How to solve the self-replicating problem once and for all

We keep having the grid taken down by self replicating objects because the capability to do this exists. Expecting everyone in a population of 200,000 avatars to play nice is unrealistic, and expecting the threat of RL legal action to deter this behavior is clearly not working. Any large population is going to have criminals. We need to change the rules so crime does not pay. In fact, crime should be very expensive.

What will solve the problem is to attach a cost to the act of rezing an object. If the owner of an object is automatically charged to rez an object inworld, self replicating objects create a self-replicating drain on your L$ balance and a automatic brake to stop runaway scripts. By setting the price-to-rez very low for small numbers of objects, the vast majority of users will not feel any pain. Those that feel the need to rez more can buy more L$. And those that want to replicate without bound are automatically throttled. What I have in mind is an exponential increase in the cost to rez an object after a threshold number of rezed object in a day, so the cost goes up very quickly. With a volume-based surcharge (the inverse of a volume discount) after you have rezed enough to fill half a sim or so, there is an effective and automatic brake on this problem. The idea here is very similar to the charge to upload textures. Just add a sliding chrage to rez and you stop the problem before it gets out of hand, and nobody doing reasonable things loses any funactionality.

Another weak spot in the whole SL system is probably the user's inventory, since objects held here are against stored "free", and there is no volume-based pricing to throttle excessive database resource consumption. The same principle of volume-based surcharges can be employed to protect the database by running the L$ balances of abusers down to zero.

Providing the capability to cause large volumes of resource intensive transactions without some sort of cost to the user is why we have these grid wide attacks. Without a throttle we are going to keep having them. Linden Labs can fix this problem inworld, if it wants to. That it has not adopted any of these sorts of measure makes me question how interested they are in providing a stable game environment.

Beta called. They want their bad idea back.

I look forward to having to dump US$10 on the Lindex every time I want to test a machinegun.

Look at it this way: Your dueling pistols would suddenly be much more popular.

/me is waiting to hear how you propose to fix this problem.

NOT by implimenting bad ideas, I'll tell you that. Continued grid attacks would be better than your proposal.

and have to pay 1L every time someone hit an arrow key on a holo vendor? no thanks!

VERY bad idea

make the first 1000 rezes in a day free,
then apply an exponential increase in cost for each until of 1000 rezes in one day after that.

without a throttle, given the capability to write runaway replicating scripts, SLs grid will never be stable.

Thing is, that fee is already being paid by way of land tier fees. The owner (and / or group peoples) have already paid tier to be able to build X number of prims on a parcel.

The only area that isnt covered, is building over other people's land.

I can very, very easily go over 1,000 rezzes when I'm testing a gun. At ten or more per second that's not tricky.

Man, the worst part about a grid attack isn't the downtime. It's the flurry of bad, half-cocked ideas that invariably show up afterward.

IMO a gun shouldn't that wasteful, it's just silly and no fun for anyone else nearby when it's fired because those things cause lag like hell, but that's not the issue

The best idea really is some kind of exponential DELAY on rezzing. This doesn't remove griefing entirely (as it can effectively block other people from creating legit objects), but it does contain it when the delay becomes so great that objects stop being able to self-replicate within a sim, though the delay could easily enough be placed on a per owner basis, so if I'm the only one with objects being rapidly created, then only my llRezObject() calls will slow down/be throttled (ie throttled = refused after X many in X seconds).
The main benefit is in stopping such self-replicating attacks long enough that a sim can flag up a warning and get someone involved to fix the issue.

Ah`v got a better idea:

* Charge 1 (one) L$ for every prim rezed.
* REFUND 1 (one) L$ for every prim derezed.

Automatic limits for griefers, no hoo-hoo for jes` folks.

Aint perfect, but aint it bettah than the old prim-tax that caused the Tax Revolt Tea Party in Americanna?

Iffn y`all don`t know what Ah am talkin` about, read New World Notes:

http://secondlife.com/notes/2003_08_11_archive.php#20030912
http://secondlife.com/notes/2003_08_25_archive.php#20030826
http://secondlife.com/notes/2003_09_08_archive.php#20030912a
http://secondlife.com/notes/2003_10_06_archive.php#20031006b
http://secondlife.com/notes/2003_11_03_archive.php#20031105

Correction: Haravikk Mistral has a better idea.

