Meeroo Scandal No Surprise – LL Hides Behind Privacy Shield
by Pixeleen Mistral on 03/08/11 at 1:03 pm
Linden Lab doesn't fix exploits or provide customer service - it's business as usual, then?
A predictable scandal erupted over the last few days as Meeroos began abandoning their owners to wander the grid in search of food. Meeroos are a popular form of virtual pet that require continual petting and feeding with scripted food purchased with L$ spacebux. This may seem something like playing Farmville - an innocent pastime for those raising pretend crops or pets. But for the creators of the Meeroos this is a money spinning business which has attracted interest from scam artists attempting to cash in on the Meeroo craze.
a Meeroo asks - why won't you feed me?
Problems began when day-old accounts with names that appear similar to the legitimate Meeroo creators' account began placing faux food vendors over the top of the legitimate food vending machines in-world. Purchases made from the fake-food machines then credited the scammer's accounts - among them Meer00s Resident and Meero0s Resident. The Meeroo creator's account is named "Meeroos Resident".
This sort of scam should not be possible, since Second Life landowners can control who can create objects on their land. But as reported months ago here in the Herald, there is a long standing exploit that allows players to rez un-authorized objects on restricted land - the sort of thing one might expect a game company to fix quickly - unless the game company was named Linden Lab. Yet it is almost certain that the rez-on-no-rez-land exploit is being used in the Meeroos scam. At the Wonderful World Of Meeroos site, Catherine describes scammers hiding in the corner of the sim creating fake vendors on no-rez land.
Protip for Rodvik: un-patched exploits are killing your game.
To compound the problem, Linden Lab then banned the wrong player - Meeroos Resident - the master account for the food vendors. This effectively shut down the only legitimate food supply in-world. No wonder the Meeroos look worried.
While the naive might like to think this is an isolated incident, it has become clear that the Lab is more than happy to ban accounts wildly in hopes of catching the bad guys - so what if a few innocents are harmed by the Lab's rough justice? With no transparency about who has been banned or why, there is little accountability inside the Lab and a corporate culture that cultivates gross incompetence.
At this point any normal company would have apologized in public for what can only be described as a first class clusterfuck. But Linden Lab is not a normal company.
Instead of explaining what went wrong and how the fundamental issues would be addressed, the Lindens resorted to their infamous privacy policy. In practice, the privacy policy exists to cover up for anything that might embarrass the Lab. Is anyone really surprised that Second Life has wallowed in a sea of unaccountable incompetence for years?
hobo kelly
Aug 3rd, 2011
“Eat up, hungry ‘roos!” … I think I’m gonna vomit
Meeroo-skandalen « opensweden
Aug 3rd, 2011
[...] Läsmer här: http://alphavilleherald.com/2011/08/meeroo-scandal-no-surprise-ll-hides-behind-privacy-shield.html [...]
Observer
Aug 3rd, 2011
Must be a reason the staff of LL doesn’t want to fix glaring exploits.
Meeroo-skandalen | 2life.se
Aug 3rd, 2011
[...] Läsmer här: http://alphavilleherald.com/2011/08/meeroo-scandal-no-surprise-ll-hides-behind-privacy-shield.html [...]
Emperor Norton hears a who?
Aug 3rd, 2011
Observe @ “Must be a reason the staff of LL doesn’t want to fix glaring exploits.”
Sure, work like that would harsh their foosball game.
Nelson Jenkins
Aug 3rd, 2011
Can we ban that Amaretto cunt as well? (And keep her banned.) I’m tired of all these goddamn horse farms lagging down everyone. One of the reason I stay on privately-managed estates.
Hey, tip to you “horse breeders” – nobody cares anymore about your rainbow shiny sparlkey unicorn enchanted special horse. The economy collapsed. The only thing that’s keeping Amaretto in business is you tools thinking you’ll sell your horses someday, so you keep having to buy shit for them.
Up next: Breedable Prims. I’ll call them Primables.
