The New 200 Meter Ban Sucks and Accomplishes Little

I am a resident who enjoys flying in SL. I believe that flying is one of the best features offered by SL and I encourage all of you to try it. It is easy to learn. But flying is now nearly impossible cuz of the new 200M ban. It seems every idiot landowner under the SL sun is now deploying 200M+ security fences. In the area near my home where I have a private airfield, MOST OF THEM ARE HIGHER THAN 250m!!! I SPENT THE ENTIRE DAY TODAY ASKING RESIDENTS TO REDUCE THE HEIGHT OF THEIR FENCES TO THE LEGAL LIMIT.

For all practical purposes, flying over land for any distance is now impossible!! Once an aircraft touches one of these fences it gets stuck on it and cannot backaway. Then the pilot is ejected/pushed a distance away (up to a sim away or more), the ejected pilot then must relog to get out of the sitting/pilot's flying position. When he relogs he finds himself in the middle of nowhere and his plane is somewhere on the way to Lost and Found.

And what does this accomplish??? As I see it nothing!! Listen buddy, if I want to grief you a stinkin 200M ceiling on security is not going to stop me.

The new limit only harms peaceful pilots. Its like the gun control arguments that if you control guns only the criminals will have weapons. True. And true here. Impose a 200m- high ban and only the innocent are effected. The griefers will only be slightly inconvenienced and not hindered.

This is just an example of some sucky, thoughtless Linden's "solution" to a problem now largely being generated by Linden's own open-anonomous - any griefer can join and hide his identity- free memberships that creates a griefing playground to all and every teen age griefer and script kiddy with nothing better to do.

I have been giving Linden Labs $300 USD every month largely so I could have enough land to have airfields located around the SL world. No more!!! F%^K'em!

I am a long-time hard-core gamer. I have seen at least one terrific online game destroyed by griefers because the gaming company failed to take head-on action against them early on. I fear that will happen to SL. You can't stop griefers and hackers and script-kiddies by imposing do-nothing bans on the rest of the gaming community. And you don't stop them by relying on outside parties like the FBI (LOL) who could care less. You can do it only by employing sufficient manpower and hardware to investigate griefing incidents and to identify and permanently ban the perpetrators.

I have never played a game with so little in-game live support. Live-help is ok for what it does, i.e., provide answers to questions but it can not serve the same vital functiojn as in- game game managers.

Nuff Said.

Unfortunately, your neighbors can't change the height of the ban lines. They're either up or down.

I was building a new airstrip, but abandoned it when a 200m wall appeared over the north end of my north-south-oriented parcel.

I asked about compensation in the Answers forum but got directed to a bulk reply that didn't address compensation.

Note: the ban lines go 200m above the ground level. If the ground's at 50m above sea level, the ban lines will go up to 250m. As the other replier pointed out, ban lines are all or nothing, and your neighbors can't "reduce the height of their fences to the legal limit". They have no control over that, and any ban lines that existed before the most recent update were automatically extended up to 200m above land level.

LL posted already that they'll be reworking the ban walls so that only the bans go up to 200m + ground height. The general wall will be at a lower height, (maybe the original one?).

It is frustrating. Those privacy walls are killing sightseeing and neighborhood visits. When you're flying, assisted or otherwise, you can't see the walls until you bump into them. THEN you get thrown a sim away sometimes.

Without assist or a vehicle you can't go to 300m which is a safe fly height. But it's also at and above the clouds so sightseeing is non-existent.

If you have a world that can't be explored there's no point in having the world at all.

I'm glad LL is going to work on this because those walls run counter to what SL is there for.

IMO, security orbs are a far more effective means of parcel security then the ban lines ever will be. Little red ban lines aren't an effective means of deterant. Sure they'll bounce you back and prevent you from TP'ing to that parcel, but even at 200m above the ground bombs can still be dropped effectively. Hell you don't even need to bomb as you can just sit on the side of their plot and attack using sensor guided pushes/bullets or even be another sim (or 10) away for deploying trans-sim nukes. Security orbs, while annoying if misconfigured, can TP the target home wich for most griefers is usually halfway accross the grid which is more effective then a 1 sim bounce.

