Waterhead Welcome Area & Griefing

First of all, my apologies if I am posting in the wrong forum. Many residents know about Waterhead. It is one of the "unofficial" hang-out area for griefers and their groupies and it is also an official welcome area for newbies...right next to Linden Village. Being in such close proximity of such a well known LL establishment, it boggles my mind as to why so much griefing occurs there.

There is a small group of guys and a couple of their hanger-on female friends who believe it is their god given right to stand around the Waterehead Welcome Area and say and do as they please. To them, they have a right to say things like nigger and constantly put down black people or use the term gooks when describing Asians. They love wearing Nazi uniforms, using soundclips like seig heil and hurling racial slurs at people. The thing is, I don't even think they are being serious. But, they have this notion that to be cool or laid back or open minded, you have to be offensive. And, so they are. They think they have a right to be offensive and use offensive terminology. They think they have a right to use push guns, orbiters, and generally curse and scream on voice chat at each other and at innocent people most of who are extremely new to Second Life. If they don't like you, they gang up on you and will use the foulest language and offensive terminology possible to push you out. Don't leave? You get orbited out. They basically take over voice chat and use it as their own vehicle for spreading chaos throughout the welcome area. A couple of them even talk about using copybots because they refuse to pay for anything. Parasites to the system, indeed.

Now, many other people go there just for the laughs. I was one of them. At first, I thought these guys were cool. They seemed like old timer residents who also seemed to be creative at making weird avatars and weapons. But, after spending some days listening to them, I have come to realize that these people, for whatever reason, are being mean spirited simply because they want to be and because they can...get away with it. They believe they have a right to be in Waterhead and act the way they do.

Day after day, their accounts are AR'd and banned. Mentors and police groups often patrol the area, monitor and report. An invisible Linden is occasionally around for insta-bans. Truth be told, more pressure is being applied lately because even the griefers are complaining about the frequency of losing alts.

I don't have a solution to this problem other than forcing residents to pay for a subscription. It is a sad fact that free accounts are both a bane and a boon to LL. These people can change IPs, emails, MAC addresses and come right back after being banned and continue their behavior. Some of them leave $1 linden on their alts because they claim that any avatar with $L will never get banned.

So, what to do? There needs to be a presence there. Someone who can insta-ban. I think the only solution short of removing free accounts is to staff that area for as many hours of the day possible. They are generally active U.S. time and can be seen griefing throughout the morning to the late evening. Yes, they have no lives.

Anyway, I'm just posting this as a heads up. I'm sure LL is already aware of the problems in Waterhead. This is a Welcome Area and so more attention should be paid to it. General offensive behavior should not be tolerated. It should not be up to me to mute them if I don't like what they're saying. We should be better people than that and not resort to such foolish and mean spirited behavior. If they want to express themselves like that, they should go to their own sim and act like animals. They specifically target Waterhead as a base of operations because there are newbies there and it is so easy to grief. When they get bored at Waterhead, one of them always suggests griefing another sim (usually an RP one). Is this what is to become of Second Life? Especially with the introduction of voice chat?

So, yeah, that's my rant. Have a nice day!

Only Waterhead? (o.o) Have you seen Ahern, Korea, or Hanja? Most welcome areas are cliqued simply because they're an easy place to hang out and expect a pile of people to be there, even if they're all gullible first-timers. Actually, especially if they're all gullible first-timers. (^_^)

Most of what I see in Waterhead is tired old *chan board memes shouted in chat and phys guns. At best, it's pretty boring and hardly offensive anymore. (=_=)

I don't think I'll ever outgrow the madness of Hanja, but, I am finding more fun in wandering around the grid and espcially in spending time in NCI. Having a secure and staffed sandbox makes for loads of fun, and once in a while I can still pass the time with a little phys-spam for the LULZ. (^_^)y

So long as Linden Lab allows unlimited anonymous account creation, these losers will come back again and again, no matter how often they are banned. It's a revolving door in the jail. an them, and they come back minutes later, laughing about how easy it is to create a new account. They lose NOTHING when their griefer account gets banned. So they don't care.

Even requiring them to pay a small fee to create new accounts won't stop them. After all, we had griefers when you still had to pay for every alt account. They will find a way to get their jollies at other people's expense. Credit card fraud or just paying for it like a would-be burgular buying a "Saturday Night Special" from a fence.

If every new account required a verifyable Player's identity, and if people could therefore be banned from creating new accounts because that Player had been banned for previous account activity, that would help a lot.

But it STILL wouldn't stop the determined ones, who would stoop to identity theft and credit card fraud to continue...

It is an unfortunate reality there here in a virtual world where you can choose to be anyone or anything you like, some people choose to be a**holes. When you strip away all of the conventions of society and see people for who they really are, some are not very nice individuals.

As Mrs. Showdog Tiger would say "there are some people who need a good spay and neuter program too."

Waterhead is a teenage wasteland.

