Great "Neighbors"

I recently decided to raise up the portions of the land around my house to increase the flat surface area of my "yard".

My intent: I was thinking of putting in a little brook/waterfall, and perhaps a raised garden along a path. I've been experimenting with the land layout to figure the best way to do this, and have wanted to do something more with my house for a very long while. As I have no other projects at the moment, now seemed ideal.

Apparently, my neighbors, who seem to think they have exclusive rights to the Natoma sim and the adjacent lands, reacted in this manner.

http://www.getingame.com/sweet_lady.gif

They...

...have never, ever spoken to me regarding Natoma, or my house. Ever, for any reason. In fact I don't have either of their calling cards, or know anything about either of them or their plans/thoughts.

...never asked me, "hey Tcoz what do you have planned?" Who knows, they might have liked it. I'm known for having some ability with building and scripting I think.

...never in any way informed me of any kind of collaborative neighborhood forming in Natoma. I am by far the oldest resident in that sim. My house has been sitting on a hill there since December 2002 or so, long, long before they arrived.

...have been steadily lowering the land all around my house so that it basically sits on a steeple, which has caused me to rework some of the layout. Nobody ever asked me if this was ok...but it's their land. So I never objected. It is apparently ok for them to alter the borders of my land by editing their own, but not vice versa. In addition, one of these people owns a raised hill directly off to the side of my house...but hey, they own that, so it's ok.

I log in one day, and find the above. No explanation, no attempt to reason at all. No stored IMs other than the ones on the day of this event telling me how unreasonable I am and that I've destroyed some neighborhood, which apparently spans two sims.

The emerging mentality of many people in this game is to entirely disregard personal right to do what you wish, provided it is not harassment and coercion, with the resources YOU PAY FOR. You want to build an area with a uniform layout, and do it around property that is owned by somebody that is in no way vested in your project, you roll the dice, and should not whine when you shoot craps.

Not complying with requests is NOT harassment. And if you wish for cooperation, I would hardly say that this tactic is a useful overture. In fact, I am more determined now than ever to exercise my right to alter my landscape.

Regarding respect and community, I am the senior resident by far, so respect that. My house and land have been there forever. A number of people in the past have politely asked that I make alterations to textures, sounds and such on my more industrial builds, and I have always complied. Oddly enough, getting involved in working on features for a Natoma community would have appealed to me.

These residents have also told me that the ugly walls are deliberate and will stay until I alter my land, and that if they get banned "that's ok, I have other avies", indicating they KNOW they are violating the TOS, and that they are prepared to continue the abuse on alternate accounts if necessary. Now of course they altered the textures somewhat and are trying to make it look like this is part of their intended builds and is in no way directed to coerce me, which everybody who has been by my house knows is nothing more than a veiled effort to continue the griefing and not get banned.

Yes, I have filed abuse reports and spoken with both residents via IM. The communication, though sanitary, was stiff. While I'm sure the admins will take the appropriate actions, this is a disgraceful example of how people in SL are prepared to deal with individuals, even long standing ones with no history of griefing at all, that simply don't fit into some agenda that has never been communicated in any way.

I will not be coerced in this fashion. Period. Again I state that no attempt, ever, has been made to communicate with me regarding plans for Natoma and the surrounding territory. I have done nothing wrong; Natoma has changed radically several times and I've basically been the rock in the middle of it, and that will NOT change as long as I play SL. There is no justification for this griefing at all.

You want me to change something on MY land, you approach me and see if I'm willing. If I'm not, consider some compromise. React in this manner, and you can expect me to ignore any subsequent requests, no matter how reasonable, forever.

Wow.

Something like that happened to me when I owned half of the island in Natoma. A player objected to what I built on my property (even though it was invisible from their land) and retaliated by buying strips of land around my island and walling me in.

These people are selfish kids who have absolutely no ability to think beyond their own wants. People who do stuff like that should be suspended on *all* of their accounts. I wish there was a more useful punishment, like confiscation of inventory and/or cash balance.

Good luck on this one, Tcoz.

Tcoz,

That was very immature for them to do. And I'm embarassed by it though I had nothing to do with it.

All I know is not all of us newer folks are like that. And I often feel ashamed when something like this happens. It gives newbies a bad name. I hope this matter gets resolved soon.

Completley unrelated to the actuall topic (which I tend to side with you on, people who bully like this suck), but that .gif is so hard to make out its almost impossible to tell whats going on.

I think it just takes a while to load. But it's basically 10 meter high walls around his house with a texture of a donkey on it and matching text reading "Jackasses."

That sign display ranks in the top 5 most immature, assinine things I have been privy to in my time in SL. I am sorry this happened Tcoz, but I am sure it can be construed as intentional disruption of the quality of gameplay for you and will probably be viewed as a TOS violation. NN

Poor Tcoz seems to attract idiots.

Hope its still there, need to add to my growing lists of negs!

