🔔 LindenLab 🔔 : The Strong Need For Differentiation Between Actual Residents Versus Bots, Scripted Agents And NPC's In Second Life

[Unity Evermore]

2 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I've been here for 15+ years, and yeah, that describes it very well. It was a lot more dense before. Which is what's wrong with SL right now, too much land and builds and not enough people to go there.

Maybe LL could delete the unused land and force everyone to crowd together in a smaller area and thereby achieve greater resident density per square meter.

[Arielle Popstar]

1 hour ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

I see too many Captain Olbies, who do NOT check their allegations of "filthy bothood" in anyway.

One or two reporters getting a group of bots wrong does not negate multiple lines of other evidence that there is significantly more then 2000 bots inworld.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

24 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

One or two reporters getting a group of bots wrong does not negate multiple lines of other evidence that there is significantly more then 2000 bots inworld.

Nobody has shown any HARD evidence of the "vast army of bots" that you mither on about, least of all, you.

[Arielle Popstar]

10 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Nobody has shown any HARD evidence of the "vast army of bots" that you mither on about, least of all, you.

I consider the report of 50% of logins being text viewers as a pretty good indicator that there is a significant percentage of bots. Even if some might be operated by real people, their ability to interact in a 3D world wouldn't be much better then a bot anyway.

Considering the amount of duplicate data collections (concurrency as an example) that happens in Secondlife, it stands to reason that it would require quite a load of bots anyway to harvest all that data from the 20K+ regions and 50K residents.

There has been quite a few people in the forums over the past few months reporting a significant uptick in region bot visits so it stands to reason that there has to be a significant percentage of inworld bots to be noticed as the 2000 bots you claim, is only 1 bot in 10 regions, hardly a significant ratio for people to notice how many are actually around. 

The only thing you are bringing to the table to contest is multiple posts about a hypothetical resident who didn't know how to differentiate between a group of bots and a group of people you party with. Not exactly hard evidence from your end regardless of the humour you state your case with.

[Rowan Amore]

50% logins from text viewers could be all those people at work/waiting at an appt/in class using their phone to stay in touch.  Not everyone who works logs in on their work computer and I talk to quite a few people who are standing at busy places who tell me they're at work and can't really see anything, when I message them.  People used to do that ALL the time at the Chamber.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

5 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

There has been quite a few people in the forums over the past few months reporting a significant uptick in region bot visits so it stands to reason that there has to be a significant percentage of inworld bots to be noticed as the 2000 bots you claim, is only 1 bot in 10 regions, hardly a significant ratio for people to notice how many are actually around.

A SINGLE bot, teleporting once every FIVE seconds, can visit TWELVE regions a minute, that's SEVEN HUNDRED AND TWENTY REGIONS AN HOUR..

12 bots could visit 8640 regions an hour, that's how many of "the bots we cannot name" a certain bot operator had roaming the grid, that were the subject of several threads of rampant Tin Foil Hat Club nonsense about "vast armies of bots".

I rate your non-evidence 1/10

 

5 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

it stands to reason that it would require quite a load of bots anyway to harvest all that data from the 20K+ regions and 50K residents.

Well since the most hated "data scraper" in the Tin Foil Hat Club threads was data-scraping us all with... TWELVE bots, at a rate of several thousand regions an hour, no actually, it would NOT require "a load of bots" at all.

I rate your non-evidence 1/10

 

5 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

The only thing you are bringing to the table to contest is multiple posts about a hypothetical resident who didn't know how to differentiate between a group of bots and a group of people you party with. Not exactly hard evidence from your end regardless of the humour you state your case with.

A while back, a proud member of the Tin Foil Hat Club, started a thread in which they compared the concurrency figures for a Tuesday afternoon  GMT, in the middle of the rolling restarts, with the peak concurrency on a Saturday night GMT, during a temporary outage on logins for text only viewers. This person proudly announced their deliberately dis-informational conclusion that "over half the grid is filthy bots".

Hooray for your side, right ?

Wrong, because somebody with more honesty pointed out that the correct comparison would be Tuesday afternoon during the text viewer outage, with the previous and subsequent Tuesday afternoons when text viewers were working as normal.

Such a comparison revealed that the drop in concurrency due to text viewer outage was about 3000, and since not all of the affected viewers are used by bots, ( your own preferred mobile app for example ) that not all of those 3000 would have been bots.

See, that's "evidence" based on actual figures, reported officially by LL, the concurrency figures.

I rate your non-evidence 1/10

 

5 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I consider the report of 50% of logins being text viewers as a pretty good indicator that there is a significant percentage of bots.

And this "official announcement by LL" happened where ? Oh wait, it didn't, this is you claiming to repeat something you claim to have heard from one of the newer employees, unofficially.

I rate your non-evidence 1/10

 

5 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Even if some might be operated by real people, their ability to interact in a 3D world wouldn't be much better then a bot anyway.

