I think Second Life had something similar early on, way before I started playing. It let users build stuff out of basic shapes called prims, and the number of prims in each region was limited for performance reasons. So users started to set up "prim banks" of unnecessary prims they could delete when they wanted to build something. The developers had to add quotas in the end.
I have worked in buildings low on meeting space where middle managers would do something similar, but with meeting rooms. You can always find a meeting if you abuse the system to 'claim' one room as your own for enough hours of the week.
Hoarding in a situation of some scarcity is common behavior, and makes the problem worse. You can't assume people will behave the same way when a resource's availability changes. And this is why we go from plentiful to very scarce so very quickly, with very little in between
Re:Dirty Coding Tricks
by Gravityloss on Thursday January 08, 2015 @05:28PM
(#8859461)
tragedy of the commons... or is it comedy?
it is more that people today take for granted huge amount of resources at their disposal
you become VERY creative when hard times hit :-)
You only become creative when faced with limitations.
Is boredom a limitation?
In 1995 I worked in a Dutch research institute where the file server was always almost out of disk space. Whenever some space freed up, my manager used to create something he called a 'balloon': a directory with 20 files of 5 MB each (which was huge back then).
If the disk was full and we needed space, he just removed one of those files and we could quickly write our files.