How to get 5 real choices when selecting a new Linden Home (Premium)

[xViXeNx71]

Well, well, well, look what we've got!

Right before upgrading to Premium Plus to just ticket one lol.

*does happy dance*

 

 

[Persephone Emerald]

2 hours ago, xViXeNx71 said:

Well, well, well, look what we've got!

Right before upgrading to Premium Plus to just ticket one lol.

*does happy dance*

 

Gorgeous location. Congratulations.

[Raspberry Crystal]

5 hours ago, xViXeNx71 said:

Well, well, well, look what we've got!

Right before upgrading to Premium Plus to just ticket one lol.

*does happy dance*

 

 

 

That looks like mine, I think! Very pleased for you congratulations

[Baiphen Quintessa]

Wow! That is a fantastic location. Congratulations. 

[Wellan37]

for me that my new  place

[Always Incognito]

22 hours ago, Logan Elf said:

I don't think there's any randomness involved in the selection. It just simply selects the first house owned by governor linden from a database table and sets you as owner. Abandoning just sets the owner field in the table back to governor linden (thus making it available again for selection). Database rows normally get returned in key order, so the earliest released houses will always be the ones that get chosen first, hence the unwanted house always coming up if there is no other activity.

This might be one of the reasons some themes ”get stuck” ending up ”less popular”. Iv tried a lot for logs and chalets too, earlier, and as this happened over and over i just gave up. 

[xViXeNx71]

36 minutes ago, Always Incognito said:

This might be one of the reasons some themes ”get stuck” ending up ”less popular”. Iv tried a lot for logs and chalets too, earlier, and as this happened over and over i just gave up.

Yeah, this must be the reason for the Chalets, because there are alot of seriously beautiful locations along that main river/canal, but the majority of them is vacant. I don't believe that no one would want them.

Edited January 5 by xViXeNx71
added something

[Raspberry Crystal]

40 minutes ago, xViXeNx71 said:

Yeah, this must be the reason for the Chalets, because there are alot of seriously beautiful locations along that main river/canal, but the majority of them is vacant. I don't believe that no one would want them.

This needs fixing, not least because it is costing LL money if customers want homes and can't get hold of them.

[xViXeNx71]

19 minutes ago, Raspberry Crystal said:

This needs fixing, not least because it is costing LL money if customers want homes and can't get hold of them.

Unless they are doing this on purpose, hoping that people get so frustrated that they upgrade to Premium Plus to request one.

That's what I was going to do, if I hadn't been so lucky to roll the one that you abandoned.

Thing is, that things have changed with the release of the new Premium Plus homes. Most people will want to use their PP on a PP Linden Home, instead of using it to ticket a regular Linden Home. At least that's what was keeping me from doing this for a while.

[Always Incognito]

2 hours ago, xViXeNx71 said:

Unless they are doing this on purpose, hoping that people get so frustrated that they upgrade to Premium Plus to request one.

That's what I was going to do, if I hadn't been so lucky to roll the one that you abandoned.

Thing is, that things have changed with the release of the new Premium Plus homes. Most people will want to use their PP on a PP Linden Home, instead of using it to ticket a regular Linden Home. At least that's what was keeping me from doing this for a while.

Maybee They are doing it on purpose nowadays. But before P+ it was no point in having it rigged this way really. It only created frustration. 

[Persephone Emerald]

3 hours ago, Always Incognito said:

Maybee They are doing it on purpose nowadays. But before P+ it was no point in having it rigged this way really. It only created frustration. 

It still creates frustration, especially as most users are not and never will be P+.

I think the easiest way to correct this problem would be for just released parcels to go to the bottom of the list of available ones.

Edited January 5 by Persephone Emerald

[Love Zhaoying]

34 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

I think the easiest way to correct this problem would be for just released parcels to go to the bottom of the list of available ones.

I was thinking about this - that would "ruin" the "GoH" where people release for other people to grab, etc.

How about: Add a "random" element.  Add the "last released" in front, but then have the NEXT "offered" home be "random".

