The discussions on the future of traffic have raised some important issues, highlighted scalability and created a great new scapegoat: camping.<\/p>\n
The discussions seem to suggest that camping is the most heinous event in the Second Life World. Forget griefing, forget obscenity, forget extreme violence, forget ageplay, camping is the number one evil.<\/p>\n
I’m just waiting for someone to link camping to rising fuel prices or the subprime crisis. Really, this is getting ridiculous already.<\/p>\n
Apparently if camping goes, all the problems go. The sun will shine, the birds will sing, Second Life world peace will break out, there will only be shiny happy people around and every single ill of the world will be magically cured.<\/p>\n
Suffering from lag? Eliminate campimg.<\/p>\n
Asset server issues? Eliminate camping.<\/p>\n
Can’t find shoes to fit your avatar? Eliminate camping.<\/p>\n
What next, a rampaging mob on the hill trying to burn out the evil camping monster?<\/p>\n
I welcome the debate on the future of traffic, I also welcome a discussion about ways to reduce asset server problems, crashes and general stability. However I’m not buying for one minute that everything will be solved by getting rid of camping. Just how many problems does camping cause?<\/p>\n
Technically I don’t see how a camper is causing more stress on the servers than someone teleporting from sim to sim in search of something. I don’t see how a camper is causing more stress than people using scripted objects, sensors, networked vendors yadda yadda yadda.<\/p>\n
There seems to be a bitter sense of entitlement amongst some premium members. I’ve never quite followed this logic of people feeling superior because they have a premium membership. A couple of important points here, estate land makes up the vast majority of the land in Second life. A resident does not need to be a premium member to live on estate land, indeed they don’t need to be a premium member to rent mainland either. Whether everyone should have to pay a membership is an argument that was made redundant a couple of years ago.<\/p>\n
Campers earn money to spend Linden dollars. There are better ways of obtaining Linden dollars, but campers aren’t generally using their camping money to cash out. This is a revenue source. Personally when I tried camping I found it to be tedious but others have said there can be a social aspect to camping.<\/p>\n
Spend some real money people cry, but the campers don’t want to do it that way, they’re happy to think that they aren’t spending actual money. Energy bills make this a false economy but if they’re happy to do things that way then I personally don’t see the big problem.<\/p>\n
Popular camping places can of course impact on everyone’s enjoyment of a sim, but that’s the same for any popular place. Popular stores, popular clubs, popular education establishments can all lead to frustrations with neighbours. Blaming campers is ignoring the real issue that the platform struggles with popularity, that popularity could be anything at all.<\/p>\n
The debate should be centred around the performance limitations. That’s the bigger issue, camping is just a contributing factor, as is any activity that takes place in Second Life.<\/p>\n
Blaming camping for most of the ills with the Second Life world is just papering over the cracks. Camping is of course inextricably linked to traffic, so if Linden Lab decide to eliminate traffic, then that would probably eliminate camping. This would probably see an end to money trees too and then people would divert their money to other avenues to make their parcels popular, but will that improve performance and make everything wonderful?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The discussions on the future of traffic have raised some important issues, highlighted scalability and created a great new scapegoat: camping. The discussions seem to suggest that camping is the most heinous event in the Second Life World. Forget griefing, forget obscenity, forget extreme violence, forget ageplay, camping is the number one evil. I’m just … <\/p>\n