Agent Limit (Number of Avatars Permitted Per Region)

[Freddie Dallas]

I'm not sure if this is posted in the right place, but I wanted to make you all aware of something that has been in place a number of years. Most Mainland regions have an avatar limit of 44 (called agent limit) youll find in world tab and region settings.  Think about it, thats on an entire sim - so if someone has a tiny parcel and a club you probably wont be able to teleport to your parcel on that sim.  All it takes is one person to ruin it for the rest of the parcel owners on the sim who in some cases (more often then not) paid a pretty penny for their parcel they can hardly get to.    My suggestion is this... dependant on how much land you own on a sim is how many agents (avatars allowed) per parcel that will be allowed.  So if its a 512sqm two avatars would be permitted and a 1024sqm maybe 4.. and so on.. this way the parcel owners (who also pay a preimum fee to even own said parcel(s) can get fair access anytime day or night without worry.. and if an additional avatar tried to access the parcel would say parcel full not region.   Has anyone experienced this??? This could be hurting the lab.. as some will just get rid of their land and that portion if not all of monthly tiers..If a Linden can comment that would be spectacular.

Edited February 18, 2019 by FredrickF

[Ethan Paslong]

1 hour ago, FredrickF said:

 I wanted to make you all aware of something that has been in place a number of years.

think about 99 % of the mainland owners are aware.. since the start of mainland 16 yrs ago.
I know it sounds a bit old, but this is how SL works, we'll have to deal with it. And it's a pain to see a store or club rise next to you, but most clubs and stores won't really get a sim full of agents unless they fill it with bots, and LL can act on that.
I think it's very rare that residential use of a mainland sim is that high in the same timespam that it's to justify to tie the visitor amount to the landsize.

It's btw exactly the same on estate lands .. agent limit is a set amount, no difference if it's on a parcel or whole sim.

[Qie Niangao]

2 hours ago, FredrickF said:

My suggestion is this... dependant on how much land you own on a sim is how many agents (avatars allowed) per parcel that will be allowed.  So if its a 512sqm two avatars would be permitted and a 1024sqm maybe 4.. and so on.. 

To fully prevent the problem you're trying to solve, you'd need to make sure the sim's avatar slots could never be overbooked, which means much lower numbers. The (now) standard 1024 couldn't support even a single avatar, for example, because the area of a sim, divided by 44 avatars, is 1489.45 sq.m., requiring a parcel at least 1504 s.m. (because land comes in 16 sq.m. quanta). If you wanted to be allowed a visitor, you'd need a 2992 sq.m. parcel or better.

Might it at least be better, though, if a single 512 couldn't gobble up all the avatar slots? Maybe. Nonetheless, the whole avatar distribution model (cleverly disguised as "land") depends on some pretty extreme overbooking. And a brief tour of the grid will reveal that there's always plenty of spare capacity almost everywhere.

So that's just dicing up the overbooking limits into hyperfine chunks. And when, inevitably, somebody can't squeeze a visitor into their parcel because neighbors filled too many overbooking slots, they'll feel even more justified in their righteous indignation at the slippery tail of the Poisson distribution.

Edited February 18, 2019 by Qie Niangao

[Blush Bravin]

This is a known issue and unfortunately it happens more than it should. I personally know of an issue where a club bought a small parcel, only 2048 sqm, and opened a very popular adult themed business. Neighbors were having a very difficult time getting to their homes in the region. So the neighbors got together and made a plan. They called all their friends to start coming to their homes when possible and camping there so to take up slots so those trying to tp to the club couldn't get in. It took a couple of weeks of this going on before the club realized that it was in their best interest to move to a private region. In this case the solution worked and the neighbors got their homes back. 

[Hintswen Guardian]

I've had this happen to me, whats worse is even after hundreds of AR's from everyone in the region (and pretty charts showing proof) LL refused to do anything. It clearly falls under "Unfair use of region resources" (which was an AR category at the time) yet LL failed to do anything about it for years.

