Alts - Linked? Or not?

From the Economic Statistics page:

I don't know. I suggested this in one of Robin's office hours, and she was silent, and I think a little surprised, as nearly everyone there spoke up about how great this would be.
.

I know that I have no issues at all with *Linden Lab* knowing that my Player owns all my alts. I've made a point to providing valid payment info for every one of them, with the sole exception of temporary alts used specifically to test payment info restrictions. As long as it isn't general *public* knowledge, most people shouldn't have any reason to complain. And it should allow them to more effectively lock out banned griefers.

I'd have no problem having my alt linked to my main. In fact, I'd think it'd be great, in a support situation.

As for it affecting griefers? Not likely. A return griefer is not likely to put his/her name into the system and are in fact, more likely to make one up or steal another identity. It's not like LL fully validates the things.

That statement has been in there for ages.. that's why I thought it wouldn't be so hard to go ahead and link all alts to one main account, like in WoW or whatever. Your guess is as good as mine why they don't do it...

Is this new? I thought it always worked that way. Or for like a year anyway...

I wonder if that's just a holdover from the days when it was possible/required to declare alt status at signup. That said, I'm no longer allowed to create any more alts, even if I provide a different email address. I have 4 payment-verified accounts, and my last two attempts to create legitimate new avatars were denied, because they said I had too many accounts already. They obviously are doing some kind of RL-info-tracking, but I don't know whether that extends to their economic stats (I doubt that it does).

In a similar train of thought, would it not be benifical to have basic accounts cost a small fee, but all alts are free?

If they want to encourage more premium accounts, tie the free alts to the paid account and:
1 - Share the L$ account among them all.
2 - No Trade items are limited to account they belong to and may be given to any of the alts.
3 - One character per account logged on at a time. (maybe two?)

Point #3 will insure that bots will be on seperate accounts. You could either go with the first suggustion and charge 25US$ for a 1 year subscription (which would generate revenue not currently being harvested) or -- in a more Machiavellian approach -- agressively track account logins and find the botters. Then sieze all assets associated to those accounts and ban the accounts. Crude and unethical but hey, this is business.

So the people that create those alt/bot armies are feeding them bogus personal info/emails?

I know that when I made an alt some time ago to test ownership issues (and explore 'stuff'), I was invited to link her to my main account.
The fee at the time was a once-off US$9

I'm almost sure that the account was set up as being linked to my original account.
On the other hand, it might simply have been an honour system, in which I was expected to do the decent thing and pay for the benefit of having a second account

A benefit(?) other than being able to test things was that my alt has a PIOF status even though she in her own right has never bought L$.

I made another alt a few months ago just to check on what happened to noobs coming in through the OI, HI and Welcome process.
Then there was nothing asked about an original account. There was no charge.

LL might link accounts based on a hardware fingerprint, with the NIC being a major factor. It could work if the client software was not purposefully spoofing. For the majority of logins (OK - apart from bots - so majority of human logins), this wouldn't be a factor.
IP is not a dependable mechanism.

From what you say, the email address isn't the limiting factor.
I have three accounts now, for which I gave the same RL info. They do have unique email addresses for tagging purposes.
Maybe I should try to create more accounts like that.
If I get refused, then the control would be on hardware fingerprint.
And then I could retry using the same info but using a different PC.

Oh, they most definitely are. The thing is, it USED to be that you only had to specify a different email address to get around that limit- but now they're obviously taking more things into account.

And actually, this pisses me off quite a bit. I can name several places that have literally dozens of freebie traffic bot alts, but I- someone who pays LL literally thousands of dollars every month- am not even allowed a fifth account which I would actually USE.

Wouldn't it be illegal for Linden Labs to gather and store hardware information, unless the user has given permission to do so? I don't recall in the TOS ever agreeing to allow the SL software to upload information about my computer to Linden Labs.

I think that it's essentially unenforceable to try to make alts be associated with a given main account. Any means that I can think of to try to enforce it, can be so easily circumvented that there is no way to do it without causing tons of potential issues for legitimate users.

This is especially true as the code for the view is available.

It would be nice to have it as an option, though. Especially if, as someone already proposed, no transfer items could be shared amongst the alts.

I don't think they are doing that. I recently got a brand new computer with the only common piece of hardware being the video card. Both me and my alt entered SL with only the SL name and password.

Since your payment info is stored in the database, then that is a definite possibility for tying accounts together -- assuming you specifiy the same pay info for those accounts. Also, for people that want to put payment info on their accounts, I doubt that too many are going to want to give LL lots of different credit card numbers and/or paypal accounts.

The question comes more in how they would know who is who if there is not payment info on file. I have a total of 7 accounts now - many not even off OI, but I just couldn't resist grabbing a few specific names. I specified the same correct personal information when I created them, but each of them have their own unique email address. I have added the same paypal info to 4 of them and the other 3 have no payment info. Originally, I only had the paypal info on 2 of the accounts, but all 7 were created before the paypal info was added to the other two. So, it might be interesting to try an create another account now and see what happens. Since I have payment info on 4 accounts, it would be interesting to see if I could create a new account with no payment info and if I could create one giving the same payment info.

Well here's the thing though: They don't ask for payment info at account signup. You have to go the the My Account page after you've created your account to put your card in. (And I was turned down right when they usually send a confirmation email.)

They collect the following information at sign-up (and this is just the official SL signup, most of the other portals don't ask all this):
- Birth date
- Email
- Real name
- Gender
- Country
- Security question

A different email's not enough, so they're ruling people out based on the remaining info.

(Also THANK GOD they switched to a new captcha system. The last one was simply unreadable. I have actually had to re-enter captchas 3 times because of it.)

Good point. I also forgot that my last 3 alts when thru some of the other portals. The CSI one asks for birthdate and email only. I don't remember the other portal I used and what info it asked for. By the same token, one of those other portals might let you create a new account.

There is one other piece of information that they have, that they do not need to request when you sign up. That information is your IP address.

Since all the other information is easy to casually forge (new e-mails obtainable for free; other information cannot be confirmed), I'd guess that IP address plays a large role. There are ways to change or forge the IP address too, but it is not too easy to do for the casual user.

IP doesn't sound extremely reliable. If I reset my router, my IP will change. Granted, it is always within the same small range of numbers, but the exact value is not always the same.

I have a main & 4 alts all on my only email, I tried quite a few times to create another with no success, even through different portals, and I have to submit a valid email during account creation.
I'm thinking of deleting one soon just to see if I can make another to replace it.

Why not just create a free gmail account and use it?

Because I really only need 4 alts at best and just don't like the name of one of them

I would be more than happy to link my alts to my main account myself, without LL having to do it automatically ... I am fine with LL knowing they're me.

I realize this is not true for everyone, but if LL would do allow me to link them, and then USE the link to do things like automatically share one set of payment info, age verification, and particularly enable transfer of inventory assets between accounts when one is cancelled, that would be terrific.
.

I really can't imagine LL bothering to create anything terribly sophisticated to block someone from creating too many alts.

Did you try simply clearing your browser cookies, going to the SL site and trying to create a new account without logging an existing account in first?

Or worst case clearing cookies and doing whatever you need to do to get your ISP to assign you a new IP addie (often enough to just unplug the power of whatever they installed for a few seconds).