Wade1 Jya over on The Merchants Roundtable (private forum so you may not have access) has pointed out that some new icons have appeared in search, that could well be an indicator that traffic may well gain some relevancy again. The icons have three symbols that seem to indicate whether a sim place is active, popular or busy, although I am yet to see any places with two out of the three icons lit up.
What are you talking about Ciaran? I hear you ask, well in search on the latest viewer you will see on some listings (a minority) things like this:
What qualifies a place as active, popular or busy? I have no idea!
I did however do a small sampling of places to compare some numbers and the results were:
- Active Place – 17 People on Sim, Traffic Score for parcel- 14,417
- Popular Place – 15 People on Sim, Traffic Score for parcel – 27,801
- Busy Place – 36 People on Sim, Traffic Score for parcel – 71,964
Now this is far from scientific but initial results suggest that higher traffic gets you a higher score on the three icon scale. Now before people start running for the bots and engage themselves in a traffic war let’s remember that these scores are having no impact on searching by relevancy, places that don’t even get on the three icon scale at all (that’s most places) are higher up the search rankings than busy places.
I haven’t seen any announcements from Linden Lab regarding this and I don’t know the formula so feel free to take my theories about what makes a place busier with a pinch of salt, I don’t know why they rank the way they do. However the icons are there in new search and we’ll have to watch and see what happens here.
I do think that they should change the active place name though, this suggests other places are inactive, which isn’t the case at all, maybe the scale should be popular, busy, heaving….. or something like that!
“People on Sim”
Not every Place is a Sim.
Maybe they mean “Parcel” – maybe not.
I still see bots and camping pads around the place.
This will probably start them breeding. Oh the drama – again.
Good point, the people on sim was how many people were on the map at the time I tp’d there, which I thought might be relevant but as you rightly point out, that’s no indicator of how many people are on a parcel.
Bots will definitely rear their heads if these icons become relevant, traffic wars 2!
I’ve been looking at this as well and it seems to me that the traffic number has nothing to do with it. It appears to be a real time indicator of how busy the sim is at the moment. IMO, this is way better than a misleading traffic score that only reflects what happened yesterday.
This type of scoring could also potentially negate any impact bots have because they could measure the data streamed within the sim/parcel instead of the minutes they are camping. Bots don’t take up anywhere close to the amount of data avatars logged into a graphical viewer do.
I didn’t look into it closely enough but the wording suggests it’s how busy a sim is now, however this is still a traffic issue, I do like the idea but I wonder if search updates often enough to give a true picture.