Just like a certain spammer that I have been ARing for multiple years and nothing has happened there either. Honestly, I'm not sure if their backlog is multiple years long or if you have to be on their nice list to get them to actually take action.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

On 2/18/2019 at 1:44 AM, FredrickF said:

I'm not sure if this is posted in the right place, but I wanted to make you all aware of something that has been in place a number of years. Most Mainland regions have an avatar limit of 44 (called agent limit) youll find in world tab and region settings.  Think about it, thats on an entire sim - so if someone has a tiny parcel and a club you probably wont be able to teleport to your parcel on that sim.  All it takes is one person to ruin it for the rest of the parcel owners on the sim who in some cases (more often then not) paid a pretty penny for their parcel they can hardly get to.    My suggestion is this... dependant on how much land you own on a sim is how many agents (avatars allowed) per parcel that will be allowed.  So if its a 512sqm two avatars would be permitted and a 1024sqm maybe 4.. and so on.. this way the parcel owners (who also pay a preimum fee to even own said parcel(s) can get fair access anytime day or night without worry.. and if an additional avatar tried to access the parcel would say parcel full not region.   Has anyone experienced this??? This could be hurting the lab.. as some will just get rid of their land and that portion if not all of monthly tiers..If a Linden can comment that would be spectacular.

I quit a parcel on Zindra one time (sold it to a flipper) because someone with a 512 on the sim ran some sort of noob help center. They occasionally maxed out access, so that even I couldn't get onto the sim.

I should have investigated more before I bought, but the land was such a good deal.

[KatyAnn Serenity]

I rarely write on these forums but as of late I am having issues with one of my neighbors filling up the sim with her afk sex avatars.  I so wish that there was a parcel limit on mainland as sometimes my friends cannot even visit as I live above my clothing store and I have owned my land a long time sometimes I wonder is it really worth my monthly tier fees to even have the land anymore but I do love making stuff and doing hunt items for people. I do agree with you Fredrick there should be a limit according to parcel size.  Maybe not as extreme as only 2 avatars for a 512 but one parcel should not have the max amount of agents on it so others cannot use their own parcel. 

[ChinRey]

On 10/30/2019 at 7:54 PM, KatyAnn Serenity said:

I rarely write on these forums but as of late I am having issues with one of my neighbors filling up the sim with her afk sex avatars.

YOu can AR you neighbour for using an excessive amount of the region's resources. I'm not sur eif it helps but it's worth a try.

[Aethelwine]

I can't agree with the proposal on avatar restrictions on land. A lot of landowners like to have parties or at least know they can have parties on their land.

I empathise where one parcel on a sim is running a club that constantly has a lot of traffic, especially if it is an afk sex sim. But the solutions proposed here worse than the problems. The simplest solution would be for the rules on abuse of resources to be enforced. 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 2/18/2019 at 1:44 AM, FredrickF said:

I'm not sure if this is posted in the right place, but I wanted to make you all aware of something that has been in place a number of years. Most Mainland regions have an avatar limit of 44 (called agent limit) youll find in world tab and region settings.  Think about it, thats on an entire sim - so if someone has a tiny parcel and a club you probably wont be able to teleport to your parcel on that sim.  All it takes is one person to ruin it for the rest of the parcel owners on the sim who in some cases (more often then not) paid a pretty penny for their parcel they can hardly get to.    My suggestion is this... dependant on how much land you own on a sim is how many agents (avatars allowed) per parcel that will be allowed.  So if its a 512sqm two avatars would be permitted and a 1024sqm maybe 4.. and so on.. this way the parcel owners (who also pay a preimum fee to even own said parcel(s) can get fair access anytime day or night without worry.. and if an additional avatar tried to access the parcel would say parcel full not region.   Has anyone experienced this??? This could be hurting the lab.. as some will just get rid of their land and that portion if not all of monthly tiers..If a Linden can comment that would be spectacular.

Welcome to my world!

Indeed, there ought to be a policy like this, and even better, there ought to be sims zoned for clubs, and the rest of the sims not allowed to have clubs on them.