Yep
Aug 3rd, 2011
Go getem Tiger
fararden
Aug 3rd, 2011
The same food scandal happened with the Sion chickens when people were actually selling fake food. Most people really don’t care whether scripted prims run away from them for no food. The whole paying money to feed scripted prims is a scam to make other people rich. Breedable pets are such big money that Ozimals sued Amaretto
just for having a similar product. People think they can make big money by selling their breedables when in truth only the creators are
taking in the really big bucks. Breedables cause huge lag on the gird and have can become an eyesore. I don’t know what’s worse breedalbes or ad farms.
Nelson Jenkins
Aug 3rd, 2011
@ fararden
Breedables, no question, because they’re so heavily scripted that even walking in a sim with a horse farm (or Meeroo farm – or, as I experienced today, a sim with both) is a complete chore. Ad farms are ugly, yes, but hardly scripted and practically only existed on the mainland, which has far worse things (plywood castles, random sound-polluting junk on the side of the road, etc. etc.)
So in short, breedables are far worse than ad farms because of their horrible impact on simulator performance… but they’re not illegal (yet ad farms are).
Pappy Enoch
Aug 3rd, 2011
Them lil’ rascals bin a-comin’ to visit, all hungry-like to my vegertable patch where I grows fake corn for makin’ fake Shine.
Now Meeroo-meat am on the table! Hoo-whee, good eatin’ you bet!
Dontspill McGinnis
Aug 3rd, 2011
There’s a job for the JLU. They could round up all the starving Meeroos.
They would finally be offering a public service that the public actually wanted.
hobo kelly
Aug 3rd, 2011
yes, round up all the starving Meeroos and take them to a parcel that has a 1 minute return time set. poof.
recently, someone has uploaded a whole complete set of “breedable” scripts to the LL free script library. this means that any joe or jill schlub that comes into SL to play instead of working on their programming ability (which should be the reason to be in SL) can now create their own line of breedable pets…
to whit, I have now seen first hand someone who is creating a “Crazy Cat Lady Talking Cat Car” that lies somewhere near the intersection of the Anne Marie Otool autonomous Linden Road travelling automobiles and these new Breedable Pets scripts that have been released.
The outcome of merging those two technologies has produced a car that looks like a big Black Cat with white paws, seats two, drives itself all over the grid ramming into people, and instead of a cat face it has a Giant Proky head on the front of the car, complete with wonkey eye and taped up glasses, leering out at oncoming traffic, all the while spewing these nonsensical textual sayings like: MOVE OVER TECHNOCOMMUNIST ROAD HOG and SHOVE THAT SAUSAGE CASING WHERE THE SUN DONT SHINE YOU EDGE CASTER it spews them as it drives along.
But the weird thing is (like that aint weird enough) these Proky Catmobiles *reproduce* yes horror of horrors. Randomly (as best as I can tell) while driving along a Linden Road, a Proky Catmobile will begin to shudder and bounce up and down on the road, and then the tail goes up, a big puff of orange smoke and hammer-and-sickle particles come out of the rear end, a moanful moan moans: “damn you Tizzers” , and then a smaller black cat (with a smaller proky head) comes out of the butt of the big Proky Catmobile and on what looks like rollerskates it begins to skate around the area while generally following its “mama” mobile. Later to grow up into a full Proky Catmobile itself.
I caught a glimpse of one of these moving down the road a few months back but could not catch up with it at the time. I gotta have one…
Gundel Gaukelei
Aug 4th, 2011
“To compound the problem, Linden Lab then banned the wrong player – Meeroos Resident – the master account for the food vendors.”
I bet that ruined the whole unpaid internship for the poor sucker who did this.
IntLibber
Aug 4th, 2011
Gundel,
Nope, he/she will be getting a promotion for that fuckup, just you wait. Remember, Cyn Linden was responsible for seizing Marc Bragg’s land and she got promoted to VP of Customer Service as a result.
Gundel Gaukelei
Aug 4th, 2011
Let me answer this with a dilbert:
h ttp://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-07-22/
At0m0 Beerbaum
Aug 4th, 2011
if I still played I’d just shoot them.
