[sldev] CAPTCHA to validate land sales.
Dale Glass
dale at daleglass.net
Wed Oct 3 10:28:38 PDT 2007
On Wednesday 03 October 2007 18:55:36 Argent Stonecutter wrote:
> On 03-Oct-2007, at 11:15, Dale Glass wrote:
> > Why? The bots probably hunt for real bargains first of all.
>
> The problem isn't the bots looking for real bargains.
>
> It's the bots looking for ANY land that's below a price per square
> meter that's "enough" below the market.
>
> It doesn't matter if they're going for land underpriced by 5% or 10%
> or 15%, that just changes where the tail gets cut off, and no matter
> what the market is automated buying based purely on price without
> taking the land into account cuts the tail off.
But buying isn't the problem, selling is.
A tier of 65536 meters costs $200 per month, which means you need to make
at least that much from land sales.
Current average price of land is about L$7 per square meter, which means a
sim worth would be about USD $1700. 5% of that is $85, which means that
you need to sell a sim-worth of land 3 times at 5% profit to earn about
$55 on the tier.
Assuming that land parcels have an average size of 512M (failed to find
stats on this), that gives an average of 128 parcels per sim. To make the
profit we have to go through a sim worth of land 3 times, so that'll be
384 parcels, or an average of 12 parcels per day.
I'm pretty sure I can through the creation of a good interface, and
practice fill a captcha in about 30 seconds. This gives a total time spent
of about 6 minutes per day, to earn $55 per month. There are plenty places
in the world where that'd be attractive enough.
Coupled with a PDA, smartphone, etc with an internet connection, I could
quite easily do this at pretty much any time I'm not sleeping.
I am fairly sure that the first person to set this up will get quite a bit
more than 5%, by grabbing really underpriced land.
> That's fine. If you take the land into account, then the tail of less
> desirable plots remains. It doesn't matter how you do it... the point
> isn't (in my mind) to slow down the bots, its to keep it froim being
> so cheap to run them without a human in the loop that they can write
> off the less attractive plots and still make a profit.
There's a limit to the cheapness even with a completely automatic bot. I'm
pretty sure nobody would run a bot to earn $10 per month, as it's far too
easy to end up losing money on it. There has to be a minimum acceptable
profit to bother doing this, and I think it's high enough that requiring a
human to enter a captcha won't change the overall result too much.
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