Basic Account Shutdown

Ok... I am sure this is going to stir the pot. But I think it is time to stir it:

There has been a LOT of talk lately about how the number of users on at a given time is causing the system to lag horribly. Here is my suggestion:

1) Only allow non paid accounts to be active for a trial period. 14 days, 30 days... something like that. After the trial period they either have to upgrade, or they cannot use their account.

2) Offer a LOWER LEVEL of paid account. Like $5 a month or something... that will allow what a non paid account has now. In other words... they cant own land.

3) Any non paid account that is inactive for more than 60 (or 90) days... is terminated.

Lets face it... 95% of those who are using SL for free now, CAN AFFORD to either pay the full premium rate, or a reduced one. This will also get rid of those who have like 10 alt accounts... and force them down to one or two REAL ones.

This will also allow LL to have more income (something they are always talking about needing) and it will true up the number of REAL users.

Now... I am sure there are those that are going to get mad at hearing this, and call me all sorts of names and whatever. But, this is just my opinion.

Feel free to leave yours, you wont hurt my feelings

Hehe... wasnt thinking when I posted the poll that the number of free users FAR exceed the number of paid ones, so I would expect those using for free now to not want to have to pay. Just remember, its no different in SL than in RL... you get what you pay for. Oh well.

The problem isn't FREE accounts. The problem isn't the people who have already willingly provided valid payment info, and are on Basic accounts now as "Payment info on file" or "Payment info used". LL KNOWS WHO THOSE PEOPLE ARE. The problem is the unlimited numbers of completely UNVERIFIED accounts, and that Linden Lab is not even bothering to do the most elementary of validation checks when someone applies for an account.

I would heartily endorse a limited 'trial period' for any unverified free account, such as 14 or 30 days, after which they must provide identifying information or lose the account. I would not object to forcing a one-time "validation fee" on those accounts that have refused thus far to provide any sort of validated identity information. Nor would I object to enforcing the current policy that all additional accounts after the first one require a one-time payment of $9.95 USD to be a Basic account. But don't make it a monthly fee. There are more people than you might realize who maintain multiple accounts for roleplaying or for perfectly valid and harmless reasons. A potential consumer or audiance for your merchandise, entertainment or Corporate advertising freebies does NOT need to buy something every month to be a valued customer. They just need to be ABLE TO BUY SOMETHING, when they want what you are selling, and you need to be able to verify who they are, if they misbehave.

A one-time validation fee could perhaps be accepted in the form of a mailed in check, money order, cashier's check, currency (foreign or US), or as an electronic bank transfer between your account and the LL accounts. There is NO reason to expect that the only valid proof of ID and the only valid way to pay a fee has to be a US credit card or a paypal account. It could be as simple as providing a valid mailing address, to which LL sends a simple form letter that includes an activation code for the account. Gave a bogus mailing address? No account validation code! The same can be done for e-mail validation.

First of all, the obligatory "this won't end well" .

The only ones who think/say that are residents, if and when you ask LL the standard response is that they can handle everything, and that lag is a very complicated thing and maybe you should check that you're not imagining it.

As they're fond of stating, all those unverified accounts come from underdevelopped regions of the world such as Europe, Asia, Australia and Canada where credit cards, bank accounts or a phone service (you used to be able to verify by phone) haven't been invented yet.

On a serious note, the problem isn't so much that people aren't paying. Other than all the way back SL has always been free, it's that the rate of growth was controlled because you had to make an effort to sign up.

They're doing that, oddly enough only to paying accounts who lapse.

Are you talking free accounts or unverifieds?

AFAIK, unverifieds can't post on the forums. LL has said they grief too much or something like that.

i don't think its up to us

:-0!

They're not doing the same for unverified accounts?

You'd have to be a complete idiot to pay $5 a month for basic account priveledges. If you're going to go the sub only route, make the $10 a month sub the only option. Anything less is a waste of time and money for all involved.

Not that I'd even have a spark of interest anymore if that kind of thing was introduced - I only bothered trying SL out -because- of the free accounts. I'm still a basic, but I've paid for a L$ start. I'm even gaining an interest in getting a premium account. BUT, if the basic account didn't exist, I wouldn't have bothered. Yanno?

Nope! They wipe content on accounts that have financially lapsed, as an incentive to keep up with your monthly payments or to tier-down in an orderly fashion and pony-up the downgrade fee. But an unverified account or even a paid for Basic account doesn't become delenquent on payments if they stop playing for a few months, so they don't get wiped.

Personally, every single one of my accounts is Basic. I see no incentive at all to go Premium. It's cheaper to buy L$ when I need them than it is to pay for a Premium account and have part of that money paid back to be in the form of my weekly stipend. I can own better land with better security against griefers and laggy businesses on private islands, without ever becoming Premium. I could even buy my own SIM, my own private island, without being Premium.

The privilige of owning land on the mainland? HA! They can keep it!

I churn thousands of L$ through the SL economy every month. I work hard, and I spend a lot of what I earn on fun stuff made by other people. I don't need to be a Premium member or to pay a monthly access dues to be a positive, contributing member of this community.

I agree with Ceera, verification and paying accounts are often muddled up, and I imagine that more people are concerned with the former.

Wow. I suppose that must be a consequence of some kind of automated system they use. It's still a bit backwards though.

I agree, Hiro. If it were up to me, Premium account data would be better protected, and any unverified account that hadn't logged in in 30 days would be wiped and deleted completely.

There is actually three kinds of accounts, free ones, basic account and premium account. Basic is one time fee of 9.90 US$. I would not remove Basics, since the point is to have all account as "verified" and basics are. I would remove the free unverified ones.

