LARGE chunk of users are likely bots, judging by the way they pack bots into those boxes, 50% of users isn't so unreasonable.

[Crap Mariner]

One of the very rare possibly legitimate uses of bots - Pandora Wrigglesworth of Curio Obscura.

The models in the display show off rather unique skins.

If it's demonstrating something that only an avatar can effectively demonstrate, I'm not as much against it as, say, if someone's trying to dodge the prim-count for a prim mannequin.

[LOL]

@WE

Traffic has no bearing what so ever on search. Top spot on search under ALL and CLASSIFIED Tab is both beased on who pays the most $L.
The only the "PLACES" tab reflects ranking (top spot) by traffic. even in that case, Noobs do not use that part of search. 90% of all noobs search ALL or classified tab.

[Witness X]

Am I the only one here who's noticed how IntLibber Brautigan uses bots in this way? Someone ought to do an article on his illigitimate activities, and put a stop to them once and for all.

Articles like these have no bearing on the current situation inworld, nor will they help or solve anything.
Shove Off.

[HA HA HA]

Funnier still is this place

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Necrotee/123/26/1538

this store has camping for 3$L every 60 min as well as a bot army just haning out in the store. almost all the time these campers and bots fill the region to capacity and no paying customers can actually spend $L in the store! Genius Full a region with bots so no customers can shop. but at least your traffic will good!

HA HA HA

[We]

@LOL

Yeah, I don't ever use the "All" search, I only use places to find stuff which is why I see it with traffic still, I don't think I'd discount newbies using it too, but you're probably right that they may defer towards All instead.

@HAHAHA

First time I saw a Bot Hive, they had it fill the sim compacity to about under 5. They were clever about it though, every time the sim filled up with Actual people, a bot would log off to make room. I think that was the "Heaven and Hell Club", but yeah, let it never be said that bot users are brimming with intelligence.

@Crap Mariner

Yeah I agree, not all usage of bots in stores is negative, I've seen Bot models, which can still be overdone (or even I think meant as camper bots but disguised as models, due to their sheer numbers), and host bots, which send you information or invite you to groups (though that can be kinda annoying).

[The Patriotic Nevas]

@HA HA HA: ha ha ha !!

[Robot]

ARGH!....boring bot discussions

i am over 2 years in sl and this discussion will never stop until you go
and vote for a different search ranking algorithms!

there is (for most ppl) only 1 reason to use bots (just a logged ava)
traffic.
most ppl use search by ALL..and type in the desired product....
most ppl tp to the top ranked places of the search result

thats it

i really would kill my bot accounts immediately if LL provide
a alternate and better search ranking. (not paid )
...and bot traffic is also a result of keyword abuse

...its boring....

[Maggie Darwin]

"traffic enhancement", what a cute euphemism for gaming traffic! Just like "search engine optimization" really means gaming PageRank.

I'm sure the mainland land owners who share sims with bot-ridden clubs and shops appreciate it, too. Other shop owners on island sims seem willing to turn their regions into molasses-footed lag pits for their (few) customers in return for a cloud of green dots.

It's heartening that "Robot" is willing to return his location to honest operation, if he gets what he wants. But LL is complicit in the game too...

[observer]

Witness X, re your observations in Necrotee: this place is even weirder than you thought. At least half of the "avatars" in Necrotee are underground and invisible. I have no idea what is going on here. The bots in the sky store are exactly on top of the 25 or so people/avatars/bots who are underground. No names show up on radar. No name tags are visible. The sky bots show up on the mini-map as on top of the underground bots, so you cannot tell that the underground ones are there. Big map does usually show them.

[Baloo Uriza]

That's a seriously douchebag move encouraging people to run population bots, and likely a huge part of the problem with the login servers getting overwhelmed if they all decide to log back in at the same time. Why would you ever consider pushing such an unethical move as a viable business tactic? Population bots in SL today are like Aeron chairs at .com's in the 1990s: The more population bots or Aeron chairs a company has, the less viable it's business model is.

[Marigold Devin]

You might think the bots are underground at certain SIMs... for example Ballers City, and Vista SIM ... because the green dots show up as "v"s... but its likely they are above 1000m level. Bots are fun to find... but in recent days, with the total number of logins peaking at around 74,000, Linden have had problems, and its time to re-assess the purpose of basic traffic bots. Isn't this just a form of alt abuse anyway???

[Cjay Price]

I think bots are sleezy and misleading. It reflects the sim owners want and need to cheat the experiance of a real secondlife user.
When I find out that a sim owner is using bots to make a sim look bizzy, I never go back to that sim again. Bots are ok for some uses like testing and maybe i can see the use for a shop as a model, but these bots should be required to be at ground level. Bots should never be used as a way to attract users to a casino sim this should be banned.

[JudgeDread]

The worst Commerical offenders are those that run shops that sell Skins and Shapes. It wouldn't be so bad if their products were high quality

[LittleLostLinden]

The bots are still around. they have not subsided.