Different account pricing structure

Okay, I know I was arguing for accessibility for a while, but in light of the recent island price-hike I stopped caring.

The fact is, LL is arguing that they need to raise prices because other hosting companies have higher prices. This is about as blindly ignorant to their own creation as I've seen them.
The truth of the matter is that LL provides more than just hosting, they allow you to buy L$, and premium accounts (which you need to buy in order to own land in the first place).
In addition to that, hosting companies out there may charge slightly more, but you're given around 99.9% uptime by them, rather than fortnightly downtime. The software on them is industry standard, tested and repeatedly proven to be stable.

As such, hiking up island prices is hurting only those people who are already paying to play SL, to run their business, to build and create. Free accounts, griefer heaven, remain untouched.
The big problem with this price hike is that with the old price of $195 a month, it is just about feasible to run a free, fun place with minimum selling out (room and vendor rental) to keep things ticking over. Any place that is like that is going to die in February or whenever the prices suddenly leap up 50% for everybody.
If prices on the mainland are going to hike too, which I'm assuming they will, then all the worse. When it becomes unfeasible for people to own land, the only things that will keep going are the businesses, and to be frank, it's hard enough to run a successful business in SL as it is.
Fun places will be forced to close or sell-out even more (thus becoming businesses), half of the attraction of SL will then be gone for good.

Thing is, I'm already paying for this game, I enjoy the game. But it's ceasing to be a game any more, it used to just be a game with an excellent social aspect plus a business layer, but it's fast becoming nothing but business, and the appeal of this fantastic new virtual world is vanishing, right as it starts getting attention.

So what am I getting at? The problem doesn't lie with the people who are already paying, the people who are generating raw USD for LL. It's the basic accounts. Yes they are great people too, wonderful players and so-on, but they are eating bandwidth with little or no return on that cost to the system. Meanwhile the island owners are the ones that KEEP players in the game, keep it fun, keep it worth playing.

What I want to see is a new account structure:

Basic account
Requires credit-card verification, free for first 7 - 14 days, $10 to then confirm the account, plus a $2 per month fee. L$50 stipend.

Standard account
Upgraded basic account, after the $10 fee, the standard account additionally has a $5 monthly fee and a L$200 stipend. A lot of basic accounts need income, here's the solution. Just make sure it factors in so a profit is being made on the L$. Enables features that drain resources such as IM to e-mail which would be unavailable to Basics.

Premium account
Same as now, possibly slightly more per month.


This way we bring back verification and the basic accounts, the majority of which drain more resources than they pay for, or are griefers, are finally paying something. I mean seriously, LL have hit the magic 1 million mark, there's no need to keep giving out resources and software to people for free just so you can punish the people who are interested in paying for this hobby.

I mean, what good is it that we have over a million residents when half of them are probably inactive or griefer accounts?

Note: The structure above is probably crap, but it's the general idea. All accounts (well, all new accounts) should have a small monthly fee to help cover the huge lump of bandwidth that basics are eating up. I mean, islands cost bandwidth, yes, but its not the island owner that's using it really. A well made sim can in fact have minimal bandwidth costs when compared to the huge textures and excessive effects that some basic accounts carry around.

I mostly agree, all accounts need to be paying at least a small amount of real world money to SL. LL is not the only beneficiary of this. I'll explain.

To get into SL you need broadband, and so the poor of the world are for the most part NOT logging in. Anybody logging in from a First World country should pay up.

Why?

When you throw too much of the burden of supporting SL onto the premium account holders and content creators, it ruins their enjoyment of SL and forces them to scale back. This is bad for everyone because it takes the most experienced people at least partly out of the market and so out of our community.

Here's an example. I have a large group, and we meet on land which belongs to one of our members. We're getting this from her for free, so that's a big chunk of actual US dollars she's paying in tier each month for us, loss that will never be covered. I work fifteen to twenty hours a week to run the group, for free. The people who did our build worked for free.

Combined, these free gifts are a huge value, which can be valued in good old U.S. greenbacks, to the group members... at no cost to them.

Newbies don't realize this kind of thing is going on anymore, as they have never had to pay and don't seem to realize who's creating the content. The new people complain at all the shiny toys around, which they can't get their hands on without buying some L. They seem to think the old timers have earned this money in-game. Most of us haven't... I bet that MOST of the in-world content is being paid for by buying L with real world cash... or paying that expensive tier... the newbies really don't seem to know this.

If they were billed, even in small amounts... say ten dollars per quarter after a free month trial... they'd have to get the concept that like anything else, this place is costing money.

Even under conditions of economic rent, there is only so much people can pay. I've tiered down before... if costs go up on the mainland... I'll tier down again. I imagine many others would do the same, and many builds would disappear. If I had to, I'd go basic and rent. That's money LL would not be getting directly from me anymore.

Overcharging premium members is likely to destroy in world content and degrade the game, and outside commercial content can never replace that lost content. It is the interaction between residents that has made SL addictive. Please, LL, don't lay any more burdens on land owners. Many of us are either not turning a large profit or we are operating at a loss.

LL, please make everyone buy a ticket to ride. You get the income, and the social structure on the mainland gets much more egalitarian. We all win.

I don't know if I like the exact details of this proposal, but there definitely needs to be some kind of cost recovery *at least* from free anonymous no-payment-info accounts. It doesn't have to be in $US, it can be in $L, so long as the $L involved are a sink. How about daily bandwidth (or time) caps per-IP on non-payment accounts, that can be raised by paying for extra time?

Some part of the $L could be put back into some kind of tier relief, based on traffic from paying accounts.

I'd say "Most" or "Virtually all".

