do you think that alts should be disabled?

Hi, Marin...I wasn't referring to you specifically. I do feel that a small monthly fee would be a good idea, or at least, I did in the past. My view was that it would help LL out to perhaps hire some qualified coders to straighten the grid out. I started out as basic, and was for a couple of months until the urge to own my own land hit....then premium followed. I don't mind paying the monthly fee. I could spend more than that on a book and have it read it 2 days. For the same price, I get a month's worth of entertainment, so that's why the monthly fee doesn't bother me, personally. I do strongly believe, though, that if paying membership would become a requirement of SL, people should have a decent length of time for a trial period, to be sure it's something they would want to stick with. The earning curve is huge, and there's no sense charging people who may not want to, or be able to, invest the time in SL.

Yes they run limited clients all the pretty features like graphics and chat stripped away.
Alts are handy, some of us have darker sides we like to play. And we are prepared to pay a fee to buy them, perhaps if they were linked to a main account they could be limited as present to 4 alts and charge an extra $1 each per month.

There needs to be something to discourage the gaming and leeching of the game by bots.
12 months ago late night figures were 1/3 of the daytime population, now due to all the 24/7 bots they are 2/3. Put a traffic logger out and watch the number of AV's per hour that log in and out of your sim so fast they don't even rez.

Not all of them, no.

People can spoof IP and MAC addresses too. Besides which, many home customers have dynamic IPs so it changes everytime they reboot/restart their modem or router.

Wrong. More and more ISPs don't provide email accounts in order to offer cheaper (net only) packages. Besides which, there are thousands of free email services out there (go check out the non-English speaking world) so that would be a nightmare to enforce.

Unenforcable unless you charge for ALL accounts. Ie. End of the Free Basic program.

There are other clients. And other, third-party clients could be made that take advantage of proxies.

They need some way to demo the platform for free, but I think that alts should be limited by requiring payment either individually, or by being tied to a premium account.

I have an alt that I had to pay $10 for, and is very useful for building and testing things. But the vast quantity of bots specifically to exploit failures in traffic and other systems are a waste, and the ease with which griefers can simply create new accounts is horrible. Yes, traffic/search needs to be nuked and replaced with something that isn't crap, but inflated account numbers don't seem to be doing any favours for the actual residents of SL who only suffer with greater lag and useless search results.

I voted no. I have alts and use them regularly. 2 of my alts are the other members of my live music show 'The Invisible Band!' so that whenever I do a live music performance in SL I actually run 3 clients on 2 computers. OK, a bit extravagant, but it looks so much better than parking my avatar AFK on a club stage while I play in my home studio. 2 other alts are their partners and I have 2 further alts for when I want to mooch around SL anonymously.

What I would be in favour of would be things like:

1) A one-off fee for setting up accounts (basic or premium) and, as expressed by others in this thread, I wouldn't be bothered if it was applied retroactively. My alts are quite happy to pay their way in SL... all but one are 'payment info on file'.

2) Linking of alt accounts to a main account. I have no problems with that and can see the benefits in terms of reducing griefing or alt abuse.

3) Limiting the number of concurrent connections on a per-computer basis to something realistic such as 3 or 4. Anything more than that would have to be bots. This would block bot-farmers and their ilk but would still allow players who run multiple instances for valid reasons (see above). From what I understand there is no need for this to be client-side. It could all be done server-side. Even with dynamically assigned IP addresses. I suppose a determined bot-farmer might be able to make each bot-client spoof its own IP address but I have no idea how that could be done. How about the SL servers refusing connections from clients that don't accept a full graphics data stream (ie: command-line bots)? Obviously this needs expertise that is way beyond my limited knowledge.

That's how it used to be. You'd get your first week or so for free (after giving LL your payment info) and then have to pay up either a one-off payment US$10 for a basic account or take out a premium subscription. A system LL should never have abandoned in the first place.

That's how it was when I joined, was great then. Griefer tools could do a lot more damage, but attacks were so much less frequent overall. Not to mention that camping wasn't really around back then, a golden age

Preposterous. Many of us have many reasons to have multiple accounts. I pay for two accounts. Why should I be restricted to one?

Long disused accounts still contribute to the pumped up millions of users that is so loved in the publicity alas but a good suggestion.

Don't be sorry. This subject often degenerates into an Us v Them row. I know of at least one account who was free for a long time. They are a DJ in-world, providing entertainment for others and spending their earnings in-world. This assumption by so many that free accounts are freeloaders gets so tiring.

