Green Dots

I'm sick of hucksterism

I wasn't looking for bots today. I was attending a live music event in the Zora sim. The biggest crowd wasn't at the music event, though, and I thought I saw an amphitheater or something, so after the event I went to take a look. What I saw was Zyngo machines. Lots and lots of Zyngo machines, in what looked not entirely unlike an amphitheater.

I counted them: 115 Zyngo machines. Who needs 115 Zyngo machines? Has the owner never seen all the empty Zyngo parlors? I've never seen more than one or two machines being used. Anywhere. Ever.

Yet, every single one of these says there's been a winner, implying that they've all been used. Payouts are in the thousands. On every single machine.

I call bullshit.

Bot Survey, The Estates Strike Back

For two days I surveyed the estate sims for bots and campers. I chose randomly, by map location. On the second day of surveying I collected data during hours I did not collect on the previous, so this data fairly uniformly covers 24 hours, including both high and low concurrency times. The raw data has timestamps, so I could break it into low and high concurrency, but I haven't done that. Once again, I'd expect the low-concurrency percentage to be higher than the number I'm reporting and the high-concurrency percentage to be lower. The results are as follows, detailed under the cut: 524 sims 953 avatars, 481 of them bots and campers 50% bots and campers, overall For sims with 5 or fewer avatars there was an average of 13% bots and campers (42 bots out of 325 avatars). For sims with more than five avatars there was an average of 70% (439 bots out of 628 avatars). The overall percentage of bots was 50%. Some observations:

While visiting it really felt like there was going to be far fewer bots. I thought I'd be able to report less than 40%, but the large bot farms just dominate the numbers. Even if you remove the largest of them (79) from this data set, the overall percentage is still 46%. And the 79-bot farm isn't even the largest I found. One of the 50-bot farms in this survey was adjacent to a 94-bot farm and a 98-bot farm (those weren't included in this survey).

There's an even more dramatic division between low- and high-occupancy sims in the percentage of bots (13% vs 70%) than there is on the mainland (~20% vs ~62%).

More than half the estates I chose (63%) were empty.

I could not get to some estates because they do not have public access. Assuming those are not commercial they'd likely have few or no bots. I assumed any avatars in non-public sims were human. This only amounted to perhaps 20 avatars.

Data collection was cut short by about two hours because of grid borkage. I'd have to wait a whole day to resume collection, but...screw it. Close enough.

Data under the cut.

Bot survey, the sequel

I repeated Saturday's bot survey, in the same set of sims, but this time overnight Sunday into Monday morning. Saturday's survey likely captured the peak concurrency, while this morning's survey likely captured the minimum.

Once again I visited 219 sims on one of the newer mainland continents (I think it's the one called Corsica?) and noted how many avatars were present in each (including the ones with no avatars) and how many were bots and campers. I made a four-sim-wide path across the continent, coast-to-coast. Once again, I noted cases where I wasn't sure whether or not an avatar was a bot so I could visit again in several hours.

The results are as follows, detailed under the cut:

219 sims
591 avatars, 308 of them bots and campers
52% bots, overall

For sims with 5 or fewer avatars there was an average of 23% bots and campers (51 bots out of 218 avatars). For sims with more than five avatars there was an average of 69% (257 bots out of 373 avatars). The overall percentage of bots was 52%.

Some observations:

There were four fewer bots, but it's not a simple matter of four bots logging off overnight. There was a completely new bot farm of 14 that came online and has since disappeared again, so there are at least eighteen, and probably twice that number, that logged off since the previous survey. I noticed some of the differences. I believe what's happening is that some people run their bots overnight and then kill them in the morning and some people run their bots during the day, but the largest number of traffic bots stay online all the time.

Data under the cut.

Bot Survey: 219 sims in 10 hours

Different kind of survey for Saturday, November 15, 2008: I visited 219 sims on one of the newer mainland continents (I think it's the one called Corsica?) and noted how many avatars were present in each (including the ones with no avatars) and how many were bots and campers. I made a four-sim-wide path across the continent, coast-to-coast. Once again, I noted cases where I wasn't sure whether or not an avatar was a bot so I could visit again in several hours.

The results are as follows, detailed under the cut:

219 sims
712 avatars, 312 of them bots and campers
44% bots, overall

For sims with 5 or fewer avatars there was an average of 18% bots and campers (42 bots out of 235 avatars). For sims with more than five avatars there was an average of 57% (270 bots out of 477 avatars). The overall percentage of bots was 44%.

Some observations:

There are a lot more bots than there are campers. It'd be hard to get good numbers since some campers are bots and some bots are disguised as campers, but I'd put the number at about 85% bots to 15% campers.

The number of bots in low-occupancy sims is noticeably higher than it was just three months ago when I did my last multi-sim surveys. Small numbers of bots (fewer than a box-full) are being deployed more today than just three months ago.

I'm convinced clubs use bots but I don't have a way to determine with any certainty how many in a busy club are bots, so the number of bots is likely higher than I've stated. In this survey I found two busy clubs and a couple less-busy but active clubs, and I just had to assume they were all real, live humans, despite getting no response to my greetings and questions except from the host, and despite there being no meaningful chat. The number of club avatars in this survey is perhaps 60.

I expect the overall average for estates will be similar. Managed estates like Dreamland and Caledon surely bring down the average for low-occupancy sims, but fully-owned sims with large bot boxes are more common on estates than on the mainland.

Data under the cut.

Bots. Gravity. Enjoy.

All but two of the twenty five avatars in the Ocean Waves sim were on a platform at 3600m, over a store that sells prefabs. Bots. There are no walls or guard rail. I couldn't resist. Sent one over the edge. You know...for science.

Picture under cut.

Playing with explosives

Seven people in the Niseko4 sim were in voice chat at about 4pm SLT. And also playing with some explosives. These were Real Live People.

Three people, Four bots

Paid a visit to the French Quarter sim this evening at about 3:30pm SLT. It's a shame to have to call this one Bots and Campers because I actually found three live people here (one standing outside a club he said he owned and two in a store), but there were more bots than people here. Four of them, in a box over a store.

Fishing

Most of the twenty avatars I found in the Fortune Land sim were at Fantastic Fins-Aquarium & Club. There are three things you can do here (in addition to feeding Lindens into some scripted objects): fish, dance and gamble. I arrived during a fishing contest, made possible by the 7 Seas fishing system.

Three clubs and a casino

The Beryllium sim hosts a casino, with five campers in it this morning, and at least three clubs. One I found empty, one had three people in it, two of them seemed to be at their keyboards, and a third had two owners (according to their profiles) sitting in it, probably padding traffic. I'll check on them in a few hours, but I'm calling this one Bots & Campers.

This visit happened at 6:45 am SLT, Wednesday, August 27, 2008.

Bots, and a treasure hunt

In the George 5 sim I found about 23 avatars, including 15 bots in a store. The bots all had empty or nearly empty profiles, most didn't rez, and there was no camping system in sight. Outside another store I found three campers with empty or nearly empty profiles. Someone was standing in a mall. Someone was editing a display in a store. And a group of three avatars in a store, which had people coming and going as I watched, turned out to be a treasure hunt. Only one of them would talk to me, and she explained that they were looking for little boxes.

This visit happened at 2:30 am SLT, Friday, August 15, 2008.