First come first assumed guilty? (Abuse Report)

I'd have more sympathy for overworked Lindens if it wasn't possible for a banned griefer to return within a few minutes with a newly-created alt.

What about me? Nobody gets on my nerves like myself.

You haven't heard about the hardware hash ban, have you Brendan?

Not a good idea to rachet up AR points with alts.
Eventually your main account, nay.. your entire computer, will pay the price.

Which of you are you trying to make disappear?

Hardware Bans are not effective, why do you think hardware banned greifers can come back in 5 minutes? They use there own open sourced client ever since LL released the code.

Amazing how so many people rush to the defense of manifestly failed policies whose effect is to enable griefers in continuing their abuse. And such horror at the thought that people (ok, avs) might actually presume to defend themselves! Something there apparently is that longs for a system in which they have the passivity of infants while beneficent parental "authority" somehow swaddles and protects them with no effort or responsibility on their part.

Meanwhile the griefers follow the observation of Friedrich Nietzsche (or would if they had ever heard of him): "I laugh at those who think themselves good because they have no claws."

And that "Authority" in this case is overwhelmed with other matters and makes a hash of it. Precious little swaddling and protection comes from the Lindens. You have noticed that, haven't you?

So it is necessary for the grown-ups to deal with this problem.

Bottom line: Griefers are disruptive to SL and its Residents. They are not merely irritating. They obstruct the legitimate business of Residents and disrupt legitimate Resident activities by whatever means is available to them. They prevent builders in sandboxes from working on products potentially of value to all of us. They terrorize newbies to the point, sometimes, of driving them to leave SL and not come back. They disrupt live events that can only be rescheduled with difficulty or not at all. They crash sims, denying their use to everyone.

It is necessary to get rid of them, or at least keep their depradations down to a manageable level. Much of that work has to be done when and where they appear. Some seem to be adolescents who do not understand that SL is not another shoot-em-up game, and those apparently can be educated. Some appear to be the sort of immature individual that "tests the limits," and will escalate bad behavior until limits are imposed on them; that, and only that, stops them. Others appear to come into SL with psychopathological personal motivations such as displaced rage, homophobia, free-floating hostility toward other categories like women, compulsive needs to express violent power and dominance over others, and the like, and are usually not open to reason. Often they operate free-lance, sometimes in pairs, and sometimes they organize into little "mafias." We are not dealing with rationality here, and we are not in a position to perform psychotherapy on them. Such persons will not stop until they are stopped. The problem is how best to make them stop.

If you are presented with a griefer, yes, you have the option of tp'ing away or logging off. Go ahead, do that, and you feed the problem. It is easy to do that - and it is irresponsible. You are then a BAD PERSON, because you are leaving the field and making it easier for the griefer to continue attacking other innocent and unsuspecting people - anywhere he sees a green dot on a map. You need to be ashamed of yourself - both for taking the cowardly way out and even more, for attempting to rationalize your cowardice into the illusion of a virtue. It is not a virtue. It is a grave moral failure on your part. It is fortunate that in SL the stakes lost by your moral failure are small. There are plenty of historical examples where the consequences of such moral failure were not small in the least.

What works here is the application of demonstrably superior and repeatable force and demonstrating the will to use it.

If you have landowner powers where the griefer is, the answer is easy: Freeze-eject-ban. Or better yet, Freeze-extensively-humiliate-then-eject-ban - because humiliation seems to have a strong deterrent effect on griefers. They tend not to come back after that, if they know you can and will do it again. (And in this case, if they do, they are banned anyway. Do be prepared for alts.)

In any other case, first step is to protect yourself - with defensive measures. Sitting on something is helpful (though there are "unsit" devices). There are shielding tools you can use. It is possible - this is highly recommended - to become non-phys. Being invulerable to their attack is indeed quite frustrating to most griefers. It is a key first step.

Second step is - govern your temper. As the OP learned, some griefers are trying to bait people into a situation where they can use LL's ill-conceived system against them. Do not let them. Besides, as the Italians say, Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

If you can summon a Linden or someone with landowner powers, that is your very next step. Most of the time, that option will not be available, but when it is, it makes your life easier, and drives away the griefer.

If, as usual, you can't get a Linden or a landowner or empowered landowner agent, next step is usually to stop the griefer, because he is being disruptive, and because in a griefer attack things are often moving quite fast, and because the sooner the griefer suffers consequences for his actions the more effective those consequences are likely to be. I personally do not like guns or other visible weapons that make a visible or audible commotion. Their use adds to the general uproar and perception of chaos, and reinforces the notion among some griefers that it's just a little game of cops-n-robbers. There are a number of devices that need not be visible at all that will make the griefer suddenly go far, far away and put him to some trouble to find his way back - only to be almost immediately sent far, far away again. (You will need to research these methods for yourself, sorry.) Griefers quickly realize they are the ones who look like losers in such a case, and they generally do not come back, because the one thing they do not want is to be confronted with being losers - again. If they do return, just send them away again.

At an early stage, it is very important to AR the griefer - with as much documentation as you can muster - and to encourage other witnesses to do the same. And to AR him for every possible ARable offense. Every time. Throw the book at him. The OP has reported one reason why: Some griefers are angling for an opportunity to AR YOU - and it is important to have your case reported and on file to offset their accusations. The other reason is, you are helping build a rap sheet on that av. Your AR might not be the final straw, but it will contribute to reaching the day the griefer will have to break in another av if he is to continue.

