Noobs that lack common courtesy

You're missing one thing here though. Getting a verified account doesn't cost anything at all. All it requires is the use of credit card (Or debit card, or prepaid debit card, etc.) info to become verified.

Now, I personally don't ban based on account status currently, (Although I reserve the right to if I start having to deal with a lot of obnoxious unverified accounts at some point in the future.) but based on that fat that it doesn't cost anything to become verified, and was in fact something that *all* users had to do not all that long ago, I don't have any problem those people who chose to do so.

Sorry you didn't want to actually discuss the issue, but I guess I was right, you *are* just looking to be offended.

PS - You managed an nice long list of things to call me there, but somehow, through an oversite I'm sure, you missed Nazi.

PPS - The seperate water fountains thing is a great idea. I'll start work on them tomorrow.

This is most definitly a bad thing. For awhile, both grids were open reg, however, people shouted "OMG PEDOPHILE" and so they closed the TG reg. Now more kids are getting on the MG instead of the TG, which is worse because they are going to get exposed to mature stuff.

I must agree with the OP on the rash of some not nice newbies. I am a mentor and go to Help Island to assist new residents, newbies, whatever you wish to call them. I help them, answer an unending bombardment of questions that range from what do I do here to how do I build houses and beyond. Some are quite nice...some will walk up to me barely an hour old and ask to have sex with me right then right there. I walk off.

I live by water, at the land edge of my sim, and possibly because of a small casino a few hundred yards behind me tend to get new residents flying over my parcel, some land. I go up to them, ask if i can help them, they say no just looking. I let them know it is a private residence, some say sorry I'll leave..I'll say you are fine and ask again if I can help them. Some go off, some ask about the homes there. What is annoying is when I get someone who begs for money, like walking into my home and yells its a "stickup". Or those that I say do NOT go into the private homes and follows me into mine asking repeatedly why not and what am I doing in the house that they can't see. Or the "nice" couple that I see using a dance ball on my land when I logged in one time, I look at them and say um, can I help you the man responds just having a date with my gf, I let him know that it is a private residence and that he needs to find a romance area to have his romantic evening...they continue dancing. I ask them to leave..get called a bitch..they were promptly ejected and banned.

This is what the OP means, NOT as some other new resident posters are assuming she means (or so I assume she means). It is NOT all residents new or old, it is the ones that after you ask them to leave or ask if you can help them and they stay around or continue to barge into your private area that drives the "old residents" crazy. I'm more than happy to help someone if they land and seem lost. I've done it! If you want help, don't be rude..be rude and you shall find yourself sent a few yards away.

Well, Once i DID try an all vegitarian diet, But i had to Give it up.

Those little buggers are hard to catch.

Angel.

Who wants a better asset server??? turn on Ban unverifieds today!! for the good of the community!!

Back when I was about a month old, I owned some property (still do in fact). One of these militia type groups setup their Moonbase Alpha (or whatever) and were doing their thing. That's fine, got no issue. Until I log in one day to find their targets sitting in my land and them shooting into it. I ask one to remove their targets and basically get told to "shut up, they'll build where they want to". I ban him from my land, set auto-return on and give them their toys back. So now one of the "officers" comes over and asks me why I did that. I explain that their stuff was on my land. He checks my profile (evidently), and says "Fucking noob". So I ban him, and everyone in their group.

Needless to say, these guys had been in SL since 2004.

On the other side of the coin, I was in my skybox, at 750m arranging furniture. This box has no entrances, other than a tp system which is permission only. Some short, fat, naked male av gets in and starts trying things out. Without so much as a word to me. He too earned a banning. His creation date? That day.

Ignorance and stupidity knows nor honors no boundaries of age or gender or any other classification one might be shoved into.

Actually i knew about that. It only costs them money if they go premium. Some people still hesitate to type in their credit card number though (if they have one). Personally when i made my account (2 years ago) i read ahead what would happen and paid my $10 anyway.

You think you have a newbie problem? Try running a military roleplay! I get several IMs daily, asking "cna join ur grioup plz", of course we only allow "recruits" that have at least two months on their account, but when they don't, they usually go into a spaz and begin shooting, then of course they are gunned down within seconds by about 20 soldiers, hah!

