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Is this greifing, or just my imagination?


Fennet
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I rented a small island on a private estate with few neighbors, but recently the manager changed the terrain and everyone mysteriously vacated their properties. I was left on a tiny island surrounded by larger vacant mountainous lots. A new tenant or landowner recently moved in, and I've had nothing but problems with my objects and property ever since.

Everything's fine until the new home-owner shows up. It all started with a security orb that kept sending me notices that I was going to be ejected from my own property. I was trying to create when it happened. I messaged the guy and he apologized. He said he'd accidentally set the orb up for the entire region. Then a number of my objects disappeared. Poof, gone. I thought it might be the orb that did it, and I asked the orb owner about it. For some mysterious reason, my viewer had stopped rendering certain objects. I hadn't changed anything, and discovered that the options had changed, so was able to remedy it.

All of my objects are locked. I did not think anyone could change them; maybe they can't I don't know. Next time so-and-so showed up in the region, in less than a minute several objects disappeared from view for no reason, not a rendering problem this time. And I was unable to get inside my structure.         It was as if an invisible shield was keeping me out of my house. I used the "sit here" trick to get in, but was immediately pushed back out again when I stood up. As soon as I was alone on the region again, my objects re-appeared and the force field was gone.

Anyway, I don't have enough SL time to know for sure if this is greifing. I'm hoping someone who has more experience in these things can give me an idea of what might be going on.                                     If it is greifing, what can I do to prevent it?

I was told by the estate manager that the terrain had been changed to provide total privacy to attract renters,  but when the new tenant moved in I found myself alone in the region with the only other house 30 yards from mine and looming over my property, despite a narrow channel of water in between us and new mountains hemming me in on all the other sides. I'm getting the impression that maybe someone wants me to vacate my land.  What do you think?

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I guess it is possible that you are dealing with a griefer, though it is tough to say with your description. To my knowledge no one can just take up your items. They can however send them back to you if they land owner.

As for locking your items, I suppose this one is possible as I did have a griefer turn my items phantom, however the effect wore off once the griefer was dealt with. I do know there is a viewer or HUD or somethng that allows someone to see information about your viewer, but I don't know much about it beyond that.

If you are unable to enter the house, especially when the person you expect is causing it, is on the sim, then it is possible that yes he/she is griefing you.

If you truly suspect that this person is a griefer, you should contact the owner with all this information and see what they say. You may also want to report them to Linden Labs and see how they feel about it.

 

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My objects were never Gone, I just couldn't see them any more. 

I've been being greifed, I'm fairly certain. I just don't know how. I thought maybe they used some kind of invisible prim, but couldn't find one. At any rate, all systems are on alert and the ban lines are up. I didn't want to do that because I hate them. It's not like this is real or anything, I don't see why I have to be paranoid in a cartoon universe.

Oh, well.  I did contact the estate manager. I'll see what she has to say about it.

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They could just be a learning builder playing with megaprims, and some of the other things are just coincidences. Either way if you are unhapy with the way the sim is now, why not ask the estate company if they can move you to another of their sims?

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Nope, the person in question is definitely not a builder. More like a security and survellience nut. There are things I haven't gone into here because it would be too crude and constitute gossip.  

Let's see, no problems, no problems, no problems for 2 months, then X shows up, 1 minute later all hell breaks loose. Then no problems, no problems, no problems, X shows up, 30 seconds later all hell breaks lose, again. Problems abate the second X leaves the sim. I seriously doubt it's mere coincidence.

I'm perfectly esctatic with My property. I worked hard putting it together, it's perfect, it's located exactly where I want it to be, and most of all I'm not wild about being run off of it after such a short period of time. If there's one thing I have in my favor it's patience. Building a mega prim sounds like a great idea. 

Honestly, I just thought maybe someone would show up here who'd had a similar experience.

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Fennet wrote:

Let's see, no problems, no problems, no problems for 2 months, then X shows up, 1 minute later all hell breaks loose. Then no problems, no problems, no problems, X shows up, 30 seconds later all hell breaks lose, again. Problems abate the second X leaves the sim. 
I seriously doubt it's mere coincidence.

