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

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.

Re:I think it's a good alternative

[2008]

"but giving them some kind of boring chore to perform to teach them a lesson would be nice."

You mean like levelling up?

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]

>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)

How about punishment through stats/items?

[SamNmaX]

I'm not sure leaving people in a cornfield is really such a good idea, since as the article suggests this is almost something to look forward to. Instead, it would make sense to punish users with something they would fear: a loss of stats and/or items. If these players are willing to put hundreds of hours towards levelling or getting rare items, they will definately not be happy if you take some of that away.

Re:Not my thing

[ClamIAm]

It's not much better in the game. I have a pretty beefy system (P4 2.5 ghz, 128mb radeon 9700), but that game was still choppy, even with the graphics turned down. While their engine allows for you to build stuff and have it visible right away, this translates into huge bandwidth problems (and I played on a Uni LAN).

But even aside from the purely technical issues with the game, I really didn't like the feeling it gave me. The community seems to be focused on creating porn-star avatars and virtual penises. And to buy these oh-so-attractive items, you have to convert real cash to ingame cash or start some sort of similar business yourself. Or you could whore yourself out to a richer player. Seriously. The game has tons of potential, but the tech problems along with the culture they seem to foster turned me completely off from it.