Having SOME "random" element would be pretty helpful.

 

[Marianne Little]

It is about time the system is changed, @Patch Linden @Abnor Mole

To set the abandoned home back first is frustrating people. To get the same home day after day after day is not a good feeling.

It could make less popular themes more attractive, if people could roll and hope for a better placement, instead of the one they absolutely do not want.

 

[Persephone Emerald]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I was thinking about this - that would "ruin" the "GoH" where people release for other people to grab, etc.

How about: Add a "random" element.  Add the "last released" in front, but then have the NEXT "offered" home be "random".

Having SOME "random" element would be pretty helpful.

Not many people use that trick of purposefully trying to get a house that someone else has just released. The vast majority of Linden Home owners don't even come to the forums, and it must be especially frustrating for new users. They think they're going to get a choice of homes, but instead they get the same home over and over.

[Love Zhaoying]

35 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

Not many people use that trick of purposefully trying to get a house that someone else has just released. The vast majority of Linden Home owners don't even come to the forums, and it must be especially frustrating for new users. They think they're going to get a choice of homes, but instead they get the same home over and over.

That will indeed be interesting if it is "fixed" by moving the house to the "back of the line'! 

Forget for the minute if any GoH players get upset. 🙂 (I seriously can't take that seriously, although I know they are passionate about it.)

My thought is, if you DO move it to the back of the line, and DON'T add some randomness, then depending on how the "line" / "queue" is built, people may take "forever" to see homes in a Region they are interested in.  For example, if the "line" / "queue" is built in the order the homes were created, and there are a lot in a new "area", then someone would need to try many, many times to get "out" of that "area"!

So, my vote is still for some "randomness".  (Whether or not an "abandoned" home is sent to the "back of the line".)

 

[Nika Talaj]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I was thinking about this - that would "ruin" the "GoH" where people release for other people to grab, etc.

How about: Add a "random" element.  Add the "last released" in front, but then have the NEXT "offered" home be "random".

Having SOME "random" element would be pretty helpful.

THIS.  I've traded houses among alts many times by trying RIGHT after releasing a home.  I know folks in Belli Citizens do this as well, tho they don't post in the forums.  (A lot more folks read the forums than post).  It's really useful.

But I am also in total agreement, some sort of queue-shuffling or random selection needs to be added.  In the past, I saw dedicated GOH players with a large number of alts claim and hold a number of homes, just to help others get to regions that were buried in the queues.  I think the Chalet queues have sometimes been clogged with a number of less perfect homes, and that has stalled the Chalet uptake more than once. 

I strongly believe that if LL ever closes the old LH regions, this phenomenon of getting the same unwanted home over and over will discourage a number of users from retaining their Premium memberships.

[Raspberry Crystal]

34 minutes ago, Nika Talaj said:

But I am also in total agreement, some sort of queue-shuffling or random selection needs to be added.  In the past, I saw dedicated GOH players with a large number of alts claim and hold a number of homes, just to help others get to regions that were buried in the queues.  I think the Chalet queues have sometimes been clogged with a number of less perfect homes, and that has stalled the Chalet uptake more than once. 

I strongly believe that if LL ever closes the old LH regions, this phenomenon of getting the same unwanted home over and over will discourage a number of users from retaining their Premium memberships.

Yes, it wouldn't take long for anyone to get discouraged, especially if they can see prime property which is not being offered.
Maybe the Moles could go in and claim and abandon a raft of unclaimed chalet properties just to reset the queue? It would be a less risky strategy than messing with the coding.

...and then it occurs to me, maybe they already do this sometimes?

Edited January 5 by Raspberry Crystal

[xViXeNx71]

I do understand the pros and cons of moving the abandoned homes to the bottom of the list.

Maybe they could just shuffle the queue like once a day at a set time, to give a fair chance to both people who are trying to pass a house to someone AND people who are trying to get a certain location?

