Rude newbies / fake newbies

I am seeing more and more rude 'newbies' lately, some of which I KNOW are faking being 'new' (IE they have to be an alt for an experienced Player...).

I've had several of them just come waltzing into my home, as if it was some sort of public park. Now, I'll admit, we are close to the telehub point, and if you happen to just select that sim to TP to, you'll appear facing pretty much right at our house. Our home does NOT look like some sort of business or public place! Yet they come walking right on in and start having a look around, walking right by me, without so much as a 'hello'? How rude!

Now, some are not too bad. I try to be polite. I say hello, and inform them that they are in my home. The nice ones are at least polite when confronted nicely. They apologize for intruding, maybe talk politely for a few minutes, and then walk off. I don't mind these so much. I try to be polite and informative, and hopefully they leave with a clue.

But we had one today who walked in, and started insulting us. Before he walked in, he and a buddy of his had started building something on an open area of our parcel, right in front of our home! There is no advertized sandbox anywhere in our sim! He was told to leave, and they both did... leaving their prims behind. The prims were promptly returned to them, by the person in our household who owns the property...

Either of those could just be clueless newbies... Rude, completely lacking in any sense of social manners, but possibly merely clueless.

But we had one in the last couple days who walked in on two people in our household, at a decidedly intimate moment. Supposedly a 'newbie', according to his profile and proclaimed status. But you show me a *real* newbie that knows how to find his way into *an underground room*, more than 30 M from any ground-level point! A room with no open stairs, ramps or even teleporters that lead there! There is no indication on the surface that the room exists. What newbie would even know it was there! Let alone know a way to get in? That HAD to be an experienced Player, who was intentionally using an alt to look for situations like that.

UMMM U lost me when U said telehub point. There are no more telehubs, just our own landmarked destinations for folks to land.

Not on private sims.

Oh you been notice that too!

Well get use to it its just going to get worse.

Welcome to the new world of SECOND LIFE Alts Hell...........

We love you Philip Linden..........

Let me just say for the record, I LOVE nOObs.

l33t!!!

I like real newbies.

Unfortunatly since 90% of the "newbies" that have been hitting my money tree lately aren't "newbies" at all, but a well coordinated group of money farmers....I've taken it down.

I'm not against helping people to get a start in the game, but when people make a business of exploiting other peoples goodwill...well its no longer viable.

I am not a fan of this new no identify verification system. It leaves things far too open to exploitation by someone with a good proxy server and alot of time of their hands.

A parcel owner on the mainland can still designate a landing point, and the default coordinates for the sim itself fall within our parcel. So our landing point is right on the edge of our parcel, adjacent to a protected river area. If we turn on the access limits, they end up on the banks of the river.

On private islands, telehubs still exist. I am an estate manager for two such sims.

Sorry to hear about fake newbies raping money trees. That's pretty low...

I like real newbies - people who want to learn how to enjoy SL. I spend a lot of time in another RP realm as a 'hostess' in their equivalent of Orientation Island and the Welcome Areas. It's the rude ones and the fake ones that bug me.

As far as I can tell, the new system provides no limits whatsoever on how many alts you can create, other than the limits of your inventiveness in producing fake names and valid e-mail accounts. I think this new method sucks, big time.

Might I make two suggestions?

1. A big fence (there are some nice fence textures out there.) right across the front of your lot, possibly set to invisible on your side, so as to discourage people from just walking right in.

2. A security orb in your underground retreat, set for a limited range, and switched on when you're engaged in something "intimate"?

A security orb has the advantage of allowing people who don't own the land to still get rid of unwanted intruders. And setting it to a limited range and turning it on only when you *really* don't want company keeps it from keeping out legitimate visitors the rest of the time.

As Jack Harker pointed out :
1) Set your land's auto-return to something small, like 3 minitues... then forget about the prims.
2) When you want privacy, either set your parcel to allow only people in a group you pick (and are officer of, so you can invite/eject people), or get a security orb, and set it to TP home anyone who stays on your property for more then 15 seconds.

