Completely fed up... Griefers!

I'm not a forum kinda gal.. I prefer to lurk and read what other people are talking about rather than chime in with my own two cents. But this time - not only am I chiming in, but I'm starting my own thread to do it (yes I am aware I could have added this to the huge number of threads already devoted to this topic).

What topic is that? Why griefing of course.

I've been playing SL for four months.. My husband and I are both premium account holders and we own a fair amount of land we like to call home. Up until the recent no credit card sign up - I hadn't been griefed one single time. My husband had only once. ONE time between the two of us during four months of all day game play - yes we're on ALL the time.

Since open season on account creation started? I'm getting griefed 3-5 times per week. It's to the point where I feel like I spend all my time reporting abuse, or talking with fellow grief victims about abuse. SL is quickly becoming a whole lot less fun for me.

Something needs to be done. I'm tired of paying my monthly land use fees, and annual account fees only to spend my days getting griefed. I try to hang out and chat, I get griefed. Go somewhere to shop, I get griefed. And I have a feeling that it's only going to get worse.

Thanks for letting me vent. I shall go back to lurking now.

Your name is "Blabbermouth" and you want to lurk?

My sympathies on the griefing.

I share your experiences, Tracy. I have rarely if ever had to use the AR feature, but since 6/6 I'm averaging almost 10 ARs per week, both on my personal land and at our group-owned club land.

I find myself enjoying SL less and less with each passing day. Unlike some SLers, my investment in this world hasn't yet reached the point of no return. My plans for a company are still in the formative stages and my personal land isn't very big. It's very tempting to just cash out and walk away, never to look back. I think I'd sleep better at night, and I know for sure I'd enjoy whatever I did more than I enjoy filing ARs and defending club members from idiots on free accounts.

Could you please explain what you mean by griefing. For instance, what form is it taking? I'd be interested to know what type of griefing you're experiencing.

me too cause I haven't seen any. Seriously. Is it because the places I frequent aren't worth it? Am I blind? Don't play enough?

There is an influx of 'noobs' -- much of whom aren't. That's annoying but hardly griefing.

Something i found in Second Life Answers


/139/83/114969/1.html#post1101856

The griefing I've been experiencing is mostly caging, today there were bombings and some dork whacking everyone in the area with a lightsaber. I've also been sitting and minding my own business, only to have a noob walk up to me, point a huge gun at my head and threaten me for no reason whatsoever.

Now I'm rational, I do know that there isn't much they can do to seriously harm me or my property but it's an annoyance that I'm rather tired of dealing with.

Thanks for the heads up Ingrid - I like the sounds of that.

It's a bunch of nonsense. I think they want us to all buy private islands.

As for trying to hold events, they don't want us to do that anyhow.

coco

/excuse my venting

Yes, griefers are fun. For me it's idiots at my track @ Misp.

Every $#&@n day i get IMs, this person is orbiting, this person is blowing up the track...lalala

9 times out of 10 it's some underage idiot (nice LL, how fuct is that?) with 0 rates and allready in a mofia/familia/ or other group of idiots. Big pimping 14 year olds. wtf is wrong with people? Steady diet of TV from birth? Education from pop songs? No idea.

Wonder if i can set up some kind of IQ test to get in the sim. You must be this smart to play here. Or auto-ban anyone with the last name Bling.

I banned 5 people yesterday. Morons with free C4 bombs, nuke suitcases and the like, buying up a box of grief for 1l from yadni (thanks yadni!)

I DONT want to spend my time here dealing with this open flood gate of idiots and their daily alts. I refuse to. I'll take my sim off the map before i spend all my time baby sitting this flood of UNVERIFIED/UNDERAGE? people.

Is this what happens when a company is lead by a marketer? They become more worried with the perception of the game from people who have never used it then they are with the REALITY of the game. Look at SL's numbers! They must be doing good. meh

anyway........to make a long moo short. Give me tools to deal with the tools. Something like this....