After long and hard experience over the years I simply never accept clubs as tenants, even very cute ones, even ones that promise only little old lady furries will visit only on Sundays. That's because any and all of them have the capacity to put 44 avatars on a 512 or less -- and do.

Most often I find this abuse involves bots being wrangled to deploy to a store or for "traffic enhancement" or some other purpose. Sometimes they are real people.

For years, I had an apartment building and townhouses as well as parcels on most of a sim. Not all of that sim, because as a newbie landlord, I discovered that snow didn't rent so well, and then I'd still have to pay tier on it, so I sold it to Anshe.

First, I rented one of my parcels to a club. I even used to have a club myself. There comes a time in the life of ever avatar when he wants to have a club. But that was when I was a naive youth, in virtual terms, and took down my club which became a magnet for griefing, harassment, scams, and tears.

So then the club I had rented to bought one of the empty parcels. And the rest was history.

On this mere 4096 lot, a certain club built an establishment on the ground and in the air for the clients, and proceeded to fill that bar and "entertainment" rooms with anywhere from 25 to the 44 real, active, script-using and bling-covered avatars, every day and night. Given the "services" they offered (it was in "mature," but this was before the adult sims became mandatory), it was very popular.

You might think 25 avatars would then leave breathing space for my tenants who led more prosaic lives to back to their homes.

44 definitely meant none of my tenants could go home. But 25 meant that they could go home -- but not move, and when the Lindens changed the sims to the different sim-time execution, it meant all their scripts executed at half-speed. 

So they moved out, and for a very long time, I had no tenants. I then decided to make lemonade out of lemons and rent to the working girls. That worked for a time, but then they weren't home much, and I still often had the 44-fill-up problem. 

Absolutely nothing -- and I mean really, nothing -- could be done about this because the Lindens had zero policy about this and zero intention of changing that and still do today. Like other new people, you can try banging your head on this -- good luck!

I was stubborn, and didn't want to give up my first SL investment. So I made a mall, rented to stores, who don't mind lag as much as they are not living on the sim. It's even possible, if the sim is full, to buy from vendors while perched on the next sim, which I owned, so it was all good. I waited YEARS before that club uprooted itself and went to an island and I could restore normal apartments.

Because I frequently AR'd their griefing, harassment etc and publicized this problem of them constantly taking up all the avatar space on a sim on their mere 4096, they retaliated by putting a large, ugly, purple store across from my nice rentals on another sim. They kept that store there more than 10 years, but I waited for them to get bored and not pay the tier and eventually they were gone.

SL is not a young man's game. 

Edited November 1, 2019 by Prokofy Neva

[KatyAnn Serenity]

I thought I would let everyone know what I did and what happen.  First I went on live chat and spoke to someone there.  They in  turn told me to go to the sim and take photos of afk avatars on the small parcel, along with gyazo photos of the map and how the person had built upward to she could fit so many afk spots on her small parcel. well, its took only 1 day after submitting my AR to LL and no more max agents on that small parcel.  when I wrote the AR I told them I do not mind the afk place but just wanted this person to respect other parcel owners. 

When I come on each day now there are only 10 avatars on her parcel.  2 days later another person with a smaller parcel 512 had max agents so I wrote this person and said to him that I did not complain to ll and ar the afk place just so he could put up bots.  which I said to him after I went and got photos and gyazos of them on different platforms  at different levels on his land. I told him he had 24hrs to remove them before I would report him for unregistered bots.  within 10mins of me writing to him all the bots were gone and so was he.   I guess all it does take is a squeaky wheel. I did not ar him but I believe he removed them because he did not want a report filed on him 

 

I will continue to watch my region on mainland  and AR anyone that uses the resources like that. 

[filz Camino]

This problem would be very easy for LL to fix.

Each sim can support 31680 avatar/hours of usage per month. So all LL need to do is impose a monthly usage cap that is proportional to a parcel size, e.g. if you have quarter of a sim, you get 7920 avatar/hours of use per month before your usage is capped by LL.

This would mean that even if you only had a tiny parcel, you could still have an occasional party with 40 guests, but that no single parcel would have the ability to hog all the sim resources 24/7.

