Scylla Rhiadra

Might work. Or I could recite poetry at them next time they drop by.

Just a quick shout out and thank you to @Profaitchikenz Haikuand @Qie Niangao, who dropped by my land to check out the mysterious radio tower left by my griefer on an adjoining parcel. Thanks both! Childe Scylla to the Dark Tower Came . . . (Sorry. Lame Robert Browning joke . . .)

Ahhhhhhhhh . . .

There is no direct access to the parcels from the highway, and it's not really a vehicle-friendly place anyway (lots of stairs and steep hills), so that's not really an issue. At some point, I will probably reinstate rezzing rights on the smallest of these parcels, with autoreturn enabled. But not yet. I've now done both of these things.

This was definitely malicious. He's attacked at least three times over the course of 3 days, twice while I was present and both IMing him and responding in real time. On each occasion he was completely filling the land's LI capacity, at a pace that was literally almost faster than I could respond. He did not, I might note, respond to my IMs, and TPed to another part of the sim whenever I got close to him. Interesting to note: I've just realized that the name of the radio tower object, "hvguplink.Flagg," includes the initials of the only group that appears in his profile, which may, by its description, be a quasi-vigilante or maybe Woodbury U-style griefer group: "Human Volunteer Guard." And the tower has been set to that group. The founder of the group, whose profile says he is roughly the same age as that of my griefer, is like my griefer's largely blank, showing just the one group. And their first life pic is of a shelf loaded with cans of . . . spam. So, yeah, I'm increasingly convinced this was a deliberate griefing.

No, I didn't AR him. I should have of course, but I was exhausted, and this ended at around 3:30 am my time, sooooo . . . I'll AR him now. One of the interesting things is that this is not a throwaway noobie account. The griefer is over 10 years old.

Thanks. How do you suggest? Ticket?

Ok, so . . . I did a reasonably thorough inspection of the property this morning, and all seems to be ok. I did, however, see this, which belongs to him, on a nearby parcel of abandoned land. That's the property I administer in the background. Again, I'm not sure how he got it there: I'm standing at the nearest rez zone, which is quite distant. It was placed there 3 days ago. At the risk of sounding (increasingly) paranoid, there are two things about this object which worry me. The first is that the sim name has been appended to the object name: it's called "hvguplink.Flagg" The second is that it contains a script, which I can't examine, called "node.api." The fact that it is in the shape of a huge radio tower is not necessarily important, obviously, but it also seems suggestive. Any thoughts?

THIS I hadn't thought of. Object entry is indeed ticked. I'll fix that. As per my response to your Orwar, you're probably correct. He was spawning complicated stuff so quickly (I mean, dozens of objects every few seconds) that it's hardly surprising that I couldn't see it. That seems possible. He didn't scoot around, however, until I started chasing him. Thanks for the replies, Prof!

Thanks for the response, Orwar. I'd thought of something like this, but I suspect it would have involved more work than he was willing to undertake. The objects scattered over the no-rezz parcel were, with the exception of the American flag (which did seem deliberately placed), dumped kind of higgledy-piggledy. What is interesting is that during the active griefing attack -- which is to say, when he was dumping crap on the region while I was actually there, responding -- he didn't bother doing this: all of the objects were placed in two small parcels (one was 16x16 m) that I subsequently discovered had been left as open rez zones. So his initial attack -- when I wasn't there -- may have been more thoughtful. Certainly possible, although I rarely have much rez lag at this sim; it's not very full, there aren't a vast number of textures, and of course it's my "home," so it's well-cached. Yeah. He was certainly at a different elevation, according to the mini-map. And, as I said, I couldn't find him lower than about 1000 m. -- and believe me, I looked hard. Good tip. Thanks! Not that I'm sure what seeing or confronting him directly accomplishes. Except allowing me to hurl abuse at him in local rather than IM.

