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A glimpse into SL’s CS calls

September 30th, 2009 (Visited 3484 times) Tags: second life, vw business

Tyche Shepherd has posted some great analysis and charts that give a glimpse into what it takes to run Second Life in terms of customer service.

Last week I mentioned that I had been storing Second Life Incident Reports since the beginning of the month to build up a database similar to my Region Survey Database. A forum lurker who wants to remain anonymous, who read this , contacted me in-world and sent me the full past 28 months worth of published incident reports (21600+). I cannot thank the person enough for providing this data…
In total I now have data which seems complete from 7th Jun 2007 up to the current time, at the moment this comes to 21665 published incidents.
What did the naughty people do ? – SLUniverse Forums.

For contrast, I just saw a Tweet from the #nygames hashtag (NY Games conference of some sort?) saying that

#nygames Playfish uses 3 support people to support is 50 million players – focused on users helping users to hold costs and scale up

Obviously, very different circumstances, but it still makes you think…

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Prokofy said on September 30th, 2009 at 4:46 pm:

This was a tremendous public service, I was thrilled with this. I’ve tried for awhile to keep these disappearing police blotters from an RSS feed in a Google reader, but then I only get a few hundred or so and they don’t seem to stay, and it’s too much bother to figure out how to keep them archived (and now I’m not sure you can even RSS that page as you used to, they’ve now completely buried the page because it was a buzz kill).

I also tried for a time to keep an alternative police blotter with the real reports and real follow up — too griefed and spammed, had to give up.
Some day.

What’s important to know about this incident report (which really did literally used to be called “Police Blotter” but that was retired as “too negative” and “too much like a government) is that they are only reporting a fraction of the incidents. A tiny fraction, judging from everything I’ve ever gotten out of the G-team (the Governance team, which are the Lindens who respond to these abuse reports and make a judgement to prosecute or not). I mean like 10 to every 100 or more — and I mean not reported, but acted-upon incidents.

You have to realize that the Lindens literally execute hundreds of accounts at dawn every day, day-old particle spewers, prim-litterers, sandbox shooters, etc. who have no appeal. And perhaps that’s how it should be given the anonymousness and unaccountability of these accounts, but it sets up troubling paradigms.

I have almost never seen a single report of a single known incident that I know was validated and prosecuted to either a temporary or permanent ban ever appear on the police blotter. The Lindens tend to just report the ones that don’t involve inadvertently shedding light on various “dramas”. So they will file bunches from garden-variety sandbox shooting incidents. Or they will pick out some “representative” cases to “show” to provide a kind of object lesson, which is a rough equivalent of “impact litigation” in its way.

For example, right now they want this report page, such as it is, read by only a tiny handful of bloggers, to say, “We care about age verification and kicking kids off the grid who are underage,” and that’s what it’s showing — they focus on it, report more, and use it as a deterrent effect in its way — although being on the front page of the website (where it used to be!) it would have a much greater deterrent effect.

Some people would even like to have interactive dynamically crime update figures to see where the hotspot regions are, and avoid clubs that frequently end up on the police blotter with shootings, or rentals where fraud occurs, or whatever, but the Lindens stay away from doing this.

I continue to insist on, as I have for five years, and I will likely go on doing for another 5 and another 5 after that, to publicize these violations not only for deterrent’s sake, but to aid against abuse by Lindens

1. Name of person making the report — yes, in a RL court, you would have to give your name and appear in court, and the media would write about you unless you were a rape victims — yet in SL, you are able to hide behind the idea that you would “suffer retaliation” if you can’t make anonymous denunciations like in a police state.

But…you have an avatar name, not a real name, so retaliation is only in pixel form, and anyway, what kind of crime-ridden place is this that perpetrators get a wrist slap and come back to harass you again if you publicize their names? I’m a VERY BIG believer in naming and shaming and I totally repudiate the idea that silence about griefing and anonymity about reporting helps — it doesn’t. It perpetuates the conspiracy of silence. I find it works very well in the long run to name and shame and I do so, regularly and often.

