Is it possible that Offering Teleports is a new griefer fad?

This week i've had 8 people offer me teleports out of the blue, with no IM or alert to explain why. These are people i have never heard of, Offering teleports to places i have never heard of. I began muting them after a while, since most likely it's some jerk with a money chair, a TP to some Casino, or something else i don't care about. Is it possible that Griefers are starting to do this to anoy? If so they would have better luck teleporting TO me to anoy me...

Yiffy...

Odds are they're people involved in this new "Lucky Chair" fad. They roam in packs, and when they find a chair, they scour their friends list for anyone with that letter, and offer it to them first. Then they go to the groups and try and find someone with that letter. Your "friends" are just trying to be nice I suspect.

Letters come up all the time, but the less-commonly-used-for-names letters tend to hang around for hours, locking up the chairs, so they often just want someone to come clear the chair to move it to the next letter.

Unfortunately.. Q, V, W, Y & Z are relatively uncommon letters for names to begin with. I get a lot of TP requests too out of the blue. A lot of times when I'm working or camping or just don't WANT to hop around. sometimes I'm in the mood, sometimes not. The tps are just being sent out without comment because people are in a rush to get their friend there before someone else's friend gets there first and snags it.

I don't know anyone in the chair groups who would take offense if you don't TP to an unsolicited offer.. it's just them offering. When I'm not in the mood, I just decline. SOmetimes I am in the mood and don't know it til the offer comes.

I have had this happen to me a few times, and it was always some bullshit spam to get people into a brand new dance club.

They get two or three people to scour the Search lists, randomly offering teleports to tons of people.

Completely intolerable.

That explains a lot . I'm sure K has to be a fairly common letter but I still get a quite a few random tp's out of the blue.

If lucky chairs are causing this behaviour then I'm going to avoid buying anything from stores that have them from now on .

Not just teleports either. Along with those, I have also been getting Group Invites from people I have never met, many of them have a joining fee as well. Sometimes when I log in, I will have up to 3 waiting for my response.

Kitty, from some of your other posts and your non-blaming for people that don't do anything wrong, why punish the owners for the actions of greedy people? Besides, there is no proof it has anything to do with lucky chairs and in my case, it's quite the opposite.

I do not agree with the idea that it's Lucky Chairs most of the time. I've gotten hundreds of tp offers lately, mostly since early September. I've went to a few for fun, but none have ever had anything to do with lucky chairs. Hell, I've went to a few because I've been trying to click all my yes' on log in, or trying to click ok for other spam. A lot of it has to do with either A) Who you are, and B) Where you are at the time. (I.E. Popular furries get tp spam to a new furry place, popular dance club-goers get spam for a new club.)

Muting (while some argue it does) does not (for me at least) work and I still get notecards, tp offers and group invites from those I've muted.

It's ninja invites and offers lately, and with Winter's idea, it would mean that they are on the friends list, while Yiffy makes it clear that the senders are totally unknown. If it were a friends list deal, I'd take them off my friends list and that would solve the problem.

As co-owner of a store that recently opened, which has two lucky chairs in it, I can assure you, those of us who own businesses that also have lucky chairs, are absolutely not to be blamed for these random teleport offers.

We have lucky chairs as a way to give something back to our customers, and if people are looking for lucky chairs and find our store, that's cool. They might find something they like while they're here. We do not intend them to be used to randomly pull in others who have no clue why they're coming to our store.

If people are misusing the lucky chairs in our store in this manner, my apologies to anyone who is unwittingly teleported to our store.

From my experience last night, it seemed to be someone who was trying to put together a party of random people in an empty sim. Why he was doing it? I have absolutely no idea. However, the reactions of the other people who got tp'ed should have made it clear to him that it was not welcome.

I got request to join group and add a friend that I thought I had met but hadn't. The one who wanted me to be her friend I added her tried to talk to her because she sent me a bunch of angel wings halos,etc to thank her but she didn't answer. I will talk to her or try one more time and remove her. I notice setting busy doesn't work if i have it set for non-afk settings or am I missing something?