Senban Babii
Aug 4th, 2011
@Hobo Kelly
“this means that any joe or jill schlub that comes into SL to play instead of working on their programming ability (which should be the reason to be in SL)”
Oh thank Cthulhu! You were just in time there! All these years as we debated back and forth just what SL really is and how to best categorise it is and you come along and just give us the answer. You must be like, holy or something.
So, can you help me with this bit of programming I’m stuck on? I’m sure it’s a simple bug but fresh pair of eyes and all that
10 REM THE MEANING OF SECOND LIFE
20 PRINT”WTF?”
30 PRINT”DERP”
40 PRINT”YOUR ASSERTION IS CORRECT FOR EVERYONE”
50 GOTO 10
>RUN
Again, thanks for finally telling everyone what SL is. Alright you heard the holy one! Everyone who’s not a programmer, pack up yer shit and get out, party’s over bitches!
(Brought to you by Tongue In Cheek Productions, from the makers of Bouncy Bubble Beverage©)
Atlouis
Aug 4th, 2011
PET MY DEAD MEEROOS!
Lili
Aug 5th, 2011
Hey virtual-breedable-pet owners, I have a better idea for all of you. Send me 500 lindens each day, and experience that warm fuzzy feeling of knowing I am happier than you. Isn’t that great? I won’t even use any of your prims and your neighbors will love the reduction in lag also. You don’t even have to own land for this, I am so noob friendly : )
Nelson Jenkins
Aug 5th, 2011
@ Lili
But being an asshole neighbor is all part of the breedables experience.
Orca Flotta
Aug 5th, 2011
Nelson wrote:
Up next: Breedable Prims. I’ll call them Primables.
http://stindberg.blogspot.com/2011/06/knee-jerk-reactions.html
Obvious Schism
Aug 5th, 2011
@ Orca
http://stindberg.blogspot.com/2011/06/knee-jerk-reactions.html
“Mind you, Chav’s creation does not actually breed. Nor does it actually sell anything. It only includes one script at all, reacting to touch, and giving you one of the plywood cubes shown on the image.”
So that’s where I came from!
GG3
Aug 5th, 2011
Privacy Policy my @$$. Linden Labs can’t tell the public that there’s been scams going on? How pathetic. Again a patty-cake company people throw their money at that enjoys leaving its customers in the dark with sloppy customer service.
The meero’s are probably the best-looking pets on SL, on the outside it looks like the creators actually put effort into making them (other than being scripted, and the Hud is a added touch).
But like all pets they have that horrendous “script garble” at the top and move as fast as a slug baking in afternoon heat. Not really a “pet” in my terms(as far as mechanics and things like that go), more like a pretty cosmetic sculpt.
But it’s sad since these scammers are already hitting up roo’s in their current state. Could you believe someone actually coming out with a realistic pet (Like Nintendogs for example) in SL? Scammers would blow out their minds just to cash in on that! Which is probably why we’ll always see half-ass representation of “pets” on SL, forever. And the laggy server probably wouldn’t allow it, anyway.
These aren’t teens fiddling with roo stands, these are grown @$$ fat Ba$turdz adults trying to make a quick meal off what looks literally like a child’s or kids game, or some shizzle u’d find off a neopets website.
But their expensive as sh3it and once a meero “goes look for food” it’s gone. Also, there’s always those who try to sell those rare species to make a living off the current craze (I’ve seen horse ranches with ban-lines protecting barns no bigger than a 512 plot of land.)Literally, someone trying to make a LIVING off breeding pets. These people, most pathetic. The only ones who make any real monies are those who made the things in the first place.
Neopets? Meeros? Honestly the creators should make their own game out of the things so their not hog-piddle under LL’s oh-so convient and watchful “eye”. The website’s a start.
lol
Aug 5th, 2011
this whole story\scam is just retarded, and so are the people that waste $$$$ on dumb shit like this. Why not just send your money to me, I will go and flush it directly into the toilet for you, TOTALLY FREE OF CHARGE.
