So how does the destination guide work? Does it work?

[Finneli Felwitch]

I logged in today after having been offline for several months (took a break after getting burnt out), checked out the new Firestorm viewer update, looked at the destination guide, etc.

About the destination guide, it changed! no longer do I see the same spots appearing in multiple categories. I log off and log back in and I get a different return in the guide each time. I like this; I can find more stuff this way, only there is a problem with the returns that I am getting.

The "What's Hot Now" category is showing a bunch of art, education style Sims but they are all empty. In fact, the University Of South Florida Medical School is in that category.... A time-capsule with everything last updated in 2011. Why is that sim in the "What’s Hot Now" category? 

How do Sims end up on the destination guide? At first I thought the system was based on traffic, and then I thought that the sim owners just paid Linden Lab to advertise their sim, and now I think Linden Lab is trying to show off a giant list of possible Tech Demos to get companies to invest.

I know I could just use the search function to pin-point a place to go but the destination guide sometimes shows the exact number of people in the sim at the time.

[ObviousAltIsObvious]

destination guide listings are maintained by LL, by hand. there is no charge to be listed, but user suggestions are considered.

"What's Hot Now" in that floater only includes "G" regions, so often they are not the most popular places for the whole grid. This is a legacy of an old SL streaming test (aka "Basic Mode") that allowed anonymous access. These locations had some traffic in the last half hour or so. most of the SL "hot" lists like this skip locations that had more than about 20 avatars at the last sampling, to steer new users away from lag bombs and make traffic gaming a little harder to pull off.

[Phoebe Avro]

LL changed the 'Whats Hot Now' a few weeks back i opened a support ticket about it not showing any sims with more than two people in and many empty sims!

It needs to be renamed coz those sims are not busy or popular, maybe rename it to 'Lucky Dip'

[Phoebe Avro]

My club is in a moderate region and it was often in the whats hot now

[ObviousAltIsObvious]

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Phoebe Avro wrote:

My club is in a moderate region and it was often in the whats hot now

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Ii it was in that floter that would have been a bug.

[Pussycat Catnap]

The Destination Guide seems very random... but its mostly because its anything but.

Its a guide of what you could be doing in SL if you'd just leave that 'me escort u long time' venue and see what else SL has to offer.

In other words, its a list of places that have been recommended to the lindens for inclusion in the guide, that the lindens then cull into the sims that better reflect the customers they wish they had, rather than the ones they actually do have.

You'll find interesting places there, but all the "blingtards" and beachwear avatars that folks are looking to date won't be anywhere in sight. This can be a good or bad thing I suppose.

The external marketing for SL is now designed to attract the kinds of people LLs knows will come, with all the sexy-time beach adverts and dating stuff. The internal advertising (the destination guide), is a desperate attempt to get those people, once they have arrived, to consider expanding their horizons into the wider offerings of SL (plus it still gets it fair share of sexy-time ads).

 

The 'what's hot' category is also based on snapshots taken I believe at a specific hour of the day - and so will have no logical relation to people not logging in during that time of day. Someone once told me it was midnight SL time - which is probably the moment of SL's lowest concurrency in a day. Its basically the lunch hour in Calcutta India...

Which might explain some of the spam we get here... (if that spam was inworld, which it isn't).

 

[Phoebe Avro]

From my watching the whats hot now it used to refresh every hour and a half or so maybe a bit more the same as the websearch shows places with a certain amount of avs in

[Koriani Ixchel]

Yea..its so great to go to something "Official".

 

ANd have it lead to you literally dead, non-existant sims.

 

No really, not dead as in "noone's ever there."  But dead in as "um..this place doesn't exist anymore." Or dead as in only partially built because it was taken down a long time ago...

 

Speaks to professionalism and how important it is...yup. *chuckles and sighs*