Alt account Question

I'm one of those weird people that only has 1 account.....one avitar.... it's all I'm interested in. But...I've read so many times that having an Alt. is a good way to back up an account should anything happen. So....what's the deal.... do you 'will' things to your Alt or can anything be transferred if you 'own' both avitars. I guess what I want to know is how exactly, does having an Alt. protect your original, and all the 'stuff' you've collected. I've got quite a bit....and it would seriously suck if anything happened to my account, so I'm considering doing an Alt.
Suggestions??

Alts are really handy if you need to buy back your debt real cheap on the market. But I wouldn't bother transferring any items or your creditors will come after your alts as well.

Well the one problem is you won't ever be able to copy over your entire inventory mainly due to permissions but if you have a lot of stuff thats /copy/transfer/ I'd most certainly recommend doing it.

I currently have a prim in my inventory called backup which contains several copies of items in my inventory I simply couldn't do without. Just keep what I said above about permissions in mind.

But in short yes, having an alt for backup is a good idea imo.

Thanks, that's what I needed to know. I guess I'll carry on as 1..... if I'm forced out by extreme circumstances...I'll resume FEAR on-line or work on my Command & Conquer battles lol (combat in SL is no where near as cool as the first person shooter PC games lol)

Absolutely true!!!

If you create a group, you want to have an alt that you also make a group owner. A group must have 2 members, so you want to make sure that you control two group owners. Otherwise, if everyone else drops your group (or people don't join it / or it's not a public group), Linden will dissolve your group and any group owned land will be forfeited. And if people withdraw their donated tier (and you might not know right away that they have withdrawn their tier) from the group, you also run the risk of not having enough tier, and your land being forfeited. It is to your advantage when buying land to have your group own it, because you get a 10% sqm bonus for your donated tier, which allows your group to own more land than a single avatar can, at the same tier level.

Alts also come in handy if your main avatar has crashed, and you can't get back in with it. Just be sure to give your alt all the privileges that your main has, including the ability to edit your objects (do this in the friends menu).

Princess Ivory

As I understand it, using an alt for inventory back up is usually something content creators do. I mean, they have full perms on their own items, so they can pass copies to their alt(s) in case something happens to their main.

Alts are good for the rest of us too, though. You can use them to form land groups for the extra 10% bonus without worrying that the other person might wander off and leave you stranded, to double-check that your land settings are doing what you want them to do, for RPing, for a little 'alone time' on the grid if you have something you want to accomplish without interruption, for privacy if you want to engage in something you're not sure your main account's friends will support, and so on.

For the average Player, the biggest advantage of having an alt is that it gives you 'someone' who can be a second member of any groups you choose to create, and who you can be absolutely sure won't vanish on you without notice.

It takes two avatars to maintain a group, so by having two accounts that you own be those first two, your group remains secure. Whereas if you form a group with a friend, and that friend leaves, if there is only one person left in the group the group gets disbanded and you could lose any group-owned land or assets.

Backing up copyable content by giving copies to an alt has some value. But what most normal users would like to back up most is the no-transfer stuff, and an alt won't help you there.

For builders and content creators and roleplayers, alts have tons of other uses. But don't feel like you have to go out and make one.

If you create things, you can give full-permissions copies to your alt. If something happens to your main avatar for some reason, you still have access to full-perms copies of your creations.

If you sell or give away things, alts are handy for testing permissions. Have the alt buy your creation, and make sure that the permissions as received are correct. Similarly, you can test vendors to make sure they function, deliver goods with correct perms, and give you the money you are supposed to get.

An alt gives you a way to belong to more groups. Get your alt to join them, and set the option for forwarding to email so you don't even have to remember to log in the alt to see the announcements. (But you'll have to log in once in a while to keep from hitting the message cap.)

Others have already pointed out the usefulness of having an alt so you can create your own groups for land ownership. Now that a group stays alive with two members, you only need one alt.

What an alt mostly ISN'T useful for is backing up your bought stuff, since nearly all of it will be either no-copy (if you give it to the alt, your main avatar no longer has it) or no-transfer (you can't give it to the alt at all). One exception is textures, which are normally sold with full permissions. Note to texture sellers: I'm NOT advocating redistribution of textures, only keeping of backup copies by the same human being who originally bought them.

Alts are also fun for trying out different personalities, genders, and/or species. But that's a topic for another thread.

One thing about that Nick guy. He definitely has ... had ... balls!

Related to this topic: Is it wrong, or against TOS to use an alt to hold some land?

An alt could "buy" say 4096 sq m. and prevent the real you from going up a huge beyond- a-single- sim tier level to buy it. Would that be frowned upon in any way?

I see no reason why using alts to hold land would be frowned upon. It is interesting to note that, if you had 3 alts all of whom were premium, last time I checked the premium fees just about balanced out the tier when buying mainland. What I mean is that paying premium subscriptions on your 3 alts worked out to just about the same as paying straight tier on a 2K lot (once you accounted for stipend and a discount for paying premium yearly).

Hmm I thought it worked out cheaper to have only one Premium own a sim rather than say 4 alts?
Alt are very handy, good if you want to do a lot of creation without being bugged by your entire friends list too, just add the main ones and your other alts, you can run them at once and use them for target practice or just holding stuff you rarely use, one alt for texture work, one for scripting, one for building, one for socialising.......

I use my alt for all my male stuff... I make clothes for both men and women, and I've found it easier on the brain to consider the alt as male, and my main avatar female. My alt does most of my male modeling, and it's great to have an alt when I need to take photos of two people next to eachother for adverts and stuff. I can run both avatars off the same computer and switch back and forth to make them do different poses and such.

Plus, it's just fun to walk around as a man now and then!

And then of course there's the camping alts .... I've walked into a place and seen "Avatar 1 OH", "Avatar2 OH", "Avatar3 OH", etc ... all the same first name +1 and same last name. They are all sitting there camping, making their 10-15 Lindens/hour, and presumably wearing anti-idle.

I guess if you had 10 alts, making 15 Lindens / hour, and you ran them 5 days / week for 12 hours / day while you were at work, etc ... Well, that's 1800 Lindens / day ... 9000 / week for nothing other than letting your computer stay on and in-world while you're gone for the day.