And last and by all means least, the standard "real people who are not doing what I think they should, or want, don't count, and are basically the same as bots".

I rate your BIGOTED non-evidence 1/10

 

You have scored 5 out of a possible 50, your Evidence rating is 10%, and that's me being generous.

 

Edited November 1, 2023 by Zalificent Corvinus

[JUSTUS Palianta]

I was going to say you could always update your avatar to mesh if you can't make friends.  However it is apparent he just wants SL to be busy so he can rent out land.  All the cool kids have a house in Belli' now. 

Edited November 1, 2023 by JUSTUS Palianta
typonise

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

🚨🚨🚨Love the aggressive title, though!🚨🚨🚨#Dominate! #Obey!!!Eleven!

[Orwar]

   The most numerous type of bot I've seen are the circles of stray avies standing at the bottom of the sea playing Tiny Empires. But I don't think they do any harm in the grand scheme of things, and in many places they are the most interesting features to look at beneath the sea. 

   .. Now if we could only get them to get mermaid avies and do a little dance or something ..

[Aethelwine]

35 minutes ago, Orwar said:

   The most numerous type of bot I've seen are the circles of stray avies standing at the bottom of the sea playing Tiny Empires. But I don't think they do any harm in the grand scheme of things, and in many places they are the most interesting features to look at beneath the sea. 

   .. Now if we could only get them to get mermaid avies and do a little dance or something ..

I agree they are a nuisance, but they aren't actually bots are they? I presume that whilst they are multiple accounts being run by one person there is no actual automation Involved that makes them bots.

[Orwar]

10 minutes ago, Aethelwine said:

I agree they are a nuisance, but they aren't actually bots are they? I presume that whilst they are multiple accounts being run by one person there is no actual automation Involved that makes them bots.

   I think there's a mix of alts and bots, you can find single or small clustres avies standing hither and tither across the sea floor (or on sky platforms on micro-parcels), but then you get those perfect rings on the minimap - could be some kind of formation follow script I suppose, but I think it may also just be bots. 

   Of course there's the question of at what level of automation it's a proper 'bot'. Is it still a 'human user' if someone has to walk by the keyboard every 30 minutes to initiate a macro to mass-TP several avies to camp various locations for traffic? 

[Qie Niangao]

7 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I consider the report of 50% of logins being text viewers as a pretty good indicator that there is a significant percentage of bots.

I haven't paid enough attention: Where I can get more details about this report? In particular, are they really talking about "logins" proper? That is, only half the login events are by text viewers? Because I'd expect 2000 text viewers to easily generate more logins than that. Or were they just using "login" as shorthand for 50% of concurrent sessions?

(Some of the more visible—and, of those, some of the most annoying—text viewer sessions rival normal users for persistence, but others are very ephemeral: it's a whole lot easier to launch and terminate a text client login than a real graphical viewer, and using different agent identities is often the main point of using a text client.)

[Nae Mayo]

What user want: Real avatars to interact with. We do not want a sim filled with avatars that do not help in user experience.

What businesses want: Traffic.

Don't allow avatar as a means to affect traffic. Allow business to use other means to improve their traffic.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

Do I understand the TL;DR correctly? "Linden Lab needs to label potential bots as bots, so other people can finally have friends."

I don't see the problem with bots, really. People are smart enough to figure out who are bots and who are not. Bots are the people you can't have a lasting relationship with human interaction with. Just join a few groups to get a feel of the buzz in SL.

LL spelling out for you who is a bot and who is not, is not going to help. You want human interactions? Better start putting some work in it. No one in SL (or RL) is going to present you new friends on a platter.

Edited November 1, 2023 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Garnet Psaltery]

19 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

No one in SL (or RL) is going to present you new friends on a platter.

Unless they're a bit weird.

[Orwar]

20 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Bots are the people you can't have a lasting relationship with human interaction with.

   I mean .. That does apply to most people, too.

[KanryDrago]

I have nothing much to add on speculation on the number of bots and don't really care.

I find no difficulty finding real people in SL to converse with and interact with and some of them I even add to my friends list. All the people I chat to also seem capable of this as well

If the complaint is basically I can't find people to interact with and make friends with then perhaps the problem lies between the keyboard and chair for the OP

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, Nae Mayo said:

Don't allow avatar as a means to affect traffic.

Traffic IS avatars, it's 1 traffic point per avatar, per minute. If avatars didn't affect traffic, every parcels traffic score would be ZERO.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

10 hours ago, Unity Evermore said:

Maybe LL could delete the unused land and force everyone to crowd together in a smaller area and thereby achieve greater resident density per square meter.

they should have infilled mainland with the new 1024 sqm houses instead of creating that gawd awful suburban wasteland known as belissaria.

but if they did, they wouldnt have been able to implement their soul crushing covanent on the unfortunates that moved in.

you support green initiatives to help save the planet? sorry, but you still cant have a solar powered clothes dryer in your backyard 😂

When people ask why i havent cut the grass in my front yard in three years i tell them its my way of fighting man made global warming 😁

*puts up a sign… nature preserve, now eff off*

[Orwar]

22 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Traffic IS avatars, it's 1 traffic point per avatar, per minute.

