rumor about accounts deletion in future

hello
there is a rumor coming sometimes, saying that linden would delete free accounts and keep only premium accounts in the near future as january 08....

is it a founded rumor ?
is it real ?
if yes, where to find infos about this ?

Hi ssm, welcome to the forums. Would it be too sassy of me to ask how to pronouce your name?

As for the rumor, there are many people who WISH the Lindens would stop the free accounts, but it doesn't seem that the Lindens themselves would benefit much from it. They like having big numbers to show the press how many people are using Second Life.

Also, many free accounts actually rent land from other people. The private estate owners and mainland landlords are major revenue sources for LL, and they probably wouldn't be very happy if LL deleted all their tenants.

Ha... considering that there are less than 100,000 paid accounts, I sincerely doubt that that is true.

With island estates available to "buy" land from there's not much reason to go premium. My account(s) are free, but I dump a BUNCH of funds into Linden Lab. I seriously doubt they would delete anything of mine - intentionally.

As long as those people with free accounts keep buying $L, they wont be going anywhere. I know a good amount of people who have been playing a year+ and never went premium, but they do buy those precious $L's.

It would be fabu if they'd get rid of 'No Payment Info on File' accounts that hadn't been used for 6 months or so, though.

The last key metrics data said there are only 91,000 premimum accounts. That leaves about 1million active free/basic users. No way they are getting removed from the grid.

No, they should not delete permanently anyone, but after some reasonable time, like 3 months, they could move inactive accounts out of the active databases and cut them down
by 80%.

If someone has not played for a long time and comes back, its not asking them too much
to click something on the website to get their account reactivated

They probably wouldn't even do that. Most of the database load is from objects and various uploaded content. Inactive characters would still have to be referenced for garbage collection (when an item gets deleted its not permanently deleted from the asset server until all references to it are deleted).

They don't delete the accounts, they simply stick the Avs at the bottom of a lake.

If it isn't in the linden blog, or in the Planned Upgrades, it's Not accurate. Ignore it.

Angel.

Like to see the stats on this one can`t be that high......frankly speaking its not enought to even support their habits on sl.....More times then not they just cash out.

Like to see the stats on this one too...

LL won't give up their precious numbers.

I'd love to see it happen. It probably never will. Either way, don't get all worked up about rumors. If you start believing them all there will be about 5 people left in SL by the end of the year.

Oh noes, the horror!

See, I was thinking maybe they were starting to accumulate in a certain "Oasis pool".

What they would have to do would be make sure everyone who paid $10 got $10 worth of Lindens, then many of those spending anyway and contributing to the economy would go with it.
Any less than $10 is probably not worth processing fees.
Though we would also loose a lot of people who primarily socialise too.
In the end I think they're best bet is to drop tier charges and they could probably encourage twice as many people to own land and hence become premium or at least regular contributors to the economy rather than the numbers expecting to take money out for little effort.

oh nooooos the sky is falling!!!

....... and on top of a lake as well...........

I am not bothered as to whether people are basic or premium, paying or non-paying.

But I have big issues with the fact that people are able to play with NO accountability.

Until they make it compulsary to have real life details on every avatar then the continual theft, copying, griefing and general nastyness will continue.

Make it so you are actually accountable for your avatar and people might consider behaving a bit better.

it is a very sad fact that if people know they can get away with doing wrong things - they will

But well never see those stas because they be counter productive. Because llabs doesnt want to facts to get out the real stats.

It's going to change. As LL continues to get more bad publicity about their worthless numbers and as more press goes out that companies are pulling out of SL, they will have no choice but to change. They will be made to be held accountable.

Finally, if bad press or lost lost customers don't work, then getting REAL competition will. When that happens LL will be forced to do many things differently.

They'll be SLeeping with the fishes, wearing stylish SLement shoes... with bling.

I suspect that Basic accounts eventually will get more restrictions, partially as an incentive to upgrade membership, but also as a means of controlling the amount of capacity used by bots and the griefing potential of free alts. One related idea I've floated as a trial balloon (completely unsuccessfully, so don't worry) is preventing the use of physics in scripts owned by non-Premium members.

You want to get people to cough up their ten bucks to become payment-verified? Simple... here's what you do:

1) Make sure freebie 'no-payment' accounts have baked-on underwear and disable all attachment points between the knees and shoulders.
2) You pays yer ten bucks, everything is then 'unlocked' and yer gets access to t3h s3cks.

Easy really. They'll be throwing money at you.