Should technical support (Liaisons, email, phone) be for Premium users only?

Support should be for all? Why should it be just for paying members? The posting of this really is distrubing because why should you only give support to those that pay? when your asking for people to join for free then NOT give them support? That leave those with freebie accounts thinking why should i even join if they don`t support me at this stage. If your going to layout the rug for all then people to be paying members why not give them the same rights of those types of supports?

Hiya's

I am a premium member, I have read numerous threads from people who want to remove certain things from basic members, and I disagree to all of them, Some people will become premium some won't, It is their right to choose not anyone else's.

There alot of basic member who create content and do good for and in SecondLife and their imaginations on what they build is totally amazing, I have seen so many amazing things created in Secondlife by Basic and premium members alike.

I don't think it's fair to continously attack basic members purely because those who pay feel they have more rights then others.

If you look at it without basic members no content creator would have the amount of sales they have, Basic members buy our content, Rent our land, Visit many of our wonderful builds, So they are paying.

So I think people should stop whinging about who pays what and get on with their own Secondlifes.

Just kick back chill out and enjoy whatever it is you feel like enjoying.

Nat

I'm not sure what makes you think I'm upset. I'm not. I just don't see the point in answering the same question, phrased differently, multiple times.

If LL doesn't want to offer a free lunch, then they should stop putting up gigantic signs saying "Free Lunch!" That's not rocket surgery, it's common sense, and it's ethical business practice.

If you advertise something, you have to come through with it.

Thank you finally common sence
Don`t understand why people believe taking the rights away from non paying accounts like support offers does any good what so ever.......I am a full account been for awhile. But why in the hell take away right to future paying members........This topic is not need do to the fact of business LLabs is trying to do. Free signups are a key to future growth (even thou "BAKED" populas is 70,000 )

Meh

shakeshead......... sigh

Agreed, especially since SL's interface is not exactly the most user friendly thing around. It's not for no reason that newbies have a reputation for wearing boxes. I've been around since December, I spend a good deal of time in world, and there are still things I don't know about.

Wasn't one of the purposes of Help Island (or Orientation Island, I don't recall the name) to raise retention rates? New players arrived, didn't know how to get around or what to do, and logged off, never to return.

New players already have trouble finding things to do; some of them undoubtedly get bored and leave because of this. And now you want to take away tech support so that not only can they not find anything to do, they have trouble simply knowing how to do things?

Also, bug and abuse reports are technical support? Except for the occasional reply you get to a bug report, I wouldn't class those as technical support: one is a means of enforcing the TOS, and the other helps LL improve SL. You cannot seriously be suggesting that basic account holders not be allowed to report bugs they find, or that people should be allowed to violate the TOS as long as they're only targeting basic account holders.

Edited to add: I'm not enormously averse to removing free tech support (except for Live Help, and for things that require a Linden to fix) for basic users who are a month or two old. But newer users should be given tech support, and I think seven days is definitely too short a time.

I am in the exact same boat. I support half an island through my partner. LL only allows one owner, so this is the only option.

And I've never used tech support.

I'm a premium member but i think Basic accounts should still benefit from Tech help... Premium should have more features then basic but why nerf things?

Is there evidence to support this?

Scenario :

I am a free account ( purely because I dont see the point of being a premium member )
I buy US$20,000 worth of Linden and the transaction gets borked in some way

What do I do - write it off as a bad experience ( under the proposed scheme I have no one to call or email )

HELL NO ( as someone already said here )

Not quite, as far as I understand it. You'd still be able to contact technical support. You'd just have to pay.

That would probably be like pouring petrol onto a burning fire..

Me : Hi i paid blah blah..........and it has gone missing
support : Ok - hold on - are you a premium member ?
Me : no, I didnt feel the need
support : Ahh , Ok then you will have to upgrade to premium before i can take your call
Me : So on top of the 20,000 i just paid - you want an extra 10 to find my money ?
support : sorry - we cant answer calls except from premium members
me : Ok, could i have my 20,000 back please
support : sorry we cant do that unless you have a premium account
me : could i speak to your supervisor please.......

To bar basic accounts from any form of support - you would also have to bar them from using any chargeable services ( buying linden being the example )
Failure to do both would result in the above scenario very rapidly.

Or another scenario

Me : Hi - i just got kicked from out of my rented land by some idot with a nuke - what do i do ?
Support : File an AR - oops your not premium are you ?
Me : No , never saw the need
Support : Ok, sorry there is nothing we can do then..

This would herald the introduction of a new sport - "Hunt the Basic Account" - as without any support back-up you would be able to do anything you like to them without any come back.
( Filing AR's is also a form of support, as it requires a aperson to actually read them at some stage )

No, I don't think you're understanding. It wouldn't be that non-premium members couldn't get technical support. They'd just have to pay for each instance of support at the time. No upgrading necessary.

Edited to add: At least, that's how I first read the OP, but upon rereading, I'm not so sure. No technical support whatsoever for basic account holders is a pretty bad idea, IMO. Especially since some of us are paying customers, via rented land.

I dont have to pay to put money into the system - but i have to pay for someone to fix any of their own errors ?

