SL Name Survey Results: 75% Wouldn't Pay to Change Their Avatar Name

What's the value of an avatar name? With 138 responses, here's the results to our survey, "Will you spend $15 to $50 to change your Second Life account name?" (Which is how much it costs to do just that, via a new Linden Lab offer.) Nearly 75% answered No.

In Comments to the survey post, readers were mostly not impressed:

"I really don't understand why this needs to cost money. There is no justification for this... why does it cost money? It's not like the Labs are employing someone to sit there and mash through a pile of paperwork forms."

Then again, the results also show that over 1 in 10 respondents are so interested in changing their avatar name, which when you think about, is quite a lot:

They so much want to change an avatar name that they themselves originally chose, that they'll pay at least $15 or as much as $50 to do so.

Which is quite a lot. In many states in the US, that's about as much as it costs to change your real life name! (Alabama's name change fee is $10-80; Hawaii, $50; Virginia $35-50.)

Comments

[Kitty]

What exactly is LL exactly charging for so they can change a username? It's probably fairly minor in code so I don't think changing some characters isn't going to be $40 worth of work for their developers. I would change Kitty's name if the fee was like $15 for premium because I would like and miss having a "last name." I know in the early days having preset last names was cute to foster community (and actually the reason why I never did remember my login for the very first av that I made in 2006), I really want to have the ability to have my own. I've been Kitty Revolver for like 11 years but stuck with kittyrevolver Resident and I really would like to change it to a legacy name.

[Luther Weymann]

I'm not sure this name change is not a manual process. It could be manual. There is sufficient evidence of the LL database code problems that it might be impossible to give the database the full authority to name change without manual intervention. It has been well known for over a decade that database and server application code at LL is a real mess. In almost twenty years, there has never been a top-to-bottom total server application rewrite, which would have required a complete clean-up of the different databases. Which is highly unusual for a NorCal software company not to do. So many things have gone wrong. If you have land, when you pay your land fee, either mainland or through a private CasperLet vendor, sometimes, not always, the land acquired date will change to the last payment date. That should never happen in a database. What to speak of my first avatar from January 1, 2004, which I still have. In 2008 I bought my first Premium account with that avatar, and on the date I paid it, the born-on date for my 1/1/04 avatar changed to the date I paid for the Premium in 2008. As for other database issues suffered by too many to mention, that list is nearly endless. So, it seems reasonable that the LL database for name changes might be unable to manage the name change by itself. It might require manual intervention to make this work.

[Rachel Miller]

When I joined, I didn't realize how important a name is in SL. Now, doing business there, I paid to change my name. What a relief. Linden labs is a business like everything else.

[Nadeja]

If so many people are willing to pay, why give it away for free?

In World of Warcraft it's $10.
In VRChat, AFAIK, you cannot change your username at all, you change the display name. It's the display-name change that is free. Same on Steam.
Changing the display name in SL is also free.
What you pay for with this service is the SL username change.

I'd prefer $10 max, though. Maybe I might consider the $15 on top of Premium Plus... if only Premium Plus were so interesting, but apparently there are quite enough people that would spend $15 to $50 to change their username.