S1lent_J@i

In the social sphere of virtuality, more Users are geing disappointed in how the newest Timeout server restriction sets in some of the East side servers are being enforced, clocking in at a solid 20 minutes of inactivity. In an effort to commit to the bit of being the so called 'man' that many delinquint users complain about in the chat logs, It's solely due to the resource strain and the expense of upkeep for some of the public servers, which somehow haven't been shattered by the frequent high User count from around the world.

VirtuRats, as the forum has frequently bequeathed them, are said to be the reason for such stringent conditions, seeing that CGL has posted in the changelogs that said inactivity is "More time spent [idle] than the average User utilizing their input devices in the span of [20 minutes]", which snipes those who use anti-AFK scripts or contraptions to keep connected. The art of loitering has yet to be stated in virtuality, whether in the forums, ConCulture, or simply out and about, though I did notice that there was some who made inactivity a bit of a sport. I think their name was something like Robert, but he became a sort of minor celebrity being a 'virtual statue' over the course of a week or two. CGL was a bit lax with their full-dive clients, but from what I've heard through the grapevine, they're working on more effective pattern recognitions to see if someone's actively using their system, or fell asleep standing up.

In the social mall areas, the food court activity has been affected to such a degree that CGL has been petitioned to add areas where the inactivity restriction cannot affect Users that are engaged in 'repetitive activity'. Well, CGL didn't let me have a free pass with the time I engaged with 'repetitive activity' with your Mother. Zing. While virtuality has had some places where Users can just do stuff without any meaning, such as wall leaning, particulators, and sitting in a chair in an honestly mind numbing number of positions (93 + standard), some other activities like e-loitering, posGriefing, and one incident where an entire idling group were rearranged in the Virtuality Public Park to form a User pyramid.

Ridiculous, a rule that prevents eLoitering? I have a number of claims that I would give CGL to allow our fellow Users to engage in the activity of mindlessness, but then again, some of you have demonstrated why the rule came to be in the first place. I for one welcome the rule, if only because the ingenuity of some Users would have to make CGL eat their own words. When CGL restricted transport back when personal transport was still in the testing phase, some of the users circumvented this by exploiting a physics bug involving reset positions, velocity, and the velocity of objects tethered to a resetted object. You got the CGL giving you vehicles WAYYYY too early just from the phenomenon of 'Heaven's Stairwells', I can still hear the collision sound effects turning me deaf from the 75th floor. AUR had shootdown orders to people who managed to fling themselves 5 stories up right before the patch came in, which had a brief but violent encounter of people simultaneously exploding in elevators.

EDITORS NOTE:

The timeout restriction has been removed followed by the CGL reconsidering the purpose of the inactivity restriction, and instead came to the conclusion of mitigating their servers to better match to geolocations. Matchmaking essentially is cleaved into a third of what the loading came to be, but at the expense of 'regional server expenses' being added if a User wants to visit another regions servers. Now we can have regional difference in more than one form, with the roleplay element of tourism! I appreciate the tens of thousands of people who unknowingly caused a server blackout while trying to protest, in part due to the massive waste of connection packets sent to keep everyone in relative sync. The AUR wasn't even summoned when it happened, every User's loading distance converged on a single fence post with a slightly high poly count.

Le0_Schmiller

Another day in virtuality, and I cannot fathom how Users manage to turn what should've been a routine event into something etched into Virtuality's history books. Remember SandBar_Eater causing The Hypercrash because of a vending machine processing 13 hours worth of Tire Iron hits in 7 seconds? It's not going to top that, but the spectacle made it way more entertaining than suddenly switching my headset to black.

A global motorbike race on one server managed to amass over 130 Users vying for a couple hundred doubloons, but it wasn't because of the amount of contenders. No, it was the fact that the AUR somehow got roped into the race itself, in what I can best describe as an inprompteau action race. You got AUR specs pouring out of every possible unit of road, trying their hardest to catch someone within the race. No easy task, especially when having to deal with the User crowd crush, and with some contributing to the chaos with intentionally using their weapons to hinder them. Some were even dropping their inventory to resupply some of the back Users!

Now AUR shennanigans is practically a mystical and unspoken art, threatened with the timeout of a couple minutes, or a longer respawn timer, but there were reports of some Users recieving a 3 week timeout with how much AUR there were. Looking at the Map UI, it was a flood of yellow and red icons splashing through the city streets, leaving wreckage behind. One of the moderators on the server was also spotted driving big rig trucks for some hand to hand ruckus, but I think the CGL gave him a stern talking to afterwards. The derezzing particles were so dense that some of the Users left because it was too choppy.

I didn't hear back from the CGL right now, but judging by the User response, it was wicked. If I was something more than a Virtuality Columnist, I would've made it a racing royale, and maybe add some event-specific stuff to add to the pizzaz. But then I wouldn't be leaving a record for future Users or eHistorians to read either, so it's just wishful thinking. *wink wink* (Dry Heaves in consternation).