Second Life Update

Camping; one of the major problems in Second Life may soon be resolved

Camping in Second Life is a unique phenomenon. It all started when virtual sims were “ranked” as “popular” based on the virtual body count. Sim owners thought, what better way to get ranked than to pay people to stay on your sim thus achieving a high ranking? The problem came with sims and mainland areas owned by multiple owners. One owner may be trying everything to rank and attract as may people as possible through payouts of say L$6 per 10 minutes. This however drastically drags down on the resources of the area and neighbors soon found the sim performance dragging. You can see a camp sight with either avatars sitting still not moving or more recently dancing in camp circles. To combat bots sim owners then required interaction from their campers to effectively refresh that a human was still present. The payout is low and really only makes sense for people in India and China where the small amount of money from camping 24 hours a day goes much farther.

The result was a “spammy” Popular Places list, hidden camp rooms, and laggy sim servers. Well now Linden Labs is working to improve the ranking system. Popular Places will first be affected by the in world search engine. Will this result in a new form of gaming? Sure. But perhaps a less harmful one. We should see these changes and others soon.