Stupid Questions about Stipends

How much does a person get in Stipends for just haveing a Membership (You pay like 9.95 USD a month)?

You get $300L per week and are allowed to own a 512sq meter parcel without tier charges.

You get $300L per week and are allowed to own a 512sq meter parcel without tier charges.

ETA: Creepy.

And of course, some older members get 400 or 500L per week, depending on when they joined. And some older basic members get 50L per week, depending on when they joined.

Ya,.. I'm supposed to get 50L a week but it keeps not sending those and some times quadruppleing my Group Fees... my Classifieds is screwed up too I probably listed over 20 times in October.

Do Stipends Increase as you own land? How much so?

No.

Stipends are flat and do not increase with land ownership.

If you are being billed incorrectly, I would double check that the groups you are in are not improperly including you in the accounting, or that land that is owned in the group does not have the parcel listing fee on. Take it up with the owners of the groups. And if you didn't get your 50L, you need to make sure that you didn't close your account to terminate service in the recent year, as you would likely lose your stipend. Otherwise, take it up with LL to get it billed correctly.

No, it's just SL being retarded. It's also been messing up my Classifieds all Summer and in Fall. I gave up after October,.. the Classified were going down in 24 hours alot.

There was nothing questionable about my Classified,.. one was like " Red Eye, Blue Eye, Green Eye,.." in the Desc and the other was for Flowers.

/me still gets L$50 a week

I'm still on my L$500 a week. My premium account basically costs me nothing (I pay the $72 a year + VAT which works out about $7 a month, my stipend of L$2000-ish a month is worth around $7). Plus it saves me a little on tier.

Meanwhile current premium stipends of L$300 a week are a loss of $2 to $3 a month unless you count the 512 sq m of tier + land-ownership rights. It depends really on what you need from a premium account though, to a regular player it's worthless (actually less than worthless! It's a cost!)

Yeah. Well, unless a "regular player" includes some value for those Mainland ownership rights and some increment in one's ability to access support; probably not.

It seems like a big problem to me, assuming LL wants to preserve the revenue from membership fees. But maybe that's not in their future business plans anymore. I kinda wonder if the whole Basic / Premium distinction is on its way out, inasmuch as there's been scant attempt to "sweeten the deal" for Premiums despite the much diminished growth in their ranks recently.

The bulk of LL's income has always been from tier, not Premium fees. The L$ for Premium had to be cut back because at the L$400/$500 mark, it was essentially setting the _minimum_ L$ exchange rate to either L$266 or L$333.

I also suspect that they are intending to take advantage of the existence of land barons by counting on them to provide most end-user sales and support, while LL focus only on the big customers. Although rather harsh, this _is_ standard practice for many internet companies ( witness http://www.isp-planet.com/resources/backbones/index.html )..

That won't happen without raising the higher tier brackets though. Like any company, most of LL's actual profit (after deducting cost) probably comes from heaps of people who own relatively little land but are paying 3-5 times as much than the "bulk" customers.

They'd probably much rather have 128 people paying $600/sim than 1 "baron" paying $195/sim (which is supposidly the running cost for LL for a sim).

That would rock!

Or to have them do another round of the lifetime resident deal..

wassat? I'll be here forever... >.>

It was waaaaay-back-when, far before my time.

I think the deal was a one-time US$1000 payment for a forever-more 4k m2 of tier and L$500 stipend. (the 4k m2 tier is US$25/month)

O.O


I could do that... then I'd have like.. 1/3 of a sim! WOOT!

THat would be cool but in reality I probably wouldn't lol.. but hadn't heard of it before, thanks for explaining ^^

Waaaaay back, when Second Life was _very first starting_, there _was_ no tier fee. You "claimed" your land with L$ and could claim as much as you could manage. You couldn't buy and sell L$, so the only way to get it was from your stipend (which everyone got) and from creating content and selling it to others. You had to pay L$10 for every prim you rezzed(!), and you also had to pay "upkeep" on prims you left built in the world. The idea was, as you can tell, to ensure that the best content was given the most space. If you wanted to be a "consumer", you would earn your L$ from ratings bonuses (which are now gone) and dwell (which is also now gone).

The only subscription at that time was: US$9.99 a month, or US$200, one-off payment, for life. Since nobody knew if Second Life would still be around the following year, that was quite a gamble.

When tier fees came in, they had the problem of the people who had paid US$200 on the promise of a lifetime membership. They decided it wouldn't be fair to tell those people that they now had to pay tier like everyone else and their big initial investment meant nothing. So they got a lifetime Premium membership and a tier-free 4096sqm.

(If you search the forums for messages around SL v1.2, when tier fees were introduced, you can find a lot of interesting older messages. Such as the now-owner of one of the biggest businesses on the grid, saying she'd leave because SL was becoming too focused on the RL rich.)

It is unlikely that Linden Labs will ever offer this again - just like the grandfathered private islands, it was compensation for a change.

Thanks, Yumi! I knew that if I just made stuff up, somebody would come along and post the real story...