2. Name of perpetrator. Not only for deterrent effect, but because some people might then like to add you to their own land’s ban list. Does this force you to suffer a penalty after you have “paid your debt to society”? Yes, but in a virtual world, there is so little recourse, this has to be done. It would also help flag what I believe is the real persistent problem of griefing in SL: groups, and the inability of the lib Lindens to tackle groups qua groups, under the belief that they can’t have “guilt by association”. Trust me, once you see 100 abuse reports successfully prosecuted out of one group, you can shed this notion that they are innocent kids with a few bad eggs and see it as the RL analogy of a “criminal conspiracy” that it is. Then eventually the Lindens could suspend groups that show these patterns, and no, don’t tell me they’d just make new ones, because griefers very much cling to the tribal power and branding of groups and their names and their often no-show non-logging members, so getting rid of/suspending groups is tremendously important in breaking up gangs.

3. Name of prosecuting Linden. This will end specious prosecutions, vengeneful prosecutions, prosecutions for the sake of old friends’ networks from when that Linden was a resident, etc.

Well, that’s likely more than you wanted to hear on this subject, but it will all be relevant to Metaplace some day, Raph.

Amethyst said on September 30th, 2009 at 5:33 pm:

It’s important to note that this is only their abuse statistics – they handle their other user support issues separately from these types of calls. Very interesting though!

Yukon Sam said on October 1st, 2009 at 7:00 am:

One of the thorniest problems in dealing with griefers is that they have zero attachment to any given character (except in a few cases a non-griefing “main” on a seperate account). The character is just a tool, and the griefer expects the account to be banned sooner or later. The game is to create as much chaos as possible before that happens.

With an MMO, a banned player has to at invest at least a token amount of effort to be an effective annoyance again. In a free account situation with no identity verification, there are effectively no restrictions on changing names and faces at will.

The net result is that the only people punished by negative publicity are those with some attachment to a particular avatar, and for the most part, these aren’t the griefers (or at least, not the habitual griefers).

Given this dynamic, revealing the names of people who report griefing incidents strikes me as being waaaaay beyond counterproductive, to the point of actively supporting retaliatory harassment.

PlayNoEvil said on October 1st, 2009 at 7:39 am:

Raph – Could you link directly to the summary chart/figure?

Raph said on October 1st, 2009 at 10:49 pm:

Not sure I understand. There’s a bunch of charts there, and the link is in the post… here it is again:

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/general-sl-discussion/34534-what-did-naughty-people-do.html

PlayNoEvil said on October 2nd, 2009 at 11:15 am:

Sorry, Raph. My bad.

Prokofy said on October 5th, 2009 at 11:52 pm:

Yukon,

You’re not getting it. And you have the same pattern of thinking about this that has obtained since the Well, and which doesn’t work, which only strengthens griefers because everyone thinks “nothing can be done” and which isn’t useful in virtual worlds.

The SL griefer isn’t like the gaming griefer, or at least, he’s a mutation.

He often prides himself on a basic identity or “main” that he keeps “under the radar” when he griefs and then runs a series of alts that might be throwaways but that *have the same group*. The group is something that isn’t thrown away (and that’s why it’s worth suspending or banning, because it cuts into the alt-storage capacity, comms during raids, recruitment, and brand recognition.

The SL griefer excels at doing things not technically a TOS offense and not bannable, so you have to stack up 100s of reports of minor harassment or under-the-radar attacks and then eventually they create a portrait that might lead to a banning or at least cutting of the alts.

The social dynamics are such that you have to keep hammering away showing how the members of a group in the main continue to grief. That they can’t hide behind “guilt by association”. Eventually, you isolate them and then other groups won’t accept them. They wage fierce battles, trying to get the “no guilt by association” rubric to work on guilty liberals. But people hold firm because by then the *publicity* of their actions adds up.
It’s the only way to get at this kind of tenacious griefer.

The ways of griefing in SL are more social and more involved than just ganking a newb.

A glimpse into SL’s CS calls

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