 

Edited December 28, 2019 by filz Camino

[Alwin Alcott]

1 hour ago, filz Camino said:

This problem would be very easy for LL to fix.

you'r forgiven because of your post count, but in SL nóthing is easy to fix.

[animats]

3 hours ago, Alwin Alcott said:

You're forgiven because of your post count, but in SL nothing is easy to fix.

SL's inability to support crowds is a huge limitation on SL. Rosedale identified that as a serious problem. The London City people show up at every Server User Group meeting trying to get enough bugs fixed that their sim doesn't stall out when near the avatar count limit.

Joaquín Keller and Raluca Diaconu in France got crowds working for OpenSimulator. They had a setup where multiple copies of the region were running on different computers, all interlinked. It was all done by intercepting the messages between the sim processes and modifying them. It was more of a proof of concept than a real system, usable mostly for performance-type situations where a large number of avatars are watching a small number do something.

They went off to AWS and Microsoft and the project was abandoned.

Improbable, with their Spatial OS, claims to be a base for games with a huge, seamless world. They have regions, like SL, but they move the region boundaries as needed so that the number of avatars in each region never gets large enough to choke the region's server.

This is a hard problem, but there is progress. Someday someone will get this right.

[Christhiana]

I find it unacceptable that you cannot go to the parcel you pay for because other avatars that don't have a parcel on that region occupy all the slots. When an avatar that owns a parcel on a region tries to enter said region while all avatar slots are taken, an avatar that doesn't own a parcel there should be booted to free up a slot. If you own the land, you come first!

[Alyona Su]

1 hour ago, Christhiana said:

I find it unacceptable that you cannot go to the parcel you pay for because other avatars that don't have a parcel on that region occupy all the slots. When an avatar that owns a parcel on a region tries to enter said region while all avatar slots are taken, an avatar that doesn't own a parcel there should be booted to free up a slot. If you own the land, you come first!

You can always go to any parcel you own, no matter the agent limit. So what you refer to are private regions that are owned by other residents, even if you purchase the land (buy land) you are paying the resident, not Linden Lab; you are renting.

I said that to say this: What you're asking for is some kind of method for a region owner to set some kind of access-priority to some residents. How would that be done? It cannot be triggered by any of the region-parcel tech, that's bad enough (no way to automatically do anything  via scripting regarding land) - so, what? Perhaps a "priority" list akin to the white and black lists in region settings? Are estate managers willing to go through the trouble of adding and removing people from such a list every time someone rents or leaves?

But then, how will the Region agent-management system decide which agent to eject when a priority-tagged agent wants to enter?

How, exactly, would all this work?

And since it cannot work, is it still unacceptable to you? Because by the fact that you're still here, it is still acceptable to some degree. Just saying.

[Christhiana]

1 hour ago, Alyona Su said:

You can always go to any parcel you own, no matter the agent limit. So what you refer to are private regions that are owned by other residents, even if you purchase the land (buy land) you are paying the resident, not Linden Lab; you are renting.

I said that to say this: What you're asking for is some kind of method for a region owner to set some kind of access-priority to some residents. How would that be done? It cannot be triggered by any of the region-parcel tech, that's bad enough (no way to automatically do anything  via scripting regarding land) - so, what? Perhaps a "priority" list akin to the white and black lists in region settings? Are estate managers willing to go through the trouble of adding and removing people from such a list every time someone rents or leaves?

But then, how will the Region agent-management system decide which agent to eject when a priority-tagged agent wants to enter?

How, exactly, would all this work?

And since it cannot work, is it still unacceptable to you? Because by the fact that you're still here, it is still acceptable to some degree. Just saying.

I think I misunderstood. The OP talked about parcels owned on mainland so I assumed you could not enter your owned parcel if the region was at it's max number of avatars. I was not talking about rentals. Thank you for clearing that up.

[Alyona Su]

1 hour ago, Christhiana said:

I think I misunderstood. The OP talked about parcels owned on mainland so I assumed you could not enter your owned parcel if the region was at it's max number of avatars. I was not talking about rentals. Thank you for clearing that up.

