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

Teaches a valuable lesson

[QuantumG]

Second Life is a social game. Being sent to play "by yourself" teaches an important lesson: we are dependant on each other to make the game fun. When Yaffle returns to society he may be a little bitter at his timeout but I think he will be affected by it, whether he knows it or not, and show a greater respect for others.

I think it's a good alternative

[Parham]

This is probably a good alternative to banning people right out of a game. Instead of doing it for a certain period of time though, they should be given a task and have to perform it. In this case, they should use the tractor to plough the land or pick corn or something and after a certain amount of work is done they will be teleported back to the real world. People can always just sit around and wait to be unbanned in a game, but giving them some kind of boring chore to perform to teach them a lesson would be nice. I hope to see something like this in more MMORPGs.

It's A Good Life

[diseasesofseamen]

I'm guessing this is a clever reference to where Anthony's horrific creations go in the TZ episode "It's a Good Life," which I saw again over the New Year break. http://tzone.the-croc.com/tzeplist/goodlife.html

Dealing with rule breakers is a chore

[Banner]

And a truely painful one. They never realize they're wrong and always want to be an exception to the rule. Look at this guy, what did he do after he was banned? Immediately tried to destroy the system!

Then he writes all about it in an attempt to get further attention (like most rule breakers, he's an attention whore and just wants everyone to notice him). I doubt they were laughing at him, they probably didn't care and were just hoping he'd leave and never come back.

Personally if I worked at Second life, after reading this article I'd perm ban the guy. People like this never learn, until the judge sentences them to life in prison. And policing them is a boring and thankless job, with lots of abuse thrown in.

Re:Dealing with rule breakers is a chore

[jungd]

> Wow, Second Life sounds like a really well-designed game.

yes and no. I think its code-base has a lot of hacks because it was implemented quickly to get first-mover advantage in the market. However, now they're dragging their feet.
The problem in question with physics is Havok's fault I guess. Their physics code is buggy. If you'd ever played Unreal Tournament you'd probably have seen crashes that result from Havok code (if you'd looked in the crash logs)

>I wonder why paying customers don't focus their complaints on the fact that this exploit exists instead of on the people who use it?

Firstly, the vast majority of SL players aren't paying customers as SL if free.
As for me as a paying customer (pay for land rights) I don't want our flexability limited in a technological war against greefers. That's the wrong approach. (e.g. look at the stupid approach taken by the US fighting terrorism! Instead of working on ways to lessen the terrorists desire to want to wreak havok, they've learned nothing and probably increased the likelyhood of violence - but that's another argument for elsewhere).

There are many legitimate uses for self-replicating objects with physics simulation in SL. For example I wrote an automated rollercoaster track builder in which the track segments self-recplicate and position/orient themselves during construction.

Perhaps there are complicated ways to try to limit these attacks by limiting replication rates or something, but that would complicate the code and it going down the wrong track. It would waste LLs resources that could be used to try to avoid people wanting to do it in the first place.
It is a human problem not a technological one.

Of course, perstering Havok to fix their code would certainly help (though I think SL is using the previous iteration of the Havok engine as they haven't had the resources to adapt to the new API in the newest version)

UO

[mduke]

The idea of sending a player somewhere boring for punishment is nothing new like the article suggests. I remember Ultima Online used to have its own thing where players would be sent to a jail for a certain period instead of just banning them.

Re:UO

[Incendiary]

UO has at least two such places... the jail where players are taken to speak to the GMs and the macro box where folks who are unattended macroing are sent in order to get them out of the way of the regular players. Neither are quite the same as SL's cornfield which is a place where residents are temporarily banished to when they've committed an appropriate infraction.

Re:Ban them.

[QuantumG]

It amazes me how much power players are willing to give to people who have no sense of due process. If you've ever been banned from a MMORPG you would know that typically you are not given any access to the evidence against you, the right to confront your accuser, or the chance to respond. Once banned or suspended no-one in the game gets the opportunity to communicate with you. The only way to stay in touch with people who have been banned is via out-of-band messages that typically require giving the anonymity the game supplies. As such not only does banning harm the individual, it harms the friends of the individual and through them the entire community.

Wow, all the humorless robots came out for this

[Pluvius]

Am I the only one who thought that this guy's attempt to get out of the cornfield by crashing the server it was on was clever and amusing? And that if he doesn't solemnly take the punishment in the way it's intended but instead treats it as a joke, that it might not be his fault, but a problem with the punishment itself?

Sheesh, some of you need to pull the stick out.

BTW, if it's true that he was responsible for crashing the "Main Grid" servers, then why wasn't he banned outright? Anyone care to explain that?

Rob