Relatively easy ways to stop griefing

There have been many, many reports of griefers causing problems for users, while claiming to be "newbies" and "unaware of the rules". Considering their hoard of weapons and expertise in their use, it's obvious this is not the case. Linden Lab has been known to give obvious griefers "second chances" while at the same time punishing users for defending themselves. Is this a balanced policy?


No one asks LL to permanently ban a griefer; the second-chance concept is a good one. But at the very least a 3-day ban for any griefing activity might be considered warranted, to drive the point home.

At this time, the average non-sim-owning user is pretty much powerless against a griefing attack. If they fight back, they can be banned themselves for "breaking TOS". This is a shame, because while griefing takes several forms, there are relatively easy ways to stop it... ways that might have been proper to institute months ago.

1. Since the majority of griefing involves PVP, yet some legitimate games and features use PVP.... give individual users the option of turning PVP on and off. If it's not on, PVP, caging, bullets etc have absolutely no effect at all. When they hit, their scripting is automatically turned off.. thus rendering even special effects useless. There could be some sort of indicator when PVP is turned off during a PVP attack in order to prevent people from cheating at games and to let people know that they are being attacked. Of course, this function would default to "on".

2. Eliminate "nuke" devices by limiting the amount of the same item that can be replicated within a given area during a certain amount of time. That will take some balancing of course... but then... doesn't all gaming?

3. Give sim owners and land owners the ability to not only ban people from a land... but if a ban is initiated, remove that person immediately from the land. That way sim owners won't be standing there waiting for the griefer to leave for the ban to take effect-- it takes effect immediately.

4. Remove the static "50 person max ban) and allow land owners to ban as many people as necessary to protect their lands. The current need to use external security devices is expensive and a royal pain to set up.

Those are just 4 possibilities. I'm sure folks can think of more (and some may disagree with the above)... but at least the subject-- and need-- is out there for discussion. The best way to eliminate griefing from SL is to render the griefer powerless and give people immediate recourse from griefer attacks. Basically, that requires more of a proactive stance from LL than seen to date. We appreciate the concept of the police blotter, but it seems poorly conceived and executed, seldom offering the victims a chance for closure, for it does not inform them of precise actions taken toward a situation.

Might mention too, that since the expanded logon functions (basically a big, hairy sign telling people that attacks against other users can result in banning from the board), I think the concept of "giving griefers second chances" is a little worn-out and out of date. I don't know of any reason a newbie should be able to convincingly claim "I didn't know". What more do they need, a statement scrolling across the screen every 5 minutes?

Some boards use a 30 second signup delay for such pages to insure that the user recognizes the importance of that screen. That might be a valid concept to employ, for then griefers would have absolutely no basis for claiming "I didn't know".

Why is this important? Because griefers cost Linden Lab money. There is no way of telling how much of course, but surely it is significant enough for them to realize that every minute spent dealing with a griefing is taking resources that could be spent elsewhere. Griefers drive away legitimate users and ruin the games of valid players, which of course, is exactly why they grief. Nothing will stop griefing altogether, but certainly some policies could be initiated that makes it less enjoyable and offers less potential to do so.

Basically, you want to stop a griefer, establish a history of royally kicking their behinds. Every time.

I'm not sure if I understand this, but when PVP is turned off, any object heading towards you avatar would need to check your PVP status, if on carry on going, if off stop in mid-air or derez?

I may have got it completely wrong, but that'd be awful. Theres no way to tell if an object moving towards your avatar has negative intentions. It'd create a lot of lag (I believe) and stop all sorts of things working.



So if I want to rez a big build, hold a building contest etc, I'll get a message telling me I'll have to wait? And I'm pretty sure it'll take less physics prims than people may want to rez at any given time for any given reason to crash a sim.



Agreed.



Agreed.

I, personally, want the freedom to retaliate in one way: Passive entrapment. I'm developing a shield at the moment for my non PvP endevours (read: almost all the time) that will keep me from being blown sky high, stop bullets, and cage repeated attackers with a verbal kill command on the cage (so I can free them if I want, or if asked by someone in charge). Caging in this manner is their own damned fault and would stop the attacker from using a good majority of weapons directly (like direct fire push guns and grenade launchers that are sadly and moronically available for free when they shouldn't be!). It also has the novelty of letting them get bored on their own and leaving, thus ending the drama. I don't feel in this case that I should be penalized for stopping a griefer, especially if locking them up gives me a chance to force them to listen to the rules they're so conveniently unaware of.

No, much easier way to do this. One thing that's required in any PVP "bullet" is to determine if it has struck an avatar. If it were hard-coded into SL that anything striking an avatar with PVP turned off would auto-derez, that would do the trick. The check would only have to be made once (upon contact with the avatar) thus preventing lag or other problems.





No, one could rez a building or similar such. What would be stopped would be rezzing of identical objects within a certain period of time. Nukes work on the principle of binary multiplication.. 2..4..8..16... and it builds fast. The system could simply test for repeated auto-rezzing of the same object on a piece of land, and once it hits, say, 128 within a 60 second period, call a halt to it. This would have to be balanced and adjusted to find the right count and time period, but could be done, thus rendering nukes non-functional.

