I definitely seem to be going through something of a Second Life phase at present. I’m sure I’ve rambled on at length in the past, about how fascinating, and bursting with evocative potential their worldbuild, scripting and societies are. It’s as if I were a kid again, and had been given every Lego set ever, all at once, and then told it was magic Lego, and that if I could just learn the right magic words, it would do stuff! (And I mean Proper Lego, not the ridiculous prefabricated mess of custom parts that passes for Lego today!)

What’s not to like? I’m spending a lot of time in one of my favourite spots in the SL Metaverse – Sandbox Newcomb, one of the publicly available designated building areas. It’s a great place to spend an evening, allowing building without the restrictions that even highly paying land-owners can face, with sizes and complexity, and it also tends to attract many other builders, looking for a spot to start throwing shapes, and it’s not just the drifters like me, either – fully paid-up respectable members of society often use the place for construction, rather than mess up their neatly manicured virtual lawns with pine blocks.

This all means that even when I get bored of my own little projects, or just want a quick break, there is a wealth of entertainment to be had flying around the huge sandy valley and seeing what everyone else is up to. Such observations often lead to technical discussions of the finer points of our craft, and before you know it, several hours have passed…a most agreeable way to spend an evening.

I say ‘drifter’, but was actually quite surprised to discover that in my absence, I seemed to have gained a promotion from the gutter to the stars. Prior to LL’s big account status revamp, I was a ‘Basic’ – The lower of the two types of account. I didn’t pay a subscription, mostly because I didn’t need any land; sandboxes and visits to the estates of friends I’d met in there were enough for me. (Indeed, I even had a helping hand in building a few of those.) The game would grant me 50$L a week, as long as I logged in at least once, and I found that most of the trinkets on sale in there were things I could make myself without too much hastle anyway. The ‘Premium’ accounts were allowed land, got 500$L a week, but had to pay $9.95 USD a month for the privilege. In both cases, they wanted to see a credit card before you got started.

Now all that’s changed. As well as those two, there are three types of status now – ‘Unverified’ (For new accounts – no credit card needed), ‘Verified, No Payment Info On File’ (Credit card details on file, but never used), and ‘Verified, Payment Info Used’ (CC details, and have bought Linden Money form their exchange thingey).

Clearly the long-term economic slide of the value of the Linden Dollar vs the US Dollar, from $L250/1 USD last September, to $340/1 USSD in May, can’t have been helped by printing off all that fresh money every week, and the 50$L pocket-money is now gone altogether, leaving subscription-dodging newbies with no automatic income at all, beside that which their skills can earn them. Getting rid of the $500L pocket-money for subscription (i.e. Paying) customers is a far more spikey subject, and probably won’t happen any time soon, but at least LL can be said to be breaking even in some fashion, with those people.

Some time not long after I joined, last year, I think I used my credit-card to buy a bit of startup toy-money, probably to the equivalent value of a Burger, Fries and Large Coke. A useful float to cover the 10$L upload fees LL charge for adding your own textures, etc to the game, which I’ve still not run out of yet. However, this seems enough to elevate me to ‘Verified, Payment Info On File’ - the SL Aristocracy, and visibly marks me out as a Man of Substance, for all who gaze upon me. Despite this, I’m still not actually paying LL anything, and haven’t in over 10 months.

Presumably, the mere request to see a credit card has been regarded by LL as a significant barrier to entry, and since the abolition of virtual pocket-money for new people, it now costs LL virtually nothing to get as many new people in there as possible, and perhaps in response to a growing greater trend, they’ve effectively created an indefinite free trial, one so free that they only want an email address out of you. It does seem to be working – as of writing, their site is reporting 382,000 accounts (of any type, ever), and 3,800 or so online as I type, which is about double for this time of day, than the last time I did a post like this, back in early spring.

So free-play does help, but it can hinder too. Since the process of setting up a fresh alt account under the Unverified scheme is so quick and painless, and requires only an email address (which may or may not be disposable itself), many feel that this is a loss of real accountability too far, and an open invitation to griefers, and this is something I’ve noticed in pretty much any game with a ‘free play’ mode - Anarchy Online Basic and GuildWars do tend to have more than their expected share of smacktalking muppets on world-chat channels and in meeting places. I was keen to see if the Message Board Banshees were at all justified in crying End of World, but it would be fair to say that things have definitely changed.

