The other day, I was cleaning up the leftovers of another failed PN attack when suddenly, out of nowhere, I hear that familiar DING, followed by the old “YOU HAVE BEEN LOGGED OUT BY AN ADMINISTRATOR” dialog, indicating I had done something wrong to piss off a Linden somewhere.  I checked my email, to find I had been banned for five days due to assaulting someone.  After some head-scratching, I realized the only people I had done anything to were the morons spamming self-replicating shit in the sandboxes.  Even though I know it’s against the terms of service agreement, I still attempt to crash or orbit shitheads conducting serious violations of the ToS, if it will slow them down and keep the sandbox running longer so I can either escape, AR, or remove objects.   This recent ban is still a reminder that LL needs to do some serious policy reviews.

In the real world (at least in the State of Washington), you have the right to defend yourself with deadly force IF you feel your life is in immediate danger.  It only makes sense to apply a similar train of thought to Second Life, particularly to griefers.  For instance, if some shithead is caging you (in a safezone like a sandbox), you SHOULD have the right to use a weapon to either disrupt that user’s ability to cage you or remove him from the immediate area.  In another case, one should be able to crash the client of a user who is trying to conduct serious violations of the Terms of Service, such as a sim crash attempt.  That is not the case, as shitheads can and do report for countering attacks, which is purely bullshit.  Those arguing “YOU HAVE LANDOWNER TOOLS FOR A REASON” should realize that, in the sandboxes and other public sims, the landowners are asleep or busy 90% of the time.  ARs filed sometimes take hours to be read (one instance took 5 hours), so by the time the Linden goes through your ARs, the sim’s already been crashed and 3 morons have been running around caging people.

On the other side of the equation are the people who get caught in the crossfire.  When orbiters and bullets and shit are whizzing around, third parties are going to get hit eventually.  The same happens IRL.  In Second Life, there’s the option of using smart weapons that try to attack only a certain key, but some weapons throw their targets in a random direction (particularly the blitzers I use to remove large physical prims from a sim), creating a shrapnel effect.  Unfortunately, this cannot be avoided, as even key-targeted orbiters will occasionally orbit the person standing next to the target.  In laggy situations like a server crash attempt, the chances of collateral damage are even higher as fine control is lost.  Pretty much the only way to get around this is to distribute freebie shields in an attempt to reduce the number of users affected by a retalitory attack.  One could also wait for the line of fire to be clear, but especially in laggy situations, someone could run out in front of you before the weapon realizes you’ve hit fire.  Before retaliating to an attack, one should weigh the risks and benefits.

</rant>