General Discussion Forum

[Vania Chaplin Member]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

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It's great if some places have found a way to revive social camping.  It seems a little weird that it's still camping though, as opposed to some other more stimulating activity for newbies.  I wonder... with region crossings much improved now (as long as one doesn't wear scripted attachments, HUDs, and such crap)... maybe group tours of Mainland sites would be more interesting.  (Sort of the "roving tip jars" in reverse: they *pay* the riders instead!)  I mean, if the paying host derives no benefit other than good will, why keep the participants captive to a camping pad?

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This place uses a camping board, not camping pads. People has to stay in a range of 20 or 30 m from the board, I’m not sure as I never camp there, I just like to stay there talking or, when I can, helping newbies. 

[Phil Deakins Member]

I've seen that system before. I camped in it once but the boundaries weren't clear and I didn't feel safe moving around very much

Another place I camped operated a system where you had to stay in the sim - an island - so, unless you TPed out, your presence counted. It was a good payer too - 3L/10 mins - so there were always people waiting for campers' times to be up (limited session length).

[Phil Deakins Member]

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Dagmar Heideman wrote:

There was nothing ever particularly helpful about camping.

Getting the equivalent of a RL penny for sitting around for an hour is and as a waste of time, and depending on where you live, what kind of computer you use, and how you normally would otherwise utilize your computer, it can actually be a net loss in income.  Many if not most campers were oblivious to this fact back when camping without restriction was allowed.

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I disagree. Camping was very useful for many people. If the computer was going to be on anyway, for whatever reason, camping allowed the earning of small amounts of money in the background. Also, camping allowed people to do other SL things, as Qie mentioned. And if a person was logged in and doing something that didn't require moving around, camping allowed the person to earn a bit of money while they did it; e.g. if I'm going to spend time sorting my inventory, I might as well get some camping money while I'm doing it. Or, if we are going to just stand here chatting for ages, let's camp together and earn a bit at the same time.

It may well be that leaving a computer on solely for the av to camp (e.g. overnight) was a financial loss for some people, but I don't think that most camping was done like that.

[Dagmar Heideman Member]

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Phil Deakins wrote:... If the computer was going to be on anyway...

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Which is why I said depending "how you normally would otherwise utilize your computer."

You can speculate as to whether or not they were otherwise using their computer while afk camping but you have no way of knowing.  They could very well only be on to camp while going about their RL away from the computer.  I personally met a lot of campers that did this and many of the camping sites used to show how long each avatar had been camping.  It strains credibility to claim that an avatar that shows over 12 consecutive hours of camping time is someone who is otherwise using their computer and I saw a lot of that at some of the largest camping locations.