Rez Limit, i don't want to turn off rezzing to avoid all the fuctard under age gangstas/police/armies/other morons with bullets. It's a race track. I want people to rez cars, or boats on the water or anything else that is not disruptive to others there. So... Rez Limit. Let me decide how many objects over how much time avs can rez.
Example, i set it to 1 object per 10 minutes. People can rez cars, bikes and such, but can't spam the sim with bullets from one of the many poorly scripted, laggy, POS weapons out there. The kiddies will lose interest in griefing at one bullet/nuke per 10 minutes no doubt. (OT/ i would also like a script limit for avs. I had 20 people in the sim and active scripts rose 1500. This was after i asked for attachments to be removed. Who is making all these laggy POS huds?)

Age Ban. I want to ban the noobs. Really. I'm not here to deal with trouble. If you are less then 1 week old i want to be able to lock you out untill you prove yourself not an idiot or alt. Anyone who knows me understands that i take a lot of time to help new players. I want people to have fun in SL and return. I want this game to grow cause i LOVE creating here, however, i simple WONT spend all my time policing my racetrack. I'm not very good at suffering fools.

IP ban. When i ban someone i want to ban someone. Makes sense, no? wtf is the point of banning someone when they can make a FREE account again in 10 seconds and get their little dicky hard again? I want to ban that persons IP. I don't need to see it or know it (for you paranoid folks) i just need to know that Idiot Bling of the hour is TRUELY banned from my Sim.

These are just three tools i can come up with off my head. I'm sure if i spent a lot of time on it i could come up with something completely useless like a raised ban height of 200M.

*switches to decaf

eh, while i'm hot, i also want to be able to automatically shut off scripts that use over X ms of run time. I don't need to see black mustangs using over 1 second of cpu time. wtf? Same with collisions. Auto return anything with a score over X. You could code this stuff in 10 minutes. Skip the second beer at lunch today and do something.

thanks! feeling much better!

The thing is the griefing doesn't seem to be of the grid wide well planned out variety. This is more like, "my account didn't cost me anything but a fake email address and i can make as many as I want so I'm going to run around acting like a complete jerk because I can."
There are also more people willing to take a risk and try scamming people because they know there is no punishment, they can just recreate and start over.
There are teenagers acting like teenagers abandoning their own grid and coming to check out the main grid just because they can.
Those of us who are spending the majority of our time hanging out in private or low traffic places aren't seeing the problem. Those who do any traveling around SL or trying to host events or run business are.

I have found scammers taking photographs of my boxes in my store and mall.
I have found teenagers looking for sex in my club.
I have been shot at.
I have had people enter my club, sit down and immediately start harassing other members.
At one popular place where I was working on one of my vendors I actually saw someone show up and start dropping bombs or something around the place causing fire and lag. I tped out quickly.

These are things I never saw very much of before either, but knew they were happening now and then. Now I'm seeing at least one if not two or three incidents a day! And I'm someone who doesn't even get out all that much and gets to live on an island. I can't even imagine what some people on the mainland are going through.

The fact that some people aren't seeing it doesn't mean it isnt happening, it only means you happen to be lucky enough to be hanging out in a safer environment or dont have a business or facility with enough traffic to attract attention.

IMO it isn't the lack of identity or age verification that is the root.... it's the lack of accountability. People know that there is no way to identify them so there is no way to hold them accountable for their actions. Therefore in order to be able to hold people responsible for the things they do in SL, LL needs to know who they ARE in RL.

Well said, Allana. I'm sure I could find a no-griefer area somewhere to spend my time, but it would mean our community area not being in the top 20 on the Find lists, it would mean yielding ground to idiotic juvenile twits who have no desire to see SL be anything more than a frag-fest and I'm just not there yet.

I happen to be around a lot of new SLers all the time. The majority of them behave well and are here to have fun. Many of them are curious about how to explore SL and how to get the most from their experience - they get as much help from me as I can give them.

The three shitbirds who dressed identically as Arabs the other night to come around and harass our members get nothing but the sharp end of the ban stick, right along with the punk dressed in his Star Wars trooper outfit who thought he was some kind of a god because he had a firebomb script. They, and the dozens of other wannabe miscreants need to be shown the door but of course, the Lindens have completely lost control over that door and the lock is broken.

When someone griefs me, I consider it more like them saying it's open season on them. Time to take out my frustrations!

