Is there anything people can't or won't game if they see an ounce of profit and know what the rules are, or if they can work them out?
Take a glance at the image above (click for a larger version). That's the Skin Oasis in Second Life, specifically here, hidden below a small pond. Traffic (even though almost nobody understands how it works) is still a factor in search results - but in the new search system so are Picks in avatar profiles - and of course, places with lots of green dots on the map interest people more than places with fewer. This sim seems to be gamed all three ways for search-results.
There seems to be about 60 avatars in the hidey-hole beneath the pond. Every one of them has B&B Skins in their Picks (at least once, and as many as ten times). They also seem to win pretty much all of the L$1 prizes given out by the B&B Customer Rewards Orb - so if you're turning up for that, don't bother.
Maybe there's nothing wrong with this from a business standpoint - except of course that it's really easy to set up with a few minutes of python scripting, so there's the potential for an arms-race of sorts. A few minutes' work and you too could have a bunch of bots gaming your location's search results. Once enough businesses are doing that - the search system becomes useless to people trying to find your products, and you're back to the same luck-of-the-draw basis as if you hadn't put any effort in at all.
We don't like the notion at all. It seems cheap, tawdry, dishonest, exploitative of would-be customers, and a waste of resources. In RL, you'd call them shills. In google-terms, they're the equivalent of 60 fake blogs linking back to your site for the purposes of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Not that it actually really seems to work. B&B only ranks about 39th on the search for the keyword skins.
[via Grid Expectations]
We've contacted the listed owner of B&B to ask more about the reasoning and motivations of the setup.