I think your argument is a little flawed ( sorry - no offense meant )

All users should get free technical support, regardless of whether they are on Basic or Premium. I thought it was a crazy idea to offer free accounts in the first place, but once they're offered, LL shouldn't start taking away things like tech support from those accounts. If LL shared the same views as the OP, it would sound to me like wanting to have their cake, and being able to eat it.

It's not my argument, but I thought you might have been misinterpreting the OP. I'd interpreted her post to mean that basic accounts shouldn't get tech support without having to pay for each instance of it -- and I could have gotten that wrong, granted -- not that they couldn't get tech support, period. You seemed to have been thinnking the OP meant that basic accounts couldn't get any tech support.

This is where LL is going to have to give us some info, so we can help them It would be very helpful to know what the Tech support calls and tickets are relating to.

Are they login problems?

Username asnd passwords resets.

Help! I've got a box on my head!

This script I bought dosn't work, can you tell me who I bought it from, as I forgot?

I worked in Tech Support for ISPs for 5 years and you get really odd questions, really obvious questions, and the same people ringing up many times to ask the same thing month after month.

<Dont get me started!! arrgghhh >


Everywhere I worked, and was asked what calls Tech support take, and what they were about, no one could say, as the problems dont get tracked, except as notes on the customers account.

Suddenly there might be a lot of call from one area, or about a particular thing, Then it's the "oh...bugger something is going on".

So usually it also comes down to a problem on the System, or a problem between desk and chair, sometimes you get problems known as Error ID 10T

So in order to be fair, the best answer I could think of would be to have a call tracking system that is tied to the account.

But then they might have that already.

Basic get a number of free tickets per X number of months and pay in $L for any others.
Premium get a priority answer, over the Basic acounts.
Phone calls should not be free, but a nominal charge.

For the record , I'm on basic and I don't use Tech support.

That's been the standard accusation for years, in various online services where one can have multiple accounts/characters.

Problem is that unless the people in question come out and say it, the only real way of knowing is held by the administrators. Everything else is just wild speculation, based primarily on the false premise that "my opinion is supported by many, yours is just held by you and your sock puppets".

[/cynic]

As for the notion of having to pay for tech support, if I were to need it, as a basic account, and told that I'd have to pay to fix a problem for which the odds are high it's not something on my end (I'm not an idiot, and I do know how to use Google and forum searches), my response would be "Ok, fine. Byebye SL. *hits ctrl-q then uninstalls SL*"

Take a look at these statistics: http://planet0.planet-zero.org/~chromal/slpop/

So you can see that when SL had, by mid-July 2005, around 60,000 "active users", it had a maximum of around 2,500 concurrent users. Today, with 222,000 users, there are at most 7,000 concurrent users. If the ratio active-users-to-max-concurrent-users stayed the same, you'd have near to 9250 users at this time. Thus, if the proportion were the same, you'd have "only" 168,000 users these days; 54,000 are not logging in at all regularly. Since they're still counted as active users at all, they are "dormant" users: not used at all

Now finding the exact number of new users that are inactive alts and new users that never login again is not trivial.

See also http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/second_life_stats_expanded_early_2006/ for some more interesting (and official!) statistics.

Here food for thought.As you noticed the increases of Mentors in the game, we are (mostly of us are ) do simple problem solving for newbies as well as other form of support for all other players in the game. This makes you wonder.........if LLabs well be headed in this direction for non full accounts. The Number of "Baked" Vs. "Total Populas is always a issue. Support on any product or service is vital to the life of any compnay.

I resently found a report in Japan about How LLabs is going push its growth in to as ( ok we are seeing signs already ). Japan is a important market to LLabs based on their abilites to go head to head with Sony product service of Online line gaming. Korea and china they are not woriied about growth. But its appears in that report Japan is a key to future growth. Strange because last year at this stage that section was slowly growing. But Aug until year end there was nothing but japanese eye builds.....How does this topic appy to this writting? Well Its about REAL growth baked accounts.The future is in the east not only in Japan but china, korea etc.....Tech support for free accounts well be Vital in these are of the world. Since trials are important so will the support these langges as well.

If new users are mostly alts that's a pretty good business for SL.

dont forget the little thing the difference between a basic and a premium is of 10 miserable bucks a month, yet as we saw a lot of peoples REFUSE obstinately to even consider to give 10 bucks to linden labs

our problem is more of a greed mindset

The information that we would need to answer this question is not available to us: what is the breakdown of LL revenues? Their revenue streams include

1) Premium subscriptions
2) People buying lindens with USD to spend in-world (yes I know much of this eventually becomes USD again but see various economics threads for reasons why currency trade is better than no trade for LL)
3) Upfront and tier payments for property (which is paid by renters/buyers from Anshe Chung through their rental payments)

LL raised a bunch of money from VCs recently and doesn't need to be profitable in the short term. It needs to make sure that the cost of having an extra 100,000 residents are less than the revenues generated, irrespective of whether that revenue comes from 1) 2) or 3)

If they can do this, then they have a winning business model (can I invest in the next financing round please Mr Rosedale?). And if they can do this, then SL needs to get BIG. Is it 1 million residents? 10 million? LL must avoid putting obstacles in the way of people becoming long term residents, Premium OR Basic.

If they're all alts, then they're not going to be a financial burden, are they?