This was before free accounts came to be, right? I'm a basic and paid no fee to become so.

This is what other "games" do. I would prefer it sure, but it won't happen. LL has made their decision and they don't care what people think.

No, Basic is not "the one time fee of $9.90". A premium account that has tiered down to basic and a free account that has provided payment info are both "Basic accounts".

There are four kinds of accounts: unverified Basic, verified Basic, normal Premium, and lifetime Premium. The verified Basic and normal Premium accounts are further divided by the level of stipend that they recieve. It is not possible any longer to get a Basic with a stipend, a lifetime Premium, or a normal Premium with a $400 or $500 weekly stipend.

Have I missed anything?

ROFLMAO! You have no idea how high my eyebrows went before my sarcasm detector went off.

Regarding three types of account:

Yes Ziibly. The first basic account has been free for a while now. You only pay $9.95USD for additional basic accounts.

Ceera made all the valuable points here. You only need a premium account if you want to own mainland parcels. It doesn't make sense to penalise the Basics because they contribute as much as anybody else and often own land and pay tier just like many premium account holders. They just don't pay it directly to LL...unless they own a sim.

Your polling is skewed since most unvarified and basic accounts do not have access to the forums.

For more than a year, the rule has been that the first account is free, and any after that are supposed to be charged a one-time $9.95 fee for Basic or whatever payment plan you choose for Premium. I joined in September of 2005, and back then, you were required to validate your ID by providing payment info. If you said it was your first account, and if the payment info you provided wasn't on file already with LL, they didn't charge you for that first account. If the payment info had already been used (like a husband and wife sharing the same credit card), or if you admitted it was not your first account, you got billed based on the membership level you selected when you signed up. Or at least, you were supposed to get billed. In many cases, LL was lax and didn't bill people, even though payment info was provided.

In June of 2006 they did away with verification of what you entered on the sign up form, and no longer required providing payment info. They had to trust you to be honest in admitting if this was a second or subsequent account. Many griefers and theives laughed and created as many free accounts as they wanted, by refusing to provide payment info, and by typing false information into the form. With no payment info, and no validataion checks, how could LL possibly detect that this was a second or subsequent account, and who would they bill, even if they knew? LL still has their head firmly burried in the sands of denial on that point. The rule requiring payment for second and subsequent accounts wasn't relaxed, but they took away their own ability to detect those who refused to pay for additional accounts.

If LL bans a major griefer, they say they do have ways of banning all the alts of that griefer. But from past experience, their methods of doing so are easily defeated by the more determined, more tech-savvy griefers and thieves.

I don't think that the Lindens have lied to us about their reasons for free accounts. They want more players thus attracting more investors which in turn will even attract more players. They want this to be a worldwide platform and not some middle class playground only for Americans, Canadians, Europeans and Australians. They have a vision for Second Life and I think it is a good one.

For you newer type residents we had many more griefer attacks in the olden days than we have nowadays and they were all from "verified accounts".

I know that many people feel a need to vent but the subject of "unverifieds" being the cause of all evil is getting to be a little tiresome.

Thank you.

My SL born on date is August of this year. I was on a "free unverified" account until this past weekend. I paid for a full year's membership/dues/whatever, and now have that nifty little "payment info" under my BOD. Why did no one in game tell me I was the problem earlier? And why don't people treat me differently in game now, since I'm one of the "leet paid verified honest persons"?

Honestly, if it weren't for the free account, I wouldn't have become addicted.

A


Also, Thanks to the kind folks who weren't afraid of an "unverified noob" back in August, September, October, November..... Everyone I met in game were very nice and very helpful. While there is no way to verify it, if someone checked my profile and saw "no payment" and snubbed me, I don't know about it.

Edit: Also, since I didn't pay until Saturday of last weekend, and I posted in the forums prior to that, I think it's safe to say the unverifieds can see and vote on this poll.

Ok. So...

How long would this "solution" help? 3 months? 6 months?

What happens when SL reaches the point (which I think will probably be sometime next year) where 15,000 VERIFIED accounts are online at the same time? It is predicted that by New Year's Eve there will have been 2 million account sign ups. So 15,000 verifieds concurrently isn't that far into the future.

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/11/new_world_numbe.html#more

And when that day comes, we will have the same thing, the grid will puke.

Right now, there are over 3000 sims. This means that when SL has 15,000 people logged in, that we have an average of less than 5 people per sim. Sims that each handle 40 people. It seems to me that some of Philip's claims about what does and does not affect the whole grid are a bit dubious. The database issues affect us all, anytime we start to see a lot of people on SL.

The winter months are upon us in North America, Europe, and Northern Asia. That means more people inside their homes doing inside activities like playing SL. I am shuddering right now thinking of how the grid will behave when the winter holiday season is in full swing and many people are on vacation.

The performance issues need to be addressed whether or not there are free accounts. The product is not scaling. They need to fix the scaling problem if Philip's vision of millions of people concurrently using SL is to ever be anything but a pipe dream.

They need to fix this ASAP. Other BIGGER AND WEALTHIER companies are watching. They are learning from Linden Labs mistakes, and it's really a matter of when, not if, they decide to enter the market that LL currently enjoys a near monopoly on.

There was a little glitch that let some unverifieds through, but it has since been fixed again apparantly.

/139/1f/149111/1.html

*shrugs* After watching the game since removal of the verification system, I have to say.. I almost think SL needed the freebie accounts. Many of the ones I know have since become verified. Forcing them to become verified upon entering the world... I don't think that would work. Right now, there is no real reason for people to become verified either. It doesn't give them any new 'shinnies,' not even land. It just lets the rest of us say, "Hey, this person is in for the long haul." But are they really?