Urgent Issue with Gacha Exploit – No Copy Item Duplication via Sim Crash
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Stoic Cat
To Linden Lab,
With the reintroduction of Gachas to Second Life, I am concerned about an unresolved and critical exploit that has long impacted artists work and livelihoods.
The Bug: No Copy Gacha Duplication via Sim Crash
A longstanding exploit allows users to duplicate No Copy Gacha items by:
Rezzing a No Copy Gacha item in-world
Picking the item back up
Forcing a sim crash
Upon region restart, the item can appear both in the user’s inventory and rezzed inworld effectively duplicating it.
This method enables malicious users to mass copy limited items and resell them on the Marketplace at the expense of the original creator. These listings often do not show the “(Limited Quantities Available)” tag, indicating they were not legitimately obtained through the original Gacha machines.
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Impact on Creators:
As a creator, it was devastating to spend weeks or months designing an entire Gacha set for events like The Arcade or Epiphany, only to see duplicated copies flood the Marketplace mere hours after the event opens. Worse still:
Linden Lab's support response times (especially on weekends) have historically been too slow to address DMCA claims before significant financial damage is done.
Exploiters often profit thousands of Linden Dollars before listings are even reviewed.
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Documented History & Community Efforts
This issue has been widely reported over the years via:
Jira reports
Blogs
A dedicated Discord server ("Creators Against Theft") where we actively supported each other in identifying and reporting exploiters.
For reference, this 2017 blog post documents the exploit and includes a quote from Simon Linden stating:
“We haven't solved all the problems outright, but we're making good strides.”
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Thank you for taking the time to review this request. We all want Second Life to thrive but artist must be protected if that’s to happen.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Creator
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Kathrine Jansma
This is kind of the wrong vector to look at. The actual exploit is that someone is able to crash a simulator at will. THATs the issue that needs to be fixed. All the rest is just a side effect.
I would consider the duplication on crashes a good engineering tradeoff actually. "Never loose user data" is a good thing. It trades the risk of totally loosing newly rezzed objects with the risk of duplication. Or the risk of much much higher complexity for simulators and inventory management. Fixing it would probably need a full re-engineering of the inventory and rezzing protocols.
One can pretty obviously mitigate the issue by shortening the snapshot intervals for regions and inventories, to reduce the window of vulnerability, e.g. if the region and inventory synced more frequently or kept extra journals around, but thats pretty expensive. And it doesn't really help, if the attacker has the ability to crash a region, he just needs to do it faster.
If LL would monitor region crash rates, this should not be a significant operational issue at all. It would not stop this all together, but should reduce the impact significantly.
If single digit appearances of your "rare" gachas are so expensive that it hurts, this just highlights the gacha schemes problems.
If you are so super concerned about duplications, there is a trivial fix. Add a script that does a ping back to some server you control and implement some of the broken expensive copy protection schemes yourself. Every copy of an item has a unique identity (it's UUID), so if one of your objects reports in with two different ones at the same timeslot, just kill one...
Dwight Clutterbuck
I propose a radical solution:
BAN GACHAS AND LEAVE THEM BANNED.
Sincerely,
The Majority of Your User Base.
Skyler Pancake
"These listings often do not show the “(Limited Quantities Available)” tag, indicating they were not legitimately obtained through the original Gacha machines." That's not how that works.
The Limited Quantities Available tag shows up for anything listed with... Limited quantities. You could create and upload your own item, make five copies, and then set them all as no copy and put them in your marketplace listing folder. It'd then show as limited quantity, as there would only be five of the unique items available for sale. It has nothing to do with them being gacha or not.
Stoic Cat
Skyler Pancake Thank you for explaining! Back before 2021 we would watch our analytics on the sales. (only a few rares were supposed to exsist at the time of checking) Yet the MP would be flooded with full sets including the rares. The math didnt add up with to the history of won "rares".
nya Resident
Thanks, I'll try not to do that.
Zia Underwood
Gacha is the real exploit. Duplicating creator profits by exploiting human psychology.
Kyrah Abattoir
So many thoughts... Can Gachas truly be considered art?
Tenaar Feiri
I'm not sure it can be fixed. I'm not sure what sims do when they crash but if I were building it, I would have it roll back to its last working snapshot after it crashed. Recovering into a faulty state would be bad.
I'm not gonna lie, I'd prefer if the gacha plague vanished off the internet but if it's here to stay, I'd like to see this fixed. If for no other reason than that I want to browse the marketplace without drowning in a flood of no-copy gacha items stopping me from finding what I'm actually looking for.
Tamara Silversten
Tenaar Feiri There is a Marketplace search filter you can utilize to clean up the results.
After having done a search, look on the left side and scroll down. You will see a section called "Do not show:", there you can tick the "Limited Quantities" checkbox and then click the "Refine Search" button underneath. That'll hide any listings with artificially limited stock, such as gacha resales.
(Unfortunately these filters do not stick, so the results have to be refined again after every new search.)
Violaine Villota
I agree with all of this, not looking forward to an increase in seeing Gatcha items spammed all over the Marketplace.
Does the Creators Against Theft Discord server already exist, or are you asking for it to be created? If it does exist, can someone please send me an invite?
Vae Darkheart
Continuing to not offer the predatory and horrendous practice of Gatchas in SL should be LL's only move, but for some reason, they want these back.
This NEEDS to be fixed before the full scale re-implementing of Gatchas.
Isabella Cinder
Vae Darkheart I wholeheartedly agree, on both accounts. I tried to make a post about a LL implementation earlier tonight, even linking the updated EU regulation on digital currency, but it got shutdown but this site's AI in 19 seconds flat.
Sadly, microtransactions and lootboxes amounted for 54% of PC gaming revenue in 2024, so they can't really let this goose go, but enforcing a proper and honest channel (including bug free no-copy, bad luck catch-up, addict behavior prevention and proper RNG) should be the top priority.
Zia Underwood
Vae Darkheart im so happy to hear you say this Vae. Its good to know you won't be engaging in these predatory practices so i can feel safe still shopping at your store.
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