During my stay in Sikkima:

1. I was visited by a yellow duck that kept touching my SL GF's parts. I banned this person immediately after shooting them with an assault rifle with Push, knocking them off the property.

2. Someone showed up who kept touching my xCite parts while I was adjusting into my furriness. I needed to change the color of certain things, but didn't have enough prims to do it on my land, and had stepped onto a vacant lot next door. I blasted the pest with a pushgun and banned him. The following conversation ensued:

Me (talking to girlfriend): Yeah, so I blasted him into orbit
Grfr (in IM): yeah, if you call 2 whole freakin' sims orbit.
Me: Wow. You must have a really small ***** and issues to match it if you're arguing the semantics of push distances.
Grfr: Well, I'm actually a girl IRL, so....
Me: So you're also suffering from acute gender confusion?
Grfr:....you have no idea

3. Someone kept flying a very open, hollow spacecraft over my land, and its jets blasted particles into my underground house. They refused to leave, so I launched a sumogun shell into the open cockpit. The result was the entire ship seeming to catch fire and teh pilot being blasted over 500m upward. Ironically, he called me a griefer in IM.

Most griefers seem to be rather stupid. I guess low intelligence in a virtual reality that attracts those with high IQs and creativeness must be rather fustrating. Plus mommy doesn't pay attention to them at home.

I've been here two days.....a grand total of maybe 4 hours online and inworld. I've been bumped, caged, bombed, and pushed, and its bloody annoying. I'm such a n00b I have no idea how to deal with it, apart from reporting it.

If this is what LL wants me to see in the world they've allowed us to create, I'm not sure I want to see it.

Vic.... take a trip off the beaten track. I reccommend Numbakulla, Telador and Svarga.

I haven't been hit yet. Odd.

Well, they've been told this is a COMPLETELY FREE metaverse, where they can be and do whatever the hell they want (remind me to take that tagline off my SL fansite: "be whatever you want to be" -- it gives them an excuse to be idiots).

They think that means playing with their bombs and pupguns and harassing other people -- I gather we're all there to provide agression therapy for them as a release for their high blood pressure or whatever.

Hmmm... are we allowed to use weapons in self-defense?

LL is basically saying "Hey, we know you're gonna get griefed alot more with our new system so here's a new fancy mute button." They arnt out to stop the influx. They want numbers, not quality. In other words: "live with it!"

Yep. Life is change. So the question is: are you going to "live with it?" You can always go elsewhere.

Ahh, so we shouldn't discuss any issues associated with SL because if there's something we don't like we should just leave. Lets just close the forums and put a banner up saying "like it or leave it".

I'm very sorry to hear that, Vic. Griefers aren't a new thing to SL, sadly, and their numbers have never been more than a tiny percentage -- but now we have one griefer with as many free accounts as he wants to create and banning one does nothing to stifle the bleeding.

To add to the other suggestions, I'd recommend learning how to explore with your Map tools or with Find (use imaginative search criteria and check "Groups" as well as "places". There are many dimensions to this world -- from the combat sims (you can't grief people who can shoot back) to the discussion groups, building/scripting classes, Tringo or Slingo games, Furries, Goreans, etc. There are forests to explore, boats to sail, amusement parks to ride. If you want to avoid griefers, you're best to avoid the griefer-magnet places like clubs and stay off the beaten path.

But even if you don't, there are means of self-defense. You can buy personal anti-push shields that will counter most of the script attacks. Even something as simple as just sitting on a prim will keep you from being pushed. And take note of the way the club or sim owner enforces his rules -- if they are aggressive in fighting off the griefers then that may be a place you want to stick around.

I see all this as a temporary situation, really. Things are coming to a head and I fully expect to see new ways introduced (either from private scripted products for sale or from Linden enhancements) that will help you enjoy your SL more. Don't give up just yet, there's too much to enjoy and you don't want to miss it.

"Sit" is the solution to most griefing. You can't be pushed (shot etc) when you are sitting down. If caged, sit on something outside the cage.

Unless they're also using a script that first un-sits your avatar.

Even then, they can't really harm you. It's the annoyance of being thrown 5 sims away and having to relog to regain control over your avatar that is the problem. And, of course, the griefer's tendency to come back and do it again.

Unsit only works on your own land, or your own objects.