Nelson Jenkins
Aug 5th, 2011
@ Orca Flotta
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/01/horsie-triumphs.html?cid=6a00d8341bf74053ef0148c82498c2970c#comment-6a00d8341bf74053ef0148c82498c2970c
Yep
Aug 6th, 2011
Go getem Tiger
GG3
Aug 7th, 2011
@Nelson
It’s hilarious how much time people waste with their petty DMCA wars on Second Life.
Big BUX millionaires these folks are!
Meeroo Food Supply Safe At Last Thanks To Cordon Sanitaire? | The Alphaville Herald
Aug 7th, 2011
[...] sim – the home base for in-world access to vital Meeroo food supplies – is now encircled with a quarantine corridor in hopes of blocking scammers from using an exploit [...]
Gaara Sandalwood
Aug 15th, 2011
They banned a legit account for being similar to the account that was mimicking it…
I remember being told before by idiots that LL observed everything that happened in-world and had logs of every line of chat. I was told this by idiots, mind you, but still. Made me laugh my ass off, the mere concept that the few amount of people they have left can do that.
Dubbleyew
Aug 21st, 2011
The only pets I buy are the non-breedable kind, that you don’t have to keep spending more money to feed, in which their scripts are more focused on them actually doing stuff rather than just sitting around looking like statues.
Ziggy21 Slade
Aug 25th, 2011
@ Nelson Jenkins, fararden, Dontspill McGinnis, hobo kelly, Atlouis, Lili, lol
There was a time when Second Life was mostly populated by tolerant, intelligent people, judging by the comments here, one could be forgiven for thinking most residents are poorly educated, envious, fascists.
Who are are any of you to judge what is and what isn’t a waste of some ones else’s money. Breeding pets is a game which many people get enjoyment from, it seems so odd that so many people here have this vicious desire to deny that enjoyment. The game structure itself is similar in many ways to Farmville, yeah you know, the thing with 90 million users, or in fact any RTS type game that uses a technology tree.
If pet creators are making a good living from their creations, maybe you should try creating something that will sell yourselves, instead of sitting there wishing your sad, vicious and jealous misfortune on those with greater ability.
After all apparently anyone can now pick up the free scripts and make their own pet. This ridiculous notion illustrates that the author has as little knowledge of scripting as he does of breedable pets and of large development projects in SL..
As for lag issues, well there is always some knob bleating on about lag, the big popular pets systems are made by some of the best scripters in SL, who spend many months trying to make things run as smoothly as they possibly can, remember, their livelihood depends upon it. Most modern pets have very little impact on sim performance, even when they are in large numbers, if you are visiting sims with pets and are unable to walk, then it’s probably time to speak to your ISP or consider purchasing a new PC
I wonder how you people spend your time in Second Life, I will hazard a guess, Pixel sex, dancing, and buying virtual shoes, or any other activity that requires minimal intelligence and makes no contribution to economy or community.
hobo kelly
Aug 25th, 2011
O.o
fararden
Aug 25th, 2011
@Ziggy21 Slade
It’s so easy for you to resort to name calling instead of using a valid argument. You are not very educated yourself calling other people facists just because they don’t agree with you. You are the facist for thinking other people don’t have the right to express their opinion on
a blog.
I once owned a huge farm with breedable animals and it caused a huge lag. I lost money on breeding pets and finally realized what a waste of time they are when Ozimals sued Amaretto. Breedable pet creators are only in it for the money. Duh. If they want a livelyhood tell them to to design their own game instead of wrecking SL.
Oh, I have a fine working PC and believe me highly scripted objects like breedable cause a huge lag. Breedable pets cause all kinds of collisions, case in point are the Sion chickens that wrecked whole sims. I had a neighbor recently put up the meero farm and the lag was so bad I had to move, believe me there was no lag until they moved in. What I imagined it? Heh, I don’t think so.
If you enjoy breedable pet it’s fine but bashing other people for not liking them makes you nothing but a troll.
As far as my SL activies I’m an artist, I write plays, and I do performances. I have created plently of content in SL and so have
many other people who post on this blog. We are not all mindless
sex yiffing SL shoppers.
You really don’t know about anybody who post on here, so why all the judgemental comments?