Lurdan Huszar
Merczateer General

When I first joined there was a similar thread and I said at the time 'I am new and nice' and like suckers lots of you believed me

Seriously though, I think a lot of it has to do with prior contact with other people via the net. Sad ex IRC geek here - every time I personally get to know someone with a strong SL presence and decent manners I find they have been chatting for a long time.

I sometimes wonder, as I have given away a ton of things to a newbie who then flies off without saying thanks or goodbye, if they will ever look back and think 'oooh did I really do that?' because lots of those newbies blossom into nice people too once they find themselves.

I think it's easy to forget being new and clueless when you have your feet under the table, and I am sure I did a few things which were plain dumb when I first started (mind you I also will have apologised for doing them once I was made aware, maybe that's the difference).

It sounds a bit like you resent it. But you volunteered to be a mentor on Help Island where completely new people arrive and try to find their feet. Of course you're going to get "an unending bombardment of questions". Why even mention it?


That just seems creepy to me. Imagine ... you're new and you want to visit a casino. You land nearby, and it appears to be ok to land there because you can, and perhaps you're not too good at landing accurately yet, and maybe there's a really nice tree there that you'd like to look at. And a strange woman keeps coming up and asking if she can help you. You say you'll leave, and she says no, but she keeps hanging around asking if she can help you. Is she an NPC? Does she really want to help you with something? Is she actually trying really subtly to tell you to leave even though she says it's ok to stay? Does she want to sell you something? Is she part of the casino? What's going on?

Unless you truly understand that people view their SL land as real land and that they feel just as violated as if you were walking around in their backyard, this makes absolutely no sense. And they're new, so of course they don't understand that.

What some of you do not seem to get is that a lot of things you know or take for granted may just be completely alien to others.

How do you join SL? With a friend who already has been in it for a while? You have a mentor then who can explain a lot to you. Alone and on your own? Ouch!

It was the latter for me - from newbie island I jumped to a random lacation. Many shops there, malls, houses. How was I supposed to know that they were not part of the sim but privately owned? Assume you go to a shop and see a couch. You will try it out and someone comes and says "Bugger off - this is my couch!".

If you do not *know* houses are private, how are you supposed to know that getting inside is bad, that sitting on things is bad? It was locked doors that told me that there were places I was not supposed to go - and there were open doors ... well ... hmm ....

After a while I figured it out - I also met some people who told me things. Very helpfull.

The other question is what kind of perception you have of SL. How did you learn about it? I learned about it on a bondage website. Lots of images that piqued my interest. I did not think that ALL of SL was bdsm/bondage/fetish but depending on age and level of maturity one can get a very wrong impression. And depending on where your information about SL came from and how it was phrased you may be on the completely wrong track when entering it. Imagine a SL addy on a Gorean website or a sex website. Is it really a wonder if people enter the game either roleplaying or just being horny with an understanding of SL that is completely and utterly wrong and only OK for a few locations?

As a land owner I am used to newbies running over my land and being next to a market area AND a Gorean place doesn't really help matter. That is why I use autolocking doors with an access list. People who talk to me when I am in my basement MUST be camming - not nice. People who sit on my things when the door is locked MUST be camming and using the sit trick to enter.

I explain to them then that this is MY house, that I pay for it and that I do not like them being in it uninvited. I'd say that about 90% of them apologize and then we have a nice little talk about SL, I hand out some freebies and landmarks, explain the interface and so on. Usually nice encounters.

The other 10% ... well .... ban list fodder.

Since I entered SL with some misconceptions on my own in my newbie days (which are not sooo terribly long over) I do not get angry when they enter. I only get angry when they insist on staying AFTER I explained to them (patiently) why they did something wrong.

I freely admit - in my first day or so in SL I found nothing wrong with entering unlocked doors and using things in there because I assumed they were part of the sim and free for all. I have for those very reasons created a little notecard with the big do's and don'ts and every newbie whom I find on my land gets a copy.

Most are quite happy, realizing, as I once did, that they had a wrong perception of SL. This wrong perception can lead to a behaviour that is perceived as rude by other, more experienced players but clearly lacks intention. So do not be pissed, explain what the Lindens do not tell them and what the website they visited and got tipped also didn't tell them.

