People always like to shout out that their favourite club in SL is the “best club” and indeed it’s heard quite often at Ambrosia. Since the word best is so subjective the only way to to really tell which is the most popular club is by its traffic rating. By typing the word “CLUB” in search places it is possible to see who is currently in the number 1 spot for traffic. This week in the number 1 spot, overtaking those pale hosers at Dance Island is the Black Rain Club – Biker Sim. I decided to check it out.
Upon arrival I found myself surrounded by a healthy number of avatars. However, some of them were not fully rendered. Hmm, kind of like bots.
Lets give them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they are all really waiting around for the random money giver to regurgitate lindens into their upturned beaks.
Here we can see this avatar waiting patiently for her payout!. But alas, it pays out ‘AFantasy Color Change Shoes’ to one of the bots. Sorry!!! No cash for you!!
Let’s wait 19 minutes for the next payout.
Over the air crackled the commanding voice of a live dj barking something in German accompanied by a driving techno beat.
Here is a new arrival – A pig headed person spewing pink particles. And i thought things were going to be boring.
Ahhh, here are some more green dots in the sim. Let’s go find out if this is where the real party is. Wow, it’s a veritable United Nations of people clustered around a CampMaster 2.0 paying out 1 L every 30 min! As I sat there among the undead i could hear the words of Jack Linden,
“We recently posted a new policy explaining that the use of Bots to unfairly inflate the traffic score (and therefore Search ranking) for a venue would be considered a violation. Whether a landowner uses Bots or Camping Chairs, or Camping Chairs with Bots in them, the effect is the same – the traffic score for that parcel is inflated unfairly”
Hmmm.
But what of the actual club? Well here it is!
Lets go inside.
Well, the Stuka dive bomber is certainly cool. Not a bad looking club either. I count 19 people. They are in voice chat speaking in German. So lets add it up. 19 people in the club. 97 in the sim. Could it be that this Number 1 venue is unfairly using campers and bots to game traffic scores? Why do they feel that they have to do this? The club that they have would be a whole lot better for the real people that use it if they did not have to contend with the massive lag caused by the 78 extraneous avatars.
Since the club members are mostly European we can assume that there is a slack time when very few real people would actually visit the club. Therefore this club should have a respectable traffic rating or around 12000 not 87403. But thanks to its number 1 ranking in Places people teleport in regularly because it is at the top of the list.
Is this an example of gaming traffic? You be the judge.
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