Public Landbot Project: Cancelled

I’ve mentioned the Public landbot project previously in this post. I’m not involved in any way in the project however since I run landbots I am kept fairly informed on the progress from parties that do happen to be interested. In this post from the projects blog, the projects only developer has had a change of heart citing “scheming soulless land barons, whose only interests really lie in edifying their own ego, or lining their wallets at the expense of those less fortunate” as one reason, and credits yours truly “for inspiring this change of position“. The simple fact is he was paid in advance for work which was not and apparently will not be completed. Unfortunately this is not the first time this has happened. A close friend informed me shortly after the project began that he himself had previously paid Fword to develop a landbot which has yet to be delivered although in this post Fword claims he has had a working landbot for quite some time. The only reference to any landbot code he has published appears to be some outdated code from back when Linden Lab still had a First Land program.

Apparently my inspiration towards the demise of the project is from publicly made comments where I stated I did not believe he was capable of creating the software (which he claims to already have). Whats surprising is that this came as such a shock to him as I’d previously in his presence made the same statements. Many interested “soulless land barons” involved in the project have often raised the same issue, and after 2 months I can understand why their patience was wearing thin. Their inquiries to him for updates were met with a less than childlike responses. Up until now my guess is he’s written more profanity in relation to this project than lines of code.

A basic functioning landbot is not difficult to create, in fact since the start of their project two new landbots have emerged and continue to improve regularly prompting one of the old time landbot operators to bow his head in shame for being beat by the new guy. The most impressive thing about these new landbots is that their developers didn’t have any experience in developing in c# (the language most landbots are written in due to the libsecondlife API library). So my hats off to the new guys, my condolences to those who have been taken advantage of with promises only to be met with excuses and to fword himself — good luck in your new endeavor.

— Yohan

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Landbots make mistakes too

Today I was working on some improvements to the Bots and I messed up. One of the parameters you send to search is the sort order, for those using the viewer this is automatically set. Those of us running landbots have to set this specifically, well I reversed the flag so instead of getting the lowest parcels listed for sale I got the most expensive ones and since the bots calculate their buy rates based initially on the average price of the results returned so as you can imagine if you’ve ever looked at search this set my initial buy rate to about 75L/per sq.m and within about 1/2 second my bot had spent L$356,000 on 5 parcels including a 4096 sq.m parcel for L$300,000. Yes folks thats 73.2L per sq.m for a 4096. I of course immediately kicked myself for forgetting to turn on the debug mode during testing and began contacting the people I purchased the 5 parcels from. All went smoothly until I got in contact with the last and largest mistake. Before I go into the details of that, you should know that because of a few unscrupulous individuals that run landbots we are often all grouped into the ‘evil’ category. I can’t speak for others, but The Super Babenco Brothers have a clean record when it comes to returning mistakes and we even go as far as contacting people when a mistake is obvious instead of waiting for them to contact us. We have never charged for a return or made a single linden on anyone’s mistake.

So I sent an IM and followed it up with a notecard,

The IM:

[2007/12/26 14:17]  Yohan Pintens: Hi Fury, I just made a huge mistake
and bought a parcel of land from you for 300K,
I am wondering if you would be kind enough to undo it.

The Notecard:

Hi Fury,

I was screwing around and purchased your parcel of land in Mantle/231/193
for L$300,000. I totally messed up and did not mean to purchase it.
I am hoping you will be kind enough to assist me in undoing my blunder.
I've marked the parcel back for sale to you for the price I paid. 

Please let me know
Yohan Pintens,
Super Babenco Brothers

About 4 hours later I saw my notecard was accepted, so I sent another IM in hopes of some resolution, the discussion is as follows (unedited)

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Landbot Directory

I’ve created a Landbot Directory to hopefully assist people in knowing who to contact for assistance if their land was purchased by a landbot. If you have experience (good or bad) dealing with any operator, please let others know by posting a comment with any details you feel important.

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Common misleading statements made about Landbots

Landbots steal your land

People are telling you all those landbots are stealing your land. But that’s wrong. There are a 1 or maybe 2 which are not giving back the land to it’s owners when they make a mistake. Do we like that? No, of course not. And we’re not even saying that this is ok. Those bots must be gone!

Truth is we, the people who are running landbots are just using knowledge to get cheap land faster than normal avatars. We, the Super Babenco Brothers for example are recovering loads of land. Just today we grabbed almost a half sim for just L$64,000 which would be something around L$2/m² which was a mistake, and <strike>is sheduled to be</strike> was returned to owner for the purchase price. We always gave land back and so we’ll continue to do so in the future.

Landbots are bad for the landmarket

Well this is not true either, realtors are just pissed off because we’re getting what they got before. The advantage of knowledge. If you would know a way to make loads of money, which is not against TOS or anything, would you not yourself participate in it? Well I believe not. We’re not affecting the landbusiness as is, we’re just hurting the realtors a tiny bit more. But in fact many realtors profit from us as well, because to people who are nice to us, we’re nice too. We offer under market deals to them for good land, we sort out crap and give it to them for less than market value.

These are just some things we’re accused of, but there are many more things, keep reading this blog and you’ll know what we’re experiencing in the Secondlife Metaverse!

 

Regards,

JayJay Babenco

Suber Babenco Bros.

* Fixed some of JayJays grammar (English is not his native language) — Stuck

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