Not sure about L$, those accounts are unlikely to shift much L$ anyway so there wouldn't be much you can push on them.
Perhaps keep the basic account to free but require verification of some kind. And have some incentive to upgrade to a standard or premium, for example switching off or limiting various bandwidth related features, such as IM-to-email, lower their maximum number of groups (since that info has to be passed around with them sim-to-sim, an expense on the grid), anything else simple like that. So long as standards aren't a major rip-off then it isn't completely unreasonable, since these things would be anything that is a resource drain beyond ordinary useage.
Then premium is still there with its incentive of free land and the ability to own more land later on.

I'm proposing a meter that you can turn off simply by providing payment info on the account. I'm not even going so far as saying "upgrade to premium" to turn the meter off here, just become a regular first-class regular Basic account.
Then they get capped at some basic grace period per day (two hours?), and don't sit there on a camping chair forever using bandwidth and bogging down SL for everyone.

Whether they "pay their way" or stop being a free-riding killing load on the system, I don't much care. The problem would be solved either way.
Precisely.

And I'm 100% in agreement with dracos, charging for behaviour other people control is a bad idea.

Charging for IMs-to-Email? You realise of course that IM are pretty much treated AS email, right? If you reply to an IM-email from your email account it gets into the SL grid as an instant message.

Here's a reason I'm against charging for it:
If it is without my consent--that is, I turn on the feature--and it's say L$1 per IM sent to email, someone could VERY EASILY drain ALL of my L$ by spamming me with IMs while I'm offline.
For a basic account that gets L$200 a week AND DOESN'T SPEND A DIME would be able to take 200 offline IM-emails before they "get lost." The higher the cost on that feature PER IM-2-Email the lower that threshold and the easier to grief. Can you immagine someone IMing anyone who rents their land paying for it with sold items while they are offline REPEATEDLY (in order to grief) until they had no L$ left? They could easily do it to several people before their 7 day free trial is over--all it takes is hitting 2 keys over and over.

I didn't mention charging anything for it like that, I meant those features aren't available unless you upgrade to a standard account. So you'd pay a small USD fee a month for your standard account, which has IM-to-email with no limits.
Basics would get nothing, or mb a daily-digest type things ("You have X new instant messages", not up-to-the-minute IM notifications.

I'm just trying to think of as many different incentives a standard account could have.

Argent, I actually quite like the limited time idea, I'd maybe switch to X hours per week though, I know I for one want to be on more some days and might not be on at all other days. Enough time that's it's reasonable for a regular av to have fun, stay-up-late the odd day and still get anything productive they're doing done, but enough to hurt the campers. If you really want to hurt free camping accounts you could impose a tax on their income, nothing excessive, basically any profit made each day, or any money being cashed out gets 5% deducted and returned to the Linden L$ pool. Untaxed income is another big lure.

Any set of limits you come up with are going to bother some people. If the limit's 8 hours a week some people will prefer 2 hours a night.

That wouldn't hurt campers at all, they'd still get to keep almost all of their camping income... but it would certainly hurt productive users more than bandwidth or time limits. A L$20/hour bandwidth fee after 2 hours a day wouldn't bother a builder (that's 2 texture uploads.. sheesh) but it would make typical L$3 per 15 minute camping chairs actually cost them money.

L$10 and hour charge would cost them money. The cost of opperating the computer for an hour is about L$4 I think. Seeing as a L$1/5 minute chair (same as L$3/15) pays out at a rate of L$12/hour the L$10 charge would hurt them.

Question...

Are we still geting monies for traffic? I thought that had been abolished earlier this year? I am asking because I want to know WHY camping is so lucrative or why it's being done by sim owners. I mean other than traffic, what else other incentive is there?

If there isn't any, why penalize the campers? They are there because the sim/land owner puts it there to take advantage of. Why not penalize the sim owner for that free bandwidth?

If they are SO worried about getting traffic, why not do it differently? With events? With a movie theater? Something more interactive than a sim full of camping zombies? It would cost them as much on output (event prizes, staff salaries) as it would cost them to have ppl dancing on their silly pads.

As far as monthly payments go, make everyone pay. Flat fee, then increase the fee as options increase (ie. buying land, no cap IM's, lower cost in sinks {have froob accounts pay more for photogs/uploads/classifieds}. Just some ideas, probably been shared already, but hey.


Just wondering while I'm at work, waiting for my ride...lol

PS. I have to say I am a yearly paid account who owns land and several businesses and have owned/ran a pretty successful club.

I don't like the IM idea... if LL was to create classes of people with regard to IMs or any other form of communication, then it would create confusion for those of us who are trying to organize (or sell to) large numbers of people. If I send someone an IM and don't know whether he'll get it, it negatively impacts both him, and myself. I realize this can happen now but at least it's by chance.

The last things we need are more inequality on the mainland, or a new class of subcitizens, or an increase in transaction costs, or one more misunderstood feature to be gamed by the slick.

It would be better to educate the newbies to the simple fact that to live really well in Second Life you need to PAY UP a little. In dollars, please.

And it's simpler, having real world parallels that are easy to use for analogies.

Nothing demoralizes a customer faster than a confusing, and therefore unpredictable, cost structure.

The cost of operating the computer isn't really relevant. I've talked to people about this, and they're either using the computer anyway, or it's not theirs, or they do't care because they can't monetize the cost of the computer as Lindens anyway.

It doesn't matter whether the campers are there because the guy is gaming the system or because he's doing it for advertising, the campers are there because they're getting paid, and the campers are the ones lagging the rest of the sim down.
Linden Labs has advertised "if you want to tier down to Basic you can, and you don't have to pay, ever" too often for that to be on the table.