Premiums in negative growth, when is LL going to get the message?

I'm certain that it CAN be eventually understood, after much time reading and re-reading, but then, when you eventually buy some land, there's a whole lot of other stuff to consider.

I've debated a few times going premium so that I could try buying a little piece of privacy. It's really not that expensive. You know, just to be able to go through my inventory or change clothing in peace, but when I read these forums, I get a little discouraged. What if I end up living next to a horse-humper/noisy club/insert whatever annoys you, I'll be forced to sell and move. Just seems like time waisted (to me, of course).

What they need to do is a "premium account for dummies" option.

Ya pay the premium and ya get a notecard with available 512k plots of land (randomly generated of course) and another notecard giving ya the basics of what ya just signe dup for including a laymans speak terminology of that ikky teir system....

Funny, this idiot must have missed the Turing Test at login.

Visit some camping ares some time, open the map and play teleport to the green dots, and try saying things like, "Hello all" or "if anyone steps off their camppad I will give them $100L", take a couple of Lindens there to open their eyes while you are at it .............

The Goldfarmers are here, this place is a smogasboard for them, and landowners here keep paying them to contribute to a corrupt search system, we might as well let people just type their own traffic numbers in for all the good it is, it would be better on the grid.

The night shift population in 12 months is now 3/4 of dayshift instead of 1/3 due to the 24/7 bots. Of course bot tax the grid resources heavily, wasn't there some change they made to slow them down because it was found one users dozen or so bots were using some ungodly amount of server resources.

Hi Isabeau, don't let teh forumz scare ya. It's fun to have privacy and a few prims to play with.

The best and easiest way to get privacy is to rent on an island estate. For 5-6 USD/month (the same as going premium, except of course you don't have to buy the land!!), you would get a guaranteed residential sim, perhaps with building codes so it looks pretty, and very very quiet (island estates are quieter than mainland because you cannot fly to them from a welcome center, you have to know their name and TP to them). You don't hear much about this sort of living on the forums, probably because there are so few problems with it.

Plus, if you rent, you can leave anytime with 1-2 week's notice. Generally you pay by the week or two, so even if your landlord disappeared, you'd only be out a couple of bucks.
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huh, Nika? Few problems? Where were you when we had at least 1 "my landlord screwed me" thread a week? "I've been thrown out on my pixels!" is exemplary.

Those threads are all about the sort of purchase/rental that charges an up-front fee to "buy" the land, and then you pay the landlord. I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about straight rental, no up-front fees.

In general, you just move in and pay by the week or two weeks. If the land goes belly-up, you've lost at most two week's rent. If the land is taken off-line because the landlord defaults to LL, you file a "region down" report and the Lindens bring it up again for a few hours so you can get your stuff.

It is easy, and no one talks about it because there are no problems with it.
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Thanx Nika,
Teh forumz don't scare too much, LOL
I think that's what I will end up doing. One thing I have learned from reading these forums is that there are many, many really nice, trustworthy people in SL... There really is something for everyone. Renting is a great option for those who aren't inworld everyday, and who are lazy with no time to lose - like me!

I read on the blog, I think it was, that the Lindens themselves are looking for ways to make premium memberships more attractive, and have said themselves that the numbers of them have gone down.

And that they have had meetings to get ideas on this, and are soliciting ideas. So if you have ideas, I would suggest reading the blog - unfortunately, I can't remember exactly where this was. It is also on Jira. But you can find the Lindens in charge of it, and submit your ideas.

Anyway, far from being a ridiculous concern, the Lindens themselves are concerned about this, too.

coco

I got that impression too. Sure, financially a few thousand premium accounts up or down might not make a huge difference, if the money's still getting to LL indirectly through rents - but in terms of numbers to show to the outside world, it does.

Looking at the hard numbers, premiums vs. free basic accounts, you can't distinguish which basic accounts are "contributing" to SL through rent, etc. Looking purely at the number of each account type, that basic account merchant who pays hundreds of USD in rent and classifieds every month counts exactly as much as a bot or a one-day griefer - they're all basic accounts.

So a decline in premium accounts does hurt their image.