Stop being such a concerned troll.
fararden
Aug 25th, 2011
Oh, now I see who you Ziggy and why you are so mad.
http://krazykittys.com/wordpress/?page_id=2
Nelson Jenkins
Aug 26th, 2011
@ Ziggy21 Slade
There was a time when Second Life was mostly populated by tolerant, intelligent people, judging by the comments here, one could be forgiven for thinking most residents are poorly educated, envious, fascists.
I can see where you could contrive some obscenely misconstrued evidence “proving” that I am a fascist – however, I would like to see how you could possibly call me poorly educated or envious. (This would be your role here, I presume.)
Who are are any of you to judge what is and what isn’t a waste of some ones else’s money.
It’s a free country, I can do what I want. Are you being affected by my opinions? I firmly believe that anyone that wastes a nickel on these silly breedables needs their head examined. That’s my opinion, and perhaps nobody cares about it, and maybe you’ll prove me wrong – I’m eager to find out.
Breeding pets is a game which many people get enjoyment from, it seems so odd that so many people here have this vicious desire to deny that enjoyment.
I intensely enjoy stringing cats up above a bonfire, gutting them, burning their insides, and sewing together their coats for clothing, it seems so odd that so many people here have this vicious desire to deny that enjoyment.
The game structure itself is similar in many ways to Farmville, yeah you know, the thing with 90 million users, or in fact any RTS type game that uses a technology tree.
Bandwagon effect does not a worthwhile investment make. The horse bubble popped recently – why do you think they just released dogs, and then demanded that Linden Lab waste their time with a blog post for advertising? Go shopping and see how many people are buying horses secondhand. Then go see how many people are trying (and failing) to sell them.
If pet creators are making a good living from their creations, maybe you should try creating something that will sell yourselves, instead of sitting there wishing your sad, vicious and jealous misfortune on those with greater ability.
I sell a lot of things and make a living off of them. I make a hell of a lot of money doing scripting work for one of the three top automobile manufacturers in the game. What about you?
After all apparently anyone can now pick up the free scripts and make their own pet. This ridiculous notion illustrates that the author has as little knowledge of scripting as he does of breedable pets and of large development projects in SL..
What large development projects? Amaretto isn’t a “large development project”. A large development project would be coding Mozilla Firefox or designing a skyscraper. A couple of people with mediocre experience with LSL (especially SL user interaction – although the 80/20 idiots that designed Viewer 2 are not very good role models) is by no means a “large development project”.
As for lag issues, well there is always some knob bleating on about lag, the big popular pets systems are made by some of the best scripters in SL, who spend many months trying to make things run as smoothly as they possibly can, remember, their livelihood depends upon it.
As any LSL developer knows, coidng in LSL is much like coding an integrated system. There is very little memory, CPU resources are limited, and “large development projects” need to be strictly managed and designed to run on such resources without severely impacting other scripts and general system performance. Most breedables are not designed with these guidelines in mind.
Most modern pets have very little impact on sim performance, even when they are in large numbers,
Now you are talking out of your ass. Have you even visited mainland lately? I did a lot of test runs for CGR and came up with a very large list of region performance indicators. Averaged them together over the course of a few months, and guess what? Regions with breedable farms in them had typically 0.3 less time dilation than those without.
if you are visiting sims with pets and are unable to walk, then it’s probably time to speak to your ISP or consider purchasing a new PC
I have a respectable 25 mbps connection and a top-of-the-line 2010 PC.
I wonder how you people spend your time in Second Life, I will hazard a guess, Pixel sex, dancing, and buying virtual shoes, or any other activity that requires minimal intelligence and makes no contribution to economy or community.
Ad hominem arguments? That’s deep.
Nelson Jenkins
Aug 26th, 2011
@ fararden
I wish I had read that before I posted… no wonder.
I’m arguing with a guy that scripts two horribly-sculpted kittens to fuck. Not joking.
I guess Pixar is just waiting for such talent to land in their offices.