It was late and I did say if . Almost every time it happens when I'm at home, or on my personal little "sandbox" at 600m so it really had to come off of search. At first I thought it was just accidental too, it happens. It's not until I started IM'ing people back that I found out they were doing it on purpose, and the tp requests started saying "Come get free stuff" or "Free this and that" recently so reading about a lucky chair mob last night it seemed to fit.

I don't really want to "punish" anyone and I'll just be attentive I guess, but if lucky chairs do contribute to it, then the only thing I can do is a silent "go elsewhere" thing. I know store owners with them mean well, and certainly aren't encouraging bothering other residents, but if (new) people have to abuse them then they go on my "bad things" list .

Lately (past week or two) it's primarily been pyramid schemes notecards which I'll just AR.

I have to wonder that if so many other people are getting the same thing, if the new "hide from search" feature is LL's solution to this. Not very impressed if that's why they added it.

I agree fully with Winter, I too enjoy the "Lucky Chair" fad, and often receive TP's. I think that most will only TP others that they know are interested, but a few will randomly select people from the search if no one present can find a friend with that letter, I am not one of them though.

What is starting to annoy me though are the new "Mob Vend" devices. The price of an item goes down the more avi's there are in the store. That is a tactic designed purely to pull people in to increase the search rating and causes inconvenience to all but the person wanting to purchase the item at a discount.

@Yngwie, I appreciate stores that have Lucky Chairs and I have returned to quite a few of them to purchase outfits after seeing the quality of free outfits received from a chair, It is a win win form of marketing, but please don’t put in a Mob Vend device

I never really had anything against the lucky chair concept. In fact i used them a few times. However it's the Teleport Offers that pop out of nowhere that annoy me. If that person doesn't send me a IM explaining it (as my FAQ in my profile says) then i wait a couple minutes and mute them. Makes me have to deal with less people who lack basic communication. Lack of Communication, is one thing i always disliked.

I must say one thing though. When I'm either busy, idling, socializing, or whatnot, i do not wish to be teleported to a lucky chair in a laggy sim full of people, wait for everything to res so i can see where to sit, only to accept a gift, and teleport back where i was, to wait for everything to load again. Find someone else! If there's nobody online with Y in their name, then just wait til the chair cycles to the next letter...

@Very

This is the first time I've heard of these "mob vend" devices. They sound pathetic. Cramming so many people in your store that absolutely nobody can even move, let alone buy something, would be a fantastic way to run a business. Sounds about as exciting as volunteering to get a root canal on a healthy tooth without any painkillers. lol

Just so long as your lucky chairs don't *shout*, they're fine with me.

I'm tempted, though, to write a script to target owners of shouting objects with autocomplaints. Objects that shout on channel 0 when unattended should be against the TOS.

I'm not picking on you, but this is what we call, 'over-generalizing'.

I have made tons of things that hit chat channel 0 and shout. They usually have a REASON to do so, and I mean for it to be heard a long way off. I also only tend to build things like that for people on private islands.

I'll never forget the time someone accused me of spamming on my own island. It was palced dead-center, could not reach other sims, and she decided to tell me I was out-of-line, and should be 'banned'.

Foolish Frost: On my own island?
Nice lady: Yes, your stupid script annoys the hell out of me! I shoud AR you!
FF: Really? It annoys you?
NL: Yes! Get rid of it!
FF: Ok, bye then. You can go be annoyed somewhere else.

Sent home, banned, muted. I figured it would keep her happy, since I would not be able to annoy her anymore.

The point is, it's not the tools, it's how you use them.

Yeah, but you can't definitively say that it's the lucky chairs that cause it en masse. But think of it this way: Chances are, those who are ninja tping for new places and to bring people in, are using the chairs to bring people in anyways!

Cause and effect, not effect and cause. Just saying that if someone is going to hire for others to ninja tp, or do it themselves, they likely have all those marketing ploys to bring others in anyways.