The effectiveness of ban lines, however, is really not whats in question. What is in question is wether ban & restricted access should countinue being one and the same. My vote is no and it shouldn't be that hard to seperate them seeing how we have ban & cover charge as seperate functions. I say keep ban at 200m, it does inconvienance griefers so it does help in some way. Make restricted access lines (yellow maybe?) and set the height to the old 15m (maybe up it to 20 because some houses are multistory and go above 15m tall).

The current ban system only discourages really casual griefers, 200m or not - it's trivial to fire stuff into a parcel or drag stuff into a parcel.

Changing it so that objects owned by someone can't enter a banned area would be a start, but it is still be trivial for someone to generate an alt. They might get bored after a few goes, but by that point your ban limit will be full and the next one who comes along won't have that problem.

I'm interested in different ideas about establishing identity on the internet and would love to see LL looking at the latest research as to this and implementing it - that's what a speculative technology company should be doing - but come on, you don't remove one system and then say "oh we're looking at another one, we've not quite decided yet".

I've said this before of course.

One of the ugliest eyesores in all of SL is that red electric fence. How about just one line of text to let people know. And lower the limit back to where it was!

@Ordinal and everyone else.

That's why I'm so supportive of Jillian's pocket proposal.

There are two methods to solve a problem and a complete solution can be made up of one, the other, or a combination. You either can eliminate/minimize the cause of the problem or you can eliminate/minimize its effects. A bonus would be converting the problem into an advantage.

At the very core of the griefer problem is of course the person, the griefer himself. Various things could have contributed to his wanting to cause grief. It could be seeking attention, feelings of superiority (or desires in that direction), it could be he just enjoys seeing other people suffer. Whatever the cause, SL cannot address this. So we have to move on.

The next stage is them getting into SL. This is where the verification process comes in. Unfortunately there is no method available anywhere and at any price that can tell you who will and will not be a griefer. Returning verified account creation will not end the griefer problem because I had been griefed on a near-daily basis even when all accounts were verified. Charging is not going to do anything either. There are griefers who pay large sums to have the opportunity to cause grief.

That leaves us with minimizing the griefer's effects.

The core of the ability of a griefer to grief are the set of functions we have been calling griefer functions. These are functions that are very useful for normal scripting but can also be used for high levels of abuse.

If you can stop a griefer's use of such scripts, you end griefing. There are several approaches:

1. Remove a griefer's access to them.
This one can't be done. This requires that you identify who is and isn't a griefer, and as outlined above, this is not feasible.

2. Change the function so it can't be used to grief
This one is too delicate to implement If you alter the griefing functions, you will affect other items that are using the script for normal uses.

3. Remove the griefer's targets.
THIS is what will happen if Jillian's proposal gets implemented When someone turns on his pocket of privacy he is still on his land, in his house, but he will fail to register on anyone scanning from outside the privacy zone. He will be invisible as well. This makes all griefer functions useless for griefing, but all otherwise normal uses of the functions are not affected in the least. No target to grief = no grief possible.

4. Destroy a griefer's interest in griefing
This one can't be done using psychological approaches, but can be done using #3. If a griefer can't acquire or affect his targets, he will come to realize that there's no more fun in griefing. He will try other approaches. But his joy is much lessened and this is a very important step to destroying griefers.

The privacy walls are an eyesore, a pain to normal walkers and flyers, and do much much too little to stop griefers. If I chose to grief, believe me, just off the top of my head I have a dozen possible approaches to griefing even if I were banned from a property. That's how I know the walls are useless.

I wish they'd tell us what the height is going to be. Reading their comments literally they could be leaving the group access height at 200 and raising the ban to 768
Agreed. I think LL has gone too far in trying to copy RL into SL in many areas, but they always claimed that they're trying to promote a virtual world that follows the real one. This... well... it undoes just about everything. Might as well just make everyone's parcel an isolated warp bubble connected to the welcome area through a hyperspace wormhole.

5. Restore accountability.

Get rid of the free accounts. Instead, let premiums *sponsor* visitor accounts for free. They (and their account) would be responsible for the behaviour of the sponsored account until it upgraded to premium, and bans to any of them would apply to all the sponsored accounts and the original.

I forgot where the post is, but I think the ban stays at 200 and the other walls will be lowered to a less disruptive height.

But really even the simplest of flight devices can circumvent that 200m ban.