Open Letter to the Police of SecondLife

To the Police of Second Life,

No, not the primmed up avatars running around with store-bought stripper uniforms. No, not the security forces that also dress up in store-bought "police uniforms" either. I mean the ladies and gentlemen that receive our Abuse Reports and bleithly file them in the round-bin.

I've filed numerous reports of actual abuse in Second Life only to have it returned a few days later with the "Transaction appears to have no content" message. What does this tell me? That my abuse report went unheard, and uncared about.

Why should I even bother filing an Abuse Report? I don't spam AR with usless and empty requests for review. I file genuine problems against real infractions of the TOS, yet ... my voice does not seem to count, as every time I've filed, I get a message that appears to say... "Request for review denied."

Is it because I'm filing in a region that's not "Ahern"? Is it because I'm not a member of the F***ing Inner Council that "doesn't exist"? Honestly, if one reads the Police Blotter, it seems that the Lindens don't care about assault and other real crimes any more. It's all "forum violation" and "adult profile" and "XXX pic." I'm sorry...isn't this grid for adults? Why can't I have an adult profile then?

For those of you whom are interested, I was minding my own business, flying around in Riddings when a security script began to PUSH me and SPAM me with blue-boxes. If I recall correctly, PUSH is NOT ALLOWED in a security script. I took the time to find the security orb and then duitfully report it as required.

Perhaps if more than just one person reports it? Maybe if I can get a community of people to moth this item, something will happen?

Wait a minute...this is the Abuse Report system.... nevermind. Don't even bother.

Abuse reports have always been a joke to me. Sure if enough people report some griefer who goes around orbitting people, and you happen to call in a Linden from Live Help to witness the situation, action is taken. And sometimes if you shoot a watermelon gun in the sandboxes, you'll get banned too. But par for the course is to ignore ARs, even when they take a serious toll on your personal/RL life and several emails are sent in on the subject.

I gave up trying to worry about AR'ing in any capacity, because as you have stated here, what's the point.

</serious>

HAI EVERYONE!

MM

Bad customer support seems to be the trend in MMOs.

I'm just wondering if you can read. Because if you can read, you could read this :



You see, that's at the SL blog that is now SL's chief means of communication with the public. Did you read it? Did you even think of checking there?

No? So were you lazy, uninformed, or unable?

'kay.

Yes. And when Sprint drops my cel phone call, it means that the person on the other end doesn't love me anymore.

um. The whole "transaction appears to have no content" thing, is probably like a php or database error where there was supposed to be a database field there, and it was changed, or it's no longer used.

I don't know where you get the idea that because the computer-macheen spits back "Transaction appears to have no content" it means that the abuse report wasn't acted on.

They probably need to check the code and/or DB fields of their ticketing system for the automated response, but I really, REALLY, think this is just a bug in the ticket system's code, not "screw you all, we dont care about you, or the tears you cry."

Every abuse report resolved since they have changed the in-world interface has had this error.

It's just a stupid code error. It doesn't mean the AR hasn't been read, and it doesn't mean you're not cool enough to file an AR. It doesn't mean that LL hasn't resolved a single AR since 1.10. It doesn't mean you have to sit at the kids table.

Next thing you know, an HTML tag is going to end up showing on the homepage, or a missing image, and people are going to start screaming, "It's because i'm not FIC, isn't it! ISN'T IT!??!?!"

God bless the giant asteroid that is headed towards these forums as we speak.

You fail to see the other points brought up in my initial letter. While the "php error" is the one that receives the most attention, I've yet to have any AR resolved. Ever. Even in clear cut cases of abuse by the other party, I've NEVER seen a reference to said party in the police blotter.

It doesn't matter who you are, what group you belong to, AR's get returned with that stock message. I wonder how many abuses go on, on a daily basis. Probably a lot more than you or me think, but for most abuses to go unpunished (regardless of an email error) is unacceptable, and they do go unpunished for the most part. Then again, what can we do except leave???

The common misconception is that a single AR should get you immediate relief. It doesn't. What it does do is create another element in a paper trail that will EVENTUALLY get somebody suspended or banned.

If a griefer gets your goat and you do take a potshot at him - you should probably find some other means of dealing with the griefer, by the way, rather than stooping to his level - but if you do, and it's out of character for you to have done it, you're not likely to get kicked out of SL for it. It takes dozens upon dozens of AR's to finally get suspended or banned, not just a single incident, from what I've observed.

Griefers do eventually get banned, and chronic abusers think they're getting away with it. They're not. They're just fooling themselves into thinking the Lindens aren't watching, waiting for that stack of AR's to pile high enough to become incontravertible evidence that you've got no right to be in SL.

Then they howl in protest when they do get banned, and permanently lose access to a few thousand Lindens, and the rare and hard-to-find griefer tools they've amassed, not to mention their friends lists. This cripples their ability to function, even if they do come back the next day with a new alt. After a few times going through this, they eventually realize they've been wasting their time, and leave SL.

So when they say, "Keep filing those AR's", they're really saying "Give us the justification we need to dropkick these jerks". But don't expect immediate relief.

For that, we are left to self-governance, in the various forms that takes. If you have your own land, you have a lot of tools at your disposal to defend yourself. If you're not a landowner, learn how to sit on things and avoid getting blown into the next sim, get some kind of shield if you have continual problems being shot at, and stay out of the public sandboxes.

It's mostly going to be up to us, really, to apply peer pressure against the continual griefer problem - since it's mathematically impossible for the few Lindens there are to be everywhere they're needed all the time - but the AR's are really the best thing the Lindens are able to offer.

So keep on filing them. They might be slow, and irritating, and you might not see your AR results on the police blotter, but they are having an affect.

Yup takes alot of AR's to get someone banned. A griefer I knew was hardly ever banned. A couple of his alts did get banned but he'd just make another. Eventually he got banned again, saying he was "permabanned". Maybe he could have made another alt but all this banning finally caused him to quit playing.

I think it would be dangerous for 1 AR to get someone banned/punished, as people could abuse this to go against innocent people, or out of revenge. So all situations have to be examined and wieghed by the lindens. Certainately it's not perfect but it's at least something.

That griefer I knew also mentioned that the no-push land option also cut down on his "fun" but now there's apparently weapons and techniques that work on no push land. I do think there has been less griefers then before though.

A probably more faster way of getting help might be calling Live Help. But I havent tried that yet, as I can deal with griefers well enough myself.

Did someone mention strippers? I wasn't paying attention.

The people/team who are responsible for investigating assaults and such in sl are a joke, a bad joke at that.
And you're right, they seem to be overly concerned with violations in the forums then anything happening in the game itself. It seems that's the default response everyone gets, the "No Content" one given to complaints.

It doesn't take a lot, it depends solely on where the AR is at.

For example, I've been cursing my ass off all week and calling people cunts and bitches and I haven't been touched, but the first time I mentioned "blogs suck butt" in SL Answers I got my first warning.

It's stupid.

what

shut up tekiwiki bastard.

no, no, it was "baastuhd"