[Matthieu Quander]

Having the queue sort by last release time (oldest to newest) rather than whatever is being used for the index key isn't perfect for reasons previously mentioned, but it likely would be the easiest solution to implement and would remedy the biggest complaint. 

Yes, it would effectively kill the ability to hand off a parcel for themes that aren't near full capacity, and some really great locations might sit empty for an extended period of time, but so what?  There has never been a guarantee that handing off is going to work, and great locations are already sitting idle in the unpopular themes.  If people want a specific vacant parcel badly enough, they can always pay for the concierge service.  Alleviating the biggest frustration of the house selection process seems worth it to me, and would likely generate a renewed enthusiasm for house hunting.      

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/3/2024 at 7:27 AM, elleevelyn said:

the main issue is when the Random function has a uniform distribution. meaning any of the available Homes have as much chance of coming up on each roll as any other home.  When so then is possible for any kind of Not-The-Same-As-The-Last function to go catatonic. "Catatonic" being a qualitative description

for example there are 10 homes available. We have 5 homes (we have seen and abandoned) Homes [1,2,3,4,5] on our Not-The-Same-As-The-Last list. We try for another home next day. The random method selects a home in the range [6..10]. Say is 6. We abandon the No. 6 Home as well. No. 1 home is added back into the available pool. We try again for homes [7,8,9,10,1] and get No. 1 Home again. Our Not-The-Same-As-The-Last list is now [3,4,5,,6,1] and the available homes are [7,8,9,10,2]. And we get No.2

whats the probability that we only get to see one different home each day that we have not already abandoned ? 5/5 * 1/5 * 1/5 * 1/5 * 1/5 = 5/3125 = 0.16%

and the probability to see all 5 available homes in 5 rolls, abandoning them all:  5/5 * 4/5 * 3/5 * 2/5 * 1/5 = 120/3125 = 3.84%

96% of the time we will see 2, 3 or 4 homes that we didn't see yesterday

we could extend the Not-The-Same-As-The-Last list to more than 5, but at some point we run into sizing issues. Like our Not-The-Same-As-The-Last list could be equal to the size of all available homes minus one

this all said. A way to do this is to not use a random uniform distribution function. To use a biased "random" function. And the most biased "random" function is an Arithmetic Feistel Network algorithm which will produce only one instance of each number in the range in some random-looking order. A LSL example of this is here:

with this algorithm then we get to see all 5 available homes in 5 rolls in some 'random' order

The Lindens put "randomizing" in various things -- not just Linden Homes. They used to randomize the infohubs on the Mainland to which newbies would be set.

There is a techie fascination with randomizing in the belief that it is "more fair" and "more democratic." But the obvious problem with it as I'm sure you know is that if you have a very finite set of elements to randomize -- and everything about Second Life is very finite -- it is not the Internet at large, it is not Google -- then you will randomly get the same items again and again, sometimes many times in a row, because it's random. That's what random does. It can randomly give you the same things again and again.

That's why I believe serial selection would be better for SL than random selection when it comes to these kinds of offering of available choices. 

Edited January 8 by Prokofy Neva

[Marisa Starbrook]

7 hours ago, Matthieu Quander said:

Having the queue sort by last release time (oldest to newest) rather than whatever is being used for the index key isn't perfect for reasons previously mentioned, but it likely would be the easiest solution to implement and would remedy the biggest complaint. 

Yes, it would effectively kill the ability to hand off a parcel for themes that aren't near full capacity, and some really great locations might sit empty for an extended period of time, but so what?  There has never been a guarantee that handing off is going to work, and great locations are already sitting idle in the unpopular themes.  If people want a specific vacant parcel badly enough, they can always pay for the concierge service.  Alleviating the biggest frustration of the house selection process seems worth it to me, and would likely generate a renewed enthusiasm for house hunting.      

The few times I’ve had Premium Plus, I haven’t been enthralled by the new themes. I’ve wanted to love them, but ultimately I’ve used the perk of selecting a home and then downgrading my account to Premium. There are a lot of primo spots that have been locked in Maintenance for months. Instead of playing game of homes, I’ve switched to be an “in maintenance” house hunter. 

