In a move reminiscent of 2007, Linden Lab made a change to traffic scoring in order to lighten the workload on its systems. The only problem is that the company failed to address any of the concerns regarding ways to trick the system in order to be drive in more traffic.
Yesterday, LL made its announcement to the way scores are given to land plots. Currently, it is a complex formula that compiles data regarding the number of people who visited, how long they stayed, and how much time they spent at each location.
"Traffic, says LL in its statement, will be the cumulative minutes spent on the parcel by all visitors to the parcel within the previous day. It will be calculated from the total seconds spent on the parcel, divided by 60 and rounded to the nearest whole minute (up or down). It is calculated in real-time, and will be updated every morning at 1am PST for the previous day."
According to the statement, this will change the numbers you see for traffic in the About Land window and the first updated numbers will be available on September 1. But they won't have much of an impact on the rankings of a parcel in search results.
Therefore, LL ignores the elephant in the room since it does not entirely reform the way traffic is used for search results. This leaves the incentive to game the system by letting bots or simple avatars standing around for hours just to rack up the traffic points.
More limits such as counting only unique visitors might have been welcome. Simply separating traffic from search results might have been even smarter to put the focus squarely on relevance. LL only makes a vague promise about this.
This is a sad situation. Even today, despite all of Linden Lab's efforts to create a Showcase area and earlier adoption of Google search technology, finding very relevant results when searching can be a challenge.
Sure, LL wants to reassure by saying "we will be pushing harder to make sure that unfair use of Bots or other means to game Search are stopped."
The only problem is that when tackling this issue, they gave first priority to their resources, not to in-world usability. Only a "customer focus" makes a project viable in the long run.
When will LL stop being self-centered and adopt a customer-based approach?
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