Nothing stupid there .. there are a whole multitude of us. My three alts (one a technical glitch but I cannot let them die!) are all me but different mes. One alt paid premium for a few reasons but heck, even the freebies have a larger PAID FOR inventory than Bilbo!

On the disabling the multiple option ... why? Where's the difference in grid load whether I run two clients on one machine or one each on two machines?

I would have been quite happy to have paid the theoretical 9.95$ each for my two extras but I don't think discussing it here is going to spur Linden to implement it. Sooo .. I've merely increased my post count by one.

One maybe off-topic but distant related point ... everybody who have ever met more than one of my avies are fully aware of the fact.

Definitely not true. Most people use alts for perfectly legitimate reasons. like anything else, some will abuse it, that's why action should be taken to correct the problem, not thorw everyone under the bus.

I'd go further.

1. Limit ALL free accounts to a 30 day trial period. After that, require a subscription fee (it could be lower than the current $9.95 per month, since presumably there would be a lot more of them.)

2. Allow subscribers to have a maximum of five avatars. Any additional AVs would require another subscription.

3. Do not allow trial account holders to have more than a single avatar.

EDIT: But I voted "no" on the poll, because there are legitimate uses for alts. I use them myself.

Note for 3:> I know people that try to visit and explore SL and for one reason or another the first account gets borked before they are able to use it (activiation e-mail gets eaten or the like). If they tried to sign up again with the same information then they will have to go immediately premium (or immediately pay something) just to have their free trial period since they would already have that one account - that one account that they can't actually access.

I think they should be limited in both number and abilities. Premium accounts need perks. I'm not for disabling things completely, such as preventing non-verfied accounts from scripting, but more along the lines of preventing certain script functions.

Notably the more CPU intensive or greif prone ones, such as llRezObject() or llShout()--llOwnerSay and llSay should be sufficient for nearly every use that llShout has without requiring land.
I know there are opinions on this, but this harks back WAY back to the days of MUDs and MOOs where not everyone could script and even everyone who could didn't have access to every function, there were even some functions that required a payment of pennies on each use (linking two rooms is a function that comes to mind, as I did write a bot to do that once--I owned the MUD so pennies were a non-issue for me).
Obviously, this applies to scripts given to non-verifieds as well as scripts writen by them. The only other way I could see it being is if the script it no-mod then letting it run with full access to the script tree, or at least the access permissions of the person who compiled it (scripts would need to have a different set of creator values, I suggest the last person to compile the script be added as creator and the person who started it get a new value such as originator so that you don't lose track of who created a complicated script you only modified yet allowing an accurate track record of the last person to compile a script so that if it has been heavily modified to be greif-atory then given away to a free alt that the "creator" not be punished because it wasn't his script).

Other things could be like limiting the number of uploads to 20 or 30 a week--most people won't hit the barrier, but it encourages those who do to upgrade. I've heard of inventory limitations of 5 or 6 thousand items--which is high enough that I can support it (having only 4000 objects, myself)--again, high enough that most people won't notice.

I have several alts, they are for different things. I have one that I am using to start up a light role play cult based on the cult from the book Casual Rex. Why? Because I thought it'd be fun. I also have another account with a name from another character from the same book. I also own an account that's name--first and last--is the same as my real name, why? Because I wanted it and didn't want someone else to have it. I have an accoutn with the name of a relatively famous person because I thought it'd be cool.

Maybe I don't need all of these accounts, but I don't harm anyone with them. I can live with hampered abilities, even on my main account--provided that they are things that cause greif, or reduce database size, but are leinient enough that I will rarely hit the boundaries. If I hit the boundaries often enough and hard enough maybe I'll go premium, and if I do, that's a bonus to LL.

I agree. I can think of workarounds to every single 'solution' posted so far. Not that the average user would likely go to the trouble. Only those who game the system would, because gaming the system (whether it's SL or the interwebs) is what they do best.

End result: Average user suffers at the expense of the system gamer who will, as always, figure out the required workarounds, whatever you throw at him.

Your #1 and #2 are basically what was in effect prior to June 6th 2006. Growth was slow to say the least, which ain't good for LL's business model.

Your #3 would be difficult to enforce. Actually, your #2 is too, because they can only limit avatars per payment method. I have six payment methods in my wallet right now. Wahey - thirty accounts!

Over three quarters disagree with abolishing alts.
That’s quite encouraging, but with a quarter of you out there in favor of our demise there is still cause for apprehension.
I plead to those of you who have not allowed your alts to participate in these forums to lighten your oppressive bindings and give them free access to this medium, so too may their voices be heard..
DON’T SUPPRESS US!!!
SUPPRESSION LEADS TO REBELLION!!