One thing that I am doing to try to effect a positive change on this is that I am getting active in the Community Roundtable discussions, and will be talking with the Lindens on the topic of doing a better job of informing people about SL expectations and culture as they arrive.

We do a very poor job of that now. New people get told about building, but don't get told that people who own land may get upset if you start building on their front lawn. The whole idea that 'privately owned property' exists in SL is a novel concept to a lot of new Players. We have guns and other weapons available, but we don't clearly tell them that the majority of SL is not a shoot-anything-that-moves game.

We can do better.

When I see someone who treats the world in SL and the residents there as if it was all 'just part of a game', and of no value, I try to consider what their experiences prior to SL have likely been. In a game like Baldur's Gate, you advance pretty much by snooping into everything; opening every room, box, and bookshelf; activating every control that does something; taking anything that is not nailed down; and by killing and looting almost any creature you encounter. Act like that in SL, and you're a griefer. In a game, everything you see and everyone you meet is 'part of what you paid for' when you got the game. None of it has any value in itself.

Perhaps an important thing to get across to them is the disticction that SL is a 'Place', and not a 'game'. It is a place where real people from all over the world interact with each other. Not a game where everything is placed there by the game's creators, and is there for your amusement.

It is interesting how this thread is bringing out a variety of inter-related issues that some folks--both old, new and the broad range in between--have with each other, and a lot of those friction points ultimately have to be dealt with by the individuals on a personal and direct level, one way or the other.

However, as far as collective "societal" issues that might be addressed to some extent through a generalized response, one notable reccurring problem seems to be that we do have a great many new folks coming in, and during the orientation phase there is no real consistent attempt to provide these individuals--who may be coming in with some very unrealistic or ill-informed notions about the nature of life in-world--with any accuarate guide to what consititutes generally acceptable behavior and how to avoid conflicts with the existing culture.

Part of the problem of course may be on the LL end of things, as philosophically, they apparently find it difficult to convince themselves that it is desirable to set any parameters that might be construed as limiting the potential experience for any potential SL customers, including those of us who were raised by anti-social woodchucks living alongside extremely lonely rural roads, or those, who as infants, were repeatedly dropped on our heads by badly-trained, chain-smoking au pairs. There is plenty of evidence to support this theory both in-world and in the forums.

There also is the the problem of defining what consititutes "generally acceptable behavior." One man's "unholy chef's salad of pathological douchebaggery" is often another man's "frisky youthful hi-jinks."

One post earlier in this thread also suggested that a guide to acceptable behavior might be taken by some of our residents--at least those who originated in the shallower end of the gene pool--as a guide to how to mis-behave. Perhaps.

But there does seem to be a cetain percentage of those who are new to the platform who would appreciate and benefit from a little basic guidance on how to avoid conflicts with established residents and business people, based upon the notion that yes, you may take part in SL in many different ways, but if you would like to live long and prosper within the predominate in-world social structure as it has evolved, you would do well to not wander univited into people's homes, not sell freebies, not indescriminately shoot Lindens or other relatively harmless life-forms, nor prance around with your prim floppy bits showing in PG areas, etc. And by golly it wouldn't kill you to use terms like "please and thank you" now and then.

Is there any practical reason why a simple notecard pamphlet to "help you better enjoy your SL experience" couldn't be created for distribution in the orientation phase?

I think that's the thing to realize. Many of these new accounts may not realize they're being rude. Sure, you or I might have, but the earlier you've joined SL, the more likely you joined up knowing what sort of thing it was, approximately. You had to search it out more.

Of course, some people really are just being assholes to be assholes, but some are approaching SL as "World of Warcraft, except people make everything."

LL has given the tools to prevent a lot of this. Lock down your permissions if need be, or turn on auto-return. Or simply try to take things as the minor annoyances they truly are - last night I had a 2004-era account, of all people, port into my sim and "dry hump" me with a poseball while I was occupied in another window. I come back to find a naked av on my back. So I kick/banned. No drama, no muss, no long complaints on the forums about how I'm scarred for life.

Which isn't to say it can't get tiresome, so don't think I don't understand, because I do. Between Suffugium and my frequent hanging out at the Shelter, I definitely have had my share. But I think a lot of the solution lies in making it as hard as possible for someone to do those things. A one-minute autoreturn can do a lot!