Actually, I kind of prefer to set it for about 20 minutes, as that tends to be enough time for them to get well into a build, but not enough time to link stuff before their build returns to them as a bunch of individual prims all named object.

a friend and i are sitting at my place. she tells me she just got a random im from someone she's never met asking for money. her name starts with E. mine starts with F. a few minutes later i get the same IM. someone's seemingly just going down the find list, asking for moneys.

i've had this happen before on occasion, and shrugged it off, but in the past days i've been getting several im's every day from random people i've never heard of (all brand new accounts) saying "can i borrow 200l?". often in bad english.

think this is one person remaking alts and panhandling, or a new fad?

got the same thing i was chatting with some friends and one after the other we got the said IM

Cant forget the power of no build, no script. Who needs autoreturn? (well of course someone could drive into your land, then you would need it)

Well, on my own land,a major part of what we *do* there is build, and we have a lot of scripted stuff, and really too much stuff that's not set to group to actually *use* auto-return. But it's the thought that counts.

OMG. I had this happen too... and my name starts with F as well, bet we got hit up at the same time. I was with my girl at the time, and calmly replied that the IM was intrusive, and closed the window. Bam, IMs me back with a mouthful... I said, I'm with my girl, please stop bothering me. I won't even repeat what came next, but it was offensive and made me angry, to say the least.

Sadly, I think the true newbies will be the losers in all of this. I am far less inclined to offer any assistance to a new resident, in the face of this torrent of alts that have been unleashed upon us.

Ok my alt violated a money tree...BUT.. she paid it back.

See when I was a real newbie, I spent the first week kind of wandering around knowing nothing and I had been told the money trees were there and I checked one out. But there were people around and it was sooo stupid but I actually felt embarassed to take the money from it. LMAO

So anyway when I created my alt, (lana Birdbrain btw ) One of the places I popped into had a money tree and I decided, I wanted to see how this worked. So I plucked a 5 L$ banana! Then I donated 20 L$ cuz I felt dumb LOL

EDIT: Oh and my alt was before all this new no credit card mess.

I have experienced this as well. Mainly in the form of a decline in the talkativeness of newbies who wander to my islands or stores. To a "hello" it is less likely to get a response. I have also had an increase in avatars just IM'ing me asking for money.

It was even worse the other day when a newbie started IM'ing people saying pretty annoying stuff (including to me). He got the privilege of being the first ever banned avatar from my grid.

I'm kinda leaning towards drawing the conclusion that this is a direct consequence of the loosened age verification on signup...

I had someone build a house on my beach - I have auto return set to 60 mins so folks can have pool and beach parties - so once it reached the point where they were furnishing it - U just returned all items not owned by me.

The sound of 200 objects hitting an inv is an evil evil sound.

But then again so was my chuckle.

Unfortunately the biggest problem of having to set your "auto return" is; if you rent vendor spaces or anything such then you MUST make a group for such partial of land so that all your vendors MUST join this group as not to have their items auto returned.

Now this is not really THAT bad, except that we have a limit of 15 groups. Now in the name of diversity I think it's sad that creators are then forced to limit their groups to their vendor locations. No room for entertainment? No room for favorites? No room for any other specialized groups you may take any interests in?

Personally I end up veering away from most vendor markets when I find out there's a group to join. Not to mention it would really suck if I went shopping and couldn't check out the things I buy while I was there (might interest me in buying more before I leave???)


I don't think it's that going out of the way to check my land a couple times a day to be sure there's not a missuse of the prims. It's NOT that BIG of a deal and it takes very little time to do it.

If by some miracle that SL actually heard the many requests I've seen for at least a limit raise if nothing at all then by all means I'll have no problems designating as well as signing into more groups for that purpose. But so far the attempts seem to have fallen on deaf ears.

As for the recent onslaught of newbies all I can say is O.M.G with capitol O.M.G
yep bigtime and it gets worse everyday.

