Why alt?

On the Subject of Alternate Accounts

November 11, 2004

To any party of interest,

On the Subject of Alternate Accounts

There has been some amount of discussion on the subject of alternate accounts. In general terms I feel that having alternates is a great boon to the game aspect of Second Life. You can role play a personality. Many MMORPG's provide this feature. And in many other programs this feature is “gamed”.

In Everquest an alternate is a pack mule. You are provided with a limited inventory and the alternate serves as a bank extension. They are also used as your store, they sit idle in the Bazaar while your main account is gather up more loot. They allow the player to explore other roles in the group.

On the more exploitive side alternates have been used to facilitate camping rare spawn sites, raise skills without risk, allow for scam sales to other players, and in duplicate item bug schemes.

In Second Life most of these exploits aren't really pertinent. We have an infinite inventory, there is no reason to exploit an item duplication bug when you can make copies at a whim. The one exploitive aspect of the Second Life alternate is for dwell.

This, in my opinion, isn't much of an exploit, since the primary reward is a place on the popular places list. In other words, advertising. In my research the monetary rewards for high dwell are, as compared to the costs, pointless for the great majority of places. For those few places on the very top of these lists that arguably could be construed is receiving a significant reward for this practice, through developer awards, they don't seem to be making much more than their costs.

It has been made clear to me through information passed to the user base through town hall meetings that the ability to role play another persona is held in some regard by Linden Lab. The reluctance to provide voice capabilities until masking technology can be implemented properly speaks volumes.

There has been a call of late to provide information on the forums to provide information linking alternate accounts to their owners. If the ability to role play is to remain a viable feature in Second Life then the linking of accounts to the player behind the keyboard must not be considered. Unveiling the players of the dwell game in my opinion is not worth disrupting this ability to explore other personalities.

Ed -


Disclaimer

As you may gather from the tone and subject of this post, the account name Editorial Hare is what has been termed an alternate account. It has been created to allow the thoughts of multiple patrons of the program Second Life to be complied and shared as a coherent unit.

It has the further purpose of shielding this group from in world retribution.

We feel that our ideas are in the best interest of the future of Second Life. We have seen many people propose and express thoughts that to us appeared sane, measured, and competent be harassed, some to the point of leaving Second Life. There doesn't appear to be a group that has not used this harassment tactic to bolster their forum opinions inside the game. For this reason we have come to the conclusion “you cannot win”, Someone will always oppose you, and therefore you will be persecuted, no matter how insignificant your opinion or project.

It was felt that with the current forum atmosphere no significant progress could be made by airing our opinions. In the past we have merely held our tongues, and let things progress as they will. But we have now come to the point where we feel significant changes are occurring that threaten to leave Second Life in a state which we feel to be unpalatable.

Our feeling is that a great many people may also feel this way, but have similar privacy concerns which prevent them from airing their ideas. We know many people that have given up reading the forums entirely, including most of our membership at times. We now see that ignoring them is as dangerous to our enjoyment of Second Life as the forums existence in the first place.

As with any group of people in Second Life, our opinions can vary to a great degree. In posting with Editorial Hare we will try to find a level of consensus amongst ourselves.

Also understand that the thoughts expressed here are filtered through one person, the actual poster, and as such unconsciously take the direction of that person. As “The Poster” I will attempt to reign in my personal opinions and provide as unbiased a view as possible for the group.
We have chosen this account to be our mouthpiece. In the interest of coherence this account will posting in a first person style. As we have no intention of providing our group members identities or numbers it makes more sense to post as a single identity, “Ed”.

As an alternate, this account has much less force of reputation than if we were using our “main accounts” to air these opinions. In order to enjoy Second Life we have given up the benefits of our reputation. We feel this to be a worthwhile trade off to be able to express our ideas in peace. “Ed” will have to be sufficient.

Even though I rarely post in the forums, I do read them whenever I get bored at work. One of the more popular discussion objects that is brought up is the subject of alts. I was curious as to what are some of the main reasons that warrants some of you to spend more money to create an alt for yourself?

Your personalities are so diverse that you need a 3rd Life?
Your friends are annoying and you don't want to talk to them?
You need a 3rd person to keep a group together?
You have an unpopular/inflamatory remark to make and you don't want it associated with your main?
You made a remark and you want to have a 2nd voice to back it up so it seems like others support your opinion?
You are a Linden and you are tired of newbies asking you how to remove the Log Cabin they accidentally attached to their head?
You want a ghost stationed to artifically up your land dwell?

Curious Ryla wants to know!

I created an alt because Aimee was too social and she couldnt stalk both at the same time. lol jk!

I created an alt because I wanted a boyfriend....

So what do you do if your alt boyfriend starts to cheat on you?

Even though I rarely post in the forums, I do read them whenever I get bored at work. One of the more popular discussion objects that is brought up is the subject of alts. I was curious as to what are some of the main reasons that warrants some of you to spend more money to create an alt for yourself?


Curious Ryla wants to know!

Walk around not being bothered, and generally relax a lil

Of much more interest to me is the fact that I'm Eloise. My alt is a role that Eloise plays...