Is second life always like that?
Sorry you had that experience, but I would say it's really not all that uncommon.
There will always be people out there whose sole goal is to cause trouble, to try to irritate people, who just get a kick out of being a**es. They are common enough, that there's even a term for them, in SL: "
Griefers"
Also, unfortunately, they know that the people who they are MOST likely to get upset are new players, and so they tend to go to places where new players are. Experienced players know better, and effectively emasculate them, by ignoring them. It takes away all of their "fun", to be ignored. Playing into their tactics only encourages them.
Again, sorry your introduction was like that. But I won't say it was unusual or even unexpected. So it'll be up to you whether you'll ever try looking again in SL. If you do, I'd suggest timing it when someone you knew and trusted from here was on, to help show you around? Hopefully, you'll have a better experience that way.
Edited to add: was looking the SL forums after I posted, and there's a thread by a newbie, asking what a Griefer was, with 27 replies. A few excerpts from the first replies:Griefer: Someone who enjoys ruining everyone else's fun, while drawing attention to himself/herself. Usually adolescent males with no life and even less moral fibre.
The morons who run around SL caging, shooting or orbiting innocent bystanders are the most readily visible form of griefer. But anyone who intentionallyy sets out to ruin other people's fun, usually while trying to draw attention to themselves, also fits the mold. So a person who buys the parcel next to your nicely landscaped home and fills it with flaming phallic symbols and blaring music is a griefer, as is the guy that intentionally dumps prim garbage on your land, or owrse yet, builds stuff on his land next to yours in a way that it intentionally pushes over into your space.
Yes, that was a griefer you encountered. Basically a griefer is anyone intentionally behaving in a disruptive way as to interrupt one's game experience. From caging to push weapons to simply stalking someone to verbally harrass them.
Here are two griefers I ran into as a newbie. I was several days old and I decided to return to orientation island as i thought i had missed some of the lessons. There was a griefer in a sort of a darth vader get-up who told me I was ugly and jumped around in my personal space. There he was at orientation island being mean to newbies like me who didn't know what end was up and hadn't yet put together a good looking avatar.
My motto: Don't give in to griefers.