If your griefer(s) attempt to bait you in chat or IM, do not respond in kind - they are likely just trying to get a snippet out of you they can quote out of context (like some do in these forums) that makes you look bad without exposing their provocation. Instead, AR their verbal abuse. Again, every time. It is OK to tell them you are ARing them, if you want, but help build up that rap sheet in any case. Some say mute them. If you must, to control your temper; but better to let them hang themselves with their abuse. In my experience, the griefers who make verbal assaults condemn themselves very thoroughly with the irrational and abusive nature of their messages. (You may refute false accusations, of course, but always do so in a very mature and rational manner. Name calling is for suckers; let them be the suckers.)

How on earth do you know the other parties involved also didn't get mandatory one-day vacations? Or were they "friends" of yours, too?

Har's next brief Post will be a Short Story about Napoleon Invading Russia.

At this point we don't even know if there really were any griefers.


OP had a friend (or maybe a friend of a friend) who got a one day ban. Or who says they did. Or maybe OP says they said they did. I don't think we'll ever really know the real facts, whose land it was, or who did what. Or if any of this even ever happened.

Did you know that it was at Napoleon's insistence that the concept of canned food was invented, but it was another 30 years before the can opener was invented.

Which is why all those French dudes starved to death.

This is in response to Har's novella, which I will not requote for the sake of brevity.

Har, I generally agree with what you advise, but let's take a moment to note that the OP, in his original story, did not do anything you suggested.

He did not use defensive measures, and he did not govern his temper. He fought fire with fire AND failed to file his own AR, so that the authorities who do make suspension decisions had only one side's account to go on.

Of course, the OP later revealed that he'd been lying to us all along, so really, there is no good reason now to believe anything he says. Maybe something like this happened to a friend of his, maybe not. We'll never know.

Yay! I'm a category!



That's ridiculous...you're basically telling us it's that not only OK to sink to the griefers' level (pausing along the way to employ a few CYA tactics), we should feel morally obligated to do so because 'they started it.' That's hypocritical and just oh so elementary school. Besides, it's a game (or sim or whatever), not Nazi Germany...there's no reason to be so damn serious about it.

Someone feel free to call Godwin's Law on me.

I see where you're coming from, but the people examining the AR's dont have a video of then event like it's some sort of star trek log. The information they have is limited, and they saw via their logs that u were attacking them, and they banned you for a day for it. Read the suggestions in the above post. The best thing to do is to leave, as it gives the griefers on one to grief, and they move on. Come back 5 minutes later, and they're most likely gone. If it's your land, you have tools to keep you from being griefed. turn off build and bullets cant rez, turn off push and u cant be orbited. Griefing back is wrong, and to wrongs dont make a right. If you grief back, you run the risk of being AR'd, and suspended over it. Use the passive methods to fight griefing, dont get pissed and fly off the handle and fight back, you just lower yourself to their level.

What keeps getting lost is that OP was not attacking them. OP did not get banned. OP was apparently not even there.

OP *pretended* that he got banned for defending himself, but OP now says it happened to .. well, someone he knew.

To the "You have no right to defend yourself, ever!!!!" crowd: Stuff it.

To the "I shouldn't be punished for shooting griefers!!!!" crowd: Stuff it.

It's an imperfect world. Ideally, no, you shouldn't get punished for defending yourself. But it's not an idea world. LL has better things to do than play "he said she said" and pour over endless megabytes of arcane server logs trying to figure out who was "in the right". You can shoot back if you want - heck, I support you. Go for it. But you ARE breaking the rules, you KNEW you were breaking the rules, and you got punished for it - so shut up and stop whining, take your slap on the wrist like the adult you are supposed to be, then move on. The rules are the rules, and while I fully endorse trying to get unfair rules changed, don't expect to be exempt from the rules while you're doing your little moral-outrage protest.

Here it is:

Napoleon lost.

Moral of the story: Do not invade Russia.



It's relevant because Napoleon was an excellent case of a griefer who wasn't stopped. And ultimately one of the tactics I propose proved very, very effective: Sending him far, far away finally did the trick.

Napoleon later admitted he never really invaded Russia at all. It was a friend of his who did.

Of course, by the time he 'fessed up to that, it was too late, and all the history books have gotten it wrong ever since.

That's why the Napolionic Armies carried thier food in Cork and Wax Sealed Champagne Bottles. (It might be the origin of the term "Getting Stewed" but i am by no means certain of that)

Trust a French Woman to know

Angel.

...until 1811 when canned rations were introduced. They would use a hammer and small chisel to open the cans. The Royal Navy soon started to use cans aswell, with Donkin's of London being probably the biggest manufacturer of canned soups and stews in the world during the first half of the 19th century.

"Napoleon" was a douche.

Despite being French, he was a tactical genius. The structures of all modern armies are based on the ideas he implemented. Specifically when it came to the use of artillery in pitched battles. The idea of using artillery to demoralise troops in formation had never really taken hold - artillery was considered only of use in sieges previously.

I didn't say he was an idiot.

I was refering to war and peace.



You left out a lot of drama.


Okay I get it.

when you comment on something that takes 10 sentences like griefing we getting a book.

When You write on "War and Peace", we get a caption.

He wasn't French, he was a Corsican, a fact that was frequently Disparaged among the Lower ranks of his own Armies.

There's that French broad again

Angel.

He also wasnt short, but of average height.

A badly translated French to English Measurment is the blame for that great rumor.