Perhaps we could combine the ideas?

-L$1 to rez each prim
+L$1 to derez the prim

-- with --

a limit of x rezez per second, tightening exponentially with the number of prims the owner has in-sim [or in-world?] at the time.

So we charge the owner.

Meaning the next grid attack will be by malicious scripts hidden in some freebie items, so the attacker gets charged nothing and a bunch of other players lose all their money.

Bad idea.

No.

Or LL could do something like the router manufacturers were forced to do when the SYN flood exploit nearly brought the internet to a halt.

The countermeasures haven't cured the problem, they just make it so difficult to mount a SYN flood to the point where it isn't worth the trouble. The neat trick is they implemented the fix without affecting any legitimate services. It did take some cleverness, but as these were firms with substantial profits at stake they did what they needed to do. Contrariwise, it likely just isn't costly enough for LL to care enough to cure the problem. When you have no profits at risk, where is the motivation to fix it?

Hitting griefers with fees and taxes for rezzing self-replicating objects will have no effect. They don't care if they get billed L$400,000,000 for bringing down the grid. Its all play money to them. Avatars are expendable, and they change personas the way the rest of us change our socks. If there was a legal way to make them pay RL cash for killing the grid, that would make them think twice about unleashing self-replicating objects in world.

Edit: These RL dollar fines would be directly connected to either the total number of ofending objects or the number of sims brought down. Again, I'm no lawyer, and I'm not sure if LL could legally pull something like this.

As it stands SL is a horrible place for newbs, when they come in they are confused, they get a slow and unresponsive movement system in a laggy and sometimes violently offensive area. Now you want to institute a system that makes them pay for exploring their new environment?! It's already hard enough, and I can bet you a /major/ portion of those '200,000' users never log in again after their first week cause of it. I remember when I joined I was scared to do anything that didn't have the word 'free' clearly printed on it, since I was told from the start that L = $, and there were pop ups for buying cash, and there were advertisements for it.. and they had my credit card!

This is the kind of stupid idea which would hurt the established users alot, and the new folks even more. A throttle on prims is a worthless idea, you'd be ruining an important creative aspect for thousands of people just to make it a wee bit harder for griefers to grief.

As it stands preliminary measures are nearly dirt, unless you could hire a linden to watch every person at every time, people are going to do stupid and malicious things. Even if you persecuted the griefers, it'd still happen.

There is no reason to be so drastic just because you lost a few hours of OMG Lolz with your friends on a friday night.

All that really needs done is 'anyone can build' needs to be set form default on to off.

Then 75% of the grid only the owner can build..

Well.. why can't the landowners do that now? mosta them have been through more than one grid attack. If they wanted to turn that flag on they could. I know alot of areas can't because there is content provided by people other than themselves. Maybe you could /ask/ landowners to do it, making it default for new sims wouldn't change any of the old places... and if you switched every sim in SL to no build..

Mines going on it as soon as I login at lunch time

I was on my land during the "Jew Stein" attack. I looked around, and saw the objects all over the sim, except for my land. I own over 9000m between 4 sims. As a rule, all of my land is no build/no terraforming/no outside scripts and autoreturn is set for 1 minute. To date, no one has ever destroyed any of my builds.

And if we can get a large portion of at least one sim to have that.. then we will have a shelter. Even if one large piece of land doesn't have it off, those around ti can stop the 'infection' from reaching it. Granted you can't rez boxes in the shop you bought them anymore, but doesn't that just save shop owners a headache?

I beg to differ...

When the L$s in the bad boy's av's account are exhausted... no more replication happens. Then LL can use the L$ they harvested either as an L$ sink to counter inflation or to compensate the victims. No L$s... no more rezing. Build it into the system so we stop trying to clean up after the problem 2, 4, or 12 hours later when the grid finally comes back up. I'm tired of being locked out of SL for hours and hours with no compensation and not real hope this problem is going away.



What I am proposing is not after the fact fines... its something along the lines of after the first 1000 prims you rez in a day, you need to pay as you go for any further prims to be rezed. Doing it that way means it can be automated and the problem self-corrects without Linden intervention

ok...so you LIKE not being able to play this game?
I'm still wating to hear a better proposal to solve this problem from you...