Selective Immersion

I'm not sure if anyone has compiled all of these ideas into one cohesive post before but here goes :

It would be nice to have anything that a particular AV owns be ignored. Objects of theirs can be toggled on and off in our clients so they not only are completely invisible to us but at like phantom objects as well. This would eliminate bothersome objects griefers and the like use to annoy us. Have an option to turn off all scripts owned by a specific AV or selected ones. This can be a client side effect. Have sounds be regulated by the same premise as scripts. Make their AVs invisible as an option as well. Doing all of this as options for individual AVs can really help the community ignore any griefer they encounter. And what is more damaging to a griefer/bully then being ignored? Mill over these points if you will.

Unfortunately, this will never happen.

Invisibility? Not a big problem. Phantom? Big problem. Not only is physics is a server side process, but it needs to be consistent. Imagine this:

You are playing catch with your neighbor. A griefer puts up a wall between your two properties. You turn the griefer's object phantom. Your neighbor does not. Neighbor throws the ball back to you. Does the ball bounce (since he thinks it is solid) or does it go through (since you think it is phantom)? You cannot have each person's client treat it differently; if you did, then the neighbor would think the ball bounced back, while you would think it came through.

Whomever owned the ball would be the setting the ball would choose to use.

However, this'll never happen.

Why? Simple. Someone could easily turn off objects for an avatar, fly to where their private, locked building is, fly 'inside', turn objects back on, and voila, be inside a private area. Sure, banning might get around this, but that's a slight hassle if you don't want to ban everyone in the game.

I think the wall would only become phantom to you if it was hitting you. I don't think this should be applied to griefer objects that are out in the open, those can be deleted by owners, but be applied to objects that can push you, so lets say a giant block keeps hitting you, you choose to ignore it, it becomes phantom to your avatar, you and everyone else around you then sees the block go through you rather than hit you, of course it would repeaditly keep going through you since its trying to attack you. But then again you have a problem where, how does the block know its not hitting you?

It would be odd. If it can be done though, I'm all for it.

I'm all for blocking specific sounds and making avatars invisible to you also, maybe you'd still see the outline of them or something though, cuse I think it'd be odd to have someone be invisible even if you were ignoring them.

The key considerations are these: it has to be server based, since that is where physics is calculated. And it has to be consistent; all viewers have to see the same thing and experience the same thing (virtual objective reality?)

This pretty much rules out having player A being able to make player B's objects phantom to A's perception. For consistency, player A would have to make player B's objects phantom to everyone's perception. What is possible is you could allow player A to change him/herself. Player A could specify that he (and all attachments) is phantom to objects created by B. This still lends itself to the abuse that Moleculor pointed out.

Another option is to build in a shield script for each avatar. Player A could specify that any object created by player B could not approach closer than 1 meter (likewise, player A could not approach one of player B's objects). And, player A could specify that scripts owned by player B could not affect him/her.

Like everything else, these are open to abuse. Griefer C could specify that player A's scripts and objects could not affect him, then float above player A's elevator object, preventing it from working for anyone. I'll save comment on social rather than programmatic solutions for another forum.