[elleevelyn]

7 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

That's why I believe serial selection would be better for SL than random selection when it comes to these kinds of offering of available choices. 

i agree. Random, meaning uniform distribution, is not fair in some use cases. The allocation of Linden Homes is one of those cases

as you say with uniform distribution is possible to always get the same number. When so we can say that this is a catatonic state for the user on the receiving end. Is not enough for the implementer to say: is random so is fair. Is not fair at all for the individual receiving. Linden Homes should not be a roulette game

with serial distribution of a set of ordinal numbers [1,2,3,4,5, etc] where the last abandoned home is added to the end of the list then when there are say 100 homes available then at 5 pulls a day will take 20 days for that last home to show up. Which is fine when the home is a undesirable, but not so fine when is a desirable. (Desirable being subjective to the individual)

In 1971 Horst Feistel invented a block cipher algorithm (feistel network), which is pretty much used in most encryption methods in some modification or other. The purpose of a block cipher is that  the output can be decoded to get back the original value. it follows that when we encode all inputs/values of a set then no two outputs will be the same, and they can be decoded back to the inputs without loss

given this then a feistel network can produce a "random" arrangement (permutation) of a set of ordinal numbers. So with [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] there are 120 arrangements: 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = 120. Which can all be produced given a "seed' in the range [1 .. 120]

taking the cookie idea mentioned earlier then it need only contain the set id (type of home), seed (arrangement id) and the serial index number. Incrementing the index by 1 to produce the next home

looks random to the user but it isn't - is deterministically biased compared to uniform distribution. A thing is that many people like bias when it comes to 'random' meaning that they like it when it comes out [3,1,5,4,2] . Much more than they like [1,5,1,3,3] or [2,2,1,1,2]. And when it comes to Linden Homes then many means most if not all people

has been about 53 years since Horst Feistel invented this algorithm, so is not like is still waiting to be discovered. When a SL resident can implement a arithmetic feistel network in LSL then this is not something beyond the ability of a Linden professional programmer to do

for sure the programmer (more the product manager) has to decide what happens on change

Like when the next available home has been taken by another person. The most common method is to increment the index til it matches a available home. Understanding that when the index exceeds the magnitude, the index rolls over to 1 and starts over

the other change happens when the seed is changed. Which requires a reset. On reset is when the homes abandoned since last reset can be added to the available list, homes claimed removed. Which gives a new magnitude (number of available homes)

 

ps add. Alternatively to do the same thing then create an index list and do a Knuth shuffle on it (similar to llListRandomize). A feistel network doesn't require a pre-shuffled index list, which is the only difference in effect

 

pps add. For those still reading who maybe into this kind of thing

yourNewHome = llFrand(llGetListLength(AvailableHomes));

this is pretty much how it works now. llFrand (equivalent) produces a uniform distribution (like a roulette wheel)

if as a Product Manager, my programmer offered this as a solution for my Linden Homes paying customers then I would give them my stoneface and say "Really!"

and if they stoneface me back I would say "REALLY!" and not give them any cream cake for afternoon tea. Til they come back from reading up on Knuth, Feistel, Galois, Margolis, et al. and go to me "Oh! yeah"

and I will say "Yeah!" and off they will scurry on the promise they will get two cream cakes next afternoon tea. Seeing as how I ate their other cream cake myself due to all the agony I was feeling when I had to say "REALLY!" 😻

annnd if I was the programmer and my product manager said we going with the one liner solution then I put in for a transfer to another team. There are somethings that all the cream cakes in the world can't compensate for

Edited January 9 by elleevelyn
ps add

[Raspberry Crystal]

13 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The Lindens put "randomizing" in various things -- not just Linden Homes. They used to randomize the infohubs on the Mainland to which newbies would be set.