I also should clarify: the OP may be trying to enter the region via another method other than "TP-to-Home" - with the CTRL+SHIFT+H command. Whenever I use this command, I always will be zapped to your home (if you own the land.) If the region is full otherwise and you try to enter through border-crossing, then you may get the "Region Full" error.

Edited December 29, 2019 by Alyona Su

[animats]

On 12/29/2019 at 9:50 AM, Alyona Su said:

I also should clarify: the OP may be trying to enter the region via another method other than "TP-to-Home" - with the CTRL+SHIFT+H command. Whenever I use this command, I always will be zapped to your home (if you own the land.) If the region is full otherwise and you try to enter through border-crossing, then you may get the "Region Full" error.

That's a nice feature. Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

[filz Camino]

On 12/28/2019 at 3:28 PM, Alwin Alcott said:

you'r forgiven because of your post count, but in SL nóthing is easy to fix.

 

are you a software engineer who works at linden labs?

i am a software engineer. can you explain to me the technical reason why what i am proposing is so difficult?

one thing i know through being a software engineer is that the most common reason technical problems tend to persist is because of laziness and disinterest on the part of the corporation who owns the product to actually address them.

[Alwin Alcott]

7 minutes ago, filz Camino said:

i am a software engineer. can you explain to me the technical reason why what i am proposing is so difficult?

in that case you'r not very informed about how complicated SL' s code is.

[Hydra Acer]

I think it's simple if you want to guarantee a number of avatars in a region and stable server resources: Buy a private region. 

Linden Lab works just like any other data center on the Internet, when you want to guarantee a high number of visitors on a website: you buy a dedicated server. 

Linden Lab = Data Center 

Simulators = web pages

Another possibility is to change the server system to a scalable data system (AWS for example). This changes the rules of the game a lot. With this LL system you can offer server resources according to the resources needed and bill for them.

 

 

[Qie Niangao]

18 hours ago, filz Camino said:

i am a software engineer. can you explain to me the technical reason why what i am proposing is so difficult?

Have you actually thought through the requirements? For example, say some parcel on a region has exhausted its monthly allotment of avatar-hours. What happens when an unsuspecting avatar bumps into that parcel? Does it behave like an infinite height banline? Does that have to get rendered in the viewer?

Also, are you sure monthly is the right granularity here? Not weekly? Not instantaneous? (I happen to know it's not instantaneous because then nobody would ever be allowed on a standard issue 1024.) Is everybody's month synchronized to the same calendar, or does the clock start ticking when the land is acquired? If the latter, what's to keep me from selling it back and forth between groups to restart the clock after every party?

What about Linden protected land parcels? Are those exempt (somehow) or do we end up with roads, etc., that are blocked? "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

We'd need an efficient method for collecting these quota data without lagging the region... something like Traffic, maybe. (I can just imagine saying that to a server developer! Hilarity ensues.)

I haven't actually started yet. For that I get paid. There might be more than one software engineer on the forums.

[SneakyBooger]

This is a big issue in the adult lands, the bigger afk sex places often max out a sim and the people that live there can't get in. I've heard of many people ARing it and nothing gets done about it. The afk places still continue to take up all the agent slots with afk parked avis.

 

Right now Behling sim is plagued with an AFK place AND random newbie looking bots scattered around.

Edited January 15, 2020 by SneakyBooger

[Alwin Alcott]

1 hour ago, SneakyBooger said:

This is a big issue in the adult lands, the bigger afk sex places often max out a sim and the people that live there can't get in. I've heard of many people ARing it and nothing gets done about it. The afk places still continue to take up all the agent slots with afk parked avis.

 

Right now Behling sim is plagued with an AFK place AND random newbie looking bots scattered around.

who on earth go rent a residental parcel at a afk/sex region .... AR is useless, except using to much resources there are no violations.. it's a "legal" way to let the traffic boost explode, and it aren't bots, so allowed. I'm sometimes seeing those places myself, but rarely on mainland, it's nearly all private estates, In those cases AR is totally useless, LL will not get involved unless TOS is violated.