Charging for second accounts?

I was just reading this Cnet News.com article:

http://news.com.com/Second+Life+land+prices+get+hefty+hikes/2100-1043_3-6131334.html?tag=st.num

It mentioned that Linden Lab would be charging $9.95 for second accounts. The article also said this was announced earlier in the month. Where was this announced? I read the Second Life Blog daily and have never seen an announcement.

I thought they always charged that for Alts. I don't know what they did before May 2006 though.

Recently I thought you were able to create alts for free. Back in the early days of SL, you had to pay a one time $9.95 fee for an account.
The article made it sound like there was a change in the recent policy for creating second accounts.

If an honest player wanted to create a second account LL has always charged $9.95.

The idea of a free alt happened because people were falsifying information of the account creation screen to get a free account.

I am guessing they are finally going to enforce the issue.

The only change that I am aware of is that you are no longer limited to 5 accounts per household.

I remember reading when I first joined about there being additional charges for alts. I never saw the charges and never paid much attention to the rules and assumed they were not being enforced. Due to them I'm assuming, as a previous commenter posted that they have now decided to enforce something that has existed for a long time.

LL has been very lax about enforcing that $9.95 fee for second and subsequent accounts. They recently changed the registration form to make it more clear that you had to give a definite answer as to whether you previously have had an SL account before. (The old form asked you if this was a first account, but leaving that unchecked didn't automaticly trigger billing, for some strange reason.) Now, if you admit you have an account already, then they charge you. An awful lot of people just lie at that point, and steal a 'free' account that they should have been required to pay for. I suspect that they will be looking closer at the provided information now, will at least check to see if the same billing method is being re-used, and hopefully will do better at collecting the fee that has always been there for second and subsequent accounts. They lost a lot of money by often failing to collect on those over the past year or so.

I think a lot of the 'free alts' happened when they ceased bothering to validate any of the information on the registration form. When they stopped even bothering to ensure that your e-mail address was valid, a lot of people figured it didn't matter what sort of garbage they typed into the form.

And yes, they finally did repeal the limit on how many accounts one person could legally have. As long as you pay for them, you can have as many as you want now. The old lifetime limits of "two per payment method and 5 per household" are finally dead.

Regarding "As long as you pay for them, you can have as many as you want now. The old lifetime limits of "two per payment method and 5 per household" are finally dead." - is there a place where this is stated formally in a clear and unequivocal manner, not just one Linden spokesperson saying they aren't aware that that isn't their policy?

I believe it was in answers and was RObin Linden in response to a post Ceera made.

In this reply from Robin Linden, Robin officially states that there is no longer a limit on how many accounts one person may have. This was the direct result of an appeal that was escalated by me all the way to Phillip (Rosedale) Linden, the CEO of Linden Lab. Phillip assigned Robin the task of making the official ruling on this matter, after I brought up the fact that this limit was no longer referenced anywhere in the TOS, registration process, or in any other official information source.

Quoting Robin Linden's reply on 10/21/2006, in Linden Answers:

Robin's statement was the unclear, not firm statement I was hoping for something better than.

"To my knowledge there are no more limits to the number of accounts people create" is not what I would call a clear policy statement, it is just saying that she doesn't know that there are limits.

It's as definitive as you are going to get, I am afraid. As I said, I escalated that all the way up to Phillip Linden. If Phillip and Robin toghther isn't sufficiently authoritative, I don't know what would be.

A signed statement fom Anshe Chung, perhaps?

Oddly, a friend of mine said that he asked on LiveHelp about this and got an answer, apparently from LL, that it wasn't strictly necessary to pay the fee for an alt account.

Weird if true.

Exactly, if it isn't in the TOS then it isn't policy, its just the word of one Linden.

Point is, there is no longer anything in the TOS or in the registration process that says there ARE limits to the number of accounts you can have. Hasn't been for many months, as far as I can tell. So, since the limits are NOT documented in the TOS, or in the registration process, they do NOT exist.

Which leads us all back to the simple fact that we who pay for premium accounts are ALWAYS charged to create an alt-while free account users go on and on creating all the alts they want and nothing is done to stop them. Time to address this head on Lindens!!!

When they first made accounts free, you could register alts free, but if you had more than a certain number per email address, the app was rejected. There was nothing saying that you had to pay for additional accounts. Now there is.

For a definitive, concrete answer on how many alts you can have, there is now an article in the SL Knowledgebase where they clearly state you can have as many accounts as you are willing to pay for.