There is a techie fascination with randomizing in the belief that it is "more fair" and "more democratic." But the obvious problem with it as I'm sure you know is that if you have a very finite set of elements to randomize -- and everything about Second Life is very finite -- it is not the Internet at large, it is not Google -- then you will randomly get the same items again and again, sometimes many times in a row, because it's random. That's what random does. It can randomly give you the same things again and again.

That's why I believe serial selection would be better for SL than random selection when it comes to these kinds of offering of available choices. 

There are currently 2550 Chalet home available. There is another recent thread where a frustrated potential home owner had been given the same small selection of chalet homes repeatedly. Whilst that *could* happen randomly it seems very unlikely.

We already know that recently abandoned homes seem to jump to the top of the list. Again, unless this is from a very small pool of free homes, this does not seem to be a random event. My recently abandoned chalet home was taken up by one of the people who had been struggling to get a real choice in that style.
 

In a situation of slow turnover, it seems possible for five 'meh' homes to get stuck on the choosing shelf being continually rejected.

@elleevelyn I'm sorry, I am sure you are making some very good points in your post but I can only skim the surface so I hope I have grasped the essential meaning, my summary is 'it is quite possible to get a proper random selection, why aren't they doing it?'
My answer would be, that if something is basically functioning, even if not in a particularly efficient way, then there is a huge disincentive to change anything, because of the risk of something going horribly wrong, which would take weeks, if not months to sort out, and the only person who could fix it is locked in a room, guarded by a dyspeptic dragon, and that person is already fully occupied sorting out the last three hundred problems caused by some utterly random event that hasn't even been identified yet.

 

[Maitimo]

If the Lindens want to keep the "newest release at the top" rule, a simple solution would be to prevent selection of any parcel that has already been owned by you within the last 24 hours. That way, they can still keep their system but eliminate frustration for users.

That said, it really sucks. What's the point of having 300 really nice Chalet properties if all 2200 of the crap ones need to be actively occupied before anyone can get one? They may as well not have built them at all.

[elleevelyn]

2 hours ago, Raspberry Crystal said:

There are currently 2550 Chalet home available. There is another recent thread where a frustrated potential home owner had been given the same small selection of chalet homes repeatedly. Whilst that *could* happen randomly it seems very unlikely.

there is the list of AllHomes and there is the list of AvailableHomes, not necessarily the same thing as some homes can be broken and marked as NotAvailable, and some whole regions also marked as NotAvailable

the likely explanation (from everyone's experience) is that the AvailableHomes list is relatively quite small. Topped up on a needs-must basis  with some recently abandoned Homes and some from the not recently abandoned AllHomes list

it could be that the re-population is triggered when the claimed level reaches some predetermined point. Same as how caches work

say the AvailablelHomes list was 100.  And say at 80% claimed then re-populate. with 80 new selections added to the 20 remaining. Problem is that can get stuck on 21. A catatonic state. Everyone playing is abandoning the same 21 Homes over and over. it could be triggered at 60 rather than 80. It could be 50. Dunno. But it can get stuck, go catatonic, when everybody is abandoning within the same period. the abandons already on the Available list staying on the list

we could think maybe set the trigger to quite low. Like at 20%. Problem is that if we don't flush the whole cache then we got people playing for the same 80% of undesirables, and when ire-populate, only 20 new additions are added. Can end up with 100% undesirables, which only changes when 21 people give up and keep the undesirable Home they don't want

having a short AvailableHomes cache list is not a issue in itself. The issue is how and when iit is re-populated - full fllush on trigger is better than top-up.  Still left with how to fill the cache from the AllHomes list excluding the NotAvailables. Most efficient way is feistel network or knuth shuffle if the widest range of cache selection is the goal

ps add. I not be surprised at all if it uses a cache. Webservers like caches. From all of the experiences that residents have had, then Somebody Linden coded it up as a top-up cache rather than a full flush cache. Because top-up is typically how caches work. Like our SL viewer cache. when it gets full then remove some from the top to make room for new stuff

Edited January 9 by elleevelyn
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