That sounds like a great idea. The other day I saw someone who had an "autofire" system that would instantly blast someone who PVP attacked. Since he didn't intentionally fire at the person and the firing was triggered by an attack in the first place, would be difficult to find the victim at fault.

So you could grief people by turning PVP off and flying in front of their planes.

A cage is just another weapon. It's slightly less annoying than a huge push, but it's still a weapon. (One can always TP out and TP back as well.)

If you want the freedom to grief griefers then fine but I wouldn't expect a lot of sympathy from any Linden who comes along to arbitrate if it all gets out of hand, unless you've got loads of witnesses, and perhaps not even then. And it's not a terribly good idea in any case if you actually want to stop attacks - it just encourages people to take more and more action, it becomes a challenge. You're probably not going to have the persistence of a dedicated griefer in this regard.

If, say, somebody is persistently coming into a sandbox and harassing everyone, bombing and bananaphoning, and it's been reported and there's no response and there's no other alternative apart from leaving in the middle of a complex build that you've been doing, then I'd consider turning on one of my autoguns, but I'd be more likely to just move to another sandbox and continue from an old version. I actually want to build, not piss about playing silly buggers with some teenager.

Well the point of passive caging is like hold a kid having a tantrum: They piss and moan, kick and scream, but after they've worn themselves out things end up better off. Only in this case the kids either leave (teleport to escape) and may not come back because they'll only be caged again, or they may listen to reason and stop firing. In Luskwood last week a griefer was dealt with in a similar fashion, everyone was sitting anyways so no harm could come of high explosives anyways, but a gravity gun was used to stop a rampaging super push pillow wielder long enough to tell them that their actions were wrong.

The point is that the use of one particular type of weapon doesn't mean that you're going to get any sympathy for the simple fact of using it. A cage, a push, whatever. I've been caged by griefers before.

We released ourselves on our own recognizance. What Evelle means to say is, we felt the institution no longer had anything to offer us.

No, what Evelle really meant to say was why not put a sign on Orientation Island:Okay, so I guess I am an idealist after all.

Suggestion #1 wouldn't work well. You'd have people exploiting it to "godmode" combat areas in legit combat situations, and that introduces to SL the same balance and exploit issues that plague games like EVE-Online and WoW. You'd be giving everyone free license to pull the 1st-grade playground "you can't do that, cuz I'm invincible" trick.

I think maybe a "personal standings" list would be better. Similar to a system used in EVE-Online, you would be able to set standings toward a person based on their interactions with you. In the future, their textbox with their name would appear in red if negative, blue if positive, brown if neutral. This could apply to groups as well. Setting standings to negative/red would trigger a flag that makes any object activated by the person flagged as hostile toward you have no effect. This would naturally extend to purchased products as well, which would keep people wanting others to have a positive impression of them. A vendor who ends up with red standings with a lot of people would be forced out of business.

Positive standings, if possible, would maybe lead to a flag checked by an object scripted to check it, which may provide additional benefits (VIP access, discounted prices, etc), whereas a negative standing would restrict access to your creations or actually INCREASE the price by 150%.

To prevent this from being abused, I'd tie the flagging directly to the ban list on your land(s). That way you can't just waltz into a combat zone, flag everyone in it to red, and enjoy godmode.

I doubt that the sign method would work for a few technical and a few prejudged reasons:

1. Technical:
   1. Sign textures don't rez that fast for most people (related to prejudice item 2)
      
   2. There's no way to prevent people from getting free/super cheap weapons before reading that kind of notice (gun control through licensing?)
      
   
   
2. Prejudice:
   1. Newbies are mostly illiterate. See gun, shoot gun, get confused when people talk about rules
      
   2. Most people don't have the patience to read a set of rules (seriously, when was the last time you read the manual for something like Quake or Half Life?)
      
   3. Some people are just asshats and will go against the grain even if they know it's wrong
      
   
   

I like the idea of personal or group flagging, however for the most part it would net the arms people a whole lot of red flags as much of SL is non-combative. An increase in cost is not feasable in that instance as it'd kill that person's or group's ability to make ANYTHING for sale in SL (as not all arms makers are solely arms makers). Whether those restrictions should apply within a combat zone either is another matter.

Perhaps land restrictions that prevent weapon systems by a certain group/person from functioning, or an exclusion factor that prevents ALL weapons not made by a certain group/person or list of persons from functioning. That way you could specify a combat zone with only trusted firearms, or restrict ALL weapons from a sim (as sims like TeaZers isle, the Forest, and Lusk have rules about). Being able to restrict scripts from functioning except by certain people or groups would definantly solve that issue.

Hopefully gun-makers take initiative and use the new llGetParcelFlags command to check if the land under the weilder has PVP turned on. Old guns can be retrofitted to use this check without modifying the sourcecode of the gun script by adding a script that turns off all other scripts in the object when not over pvp land.

The problem is that the program would be voluntary, and would likely create a black market for guns that arent limited.