Tcoz, this is a blatant violation of the Terms of Service, and I wholeheartedly endorse any abuse reports you may have submitted or are thinking of submitting.
FWIW, I love your build in Natoma and beg of you not to delete it, ever.
Let's just hope that these immature people will soon get tired or kicked out of SL.
Now, what on Earth are you doing, saving graphics files in that horrendous 20 year old file format?

that sucks guy sorry to hear.

report that. I mean thats not even close to cute. And those walls were way higher than 10 meters, more like 30.

Tcoz?

GIF files are bad for anything but cartoon type stuff.

JPGs are what you need to save stuff as.

Out of curiosity, I visited there last night. It looks like the walls were built by more than one person. At least one of the walls is now transparent on Tcoz' side... but that doesn't make it a good idea.

I'm used to .gif it because...

- you can background trans gifs. You can not do so with jpegs.

- You can interlace gifs. You can not interlace jpegs.

- You can animate gifs. You can not animate jpegs.

For this particular instance, yes, jpeg might have been the better choice for the blended colors and such. But...

...you want to talk about gif vs. jpeg, start another thread please.

...you would like to offer such advice, by name, to an individual, maybe IM them.

And now back to our regular scheduled program, "Good 'Neighbors''".

PNG can do everything GIF can, plus its not patent-encumbered, not 20 years old, and can actually have more than 256 colors...

Well it appears this thread is shot. Looks like it did it's work anyway.

Yes, PNG is good, especially related to OPACITY yahoo. But...

- PNG is not supported by all browsers (though I"m sure it eventually will be).
- You still can't animate a PNG. Not everybody wants to buy FlashMX to make a bird fly across a banner add.

I like gif becuase...

- "saying 'gif it' is catchier than saying 'jpeg' or 'png' it.

Oh get this...I log into SL today and am greeted with an offline neg rating message from my great neighbors.

They grief me, blantantly violate the TOS, start a land-wall battle, lose in spite of the fact my only retaliation was to make their actions known, and neg rate me.

Stunning characters I must say, and a helluva good example of why RATINGS HAVE TO GO.

Look, Tcoz, PNG was designed to replace GIF. Not only does it support transparency, it supports a full alpha channel... and yes, it "cant" be animated (DHTML anyone?), but its sister format MNG can, and animated gifs are universally hated anyways
Plus, this is 2004, all major browsers support PNG now. I should know, I used PNG in my former job as a web developer
If naming is a problem, call them pings, or something... lots of people do

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MNG

Tcoz, when the account is deleted, the negs go with it.

-Adam

I agree. I should have known better, but when I saw the wall for myself, I neg-rated the builder for it. After all, it's ugly and harrassing -- if ever there was a reason for negative ratings, this was it.

In return, I got neg-rated and the person filed an abuse report against me for "harassment". I'm not sure how this qualifies as harassment, but that's what she said.

I should have known that someone who would wall in their neighbour wouldn't have a reasonable response to a justified neg rating.

So yes. Neg ratings should go. And from now on, I'll try to avoid using them.

I negged her for the same reason

ping?

but PNNNUNGSH sounds so much more romantic!

ooh an tcoz im behind ya on that totally... way too many people in SL these days are so hypocritical on things like that its not even funny...

LOL eltee
Personally, I just call them Pee Enn Gees... a lot of people do seem to call them pings. But if they are POrtable Network GraphicS, shouldnt they be pongs instead?

whoah...pong... now theres a blast from the past

Pix!

Pix!

Pix!

DAMN they never push that button when I want...lemme try...

PIXPIXPIXPIXPIXPIXPIXPIX!

You have won Gun Fight for the NEW AMAZING Atari 2600 VIDEO GAMING SYSTEM!!!

HAVE FUN! Now back to Sunday Afternoon Martial Arts Theatre, featuring The Kid with the Golden Arm.

You insult my third removed sister's aunt on my mother's arranged marriage side, I will kill you!

Ah the good old days when video games were exactly that and nothing more.

Hey it's my thread dammit. Oh and Look, Eggy, I am currently a web developer (amonst other things), not formerly, and have been doing ot for 12 years professionally. I know wtf a png is and when/when not to use one. Easy there laddy. DHTML also not entirely uniform across even newer browsers, i.e. Firebird/Opera/IE. and you also have mobile browsers to account for nowadays, which cater to older formats...and writing multiple versions for multiple browsers is extremely inefficient, so lowest common denomitor server-side generated HTML is still the basic rule for public apps (though it's nice that finally we can pretty much abandon the 3.0+ schemas in favor of the 5.0+ for desktop browsing). It ain't just Netscape/IE anymore. DHTML also is often not permitted as it poses some security risks...oh we could go on and on I'm sure. Suffice to say there is more to issue than, "it's newer so it's better". When you can use them, yes. But often you can't. The trick of being a good web dev is knowing when that when is.