"Witness Protection Program"

Everyone gets onto second life for one reason or another. People might want to just have a digitial representation of themselves running about or maybe they want to be an entirely new person from their first life selves.

No matter what, sometimes we find that our current second life identities get tiresome or maybe we want to go in a complete new direction that just cant be done by hanging on to our current character. Either way, wouldnt it be neat if there was some official Linden Labs Witness Protection Program?

You could go there, pay a fee and then they would transfer all your items and money into a "storage area" until your new self goes to pick it up. I know that this might not be feasible unless we can devised checks and balances against people that might use this for fraudulent purposes but it was just a thought I had.

That sounds like a real great idea. However with the set up of SL it would be a real challenge I'm afraid. They have enough issues with data base load as it is.........and that would be one more hit. But a variance on the idea might be to download all your stuff to your computer and once all your new Avi stuff is taken care of then upload it back up to your new self. A small download fee and maybe a slightly larger fee to upload back.

Nice idea though

Yeah. I know you could put it onto your drive and then put it back once you get to the other side. However that is even more complicated than having a friend store it in game and then letting you pick it up as your new alt. I thought that maybe there could be an even easier solution than both of these methods sometime in the future when they do get more capacity to run something like that.

Ultima Online currently does something similar to this. The UO grid is broken up into shards. Each Shard looking to be an identical image of the grid you are in. You cannot transport back and forth from one shard to another. You can creat a new character and start from scratch in any shard you desire. If you want to start over in a different shard WITH you current character you have to pay a premium to do that. All of your inventory goes into a bank box and is transfered with your avatar to the new shard. Price? a whopping $20.00 for each avatar transfered.

I think a better way to do this would be to allow people to merge accounts and assets, and select which name (and UUID) the merged account ends up with.

LL could charge a fee, even one higher than just getting a whole new premium account, and schedule the merge to happen at their convenience, and people would still take them up on it.

When connecting to the preview grid, don't you go through a process where you 'retrieve' your inventory? What would prevent you from receiving your other name's inventory in a way similar to this?

As far as I know there is no way to do that as of yet. If they did implement that, it would sure make it easier.

My understanding is that the preview grid does not retrieve your inventory, but is rather a snapshot of the main grid assets.

Much simpler if they would only allow avatars to change names.

Yes this is the best suggestion.
Charge US $10 or something, And limit it to once every 3 months.

Have it delete freinds, groups that you dont own and all calling cards when the change is made.

I would have no problem with the name change, as long as it kept ban lists updated with the new names.

If I ban someone, I want it to be forever, not for only 3 months.

I sure hope ban lists are based on UUID and not name.

It would have to keep both names as being banned to work - otherwise everyone would be able to figure out the new name and the whole purpose of the name change would be wasted.

Everything is based on UUID, the name is only used for display purposes.

This is why they can readily change names: update an entry in the UUID -> Avatar Name table and that's it. Why they don't want to sell this service is a mystery. I know of at least 4 players who changed names, it isn't hard.

Then again, the obvious is never obvious there.

Database load has nothing to do with it. "One more hit" from users doing something most of them might do once in their lives means nothing.

Sorry, hadn't meant to submit yet.

As I said, there's no way database load is an issue, but it's a really bad idea anyway. A name change wouldn't be bad, provided the user's basic identity doesn't go away. But allowing a user to create a whole new identity from scratch (or I should say encouraging such by allowing asset portability, since they can create a new account now) will just encourage bad behavior. People behave badly when they're anonymous. People behave badly when they have nothing at stake. In RL we behave ourselves in large part to preserve our reputations. SL needs the same mechanism.

SL *had* that mechanism, before the introduction of anonymous accounts. It was called "getting banned costs you real money". Now... someone who's going to behave badly in SL will just get a free "griefer alt" and have that alt do the dirty work for them.

Well considering were going to make SL less fun for people who play the opposite gender with this voice stuff, maybe we really need a name change system in place. So they can change from Karen to Karl, or from Bob to Becky. Im sure it wont be a good solution for all the gender change set, but it will help many.