Don't agree, taking away something positive because of few bad apples is not the way to go.

It's just a lazy short-cut to semi solve a problem.

Limiting abilities was my preferred solution a while-back, mainly because it's the easiest way to demo Second Life as well, as it simply has too much scope to demo on an island or welcome area alone, but we can't just have new accounts freely able to grief.

The main things that need blocking completely are:
- llPushObject().
- llRezObject()/llRezAtRoot().
- Physics calls - unfortunately, unless they can be easily limited to not affect avatars or something.

After that you want to limit things like:
- llHTTPRequest() - just using the current throttling system but more restricted.
- llSensor()/llSensorRepeat() - throttling of some kind.

I'm not sure about restricting chat commands, possibly giving bigger delays for basic accounts who haven't paid or upgraded to premium (that is new accounts, current free accounts shouldn't be affected).
The main question is implementation, as scripts would need a way of being run "sandboxed" so that they run with the given restrictions, so that they can be switched to non-sandboxed once the creator upgrades. My thinking is that this could work by being a simple checkbox that new, free, basic accounts couldn't turn off, so they could sell script something and give it to a premium account who can turn it off with a warning of what it means. This way a basic account could still script a fully functional weapons system or something, but to sell it requires that the customers "un-sandbox" the product.

This however only combats anonymous griefing, it does not prevent bot camping and other practices, though I guess they could simply not count for traffic to solve the search gaming issue.

Walker, is the REAL growth now (residents who come, stay, play, and participate in the economy) any greater? Or are the numbers just inflated by griefers, alts, bots, and those who come, try it for a few hours, and never come back, leaving their account to boost LL's numbers?

I understand why LL wants big growth numbers. But from my point of view, I could care less. I think there's enough of you here now already.

As for enforcement, there's always a way to game the system. There are ways to limit the gaming, too. I won't debate those, it's not the purpose of this thread. But...would you REALLY give LL ALL the credit card numbers in your wallet?

As I understand it, there really is no way to abolish ALTs and no real reason to. Hey, I am on SL to be someone else, why should I be limited to one personality?

If you want to do away with the bot problem, fix the search. Have popularity be one of the search criteria, with perhaps the sl mentors recommending sites in different categories rather than just visitor numbers. Sort of a Yahoo like search. If they did that, I would never use the old search again. The popular search only identifies camping sites anyway so its useless.

If you want to reward premium users, just give them priority in the rezzes. A lot of people pay more for wide bandwidth on their dsl, so whats wrong with doing it on sl? (assuming thats possible) I might even upgrade if it got me out of the lag zone!!!!!!!

AK

Perhaps you misunderstood me when I said one account per person. I was trying to say that SL should allow only ONE account period. Just a main character and no alts.

Someone needs his/her medicine.

While we're at it, RL authors of books should only be allowed to have one character in each novel. TV and movies, too. And no actor can play any role other than what they were actually born as, and they have to all write their own lines. Nothing but autobiographical monologues allowed, unless multiple actors collaborate on a piece. each creating their own lines. We all know how terrible it is what the same author writes the dialogue for the male detective and for his female client...

Oh, and it can conclusively be proven that 100 % of all griefers breathe air and drink liquids, so you better ban breathing and drinking...

Had enough comparisons yet?

If all you want in SL is to be an extension of your RL self, go right ahead. But don't tell ME that I can't tell a story here with more than one character. Because that is precisely what every role-player that has more than one avatar is doing - writing an ongoing, interactive story with more than one character in it. For every individual that abuses alts to Grief, there are thousands of individuals who use them for positive, creative purposes.

Perhaps your mind is too narrow and unimaginative to be a story teller. Most of us are not handicapped in that way, and would greatly resent being limited as you propose.

Fine if we had the ability to change our displayed names, and carrying more inventory didn't mean more sluggish movement. Anyone savvy in combat sims knows running a character with only 1000 items will run rings around a 20,000 item sloth, but if you want to have a good texture library and builers tools, you need everything to be carried by one character.

Does the premium attitude need to change?

IMO NO. Premium members are directly supporting linden labs. There is a huge cost to running SL. LL makes a dollar from a lindex transaction, but $9.95 from premium accounts plus their lindex transactions. They also make tier fees from premium accounts.

And premium accounts get land and stipends and so on.

Restricting the abilities of free accounts does not make my paid account more valuable; it just makes free accounts less valuable, which is not a bonus for me at all. In fact, if some of the dafter suggestions regarding script function restrictions were implemented, it would mean that a lot of the stuff I do wouldn't sell or be useful to anyone else not premium, which makes SL in general worse for me.

It won't happen anyway.