Campers and Bots Continue to Inflate SL Usage

Dumb Bots and Campers entice newbies to wander into empty shopping malls on the Second Life grid. It is a scam that Linden Lab continues to allow as it masks the lack of engaged user growth. Linden Lab knows the percentage of sessions and the amount of hours that Bots/Campers represents, but is not revealing this information.

While grid continues to protest the OpenSpace scandal and Linden Lab continues its policy of spin, hype, confuse and ignore, the big issue of where is the growth on the Second Life platform is still a mystery--or is it? Is there in fact no real growth and just a lot of data mixed up with Bots and Campers? And if LL is serious about improving the "user experience" wouldn't getting rid of this scam practice be a major step forward?

We look at the SL Statistics and think a useful measure of engaged user growth is the amount of avatars spending money inworld each month. In October LL reported 419,000 avatars spent money or which 323,046 spent more than $L500 (about $USD2.00).  That is also a count of avatars--not humans which considering most active people have alts means that there are a lot less than 419,000 engaged human users inworld.

This spending statistic is up maybe 10%  in the last year and matches our general sense that engaged users in SL have not grown much since before CSI flop. Sure there are new users, but old timers are leaving and spending less time inworld at more or less the same rate.

But how can LL then claim growth in concurrency and growth in monthly user hours? Answer is they include the seemingly growing usage of bots/campers as a pathetic lure to pull people onto shopping malls. They participate in the same scam that mall users try to show activity and interest.

The continued use of bots/campers is bit of a surprise actually since LL did the right thing and killed the Popular Place feature on Search. Of course they dropped the ball with Showcase right behind that and still it is hard to find stuff to do in SL. However, the traffic statistics in Search still rank bot/camper infested areas higher as well as also spewing the green dots all over the map enticing people that something may be happening on a sim.  When you click on a towering stack of green dots you sometimes find dawn of the dead style campers hopping mindlessly on a pad, sometimes you find stacks of campers in alleys--sometimes the campers are hidden completely.

But just how much usage do bots/campers represent? Linden Lab of course knows. 15% of sessions? 50% of total hours?

Bots/campers don't move and they don't IM. /me wonders if you can shoot them?

Anyway, if you want to add a few photos and comments about how useless and annoying bots/campers are please add them here.