Bio-Warfare Attacks on Second Life Chicken Farms

by Alphaville Herald on 12/07/09 at 6:22 pm

sionChicken Killer threatens virtual birds with death by starvation

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

Second Life’s chicken farming community is facing a deadly new threat – a food decoy  that distracts virtual chickens from their food trays, starving them to death over the course of several days. The threat of biological warfare marks the latest stage in an ongoing conflict between chicken farmers and anti-chicken residents. While a growing chicken farming community enjoys raising the birds, other residents feel chickens create lag and are willing to take matters into their own hands, despite an improved version of the sion chickens with reduced lag.

Chicken killer

The sionChicken Killer is being sold for L$ 1000 on Linden Lab's XStreet market as a weapon “to be used on uncooperative neighbors who refuse to consider how these chickens affect everyone around them”. Despite the weapon maker’s disclaimer, it is hard to believe that the sionChicken Killer will not be used to grief sionChicken owners.

Will this create a market for a chicken killer detectors?

Chickens

healthy birds in a cages

SionChickens are raised both as pets and as breeding stock. Mature chickens lay eggs which farmers trade and sell — rare colors fetch hefty sums at the egg market.

Chicken farming can be challenging because the birds need a continuing supply of chicken food sold by the scritped chicken creator. The thrill of seeing a chicken lay eggs from which chicks hatch and grow into mature adults is a reward enough for some farmers, but others treat farming as a business and are active in the egg markets.

Dead chickens 

dead but revivable chickens after a griefer shooting spree decimates a free-range flock

Beyond scratching up the L$ spacebux to pay for food, farmers also have to fight off thugs who go on bird shooting sprees. After several brutal slaughters, farmers have begun systematically locking down their chicken coops to minimize the potential for violence. Unfortunately, this has made organic free range birds difficult to find.

While the farmers have adapted to the griefer shootings, it is unclear how they can respond to the biological warfare threat. The sionChicken Killer claims to have a range of 96 meters and affects both v10 and v11 chickens, so farmers without complete control of an entire sim are at risk. Meanwhile, chicken farmers have threatened to abuse report Tantra Breen's deadly chicken feed in an attempt to save their no-copy birds from destruction – but will Linden Lab take action to save the chicken flocks?

When will the cycle of violence end?

16 Responses to “Bio-Warfare Attacks on Second Life Chicken Farms”

  1. Aya Pelous

    Jul 12th, 2009

    lols

  2. Yakumo Fujin

    Jul 13th, 2009

    It seems it has been pulled from Xstreet, when I wanted to look at it’s listing, I couldn’t find it.

  3. Anti-Matter

    Jul 13th, 2009

    “When will the cycle of violence end?”

    the use of cliches on this site is starting to reveal a disturbing pattern;
    shallow d!psh!tness.

    “When will this cycle of violence end”, “think of the children”, all of em – just goes to show a real lack of journalistic prowess.

    In all seriousness, learn to do better

  4. Alyx Stoklitsky

    Jul 13th, 2009

    This is hilarious.

    I should scour SL for similar methods of fucking with people’s virtual pets.

  5. corona Anatine

    Jul 13th, 2009

    I should scour SL for similar methods of fucking with people’s virtual pets.

    GET A LIFE ALYX

  6. We

    Jul 13th, 2009

    I’m guessing it’s not going to have much of any effect, considering how the “sionChicken Killer” seems more interested in getting a lot of money than spreading this item around. 1000L$ for the item? Are you nuts?

  7. We

    Jul 13th, 2009

    Incidentally, I looked this up on Xstreet, can’t find it. The creator only has 3 items which are all furniture. I guess either they or Linden Lab took it down.

  8. Prof. Archie Lukas

    Jul 14th, 2009

    Its April 1st somewhere in the world, right?

    Didn’t fool me

  9. Pappy Enoch, Herald Reporter

    Jul 14th, 2009

    Mess wif my chikkins an’ the rascal will have to pull a chainsaw out’n his butt.

    My wimmen: maybe
    My dawg: no
    My guns: hell no
    My chikkens: they’s for dinner, dang your hide! Bend over!

  10. Poe Zepp

    Jul 17th, 2009

    Solution is simple. Add a rule to the rental agreement of no chickens or any other stupid animal thing that can create collisions and if the renter ignores it guess what they face eviction without refund.

  11. IntLibber Brautigan

    Jul 19th, 2009

    With the Version 11 Lagless model, the collisions produced by sion chickens have dropped from 150-250 down to 3-30 under most circumstances. The script lag still runs from 0.1-0.3 ms per chicken. For this reason I recommend that estate owners impose a covenant limit of no more than 1 chicken per 1k sqm of land. In our Ancapistan estates, weve found that these limitations keep sims healthy and enjoyable for the most part, however we do recommend an upper limit of about 50-60 chickens per sim ONLY if these are the only objects in the sim. The more prims in the sim, the more collisions that will happen, and other scripted objects of course will take up some of the total script time.

    Other tips:
    Never use prim chicken pens, as the pens also experience collisions from the chickens.
    Use pits to keep the chickens in, typically 8×8 meters square, 3 meters deep with straight sides. This minimizes collisions as much as possible.
    No more than two chickens per pit.
    No prims in the pits other than the feeders, the chickens, and a toy for the rooster to play with.
    If you have a breeding pair in a pit, you should be present to remove eggs as soon as they are laid, else they also generate significant collisions, particularly when colliding with chickens.
    Roosters need a toy to play with when their anger levels rise… script time for roosters rise when they’re angry, we’ve seen it as high as 4ms per rooster at peak anger, hopefully Sion will reduce this in the next update.

    NOTE: do not use regular version 11 or version 10 chickens, eggs, or transporters, only permit your residents to keep Version 11 Lagless or newer updates. Older chickens have to be updated by popping them in new transporter boxes. old version eggs get updated in new version ‘proteggtors’.

    When these chickens started spreading across our estate, we considered banning them, but considering the economic activity they stimulate, we sought instead to help the makers at Sion Labs reduce lag as much as possible. Provided these tips are followed, theres no reason why chickens cannot be permitted in any sim in the numbers specified.

    Estate owners IMHO should look at the chicken craze as a means of expanding occupancy, particularly by imposing limits in numbers of chickens per 1k sqm, this obviously means a chicken farmer needs a lot of land to farm a lot of chickens.

  12. Nidol

    Jul 26th, 2009

    I encountered some of the “farmers” of these virtual cocks, and I have to say they are some of the biggest lolcows I’ve ever seen. Srsly

  13. samual

    Jul 28th, 2009

    FRIED E-CHIKKENZ!!!!!!

  14. What a laugh

    Aug 4th, 2009

    there’s Interblubber, thinking he’s going to ride on the coat tails of Sion, now that his ACE is circling the drain.

    That’s like a scam artist working for a con artist.

  15. francesco Smadga

    Feb 9th, 2010

    well not only chicken reeder but also bunny breeders and dog owners are those days under attack of sim owners i had a half sim rented for me and my daughter we had 20 vkc dogs out from the first day we rented no problem after a month or 2 the neigbour wo rent other half f a sim start complaining aouth lag of our bunnys and pigs we removed them and after paying the new moths rent with in a day they forbit our dogs (well the rent not refund grins so they have a month for free )because it is not fun life on a rented sim where you cant have youre pets

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