Archive for the 'Rants' Category Page 3 of 4

You’re Killing Me Here!!!

Just announced on the Official Second Life® Blog (emphasis mine) :

We are aware of multiple issues affecting the whole of Second Life® and are working to resolve them as quickly as possible.

Please refrain from uploading textures or making any transactions for the time being. You may notice problems with logging into Second Life® grey textures/avatars,  inability to Teleport, failing transactions.. among other things.

We will update this blog as soon as we have information to update with.

I know it’s not really like the metaverse is actually saying "Don’t buy Robby’s stuff, we don’t want him here", but with all of these "Don’t buy stuff" warnings having become practically a daily occurrence, for the first time in over 18 months I’m starting to worry whether I’ll make enough sales to pay rent on my in-world stores.

Okay, rant’s over.  Sorry for the off-topic venting :)

[UPDATE] Just tried to view the Second Life® blog announcement mentioned above (because I followed the link while testing my blog in IE7), and discovered that when I open the SL™ blog in IE it tells me that the Lindens have no guns.  What a relief, I was worried I might have irritated them today :

lindenGun

Popularity: 100% [?]

Proceed with caution - Second Life® Utilities

It’s a bit of old news now (in Internet time, at least), but not long ago there was quite a bit of buzz in the Second Life® blogosphere about a new program called Second Inventory, whose stated purpose is to allow a Second Life® user to create a local backup of their Second Life® inventory - Scripts, notecards, textures, the works.

Of course, there was an immediate buzz (see Dedric Mauriac, Vint Falken, and Your2ndPlace for example and comments) in the SL™ blog scene and lots of interesting speculation, discussions, and outright accusations on SL-related forums about how the software could be used to steal from content creators.  I don’t know and won’t speculate here on whether that’s true, but I could actually envision myself using this software for it’s intended purpose, as there have been many times when I’ve wished that I had a local copy of a script or texture that I can no longer find or that Second Life® seems to have lost. 

Most recently Second Life® had lost the notecard for my ZHAO animation override, but even more importantly (and more frequently) I’ve lost several important scripts over the last two years.  Unlike my real-world software development environment, Second Life® has no version control, automated backups, or even adequate inventory search functionality, and this has led to my rigidly following a practice of doing *all* of my SL™ scripting work offline using SciTE-ez, lslint, and Subversion.

So, as I say, I can see wanting to use the Second Inventory program myself, but I just can’t get past the most powerful of trust issues : It requires your Second Life® username and password.  Having developed several kinds of utility software for myself using libsecondlife, I’m well aware that this is a requirement for which there is no workaround, and that’s not the part that makes me uncomfortable.  The part that makes me uncomfortable is that I am just fundamentally wary of giving my password to anything but official Second Life® software.

There’s another program generating a lot of buzz in the blogosphere right now that provides a pretty concrete example of why that unease is justified : G-Archiver.  Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame recently received an email from Dustin Brooks (who reverse-engineered the program) describing how he had discovered that the program sends user’s GMail login and password info to the software’s creator.  Mr. Brooks apparently discovered the sign-in credentials for 1777 GMail users!

Now, I’m not saying Second Inventory is a phishing scam, I don’t know if it is or isn’t (I tend to believe it’s not, but not as strongly as I believe that the Nicholaz viewer is not), and that’s not the point I’m trying to make.  The point I’m trying to make is that thousands of people get fooled by malicious programs because they don’t have a fundamental mistrust of software that asks for sign-in credentials.  Even fairly intelligent and tech-savvy people fall for these kinds of things, perhaps in part because they *do* understand the technical reasons behind the software asking for such sensitive information, and they are very comfortable with technology.

I strongly suspect that with the Second Life® viewer being released as open source and libsecondlife growing steadily more capable, we can expect to see an explosion of third-party utilities and programs.  While that’s generally a good thing in my book, and I look forward to seeing what kinds of things such software will enable with respect to bridging the real and virtual worlds, I think it’s important to remind potential users to proceed with caution.

Popularity: 71% [?]

Why do people cheat?

That’s a question I’m sure I’ll never understand the answer to, but it’s also one that comes to my mind frequently.

Specifically, I don’t understand why people attempt to cheat at C:SI combat.  There have been quite a number of people who’ve done so, and most of the time it’s the most naive, blatantly obvious, pitiful kind of cheating that just makes me shake my head in disgust.

