Improving the Premium Experience

I guess I'm taking this as a "wait and see". I'm a premium acct holder and have been nearly my entire time in sl. I co own 2 sims so this helps me none besides the fact that I shudder when I think of mainland living. It's like living in a big city to me.

I'd love to see the Allowance boosted up rather than something like this but then again, it's my choice to be a premium acct holder.

So, let's see. You don't actually own the land, or do you? Are you going to have to live within the constraints of 117 prims, minus the number of prims for the house?

Either way, it just sounds like a bad deal for landlords who rent out apartments and homes. It may just be a bid to whet the appetite for more land and it doesn't really compete with estates since that is a different kind of rental altogether. Well, if it drives the price of land back up, it might actually be worth the time to sell it.

Are these introductory plots for a fixed period of time or do residents keep them for ever?

I think the best way to boost Premium membership would be to increase the tier-free allowance to 1024 sq metres.

gom gom gom gom

im still waiting for the first land you promised me ll.

I think you'll own the land, as I can see no other way of working out your tier level. The house doesn't count against your prim count, so you have 117 prims to furnish it. They're turning off resale though, so you can't deed it.



It competes with estates who rent out small parcels, how many there are I'm not sure. I think Desmond and people who have good communities will be the ones who might notice this more than your average estate landlord where larger plots are generally more popular, however this sort of concept doesn't really offer the level of service with the added value people get from Desmond and those who have good communities.

Mainland landlords are probably less likely to be impacted because this is for premiums and how many premiums rent a 512 instead of owning one? Financially it doesn't make much sense to me to rent a 512 on mainland if it's your only plot of land, prices are so low that you'd soon be making savings over renting.

I love to explore the mainland. Knowing that there could be literally anything over the next hill makes it fascinating in a way that exploring islands, even mini-continents, can never be.

Every so often in my travels I come across a little house in among the chaos. I look at the name of the parcel and it's often called something like 'Our Hideaway' or 'My Home ' and it always makes me smile, because I know it belongs to someone who took their 512 and made something of it, in spite of all the drawbacks that the mainland is notorious for.

These are the premium accounts that the Lindens should be reaching out to - the people who have bought into the dream of making their mark in a true virtual world instead of fleeing to the more controlled and insular environments of the island estates. Premium newbies who want somewhere to call their own should be encouraged to do it on the real mainland, not herded into some bland company town which will only set them up for disapointment when they do graduate to the real mainland and discover that more money buys them less prims and less stability.

Community? Dream?

Come on...Philip is gone...SL has lost it's vision and progress...Linden Lab is transitioning from visionary company to a corporation that is only focused on profits. This is simply another attempt to get away from the "user created world" idea towards SL content being packaged and sold by LL to users.

Also known as "The More Predictable Experience".(tm)

I was hoping you would just say it's Cack.

I reserve that word exclusively for SL Answers these days!

Ermmmm..... if this is some wonderful improvement to the premium experience why do users have to apply for a linden home ...why isn't it just handed over and aren't most premium users going to have a home anyway...

give us some decent offers lindens - a cut in tier prices or an increase in the amount of land you own for the tier you pay. Ive been paying a lot of money for two years and I'm sure for many others its been a lot longer, yet Ive never seen any offers from lindens, any bargains, any price cuts or extra allowances.

The premium experience might also be best served by tackling long standing issues, problems with texture transparency, regional border crashes, lag.

Or how about new ways of pushing sl forward...new building techniques for example , upping the prim allowance on land, increasing prim size.

I'll forego the offer of applying for a linden home, how about being able to apply for a nice discount on my tier charges instead

We all know the overwhelming portion of LL's income is tier-based so anyone renting out land is actually the one who came second and decided to compete against LL on its own platform.

LL also isn't going to be offering parcels but rather an unfurnished cookie-cutter home.

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It would be interesting to know how many people pick monthly over quaterly over yearly though since if the sims really are double-prim then they can't stuff more than 64 premiums on one sim which means that they'll only make $49/month/full sim if they're all (new) yearly premiums or $302/month/full sim if they're all (new) monthly premiums.

Either way if it provides cheaper housing to new residents (or existing residents who aren't looking to spend that much on a home of their own) then it's a big win for SL as a whole.

Hopefully LL will expand it to include bigger parcels/homes as well and drive rental prices downward across the board to the more sane amounts they used to be.

And deservedly so.

Maybe some landlords here could tell us what percentage of their tenants are Premium.

