One Account To Rule Them All

The Redzone kerfuffle is in serious danger of masking other concerns regarding Second Life, griefing being one and I personally find some of the harassment of Redzone users to be particularly unpalatable, whether you agree with Redzone or not, there is nothing to be gained from harassing Redzone users. However one thing Linden Lab should consider is taking a look at Argent Stonecutter’s Jira proposal to give us better security via a master account, as explained on Jira-SVC-6212.

This proposal has quite a few big advantages, for a start it means it’s harder for people to guess your Second Life login name, it could be used to adult verify and give payment status to, all your associated accounts if you choose and it could also be used to ban or allow access to parcels or sims for this avatar only or all avatars associated with this account.

This would of course mean some substantial work for Linden Lab, but in terms of security and greater options it would enhance the Second Life experience.

Argent points out:

“SL security would be better, also, if you separated the account and avatar names… so for example instead of logging in as “Argent Stonecutter”, I’d log in as “Argent007” or something that isn’t actually published… and then picked my “Argent Stonecutter” alt from a pulldown.

• Something else for attackers to have to guess.
• Better account management.
• Fewer name-password combinations for users to remember.“

These are very good reasons, they make Second Life easier to engage with, this would mean people won’t forget that alt they created six months ago but don’t use anymore because they’ve forgotten the login details, it would be there in the list, of course this doesn’t mean they’d use that alt, they’d just know it was there and Linden Lab could reintroduce a fee for creating more alts, if you hit you five avatar limit then you pay a one off fee for another block of five, this would need to be applied only to those who hit the limit after the changes, whereas I am at the five avatar limit, others went over it at a time they were allowed to.

There are other potentially good options in this concept, Ceera Murakami in the Jira suggests having the choice of a shared Linden dollar pool between your avatars, that would mean if you bought Linden dollars under one avatar name, your alts could use that money too, this would be similar to the concept of a guild bank in World of Warcraft, but your guild just consists of your own avatars. Another option could be for content creators to have another permission level of share with account, which would mean you could purchase an item on one of your avatars but have the ability to transfer it to your alts only, you wouldn’t be able to transfer it to avatars who are not your alts.

Bringing our accounts under one umbrella has several advantages and whereas it won’t stop people creating throwaway alts to engage in mischief, Linden Lab’s own security can start working towards assosciating accounts in the background, they already do this in some ways and do try and ban accounts using the knowledge Linden Lab have on accounts.

I have two no payment info, non age verified alts who can access adult land because I submitted a support ticket, it would be easier all round if my age verified status was automatically applied to these alts without the need to have submitted a support ticket and as they are my alts, really payment info status should be applied to them too, my alts can’t access parcels that restrict access by payment info or age verified status because of how things are setup now, realistically they should be able to access those parcels because the person behind those avatars has age verified and does have payment info used status. Linden Lab know all my alts, if I do something wrong with one of alts, Linden Lab know it’s me doing it, I am already linked.

As I said, all of this will take a lot of work from Linden Lab but long term, it’s the right thing to do and it also makes using Second Life easier and safer.