Yep
Aug 26th, 2011
LOL Go getem Tiger
Sky
Aug 26th, 2011
Hmm funny I have Horses,Dogs and Meeroo’s and my sim doesn’t have lag at all. And it’s pretty funny that some of you say that only the creators of these breedables are the only ones making money. Because I know a lot of people who make a fortune in RL off of these things. My mom knows a woman who just bought a brand new car in RL from selling her meeroos. So you can say all the bad shit you want about breedables because when all of us breedable owners are living high in RL off of them and your all still stuck with your sucky ass 9-5 job then the joke will be on you. Like anything else it takes time and patience to make money off of something no matter what life your in. I’ve been breeding horses for a few months now and I’m just now starting to get the really good expensive horses which I will eventually sell. Have fun with your pathetic and close minded ideas and opinions.
Nelson Jenkins
Aug 27th, 2011
@ Sky
So you can say all the bad shit you want about breedables because when all of us breedable owners are living high in RL off of them and your all still stuck with your sucky ass 9-5 job then the joke will be on you.
Actually, joke’s on you – when the breedables bubble pops, you’ll be out of a “job”. Meanwhile, I’ll be making $50k in my day job, $50k from my SL business, and $250k on my small business IRL. Keep telling yourself it’s a worthwhile investment… I’m sure you, too, can afford a brand-new Chevy Aveo for only 12 hours a day on SL for a year straight! Too bad you won’t be able to keep on on rent payments though…
Moi
Oct 18th, 2011
HEre is something what people forgot all theses breedables are violating anty-trust laws what are in use in many countries… Someone who tried to make something scripted for such things got hurt by monopolistic DMCA from interested creators of such junk something more, here are two type of customers privileged ones who has many advantages from creators and dumb ones paying for all!!!
hobo kelly
Oct 18th, 2011
I think what you are trying to say is: A Meeroo in the ass is better than two in the bush?
Ziggy21 Slade
Oct 19th, 2011
@Nelson Jenkins
I can see where you could contrive some obscenely misconstrued evidence “proving” that I am a fascist – however, I would like to see how you could possibly call me poorly educated or envious. (This would be your role here, I presume.)
This is apparently evidence of your great education…
Can we ban that Amaretto cunt as well? (And keep her banned.)
It’s a free country, I can do what I want. Are you being affected by my opinions? I firmly believe that anyone that wastes a nickel on these silly breedables needs their head examined. That’s my opinion, and perhaps nobody cares about it, and maybe you’ll prove me wrong – I’m eager to find out.
You are right you can do what you want, but what you want is to stop other people doing what they want, so you should expect some pretty fierce opposition. This is what I am getting at when I talk about intolerance. Personally I don’t understand dancing in SL or Child avatars or any number of things, but I don’t attempt to deny the right of others to enjoy such things.
I intensely enjoy stringing cats up above a bonfire, gutting them, burning their insides, and sewing together their coats for clothing, it seems so odd that so many people here have this vicious desire to deny that enjoyment.
Ad absurdum arguments? That’s deep.
Bandwagon effect does not a worthwhile investment make. The horse bubble popped recently – why do you think they just released dogs, and then demanded that Linden Lab waste their time with a blog post for advertising? Go shopping and see how many people are buying horses secondhand. Then go see how many people are trying (and failing) to sell them.
This is a game, its isn’t supposed to be a worthwhile investment, all the systems eventually see a decline it’s an inevitable result as more and more competition moves into the marketplace and a finite number of breeders want to try out new things. While this is playing itself out many breeders make themselves a nice bit of pocket money and this is money which most could not have made otherwise since they lack the creative skills, This is the best thing about breedables, I think, they have drawn more people into the economy.
I sell a lot of things and make a living off of them. I make a hell of a lot of money doing scripting work for one of the three top automobile manufacturers in the game. What about you?
Nice of you to ask, I have over 500 products listed, including 3 that reached number one on the old Xstreet and more than a dozen top 20s, my top sellers have sold thousands of copies, I am willing to bet you could pick any ONE of my top ten items and it would outsell your entire inventory of textured box prims twice over. When I launched my badly sculpted Kittys I sold over 1000 starter packs in the first 6 hours, at their peak there were over 10000 pets on the grid. Virtual traffic lights, vehicle scripts, 50k – lol, lol and lol!.