So, tonight I spent a good hour and a half battling a griefer attack on the group-owned land for which i am an administrator. That it took that long to deal with him, and that he was able to come back after his first go for a second try, is due to the fact that it's a large group of various parcels that straddle parts of three regions, and that it's been so long since I dealt with something like this, that I'd forgotten half of the land tools at my disposal. (One of the "good" things about tonight was that it was a crash refresher course in land management.) Without getting into too much detail, he was basically locating small parcels that for some reason one of my fellow administrators had left open with full rez rights and no autoreturn timings, and spamming the regions with objects. It took me a bit to realize he was probably using a driver's rez zone HUD to find these. I eventually worked out remembered how to return his objects en masse from each region, allowing me to return them almost as quickly as he was spawning them, and then, after a fun chase after him across three regions, he gave up and left -- hopefully for good. I think I've managed to lock down all of the parcels now (using my own rez zone HUD, duh I'm such an idiot). And of course he's banned all over the place now. But I have three questions which hopefully someone can answer for me. 1) One of the things that confused me at first was that he had rezzed a number of giant buildings (and a large American flag, which may or may not be significant) on a parcel that did not have open rez rights, but was adjacent to one that did. How was he able to get these buildings onto a closed parcel? I assume he rezzed them in the free rez zone, and then "pushed" them across into the adjoining parcels? Does that make sense? Can you do that? 2) Whenever I TPed to the objects he was spawning, after his initial attack using buildings and the flag, I was totally unable to see them. According to area search, I was literally standing on them, but they weren't even visible using the show alpha option in my viewer. And these were fairly complex objects, generally 64 LI each. And there were dozens of them, all in a very small space, and all, as I say, completely invisible to me. I didn't need to see them to return them, fortunately, but this still has me puzzled. How did he do this? 3) He himself was not at the place where the objects were spawning. I was never able to actually nail him down, but I think he was at some height above me. I flew up nearly 1000 m. at one point, using my minimap to guide me, and still didn't see him. Is it possible to rez objects at that great a distance? Can one use one's cam to do this? (I've never tried.) On the plus side, I've relearned all of my land tools, and I've got the area pretty well secured (I think, and hope), so as exhausting and upsetting as that was, I got some benefit from it. But I'd love to know the answer to these three questions. Thanks!

Or . . . many of those who don't or rarely use gachas have had terrible experiences with them. /me raises her hand

Well, that's good! So it sounds as though you are satisfied with your haul! The problem, of course, is that this is so unpredictable. You did well this time around. Maybe you're lucky enough to always do well! If so, great. But, again, the random element ensures that there will be others who do not do so well. Your good luck and their bad luck probably evens out mathematically in the long run, but that's not much consolation for the person with the bad luck. Which is why basing a judgement of the "fairness" of gachas on the anecdotal experience of one, or two, or even twenty players is not really a valid standard of measure. The system might behave fairly for you, and terribly unfairly for someone else. In fact, it's guaranteed to. And that, in and of itself, is unfair.

Oh, I have played one. More than one, in fact. That's an interesting take on the value of rare -- but the random element ensures that when I play it might well be SUPER fair, because I get the rare after the first or second pull, but super UNfair for you, because you pull and pull and pull, and never get one at all. Out of curiosity, how often do you get the rare before you've hit the price you've set for it?

That's a big part of the issue. But only a part. And define "fair" . . . ?

As Rowan points out, this is not true -- and makes no sense. They are called "Rares" for a reason.

THIS. But . . . as there is pretty much zero in the way of protection for consumers in SL, LL won't mandate this unless they decide it's likely to become a legal embarrassment if they don't. Pretty much nothing has ever been banned or stopped from SL on the basis of mere ethical considerations.

It was kind of a glorious day here today -- the temperature not only rose above freezing, but all the way up to about 8°! Positively balmy. So I was inspired to grab a bike and do some more touring in Heterocera. (Usually Laskya gets to do that, but why should SHE have all the fun?) Later, I was joined by a friend and, briefly, a new friend (a noob) he's just met. This is just a Gyazo screen grab, neatened up a bit in PS. SPRING IS AROUND THE CORNER!!!!

Pic please. So that we can judge!!

Awww! I'm sorry, Drake. How can I expiate myself?

That's not an uncommon sentiment, and I understand it. I love the mainland, though. I love booting around it, finding weird and wonderful little corners I didn't know existed, on my scooter. Then again, I also like living in RL in the downtown of a very large city that is currently blanketed in black snow. What do I know, really?

What viewer do you use? FIRESTORM? (NOT "Firefox," which is my web browser of choice, and so always on my mind. You should use it too! It's open source, and full of crunchy goodness!) If so, right click on an object, then choose "More" > "More" > "Derender". Then choose "Blacklist" (permanent) or "Temporary" (until you log out).

All I know is that this place is making it awfully hard to be Julie Andrews. Yours in disgruntlement, Julie Andrews

With respect, I don't think I was being "nasty." I was being jokey, in the (obviously vain) hope that a bit of levity might lighten the mood a little. Orwar clearly picked up on this; I'm sorry that you didn't. There is nothing in this thread, or in the substance of the disagreement between you and Orwar, to warrant getting angry at each other. We're talking about gachas and dinkies, not climate change. I do think that stepping back a bit from this thread for a little might be a good idea.

And welcome back.