Yes you're right, it doesn't look like a coincidence. But griefing is deliberate. This looks more like somebody playing around with things he doesn't understand, and that means it may be possible to discuss the problems with him like you did with the security orb. The most likely general explanation is that he is doing or wearing something that overloads the server and/or viewers.

If talking doesn't help, contact the landowner(s) and ask them to sort it out.

If that doesn't help either, I'm afraid the only solution is to follow the example of your old negihbors and move somewhere else. If you want to avoid unpleasant surprises like this, you probably want to find a place where the owners have established some clear rules and have enough control over the surroundigns to enforce them. Whether it's mainland or island doesn't really matter although such places are easier to find on private sims.

Or of course, you could just be patient and see how long he stays. ;)

 


Fennet wrote:

Building a mega prim sounds like a great idea.


In retaliation you mean? In one word: Don't!!!

 


Fennet wrote:

Honestly, I just thought maybe someone would show up here who'd had a similar experience.

I think most people who have been in SL for a while have ahd problems with neighbors. ;) Me, I'm hardly an oldtimer in SL but I've already had to move twice because of bad neighborhoods. I'm not going to do it a third time, I've taken every precuation I can possibly think of this time.

Exactly what kind of problems you get may vary a lot though.

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Things I can think of

 

  • The sim wasn't rebooted after all the terraforming
  • Your cache/viewer was messed up
  • You are being griefed

Fennet wrote:

Building a mega prim sounds like a great idea. 

Do not do this under any circumstances.

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Bryce Kidd wrote:

Things I can think of

 
  • The sim wasn't rebooted after all the terraforming
  • Your cache/viewer was messed up
  • You are being griefed

Fennet wrote:

Building a mega prim sounds like a great idea. 

Do not do this under any circumstances.

1)  Nope. Region is rebooted every morning. 2)Nope. Viewer is working fine at all times Mr X is not on the sim. 3) Hmmm.

 

Mega prim? Joking. I thought that would have been obvious.

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Fennet wrote:

1)  Nope. Region is
 rebooted every morning.


Every morning? That sounds a bit excessive. Problems with a sim can persist through several reboots actually. Gukyeol for example, was misbehaving for months - not sure if it still is. But yes, I think we can safely rule out sim issues in this case.

 


Fennet wrote:

2)
Nope.
Viewer is w
orking fine at all times Mr X is not on the sim.


So he's doing something that overloads the sim and causes it to misbehave, and he doesn't seem to be on purpose. Next time he turns up, ask him what he's doing. It's even better if the sim stat readings (ctrl-shift-1) show performance changes the moment he turns up.

 


Fennet wrote
Mega prim? Joking. I thought that would have been obvious.


Yes, I think we all figured that out, but just in case... Besides, other people may be reading this thread and get some bad ideas. ;-)

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Since I put the ban lines up I've had no strange occurances, nothing has disappeared, and I'm not locked out of my house or booted off my property. Plenty of bad bad lag when they show up, but that's all. They never seem to stay long, so I can live with the lag for now.

Honestly, I'm not even sure I know what a mega prim is. I built a big 1 prim sky platform with the regular viewer tools; maybe that's a mega prim, but I thought you needed special tools or something to make one. My platform doesn't interfere with my performance, and I made it as per instructions.

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Fennet wrote:

...

Honestly, I'm not even sure I know what a mega prim is. 

...

Back in the day, the maximum dimension for a prim was 10m on any axis, which wasn't terribly useful for building large structures. So an 'innovator' found a way to make them bigger. MUCH bigger. Some were useful for legitimate purposes, others were potential griefing tools (one was a 256m cube that could cause weird effects because anyone teleporting to a sim would rez *inside* it).

A later viewer hack made it possible, for a short time, for anyone to create >10m prims. Many of us did so (mostly for non-nefarious reasons) and made them available free-of-charge. I've still got a few that are outside the 60m max, but I've not tried to rez any in a while. I think they work, but as soon as you try to resize them they snap to the 60m maximum.

