From Dnali:

Hi Catherine,

So I know not to use any auto petter at this point but I do remember you saying in a blog post that Malevay Studios would be coming up with a legal one. You said that the HUD was set up for one and that is why it was exploited.

Could you tell me when this is coming?

ANSWER: Indeed we were creating something called a "Mee-prentice" tghat would have pet your Meeroos for you certain times a day. The regard it provided you and your meeroos would have been less than if you did it yourself. This was the balance we tried to strike for large an big big breeders...

And then came the exploit, which sent some player skyrocketing past 3 million regard creating an unfathomable chasm between themselves and those who didn't have an auto-petter. I'll be honest: The Auto Petter hurt the game. This was their intention, they succeeded. The took huge sums of money from people in order to exact a revenge upon us for banning them. They have gone so far as to tutor other lplayer on how to make it, believeing it is a way around accountability if they have YOU, the player break the EULA in order to make your own.

The consequences for this have been heavy on us. We get many, many people putting in support tickets having being auto-banned from the security device within it per day, which occupies our CSR resources.

We have had to completely revisit our own autopetter and our entire regard system and leveling system that is now completely obsolete as a result of the autopetter. This is also why we have not added our additional planned content to the regard store. Those who have chosen to use autopetter have left those who have not in the dust, and we're having to maneuver very carefully, developmentally and programatically, to determine how to close the gap and make regard valuable again. Right now it's available in infinite sums without the player having to do anything to gain it, or benefit from it. It no longer factors in as a reward, and leveling is no longer considered an achievement by a player using the autopetter.

So we're having to spend a great deal of time determining how to proceed. We have, as of today, stopped the auto-petters from working with our next release. But the damage is there. The way the player interacts with the game has changed in a way we did not intend, and it has a domino effect on other critical aspects of the game and the players unwitting getting themselves banned daily after spending 1,500 lindens for one.

We have to first try to fix what has been broken by these malicious players before we can logically introduce another automated system into our game. It created more of a detrimental impact than most of our players realize.