Unfortunately, just about everything in this game can be abused. I mean, if you are in a private sim that's all sweet and wonderful looking and someone comes and yanks on your naughty bits, is that the owners fault? Ban lists would be semi effective if open registration wasn't in place.

OK, a script shouting on channel 0 so it can be heard outside your own property should be a TOS violation. Sheesh.

This thread was the first I heard of them too until I was catching up on posts at PXP. Crossing my fingers this doesn't appear in any store I go to, things are bad enough with a normal amount of people on a sim . (http://pixelpinuponline.com/goodies/mobvend-new-from-shep-korvin)

[Off-topic: I had a root canal without any anesthetic on a tooth were one nerve was decaying but still sensitive and the other two were still live. My dentist's reasoning for doing it without painkillers was that it would give him a better feel of how he was doing and would significantly reduce after-pain because he'd never do too much damage. I haven't skipped brushing since ]

Hi all... just adding a bit of input to the thread, since I'm the designer of both the Lucky Chair and the new MobVend devices.

Firstly, if these unsolicited teleports *were* related to lucky chair activity, then I'd like to unreservedly apologise; it's certainly not a behaviour that I've encouraged when marketing the chairs, and I'm more than a little surprised that it might happen - there are several open-registration lucky chair "fan" groups operating in-world; at least two of those groups have membership levels in excess of 1000 residents... if somebody is *desperate* to find somebody with a given initial, then these groups are usually a pretty fertile hunting ground; so I'm kind of surprised that anybody would get desperate enough to resort to drive-by random teleports

As far as "shouting" lucky chairs are concerned - yes, there *is* a setting in the lucky chair configuration file that lets you switch a chair into shout mode. I'm only aware of a couple of owners that use this feature. The setting carries dire warnings about the social implications of activating "shout mode"... and if you *do* find an inappropriately-shouty chair, *please* approach the owner about it (and abuse-report if necessary) - having badly-behaving chairs out in the wild _really_ doesn't do my brand reputation any favours!

The new mobvends, btw, ship in "whisper" mode by default.

Which leads nicely to... Mobvends! Please don't assume the worst about these until you've seen one in-situe. While it's true that these machines *DO* attract large crowds, they've been deliberately engineered to create very short-term "flash mobs" (hence the name) rather than long-term "camping-chair" style crowds. Typically, a MobVend event will run for around 15-20 minutes (depending on how the owner has set up their vendor). At the end of this cycle, the crowd tends to disperse fairly rapidly; usually within a couple of minutes.

Only the most popular stores are attracting more than one mob a day (MobVends are pretty much self-limiting in this respect; there's little point for an individual to visit the same mobvend twice - plus, you *do* actually have to pay money into a mobvend... unlike lucky chairs, mobvends actually _sell_ stuff; it's not a free lunch!).

Unless you tp into the store where a flashmob is already in progress, it's not going to affect your shopping experience in any way. (and if you *DO* tp into a store while a flashmob is in progress... well, chances are you're about to be offered some insanely-cheap clothing anyway - what do you have to lose? )

Tad McConachie wrote a good piece of reportage on MobVends for SLNN (http://slnn.com/index.php/article/about/mobvendor.html), in which he made the same observations about mobvend traffic flow - please check it out... hopefully it'll help to mitigate your concerns.



Amen to that!

Thanks Shep for stopping by to help clear the air!

Lucky chairs aside, there is another possible reason. A friend of mine's RL wife & SL partner got one of those out of the blue. He told me that he warned her not to accept it because she was about to (apparantly thinking it was someone she knew, but didn't remember). He told me he checked the tp'ers profile and found the person was part of what their profile proudly proclaimed was a kidnap group. He said he IM'd the person feigning interest in joining and was told that they send random tp requests and caged the person who tp's in, for fun. Some fun, huh? He tells me (RL coworker) that this happened back in late April 2006.

So yes, it could be a lucky chair tp. But it could also be a griefer tp... not a new annoyance, but a very old one.