What large development projects? Amaretto isn’t a “large development project”. A large development project would be coding Mozilla Firefox or designing a skyscraper. A couple of people with mediocre experience with LSL (especially SL user interaction – although the 80/20 idiots that designed Viewer 2 are not very good role models) is by no means a “large development project”.
This is almost too stupid to bother commenting on, of course if you compare creating a breedable pet to something totally irrelevant like building the Large Hadron Collider it isn’t large, however if you make a sensible and relevant comparison to other developments for the public market in SL its about as big as it gets, the idea that any Tom, Dick or Harry can come along and knock out a breedable pet is ludicrous. A basic system is going to require a database backend, a website, protracted marketing campaign, support ticket system, support personnel, custom animations, scripted prim animation, scripted movement, food and health systems, extensive testing, I could go on and on suffice to say by any sensible comparison its a very large development project.
As any LSL developer knows, coidng in LSL is much like coding an integrated system. There is very little memory, CPU resources are limited, and “large development projects” need to be strictly managed and designed to run on such resources without severely impacting other scripts and general system performance. Most breedables are not designed with these guidelines in mind.
Complete nonsense, the success of any system is totally dependent
on the pets ability to run smoothly with minimum impact, the idea that a developer wouldn’t even consider this is obviously ridiculous. Like everything in SL its a trade off between what you actually want it to do and what is actually possible in SL.
Now you are talking out of your ass. Have you even visited mainland lately? I did a lot of test runs for CGR and came up with a very large list of region performance indicators. Averaged them together over the course of a few months, and guess what? Regions with breedable farms in them had typically 0.3 less time dilation than those without.
You need to remember that a huge trade exists for breedables, there are numerous markets, auctions and stores all with lots of pets on display, many of these places are very popular and have numerous visitors, if a few pets rendered the average avatar unable to walk as you claim they simply couldn’t exist.
Ad hominem arguments? That’s deep
Yeah sorry I forgot to mention the very worthwhile, and definitely not weird hobby of RPing a Firefighter
Yep
Oct 19th, 2011
Looks around for Tiger
dave blusto
Nov 30th, 2011
At this point in the game, the only spectacular thing about
Linden Labs, is their spectacular lack of comprehension
of their own incompetance.
Reader
Nov 30th, 2011
true words
Dontspill McGinnis
Dec 1st, 2011
Way to go “Reader”, you just shot down any credibility “dave blusto” might have had.
dave blusto
Dec 2nd, 2011
Ok ‘Don’tspill’ lets see…I am a 40 Million Dollar Company called Linden Labs- I have a Primary Client, The Meeroo Company, that is paying me, and putting more revenue into my coffers, than any other breedable company..So I do this:
~ The food system gets hacked, so I ban the companys owner by mistake, further endangering the food supply, and in doing so massivly compound the drain on their revenues as the supply dries up.
~ I fix the mistake, and publish a snide, pompous joke about it on my website, that is insulting to the company whose problem I just compounded due to my own ineptness.
…If thats something you feel like defending, then all I can say is that i hope you dont have a business. And if you do, please remind me never to buy anything from it. Yours, Dave B
Aliara Inaka
Jan 20th, 2012
I found the contents of this article interesting, not for the points laid about, but the complete ignorance in which they have been placed. Let me point out a few:
In reference to the Land Exploit: “the sort of thing one might expect a game company to fix quickly – unless the game company was named Linden Lab” First of all you should have a basic understanding of what actually causes this issue. This exploit occures adjacent to a region border either into another region or into the “void” itself. At region boarders and close enough to the void permissions no longer apply because these areas are transitional or completely empty. This is also not an easy issue to resolve. This issue persists in Second Life, Open Simulator, Aurora Grid and other grids that follow along the same framework. One of the only ways to fix the issue would be to eliminate the void and region boarders which would cause large amounts of stress on the simulators(Region Hosting Servers). Down to the fact is every game or virtual world has its bugs and loop holes, and people will exploit them Infact most residents DO exploit them.
