08-19-2003 12:37
The Police Blotter has been spending a good deal of time hanging around the Welcome Area lately. Newly arrived players are there, naturally, and it has become very popular place for veterans to gather. Of the veterans hanging around the teleport pads, the majority are assembled to greet the new arrivals in a good-faith effort to offer guidance. A smaller subset is flocking to see what kind of mayhem might erupt, and an even smaller group shows up hoping for the chance to dish out a bit of vigilante justice. The smallest group, however, are tuning the tables by showing up in the Welcome Area sporting newly minted trial accounts.

As regressing to a trial account is the Second Life equivalent of putting the training wheels back on your bicycle or repeating the second grade, the Blotter will assume that there must be some sort of malevolent intent driving this behavior. Maybe it’s all just an attempt to relive those carefree days of newbie-ness, and it’s entirely possibly that annoying fellow long-time users by asking “are u a computer?” is a far funnier joke than the Blotter understands. Whatever the motivation for returning to the womb, the Blotter and the Liaisons don’t need to be part of this particular game, so don’t waste our time by trying to pull us into it. Please remember that trial accounts are subject to the same Community Standards as everyone else -- and as juggling multiple accounts can be time consuming and confusing, the Police Blotter will gladly help out by applying any suspensions earned by your incognito trials directly to your main account.

Actual trial users haven’t allowed the ersatz-trials to completely upstage them on the abuse front. Some of the most bilious speech the Blotter’s ever heard in Second Life has come from the mouths of trial users fresh off the teleport pad. For the most part, these users are like hateful shooting stars – burning angrily for a brief moment before disappearing forever. The brief lifespan of these would-be troublemakers is a matter of policy: trial users are given a much shorter rope and hung much more quickly. Long-time users who have had trouble with the Second Life law might disagree, but veteran players have been given a fair amount of wiggle-room when it come to discipline. Abusive trialers haven’t earned this leniency, and thus seven trial users have already been completely and permanently removed form Second Life.

Statistics: Twenty complaints of harassment, intimidation, or vandalism, four complaints about assorted rule violations, four instances of inappropriate content on a PG sim, and three complaints of an undisclosed nature. As a result of these complaints and our subsequent investigations, eight residents were suspended, fifteen warnings were issued and five residents were shown the door forever.