Let me offer of this thought... perhaps some are rude, while others just aren't knowledgable.

When i started, i didnt know that there was such a thing as "private land" that concept was foriegn to me. I must have res'd lots of items on land, without knowing it was wrong. I ran around topless for a while till i figured out how to find the clothing in my inventory and put it back on. I didnt even know how to IM or for a short time even speak in open chat.

I'll agree that some are just rude people who don't care. But, others might jsut need to have someone tell them how things work and guide them.

I read a few days back a comic regarding the topic of noobs. I thought I would post the link here. I found it funny.
http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20060823

*snicker* Thanks. That was pretty good!

A question if I may. Did you go through orientation island, or did you skip it? Because some of these things, like using chat and so forth, are tought there.

When it comes to private land, I think that LL really is remis in telling people that almost any piece of land they land on, unless it's a road or owned by "Gov. Linden" is owned and controled by a group or resident, and that the residents fell about people walking into their houses, or hanging around on in their yard the way that people IRL feel about it. Also that anywhere you go if the resident decides that they don't like you, they can eject you from their land, and keep you from coming back, which means that there is a good practical reason to be polite to people you meet.

Hmm...I may try writing up a notecard of my own giving a brief, to the point list of "Things you should know about SL," but LL could do a lot of good if they'd tell people the above when they're still on orientation island.

Well, I intend to try to help the people at the Community Roundtable to come up with better new user orientation materials that do cover things like property rights and shooting people. I think this is something that we CAN change. Sure, there are always going to be some idiots who come here just to be a griefer. But I think an awful lot of the new accounts that intrude on homes and rez stuff on other people's land just don't know any better.

The fact that childern can come into SL now, yes i said it, children, because that's what most of these rudes act like, is the fault of no one but Linden Labs, for making it so easy to sign up. Sure there's a warning that SL is for 18 and up, but what kid will listen to that? 2 years ago (almost) when i signed up, i had to use a credit card, i think that should still be the case. most of these rude newbies are underage kids, or kids right at 18, who don't give a crap about anyone or anything but themselves, and have no concept of private property or privateness in general. I'll give you an example. a good friend of mine and i were in my skyhouse, enjoying a private moment. the teleporter was set for public, but that is because i forgot to change it to group after the friend who owns the place made it accessable to everyone. So, during this private moment, this noob walks into my house and starts using the poseballs, and would not answer me no matter what i said, and i called him some pretty bad words. so, i kick him from the land. I thought, ok he's a newb, he'll go somewhere else, not 3 minutes later, he comes BACK and starts using the poseballs again, so i kickbanned him from tha land. that is when i put up the public ban again, i value my privacy and these noobs don't.

Also, the reason the original poster had so many come i bet was that they were probabaly, alot of them, the same few people on different alts, hence they were all created on the same day or a couple days previous. You can thank the tards at LL for this crap. I remember when SL was a much more fun place to escape reality, now, it can get aggrivating, and for all the people who have been here for a while, we don't deserve this. Period.

One more thing, this goes a tad off the subject, but be careful who you date in SL, i was interested in one guy, who turned out to be 17 in RL, no i didn't meet him in RL but he told me that he usually never tells his age because then people won't have sex with him. Adults, PLEASE be careful, always ask their age and document it, so if something about it comes up, you have proof that you were mislead.

Do you think that LL will actually take you seriously?

That's my big concern. They seem to spend so little time in world, doing the things that regular players do that I don't think they're ever really exposed to most of the normal problems that normal players have, and from what I've seen, don't seem to have a culture that is willing to take these things seriously.

When it comes to private property, I can actually see where telling new players about this would conflict with LL's goal to stuff as many players into the game as they can. The game doesn't sound as much fun to some people when you tell them, "Oh, by the way, pretty much everyplace you go will be owned by someone else, who can and will kick you out permanently if you don't behave."

Anyway, here's hoping that LL listens.

Which, as they have already made clear by their actions, they won't. they've made it clear that they don't respect people who have been loyal SLers for years, by making it so easy to have multiple alts, not caring if kids are on the ADULT grid, etc. They...Just...Don't...Care, and as soon as someone makes a better version of a game like SL, alot of us are going to migrate there i am sure.