How to Find Good Camping in Second Life Part I

As the proverb say "Give a fish to a man, he will eat one day, teach him fishing, he will eat for the rest of his days". Many readers and group members asked me how I proceed to find good campsites. I have no special procedure, and I think it's all about common sense, but here is how I do.

Let's start by defining what a good campsite is. First, the payrate must be acceptable. To make comparison easier, I check it on an hourly basis. I don't camp for less that 12 L$ per hour. This is equivalent to the frequent 2 / 10 or 3 / 15. This is what I consider standard. Anything above is good, but 12 per hour is ok.

As the campsites change very quickly, I do share my time between camping and searching for new spots. The objective is to always have at least a couple of 12 / hour sites available so I never wast potential camping time because of no campsite available.

When I teleport to a new campsite (I'll say how I find them in part II), I expect the camping device to be easy to spot. Given the number of campsites out there, I don't spend time flying or walking through all of an island to find them. Using the mini-map is helpful here as it makes easy to find where crowded areas are, and crowds most of time are due to campers.

Once the device have been easily located, I have a look for other camper earnings. If campers have earnings in the 20, 50 or even 100 range, it's a good sign of unlimited camping. If decide to give the new site a go, I camp for about half an hour, keeping an eye on the process.

This test run allows to check for any blue box popping-up asking if I want to continue. This is quite common now, and makes any unsupervised camping impossible. The test run is also good to make sure that the device is actually paying, before starting spending too much time. To be fair, most of the camping devices are paying, but it's worth checking.

To sumarize this first part, here are my rules:
1) No camping below 12L$ per hour
2) Camping device must be easy to find once teleported
3) Use the mini-map to locate camping crowds
4) Check how others are doing
5) Have a test run before camping too long

In part II, I will explain how I find new campsites to be checked... stay tuned !