   This. I do get the complaint about traffic being the metric for figuring out 'where people are at', in that it may cause you to TP into some bot-trafficked clubs when you go out looking for a club experience (or stores, I guess, but then you're shopping wrong in SL). But is that a minor inconvenience and a slight annoyance, or the heralding trumpets of the apocalypse? Besides, how's that any different from TPing into a venue only to find that there's 25 people fishing at a buoy next to the dance floor (not saying virtual fishers are totally incapable of conversation, in fact I'd rate them slightly higher than the average club-goer, but most of them will likely scatter the moment the buoy runs dry or when they've reached their location quota). 

   What would be a better measure for 'activity'? The amount of chat messages occurring (and promote more gesturbation and more frequent host-spam?), nah. The amount of Flickr followers to the linked accounts of users? The combined social credit of the people in the region? 

   Traffic can be a misguiding metric at times, but if you base your entire meeting-people-game on the amount of avatars that have stood around in a given region it's what I believe the kids these days call a 'skill issue'.

   Simple solution, hit the 'show on map' button before you TP to see whether any of that traffic is actually present, if there's green dots you give it a go - if those green dots are no fun, just repeat until you find some that are. If that isn't working then it's probably either because A) people just aren't interested in YOU or B) you're one of those 'shy' people who stand around waiting for others to take the initiative to engage with you - an at least occasionally wise man (and creator of the prettiest virtual lamps) once said:

1 hour ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

No one in SL (or RL) is going to present you new friends on a platter.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

44 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

I have nothing much to add on speculation on the number of bots and don't really care.

I find no difficulty finding real people in SL to converse with and interact with and some of them I even add to my friends list. All the people I chat to also seem capable of this as well

If the complaint is basically I can't find people to interact with and make friends with then perhaps the problem lies between the keyboard and chair for the OP

 

I have an endless stream of admirers iming me. Why are guys so gulible?

The thicker I lay it on, the more they eat it up.

Just today after I convinced some guy he was my one and only, he told me from now on I should at least wear a bra and panties, no giving other guys a free show 😂

Annnnd I also have quite a few very good friends.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Garnet Psaltery said:

1 hour ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

No one in SL (or RL) is going to present you new friends on a platter.

Unless they're a bit weird.

I've never made friends with a crudité, hors d'oeuvres, or an entree!

[Love Zhaoying]

2 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Do I understand the TL;DR correctly?

It was quite an impressive wall of text, wasn't it?  With Chapters, Subheadings, Summary and everything!

[Extrude Ragu]

I am someone who operates some scripted agents in-world.

1 is scripted as a clothes display in my store at AMH. People can select an outfit and it will change into that outfit so the customer can see what the clothes look like before they buy it.

A couple are scripted agents that act as NPC's in my anime roleplay sim. They are scripted to walk around using path finding, with complex behaviour based on time of day, who is nearby, personal needs etc. They interact with the environment, and I use a self hosted language model on my personal computer that allows them to talk to guests, each with their own personality and lore. I put countless hours of work into those NPC's and making them fun to play with and guests are often playing with them together.

I personally beleive scripted agents are not necessarily evil and do have legitimate purpose that can be helpful in SecondLife - It's not the tool it's how you use it.

With that said, Do I think they should be excluded from the world map? Actually, it might surprise you as a bot operator, my answer is Yes, they should be excluded from the world map!

Why do I think this? Well, as a sim owner, running my NPC's come with a downside - Some people do come to my sim thinking there is activity at hours when there is not. I don't like this because it might make my guests think I am dishonest or trying to mislead them into visiting - I'm not. I want my guests to always have a good experience when visiting my sim, because it gets people to come back.

I actually made a jira precisely because of this problem not too long ago.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-234612

The topic has also been discussed on the internal sl discord so it's certainly on people's mind.

Nobody is complaining that 99% of the human characters in GTA online are not real people, and the reason for that is the game does not present them to you as real people. People don't mind NPC's, and a lot of game worlds would feel very empty without them. The key is that they are not presented to us as real people. SL does need to differentiate scripted agent and real human to users.

We do also need to clean up the less than savory bot operators that really are just using them to game traffic, that just plain sucks

[Extrude Ragu]

In my own region as part of the Experience, I implemented a custom mini map HUD, which shows players nearby as green dots, and NPC's as grey dots.

Below the map, I show a count of real players on the region to give you an idea of how many actual people there are around. Clicking it gives you a list of profile links, as a quick way to IM real people on the region.

Perhaps a green dot-grey dot system on the SL minimap would be a good addition to SL itself.