Take, for instance, this guy I was fighting several months ago in Samurai Edo.  He had on an attachment that, when he pressed an attack key, would just hammer me with invisible physical spheres.  Of course, he wasn’t even sly enough to make these prims silent, so my first clue was the massive collision noises I heard every time he slashed.  Secondly, the collision of these prims with an avatar creates a pretty noticeable impact effect, and only someone relatively new to Second Life® would fail to notice.  I could quite clearly see them in View Transparent mode, so I asked him what the heck he was doing it for (since it simply would never work), and…  He denied having any such device.  I mean, seriously, that’s an insult to anyone’s intelligence.

Recently, Shindo mentioned to me that he’d seen someone that was using another extremely obvious cheat that allowed him to remain blocking at all times.  Um, like nobody is going to notice that, right?  Esprite mentioned a similar cheater to me the other day, but I’m not sure whether it’s the same person or someone else.

There have been countless other examples, but the point is that I can’t understand the confusion of thinking and absence of character that drives people to do this stuff.

So, what gets done about it?  Well, here’s what I think is likely to happen to someone that is caught cheating at C:SI, though every situation is different :

  • Their win/loss record could get permanently wiped, depending on the severity of the cheat.  This might take some of the motivation away from cheating, though I don’t understand the cheater’s mindset enough to know for sure if that’s actually effective.  This is extremely rare, but we do reserve the right to do so.
  • Banning from C:SI regions, both official and otherwise.  Again, this depends on the cheat as well as the region.  The criteria is likely different for me banning someone from Samurai Edo, for instance, than someone else banning them from Meiji.  Every region administrator has their own tolerance for cheaters, but it’s not at all uncommon to see the ban-stick come out no matter where the cheating happens.  By and large, the C:SI community is made up of honorable and skillful warriors with utter disdain for and little tolerance of cheaters.
  • Abuse Report : This is uncommon, but I have personally met people who claim to be using Second Life® exploits on C:SI scripts and objects in order to cheat (or worse).  In every case I’ve doubted that the person was telling the truth, but as they say, "tell it to the judge".  Linden Labs has the capability to verify or disprove that claim, and I believe that it is appropriate to report them.
  • Public "name and shame".  If someone is caught cheating, it’s likely that the people that catch them are going to tell others they know, with the likely result that the person will no longer be welcome in many places, and will have a hard time finding good sparring partners.  This probably wouldn’t bother many noob-farmers, but that’s a subject for a different day.

Okay, sorry for the long and pointless rant, I just get really irked when I see this kind of stuff.  I know so many people that are dedicated, work hard, and train regularly, and I respect them for it.  Cheaters, on the other hand, are just slime, and I felt like griping about it this morning :)

 

Popularity: 63% [?]

Myth Busters - Second Life® Edition

Ever since I released the Wave Katana 2.0.3 update, I’ve been hearing rumors about it that I find somewhat disturbing.  It’s not the content of the rumors that I find most disturbing, however, but rather the fact that only a single good friend of mine is relaying them to me.

The rumors range from the new version being much faster than previous versions, to being able to automatically counter from block, to being able to combo without getting stunned, and now I’m even hearing that some people refuse to fight an opponent with a Wave Katana because it’s considered "cheating".

So far I’ve found very little of substance to these rumors and have been unable to duplicate any of the supposed exploits that have been described to me.  It may be that I’m missing an important detail, or some step has been omitted, or I’m just plain misunderstanding what’s being said, but I’m not convinced.

This reminds me somewhat of a time early in my Second Life® when I was talking to a C:SI regular who had been around from day one, and he used a phrase I will always remember to describe the drama that sometimes happens within certain cliques of the C:SI community : "Samurai Soap Opera". 

I think it’s irresponsible to spread false rumors, and certainly doesn’t help the community.  All it does is spread FUD, and to some extent makes the most active rumor-spreaders lose credibility.

If there were truth to these rumors, or even a suspicion that there might be truth, it would certainly be better for all if the one person able to do something about it were told, wouldn’t you agree?

I’m a pretty accessible guy, usually willing to converse, and always willing to test something.  Ask anyone who’s known me for a while, and they will (I hope) tell you that I’m just a regular nice guy and you can talk to me.  Even if someone feels uncomfortable talking to me personally about what they think might be bugs or exploits, there is the official Combat: Samurai Island Bug Reports forum available to everyone specifically so that issues can be easily reported.

I know this has been a rant, and probably sounds much more negative than I intended, but I’m honestly quite disappointed that only one person so far is willing to come to me and say "Hey, dude, there might be something wrong with this update".  I want to know when something is wrong.  And I should think that more than one person would be willing to tell me about it.

Why wouldn’t you?

Popularity: 49% [?]



Bad Behavior has blocked 143 access attempts in the last 7 days.

Close
E-mail It