I don't see the proposal as being a threat to landlords.
I've thrown my two bits into the Blog. I would recommend that the thenure in the 'homes' area would be temporary.
The thing should be a very easy stepping stone into land ownership in the grid at large.

The big winner from this will be sellers of decent, ultra-lo-prim skyboxes that fit on a standard 512. And lo-prim furniture makers.

Big losers: folks who sell avatar stuff like clothing and skins: residents in Lindenville will be spending all their disposable stipend on furnishing the little hobbit hovels and the glorious humperbunkers floating far above.

Temporarily, Mainland prices will dip even further, especially for low-end 512s, but ultimately some slight improvement, maybe, because people really will get sick of those Linden Homes pretty quickly.

I doubt it will have much of an impact on rentals, as long as it stays more or less as Jack described it. The reason is that renters are overwhelmingly Basic accounts, and Basics will *mostly* stay Basic; even if there's a huge increase in the number of those that go Premium, it still leaves nearly the same number of Basic accounts. (Why? Imagine New Zealand doubling its population, all by immigration from China: that would be a rounding error at the scale of the Chinese population.)

And it's not as if it's going to be that attractive, compared to existing Mainland. It's not really the purchase price of land that keeps many Basics from becoming Premium. I've repeatedly tried to give away parcels to long-term renters. They almost never take it, despite the Premium bonus 512 being by far the best deal in land ownership: net of stipend, it's the cheapest per sq.m. tier or rent available, even including the full-sim tier level, so it's *always* been a better deal than renting a 512.

I think the Linden Homes plan is just recognizing that the bonus 512 is already as near to free as makes no difference. It really only matters to some smallish number of Basics who are nervous about how complicated Mainland purchasing seems. This gets them past that hurdle. It also saves them having to lay out that initial purchase price, which also may contribute to their anxiety even though a 512 goes for less than a month's Premium membership.

I'm inclined to disagree with that. Certainly some people will want to be in different places but I can imagine a lot of people, maybe a majority, being quite happy to stay where they are.

The benefits of staying will be:

No adjoining neighbors compared to adjoining neighbors with possibly ugly builds.

117 prims not including the building, compared to 117 including the building if they buy land and move.

Free to stay, compared to what? Tier cost to move to a bigger parcel, or pay for a disadvantageous 512 and have to include the build in the 117 prims.

And I don't think the homes will be hovels, as you described them.

I can envisage a *lot* of people staying ad-infinitum.

You may have a point there, now that I think more about it, especially because of that prim bonus: people will always use up 117 prims with furnishings, and then they'd either have to part with some of it to fit in a 512, or they'd have to buy at least a 1024--and tier at levels just above the bonus 512 is really exorbitant per sq.m. Presumably that's exactly what Jack hopes people will do, and probably that's why they gave the prim bonus in the first place, but yeah: it's a non-trivial barrier there.

Also, I have to put myself in the mind of folks who'd be interested in this offer: they mostly aren't the folks eager to build their own place, nor to terraform their little piece of virtual paradise. So on that count, too, more Linden Home residents may be satisfied with the arrangement longer than I'd first thought.

A few more thoughts on this plan:

-It will create an even more deserted Mainland.

-It's unfair to offer this beta to random Premium users, but not to all of us.

-It will make the land process even MORE complicated. Do we really need yet another option on top of the already confusing ones that already exist?

-It really won't do anything to attract new users. People who were passing on SL before will still pass on it now.

-Many people don't like houses on their land. I don't...the walls always feel confining, especially on a 512.

Hey! I finally get a house!

.. Ahem.

Seriously, I think this may be a bad idea. New users - who this is presumably targeted at - aren't going to quickly understand the business about "the house doesn't count towards your prims", so it'll probably ultimately increase the amount of confusion and trepidation about buying someone's first land.

Also, having a neighbour who you hate is bad, but having no neighbours is in no way good.

Even if we conceded that is IS a good plan, which I don't either, a show of hands from those who fully expect LL to screw this pooch like all the others?

I'm astounded by the tame bunch of replies he's had in response to the blog......

I am interested to know what the other plans he mentions to improve things for long term members are and how long they'll be .....

It might make going premium attractive for current basic members, but I don't see how it enhances current premium accounts at all. Since the main reason to have a premium account is to own land, it stands to reason that most current premium members already own land.

mind you he didn't say its to enhance things for existing members....

its a lure for new meat to lindens isn't it.....

It sure isn't enticing this Basic member to go Premium again.