The use of bots to make a place look popular in Second Life

Ok so you search a place, lets say jewellery and you see that there are some stores high up on the list with a huge amount of traffic so you think "wow thats a popular place they must be good" then you TP there and its empty but on your mini map there are lots of dots in the sky, ever wandered whats up with that?

Find out after the jump


Bots, computer controlled avatars that stand on land to increase the traffic. There was a time when this job was done by real avatars and it was called camping, now its done by bots. They are cheap and you dont have to have a computer logging them in.

This is just an example of what bots look like and how they are inworld. With this amount of people on your sim constantly you will get high traffic numbers and your store or club or whatever will rank higher up on the rankings.

How can you tell the real traffic then from the fake? If you tp somewhere and you look on your minimap and it shows ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ that would mean there were 5 people above you. If they dont move and are there a long time you can pretty much guess they are probably bots. Store owners like to keep them hidden usually so they are normally on a platform somewhere around 4000m just standing around doing nothing. They usually are all grouped together like in the above picture too.

Now im not saying there is anything wrong with bots, they do a great job of group invites and group chat moderation etc but faking your place to look popular is a bit unfair.

So next time you visit a place thats deserted but has high traffic, take a look on the minimap and see if there are any bots in the sky.

Do you agree with our post that bots are a bad thing to fake traffic? or do you agree they are good and help bring people in who might not otherwise visit? Let me know in the comments box below, thanks for reading and ill see you next time