It's kinda funny to watch the hyperactive children
there, just bumping into each, pushing...silliness!

Well, I just needed to vent. I am fully aware that Waterhead isn't the only place. I just think about the newbies and having to deal with these morons upon arrival to SL. Ah well. I have decided to devote my time in SL to combating these people. I shall learn the ways of the force! Or, at least try to become a mentor.

Waterhead...a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

So true, Pablicious. Applause for your intention to go and Clean Up the town, too. A number of us spend time there, trying to get to the newbies before they run afoul of the pack of asshats.

Nothing solves the problem, but having a mentor or two around (or even just a few friendly, helpful people) goes a long way to counteract it.

I try to stop by there every so often, too. Such a pretty location, and such unpretty types hangin there.

Hey! That is the description of the Cartel Hangout. But we are nice scum and villains.

They just crave attention from newcomers, Lindens, mentors and the like. Just redirect all new people to other welcome areas. I know the Lindens can do that. Then we just forget about the griefers over there.

True. When I wrote that quote, I heard Alec Guinness saying it in my head. When I see the sign at the Hangout, I hear Soji saying it in my head. Makes all the difference.

Waterhead is worse than the others because it allows rezzing of objects where the others, guns etc just done't work and then if it comes to a battle of wits, they are armed with plastic spoons

The A/B project (http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/04/15/announcing-linden-labs-ab-testing-program/) is about to start (or just started) and a number of newbies will be dropped off at a limited number of infohubs without ever having seen OI or HI (they do get a "tutorial", if you have the RC viewer it's available under the Help menu) to see if it helps retention.

That would make more oversight at infohubs (and welcome areas) necessary or those new residents will end up griefed before they even get their first glimpse of SL.

ARs from infohubs and WAs already get a boost as well to make sure they bubble up to the top faster than a regular AR elsewhere.

That quote has been applied to WAs before - sad that it is a perfect fit.

All the WAs are networked by the same ppls and alts, they just cycle through them.
Wish there were more places to chat up random friends, sort Inventory, IMs, help real new ppls w/o all that BS.

One could hang out at sites like the Shelter or NCI locations.

The thing about the griefers down at Waterhead is that they are so silly that watching and listening to them is almost like going to a freak show to laugh at the lunatics. In RL, that would be totally unacceptable but in SL I guess it's OK!

You have got to be kidding. If I had been dumped at an info hub on my first login, I wouldn't have lasted a day, tutorial or not.

And, with these places in the state they are currently in, I wouldn't have stayed an hour.

And even if the ARs do get a boost, the griefers are back in minutes to do the same.

I spent yesterday morning in Waterhead to see what all the hubbub was about. There was a guy 5 months old running around insulting the appearance of some of the newer girls, while someone else with a rez date of 2004 was caging people in giant pill bottles and bouncing them all over the place while playing vulgar gestures and spewing out other profanities. It didn't take me long at all to remember why I was avoiding those types of places.

I find it kind of funny that as bored as I can get in SL sometimes, I still haven't visited any welcome area other than Ahern, and I've never been to an Infohub. Might just be entertaining lol.

Perhaps the silver lining in this particular cloud is the (seeming) fact that the griefers who hang out in Waterhead, tend to stay there. Perhaps it would be prudent to leave Waterhead to them, at least for the moment. Create NEW newbie-drop-off points elsewhere, places that are comparatively pristine. Perhaps some non-Linden landowners could host such areas. Then, it will be as a clean slate - the areas could be "patrolled" in a sense, such that problem users are ejected right away, before enough of them can gravitate to the place long enough to form an attachment to it.

havok4 makes it harder for the greifers to crash a sim, i hope you know, so DONT WORRY ABOUT IT!

YOUR GIVING THEM WHAT THEY WANT!

ever hear oen with his mic open?

i have over at FN (furnation) once,

he he *chomping potato chips*
*sound of mom calling faintly*
"IM DOING MY HOMEWORK!" yells the little kid
*laughing faintly while talking to people on WoW*
"yea, hold on, guys i gotta pwn some furfags"

The primary concern seems to be that people would rather start clueless than have to "suffer" through any kind of orientation. They want SL *now*, not in 5 minutes.

That, coupled with the fact that some newbies never find their way off of OI (there's a big sign they click to get a landmark, but apparantly that's too complicated for a lot of people already) although I have to wonder whether you can ever retain someone who just can't figure out how to leave OI.

Well on my 5th alt, I'm buggered if I could work out how to get off OI, I eneded up sending a TP offer from my main and even took 4 frustrated newbies out with me.

And imagine if your first experience of SL was a naked obcene avatar pushing and pinning you into a corner withing 5 seconds of rezzing. I've seen this behaviour go on for hours unchecked, new people logging out within minutes, and the rest of us being less experienced ourselves could only offer the new people landmarks they didn't know hoow to use. We ended up having to pin this idiot in a corner ourselves as multiple AR's had no result.