“it has become clear that the Lab is more than happy to ban accounts wildly in hopes of catching the bad guys – so what if a few innocents are harmed by the Lab’s rough justice?” This is one of the most Naive parts of this article. There are very few tools A company like Linden Lab can use without violating the law when issuing a governance ban.
1) Linden Dollar transactions: Both the creators account AND the fake accounts would get transactions for the same Item. If you look in your transaction log you will see that you get who you paid, how much you paid and whenm these logs do not show where, or what you paid for.
2)IP,Mac Address, Volume Serial: These are comonly used to track offenders in games, websites and most deffinatly second Life. Now you need to remember that all three of these can be spoofed, second IP addresses are rarely static, and third they are unreliable because multiple people can share the same IP, MAC and VS.
3)Email, Chat Logs.: linden Lab cannot force you to give them your REAL email address, and as for chat logs well if you are breaking the rules of a game you usually dont want to brag about it.
So what is the sad truth in that? Guess what Innocent people will get banned, there is no stopping that. But If they are TRUELY innocent they will cooperate with the Policies of the company in order to get their account back. Second Life and Linden Lab are not perfect they will never be.
” With no transparency about who has been banned or why, there is little accountability inside the Lab and a corporate culture that cultivates gross incompetence” This part of the article actually made me laugh. Appearently the author Has NO knowledge of United States Laws and regulations regarding the sharing of online account information of any kind. And I do say US law because Linden Lab is a US based company and therefore bound by those laws. There is also the matter of California’s Privacy laws. So let me put this frankly. IT….IS….ILLEGAL…TO….SHARE…BANNED…ACCOUNT NAMES….AND REASONS…FOR…BANNING. I personally run several websites and a VIrtual grid based with OpenSim framework, there are laws and regulations you MUST know to operate that kind of business and you must follow those laws with dealing with accounts. How many of you would like your stupid actions, bans, suspensions, and mistakes broadcast for everyone even your friends and family to see? Not a single person would want that.
“At this point any normal company would have apologized in public for what can only be described as a first class clusterfuck. But Linden Lab is not a normal company.” Linden Lab is not a normal company, and Second Life is not a normal product. Expecting them to apologize for innocent casualties when they are trying to protect the entirety of Second Life is downright ignorant.
“Instead of explaining what went wrong and how the fundamental issues would be addressed, the Lindens resorted to their infamous privacy policy. In practice, the privacy policy exists to cover up for anything that might embarrass the Lab” If you read the privacy policy you will see that its sole purpose is to protect YOU, the customer from having your information shared. Infact the only people who want to know if another resident has been banned are the people who have a sick desire for the satisfaction of seeing their own retribution fullfilled. “Is anyone really surprised that Second Life has wallowed in a sea of unaccountable incompetence for years?” If Linden Lab is so Incompetent why are people still spending thousands of dollars a year or a month in their virtual world? Because they actually see how difficult a job it is to run something like Second Life. They BENEFIT from the work Linden Lab does to run Second Life.
So what is this article doing? It is wrongly placing blame on a company, because it is a company that makes millions of dollars a year. The blame for these issues belongs to the violators of the Terms of service, it belongs SOLELY to the people who exploit bugs and glitches to steal from people who work hard for their money and to enjoy Second Life. Let this post educate you and anyone who wants to read it, because the article I am posting it for is only pointing fingers, not telling the truth.
pat
Feb 10th, 2012
i never see linden do something correctly,all what is important is making money just money.linden really dont care at people,if you say something wrong abouth then they will ban you for a certain time but as soon you need them what they do is we soory we cant help you because you not a premium member.today is just money that run everything.you just $$$$ at their eyes nothing more,have problem or not they dont care unless you show them alot of money and they will be at your feet the tungue out.so dont be surprise if linden dont apolosize or do thing right
Maggie
Feb 20th, 2012
Come on people, lets not be down on the meeroos. Yeah they are as ugly as sin, but they are some good eaten to be had there. Next time you find a wandering meeroo. Splash some BBQ sauce on him and toss him on the grill.
They are good rotisserie style too. Put one over an open pit on the beach… Just don’t ge me started on my recipie for meeroo potepie.. Yum…