Eventually LL saw sense and set the maximum prim size to what it is today.

 

TL;DR a megaprim is a prim bigger than the maximum dimensions LL allow. Some were used for griefing, many weren't.

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Fennet wrote:

... Plenty of bad bad lag when they show up, but that's all...

The blocked house could be due to bad lag as well. The physics engine has a safety guard. When the region performance is low, it sets objects to a box physics shape, until the region recovers. This can be seen in the Statistics floater as well. If Low LOD Objects is > 0, the region is definitely in trouble.

The other incidents could be due to lag as well.

Setting up a wrongly configured security orb is rather standard. Especially for people who do it for the first time.

The question is why/how they produce this bad bad lag?

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Thanks for a clear explaination. I understood that mesh buildings and such had a physics shape, but was not aware that prim buildings do as well. Do they?  I've never had the experience on any sim, regardless of how bad the lag is, (and sometimes I can hardly move at all), of being unable to enter through a doorway.

In the case of my own property, I could walk around just fine. Trying to walk through the door, however, was like trying to walk through a solid wall. I even got the "clunk" sound ever time I bounced off the building. The sim didn't seem overly laggy, but what do I know. Maybe you're right.

The almost empty sim I live on is known for its almost non-existant lag. But I have experienced more lag than usual only when the new neighbor is around. Don't know what he's doing, I don't even see him, I just know everything returns to normal once he leaves.

I see no pets, I know there's no building going on, and he has no particles. He doesn't even wear flexi-hair.

I have pets, and I may be the biggest resource user on the sim, but I still rarely experienced any lag whatsoever in the past, even when more of the sim was occupied. 

There's one other tenant with a small property crammed full of breedable, artificially intelligent pets and other scripted objects, games and such. I experience zero lag when I visit that property. 

It's all very curious to me. I'll try opening the statistics floater, if I can; maybe it will give me some more to go on. But I've had no more object problems since I put up the ban lines.

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Fennet wrote:

 

It's all very curious to me. I'll try opening the statistics floater, if I can; maybe it will give me some more to go on. But I've had no more object problems since I put up the ban lines.

The numbers at the bottom are of most use, the frame time of 22.1ms and those below. You should have spare time.

If your landlord does complain about the ban lines, you should get the same effect with just "disallow object entry". In most cases this stops your neighbors sending through camera following physical prims to knock you about or even rezzing transparent or invisiprims and editing them over the parcel line to cover your door.

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Thanks for all the helpful tips. I've never had to think this way before because I never used to build and have only had my own property for a couple of months.

Ban lines aren't a problem landlord-wise, I just don't like them. I hate running into them on other people's lots, and hate being ejected by orbs, too, I'm not out to cause trouble.  I'd rather keep an open door policy, since it's a pretty much deserted sim anyway. But ban lines it is; I want to keep object entry open for my friends.

The sim frame rate tonight was, (if I'm reading it correctly), 45. Lo lod objects <0. All the lag tonight is on my side, internet if I'm not mistaken, and my system. I was alone on the sim. I'll check it again next time there are people around.

And I've taken to wearing a radar hud so no one can sneak up on me undetected. It's getting more and more like RL every day. Feh.

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Fennet wrote:

I understood that mesh buildings and such had a physics shape, but was not aware that prim buildings do as well. Do they?

Sure do, and so does everything else with which you can collide, including the terrain. The physics shape of prim objects is usually the same as their rendered shape, but you can simplify or remove that shape altogether using the "Physics Shape Type" pull-down in the editor. You can make your own doorway impenetrable this way, using "Convex Hull" as the shape type of a hollowed or cut prim doorway. (Same with a mesh doorway, of course.)

Also, you mentioned "I want to keep object entry open for my friends" but unless your friends have stuff elsewhere on the sim that they want to push into your parcel, this particular permission won't be useful for them. Rather than "object entry" they need "build" enabled, either for Everyone or Group if they're members of the group to which the land is set.

