Sandbox no longer has a sanity governor

1000 prims per hour? I have costumes with more prims than that.

...and while we're at it, what about sandbox users who are trying out their newest push weapon? A "about to blast you into outer sim space" warning would be nice. Or better yet, ask for volunteers, instead of shooting another sandbox user and then offering the lame "oops! bad aim!" excuse.

The push weapon question is easy: it is not allowed today. Neg rate them, PvP Abuse Report them, Mute them and away you go. Take a zero tolerance policy on that, don't retaliate and the griefer will be gone after his 3rd strike.

I did this just yesterday. I was just sitting in a corner of the sandbox minding my own business and a "insert name" Chaos flys up and hovers over me. I have learned through experience to right click them and open the Rate dialog box and minimize it for later use. Sure enough, a little while later (nothing said) he pulls out a gun. I see a long particle stream come from it and hit me. Luckily I was wearing my Anti-Push ring (found in the script library here). And he flys aways. I grab my stuff (to prevent retaliatory neg rating), neg rate him from the previously opened ratings dialog, and teleport home (also to prevent getting neg rated). Once there, I pull down the Help / View PvP Abuse menu and there he is. I file a Abuse report and hit Ctrl-F to find his profile then click Mute. And, I right click my land (which I am now standing on) and select About Land / Ban and add him. All that takes about a minute.

The only problem with the system is having to avoid the retaliatory negative ratings. In these cases I usually just neg rate the griefer on Behavior. But they triple neg rate you in return if you give them a chance. So, it sucks - but you have to lie low for a bit until they forget the incident.

Does it work? I have seen at least 3 people suspended from abuse reporting them. And at least 1 was banned all together. Is it the right way to handle it? Well, it is how the system is set up. And the Lindens give them fair warning. One incident like this should be enough to deter them. If not, they should be banned.

I agree that a few people can spoil the fun of others. It's anarchy in the sandboxes sometimes. I think we have made some good suggestions here and we've mapped out some of the potential problems.

I do want to ask that we not do anything too hasty. I'm somewhat hesitant to race in and ask for a bunch of new rules without trying to resolve this under the current system.

I see additional rules/regulation as only a source of more problems rather than a solution. Griefers love having a larger body of rules becuase that gives them more perimieter to toe the line on.

You give me any example of a new rule, and I can probably come up with some way that a griefer will take advantage of that new rule. I've seen this in MMO*s all the time. Every time the game developers try to fend off griefers with some new algorithm, the griefers rub their hands in delight at all the new loopholes the algorithm introduces.

1000 prim limits? You can rest assured griefers will come by and allocate their 1000 prims and sit on them and proclaim their rights to do so. They will still continue to apply physics to them all and scatter them about the sim.

30 minute derez? You can bet a griefer who dislikes you will find some way to keep you from getting back to your 75 prim build before you can link it up to take it. So you wind up with 75 unlinked prims in your inventory when the sim does it's 30 minute cleanup.

MMO Environments are simple when it comes to griefers - the more programmed-in rules, the more loopholes they will find and exploit.

With these examples, what have we solved? The only solution to them is to neg/report them or plead with LL to add more restrictions. We could have just done that from the very beginning before we took away everyone's freedom and flexibility, all the while wasting LL's developer's time developing the code for these new rules.

Any additional limits put upon us will only come back to bite us later when we have some project where we need to test something outside those limits.

Everyone loses with new restrictions, except the griefers -- they will always find new ways to harass under any set of rules. The solution is to deal with the griefers, not the system.

All I ask is that you please consider this before taking the next step. If you've been in other MMO*s, think of how they evolved to deal with griefers, and if all that additional complexity really did any good in the end.

Thank you for reading.

-- Kex =)

Click on Help, select Report Abuse, and fill out the form. So much more effective than whining in the forums =)

Kex, I hear ya. And I agree about handling the griefers vs modifying the system. But, these changes aren't developer time. All of them (except the 1000 prim suggestion) could be done with the existing land management tools. The only manual labor would be for the Lindens to track the # of abuse reports they get per person. And, I'm sure they already have a method to track that. In fact, there would be less code if they took out the daily sim wipe code.

Eggy it is called collaboration when we do it. It is called whining when you do it.

the 1000 prims an hour was a random number.

Please consider the suggestion for the idea of 'prims per hour' or maybe 'prims per minute' or something.

Everyone concentrated on the '1000' as if it were some hard number I spend years researching.

It could easily have been 10,000, 50, 2000000, 5...

The point being, someone script-generating a fall of dominoes burns up a LOT MORE prims than someone building a house or costumes.

I was giving my counterexamples to show that any limit on the rate of prim generation will harm honest experimenters. And the limits won't be able to stop griefers -- I know how to bring down a sim using only a half-dozen prims.

What a limit might stop is accidents where an auto-rez script gets out of control, but I haven't seen any of those.

I remember Charlies auto reer in darkwood - the semi transparent walls got darker and darker as he started going frantic about 'OMG someone is stealing my money! Where is my money going! OMG! I've lost 10k! 20k!'. It was freaky til we realized what was going on - an out of whack auto rezer that drained his account and filled the sim with prims.

Or maybe just limit the number of prims that can be rezzed using the llRez script command... (limit # over time).