Im against auto-derezzing physical objects that hit an avatar on the grounds that it would hinder game development - I know of a few legitimate games that entail avatars colliding with physical objects. llPushObject has been nerfed so much that its no longer useful for anything involving precision movement - unfortunately all nerfing it has done is increase its use as a blunt-push greifing tool.
==Chris

ok maybe this is way out there but what about giving the property owner the ability to turn off PvP on their land much like we can turn off scripts.

Seems to me like this would be low lag.

The technical ones could be solved by putting the notice on the sign-up screen before they ever get anywhere near the client... and requiring the new account owner to click a checkbox before continuing. JUST that sign. Anyone who can't read that wouldn't have been able to create an account in the first place.

PvP *is* off by default in all lands, it has to be turned on.

The problem is people using things that aren't designed to be used for PvP as griefing tools.

A black market wouldn't be all that horrible. If gun makers used the code in all their new guns, then that would stem the supply. The black-market "pre-safety" guns would be rediculously expensive and, since many griefers don't sit around in SL making money because they're busy griefing, it would cost the user RL cash just to grief in the first place.

It would also revitalize the security industry, as they can acquire these weapons for themselves and use them on the very people who would exploit them.

No matter how you shape it up, if the objects and characters are removed or deleted as the griefing continued, the supply of those guns would get smaller and smaller until they became items for collectors that stayed in a gun case to "show off" in houses and weapons stores. Other than the rare person here and there selling the now "priceless" pre-safety gun to someone who uses it, then loses it, the entire problem would be curbed itself. Sure, there might be the sporadic griefer that codes one themselves, or a black market handler that makes them (conspiracy to grief, much?), but the nature of the griefer is that they are lazy and looking for a cheap thrill. Coding a gun just for 20 minutes of being a jerk is going to be too much work for them, and many just don't know how.

How hard is it to give a free copy push gun to everyone you know?

True, but then how hard is it for the Lindens to check the logs and see where those guns came from before a mass grief?

It's not, and we seem to be forgetting that there are many free weapons to be found, right next to the free textures and free misc. tools vendors. But if it were an enforced rule by LL that "all weapon systems may only be used on your land or must have a safety system that prevents their firing outside of a combat zone" then it would be a simple matter of reporting a griefer, having their inventory confirmed as loaded with safety free weapons, and then subsequently have them suspended for a day.

not perfect but we've been runing a send home system for awhile now that has pretty good effect, when any of a number of 'admin' people trigger the device, it sends the perpetrator home, and adds them to the ban list, its the only way to even begin to combat griefing on the mainland.

basically once they boot up, anyone with access just has to say 'gohome <name>' in general chat, and the person is banned, and sent home, its that easy

Even on islands tools like that help because YOU choose who can do what, via say access lists, so people who aren't in groups (or the island owner) can still have the ability to keep vicious/nasty jerks at bay.

of course revised group tools, eliminating the land ban cap, and right click for 'ban and send home' would be nice too O.O

what we do NOT condone is using pvp to combat pvp, and we *will* yell at 'vigilantes' doin that to griefers because honestly, it only opens them up to valid ar's too... stick with the provided land tools, and a warning couldn't hurt either.

(ooh one last note, if group objects could IM people to give warnings, automatically, that would REALLY help)

We're not talking about combat zones here. We're talking about personal, private land. On battle lands like Jessie... just as it is now, all functions are full-bore. But I think most folks will agree that SL battlezones leave much to be desired. The health system that auto-teleports people home is wide open to "instant kill, long distance" weapons. The allowance of PVP can allow one shot to blast people clear out of the sim. That's why we see more battles fought on private sims than on public battle sims such as Jessie... they're better designed and organized.

As far as the comment by someone above that people would "grief others by standing in the way of planes"... LOL. I can't even take that seriously.

There is always some childish moron that will think up yet another way to grief people. Nothing is perfect. But removing the main avenues of griefing (pvp abuse, nuking, caging) will prevent most occurrences. One guy used to grief people by burning crosses on their lawns. Easily photographed, easily reported, easily perma-banned.

I think I stated above that there is no way to 100% stop griefing. But if you could stop say, 70%.. 80%... that would certainly be a significant improvement.

This has already been taken into consideration and a resolution suggested. It was mentioned that whenever someone has PVP turned off, a visible sign of this would show up if they were pushed (maybe a yellow glow would outline them or something) along with a text announcement to the attacker and the victim that a PVP attack had been negated. A visible sign of PVP refusal would, as stated above, prevent cheating in PVP-oriented games.

But in truth, the "game interference" argument doesn't hold up at all. People can already wear anti-push devices that are totally invisible. These devices basically root them to the ground and turn themselves on and off automatically depending on movement. So there are already ways to cheat games. That potential should not prevent steps being taken to help people defend themselves against unauthorized attacks.

I agree that this is probably a "definitely needed" aspect. In truth, I think such a thing already exists. But LL needs to be more consistent in enforcing it. Every time a newbie claims "I didn't know" and a Linden buys that bogus claim, I feel like blasting the Linden. LOL.

LOL. Surely not. As one user very aptly one-lined it...

How hard is it to give a free copy push gun to everyone you know?