You probably don't need to disable either one of these, though, as long as you have a habit of tidying-up stray prims, either manually or with a non-zero Auto Return interval.

Thing is, I don't think the banlines are really doing you any good either: they'll only keep unwanted avatars from entering your parcel, which doesn't seem to have been any part of the problem here.

Rather, what may have been a problem is temporary "encroachment" of parts of a barrier object, where the object's root origin remains on the neighbour's land. That can continue to happen with Object Entry disabled; that land setting only prevents intrusion of object root origins, while still permitting encroachment of extended parts of an object. (You can manually remove encroaching objects if you find any, but there's no land setting to prevent it from happening, and there's no practical way for a script to automatically detect encroachment in all cases.)

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Not being a greifer myself, and having no former experience with such, (except for occasionally being kicked, pushed, or caged in a public sandbox), it's hard for me to imagine all the possible ways a sneaky greifer could interfere with me or my land.

If an object is introduced, It would show up as land impact, or, if transparent, I should be able to see it with highlighting, no? And If an avatar enters or comes near, my radar should (now) detect it.

How do I find out if someone has attached something to me? This has happened before. I suddenly found myself holding a tiny raccoon, for some odd reason, but could not find it in either my appearance window or, later, my inventory. I was able to remove it, though. 

How do I look for scripts or attachments or camera-following prims that may be animating or interfering with my avatar? I'm not well-versed in the more esoteric viewer options.

And how do I look for an invisible prim that extends onto my property? That seems like a highly likely explaination for a blocked door to me. Either that or someone entering undetected and using some kind of device, (or using one from a distance).

Last, is it possible for a clever someone else to somehow change my viewer options, or the properties of my locked objects?

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It's easy to detect that somebody put an object with its origin on your land -- it does show as Land Impact and you can get a list of how many prims are owned by whom using About Land / Objects tab, refreshing the list of Object Owners. For objects that merely encroach, yeah, highlight-transparent will likely reveal any that are large enough to act as the impenetrable barriers you describe.

Attaching stuff to you directly (the tiny raccoon) can't be done without your permission, although that permission may be a bit indirect. The dread raccoon was evidently "temp-attached" (hence not shown in inventory), which nonetheless requires permission from you. One way to give that permission is by agreeing to participate in an "Experience" (but those are forced to ask explcitly for a scary long list of permissions at the start, even if they only do one of the things they're threatening to do).

There are such things as scripted follower objects that can be nearly invisible (or not). It's no fun to use this all the time, but if you suspect such a thing, try World / Show / Beacons : Scripted. Those beacons are just generally useful to know about for keeping track of your own unintentional self-griefing, which I find a greater threat than anybody else's evil intent.

(Another viewer window useful for unveiling one's own "unintended consequences" is Build / Pathfinding / Linksets.)

You also asked if others could change:

  1. your viewer options (No, not with normal, "mainstream" viewers except if you enable RLV -- and probably not the kind of changes you're thinking, even with RLV), or
  2. the properties of your locked objects. (Yes, if you give them permission, or if the object is scripted to change by remote control, otherwise not. "Locked" is less a security setting, though, and more a convenient protection from the builder's own clumsiness.)
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Thanks. I knew about everything but Build / Pathfinding / Linksets and RLV, will check it out next time I'm inworld.

Script beacons are a mega-pain, and not always easy to use. I recenty learned about the render/ground patch, so now it's easier to find my lost objects when they've gone underground. I still have to manually look inside the rocks, though. Maybe unchecking render/volume can help with that, haven't had to try it yet.

 

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  • 1 month later...

Sounds like an inexperienced, new sim renter/owner who is experimenting. Best to find somewhere else, because with numerous reboots and such - must be testing and experimenting features, loading up landscape terrain files or w/e and messing with your inventory listings or w/e on the sim.

Thogh I have never rented a SL sim, I have rented game servers and i have messed up regular players' things, houses, builds, etc tryhing to install plugins or testing or w/e.

It happens.

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