The biggest thing I noticed was an almost palpable increase in general suspicion and distrust. Many of the places I’d visited before; virtual homes of friends and acquaintances, popular malls and clubs, and so on, had allowed building on their land. There are many better places to do that, but it would be handy to be able to pull a copy of my latest work out of my dimensional pockets to show them interesting techniques or features. I’d be careful to tidy it away when done, but lately, it seems not everyone is this considerate.

Rather than, as I expected, the whole place suddenly becoming inflicted by rampant script kiddies going berserk on a pandemic, but largely unfocused level, what seems to have happened instead, is that the malcontents are organized. Many anecdotal tales suggest that they travel in packs, target specific venues and know almost exactly the right way to annoy the other residents. The two main forms of abuse consist of intentional prim-littering and push-guns.

The littering is pretty self explanatory – dumping massive amounts of imaginary rubble on someone else’s imaginary lawn. Of course the obvious defence is to turn off public building entirely for your land, and something many many people seem to have done. A shame, and another fine example of One Idiot Spoiling It For The Rest Of Us.

The push-guns are more elegantly scripted toys, designed for SL’s somewhat underwhelming PVP features. Modified to use Physics to Push the target, rather than damage a health-bar, they can then have an effect pretty much everywhere that scripts are allowed to function, rather than with health damage, which can only occur in a specially set combat area. All very irritating, especially if you’re in the middle of a complex build, and suddenly find yourself flying through space some miles away. Unfortunately for most, scripts are the lifeblood of everything in SL that does anything, so turning them off on a land-wide basis will also stop anything you want to work from happening there. I guess LL are looking into this as part of their ongoing Anti-Griefing Measures – a tacit acknowledgement perhaps that they have opened the floodgates by removing the CC requirement.

The sandboxes offer an especially target rich environment for the online misanthrope, but then that’s why I tend to work in the Newcomb sandbox – that particular sandbox is a script-disabled one, and at the moment, I’m just making ‘dumb’ objects, with no code needed. The last few days in there have been relatively quiet however, and not nearly as much of a bearpit as I’d been expecting.

Hell – give a man a chatbar and he can grief, but to be honest, I haven’t noticed a massive leap in the standard level of background idiocy you’d find across most of the internet anyway, and on those few occasions I have had any trouble, I found that just rolling with it works well, and in a few cases, I ended up having some quite involved technical discussions with what turned out to be actually quite intelligent and interesting men/women/foxpeople/robotmechas. We at Van Hemlock do not condone griefing, but I had to wonder how I’d react if most people took one look at my profile, saw the word ‘Unverified’ tattooed there and instantly clammed up or became outright rude and hostile. It certainly wouldn’t encourage me to ‘Verify’, that’s for sure - "Well Screw You Guys Then!" would probably be closer the mark.

Turns out most of these folks were just bored, and annoyed at the elitism that seems to have come about from LL’s latest New World Order, and underneath, they weren’t especially different from us ‘civilised folk’. Doesn’t take much to get them typing enthusiastically about their latest project, and showing you their own personal dreams and nightmares fashioned from Lego and Magic.

Certainly the shake-up has caused troubles, but my verdict is that they aren’t nearly as bad as most forums would have you believe. Then again, we of the Internet have always enjoyed a good car crash…

Edit:

"Originally Posted by 1.11.2(1) Preview Release Notes lRequestAgentData can now return the resident's account type *Example usage: llRequestAgentData(llGetOwner(), DATA_PAYINFO); *No Payment Info on File: 0 *Payment Info on File: 1 *No Payment Info on File AND Payment Info Used: 2 (Only Beta/Lifetime users fall under this status) *Payment Info on File AND Payment Info Used: 3 "

In other words, determining an accout's status can now be done in scripts, automatically, along with the appropriate punitive measure being enacted. Expect many new 'Auto-Lyncher V1.0's on sale in a metaverse near you soon...