Wednesday, March 26, 2008

How to fix the problem of "free accounts"

...says the free account himself :-) (and after all, I wonder if there is really a problem or such...)

Anyway. Rather than using "payment info on file", introduce a status "beginner" and "full". Quite simply - paying L$1000 or such achieves the "full" status.

If there are no-build., etc. restrictions based on this status - then the folks would be interested to get it.

And since there is no requirement to pull in the real bucks - this could be a good motivation for some to do some more activities inworld...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know what is the problem of free accounts. Most of them are fine, nice residents that are not willing to provide their CC number to some company in San Francisco. Some are just incomers that wist to try something before buying. That is ok too. Company actually couldn't live and prosper without them. And the minority are freaks that use anonymity of the free account to grief others. Oh, there we are. It is crazy to lock two first groups because of the few. So we have a security problem. I gave my few thoughts on the subject of griefing and even proposed a solution. Pity that nobody cannot access that JIRA page for unknown reasons. Someone can help about that, please?

Dalien said...

yeah, I know :-) although I think both can work in complementary manner - you mention "non-identified avatars from rezzing and running scripts". How do you define the "non-identified" ? the ones who refuse to run some sort of third-party stuff that they chose ? I'd actually easier give out my credit card info to LL, rather than trust the data to some unknown third party - no matter what they claim.

"The problem" with this minority of the anonymous accounts is that they are easy enough to re-create if banned for misbehaviour. My thinking is that the account creation itself should remain free - but the "avatar's rights" should be equal to "child level" till they "grow up" - aka pay back some amount of L$. It would be as well good for the world economy.

Although, the root of this thought is actually coming from my thinking around using LETS-like monetary system within the distributed open model, and the "solving the griefing problem" is somewhat a second-order side effect :)

Although still not sure if this is a decent way to handle the mischief... but until someone tries - it's hard to know :-)