Random IM begging me for money - CHECK
Newbie trying to sell me freebies on my own land - CHECK
Newly created account trolling every forum post in the last hour - CHECK

Looking good Linden Labs.

People building on someone elses land with autoreturn set are proberbly genuine newbies, as non newbies would know how pointless that is.

With a lack of restraint comes the crowd. From the MMO forums to the bored young crowds of people looking for the next big time-filler,Second Life has opened it's gates to chaos and confusion,but also to new people who can now try SL pressure-free.

Now comes the test of how well the 'social neighbourhood watch' works in repelling young people from the Main Grid,preventing griefers from arising among the new player crowd and of course the ALT scams to come. And making sure the genuine new players (they exist) are treated well.

Two things may happen.

1: Second Life will fall to the ever-rising tide of scamming alts and new player griefers,causing a dramatic change in policy. Money trees may disappear altogether,stricter policies on checking Alts may begin,etc.
There could even be some sort of "attack" on the new player population; people may begin to completely cut off their prims to all but their trusted friends, Newbie centres may start asking Lindens or Helpers to strictly check every SINGLE new player who enters their place. People may stop helping new players and a stereotype formed. New players entering areas may be faced with more pushers/orbiters/security scripts/general GTFO out consensus.
As a result,Second Life becomes a not very newbie-friendly game,and thus SL falls into dark times. First impressions are all that interested players hear about. Just look at how Dark and Light is viewed; crap and buggy. Imagine a new player reading forums and hearing SL; crap,unfriendly,grief-ville.
Yeah,they are going to want to play a game on that basis.

2: Second Life beats the griefers,beats the scamming alts and this is more likely to come from either strict vigilance of the SL community in punishing and identifying the griefers/alt scammers, or by LL restoring a stricter Basic Account registration.
The latter looks unlikely as I'd imagine LL wants a higher resident total to compete. Especially after making bold claims that 'SL will own WOW in 2 years'. Not that this is a bad thing of course.
If people identify the alt scammers,report them and LL does its part in punishing them,new griefers will realise their kind are not tolerated and will play fairly/leave, the alt scammers risk their main accounts being banned and will stop, and young people sent to the right Grid asap.
SL is viewed as being tough on crime and genuine new people should hopefully see that the SL community is nice to the genuine new players,thus making SL better. SL survives and grows.

So what if L$ beggars may IM you? If they (and we) are decent people tell them how to make money,encourage them and say L$ isnt the be-all and end-all of Second Life and show them some help if needed. Of course if you feel they are spamming you just ignore them or AR them if necessary. They'll get the right message either way.

So what if more new players make Furry/other SL culture avatars? It's their right to choose what they want,even if they want to do it to be popular in SL.

So what if new players don't have L$ from the start? If we tell them how to gain money easily (if they really want it) or perhaps help them along the way a little bit if you see them as genuine new player and also a kind genuine new player,they will learn to gain their own money however they please and can then enjoy shopping,etc. And they won't mind having to work a little to get it,and will feel better having earned it.

CONCLUSION: As long as we don't let the Basic Account change turn us into newbie-hating stereotypical SL'ers,and punish the scammers/griefers (and direct the young people to the right grid), Second Life will endure and the genuine new players will enjoy SL and not see it as a griefer-tolerated hell.
And there will always be rude people in SL,just like in RL too. But they aren't the majority of the new player population.

I had a similar problem as some other posters here, and considered no build/no script, but the problem is that I build and script on my land and it's group owned, some others in my group also build/script on it. So that isn't really an elegant solution. In my case it was also a newbie, but he was a neighbor who bought a tiny sliver of 256sqm and then tried to build a garish neon club on it that overlapped his property lines

Question: Someone told me last night that if you ban someone from your land, they can no longer rez prims on your land either. Is that true?

I will always be here to assist nOObs.

nOObs, give me your tired, your huddled masses yearning to be free!!!