Don't Go Into The Corn Field

Via GameSetWatch, Clickable Culture's look at the Second Life version of purgatory - The Corn Field. A player explores an off-grid prison that misbehaving avatars are sent too for infractions. From the article: "Yaffle tested the limits of the prison, finding that communication to Second Life's 'Main Grid' was cut off. He even came up with a scheme to crash the server The Corn Field was running on in order to be teleported to the nearest safe simulator by default, but creating objects in The Corn Field appears to be impossible. Having exhausted his options, Yaffle merely waited around to see if anyone else would show up. A Linden Lab employee did stop by, but was incommunicado. 'If I was them, I would have been watching me and laughing,' Yaffle told me. 'I know I was laughing even though it was a punishment.'"

Comments

Re:Dealing with rule breakers is a chore

[jungd]

>Secondly, you don't even know what he did.

He repeatedly took down the entire second life grid, disrupting thousands of players and disrupting the many real businesses and other activities (classes etc.) that go on in SL.
SL allows scripts to be written and attached to objects. He created physics objects that self-replicated and spread over the entire geographic area of SL (which is huge). The replicating objects themselves usually had nasty images or racist taunts attached to them.
The load of simulating so many physical objects (Newtonian mechanics, collisions etc.) slowed everything to a crawl on each simulator. Due to a bug in the SL Havok code many simulators would crash.
In addition, the thousands of objects created would use up the object quota of most private land and cause devices that need to dynamically create objects to malfunction (e.g. holographic vendors, games, etc.)
In the last instance of his attack the SL Grid was taken off-line by Linden Labs for most of a day.
(it was apparent that they'd implemented some 'fire-lane' like automatic system to take out strips of simulators to try to isolate the objects, but it didn't appear to work)