IDEA for Premier Member Benefit

I thought of this last night. Maybe it is old and creaky, but it is new to me...

How about giving premier members higher priorities. For example, if two or more clients request a texture download (or any other download) at more or less the same time, then the server satisfies the Premier Members first.

If two or more people TP to a sim at more or less the same time, process the Permier Members first...

When sending viewer updates from sims to viewers, do a quick re-order and send the ones to Premium Members first.

...and so on.

In fact, this could turn into QoS tiers. Pay more, less lag.

By the way, I don't think we should use this forum to discuss technical feasability. Probably, a lot of these kinds of things are possible, but will require some clever changes to the server code.

The problem is that this would send the implication, to platform users, that lag for non-premium users was deliberate and a source of profit for LL.

Trust Yumi to see the glass as half empty and blame it on a conspiracy.

I suspect most would see the opposite: Performance is available...at a price.

My question would be, how could you measure it? I mean, say we had this, and someone goes Premium. There would have to be some little on screen meter or something that would shoot up, showing higher performance.

It wouldn't necessarily have to be accurately tied to actual performance (some would no doubt accuse LL of ONLY changing the meter, not the actual performance at all, I'm sure). But the customer has to have some way of perceiving the value he is paying for.

I'm not sure sims even know if you've got a premium account.

Similar ideas:
- when a sim gets 75% (or whatever) full, only premiums can enter it (would need to be an estate/sim setting)
- inventory for premiums get stored on faster asset servers
- something with search.. er.. throttles (like they have on land search) or something

And, before anybody starts jumping up and down, by "premium" I mean the not-actually-correct definition of anybody with a premium account AND anybody who owns a private island.

edit: and this sorta screws people who, for example, rent big chunks of Caledon..

Given that performance varies so wildly across the grid, I suspect you would be hard pressed to notice a significant difference under that plan.

I'd rather they do something mundane like bump up the free tier to 1024M.

- team up with Google (or someone else) and offer an SL-specific email (and some webspace or blog service or something equally "shiny"
- more than 25 groups: apparantly the biggest reason not to increase the limit is that it won't scale... giving only premiums more groups might work
- web-to-IM gateway for offline communication with friends

Personal pet want:
- allow premiums to directly own a homestead: the product is entirely aimed at being a personal home so there's absolutely no reason why anyone is required to go through a landlord to get one

As it stands right now, the sims can't tell the difference between a Premium account and anyone else who has Payment Info Used.

Then again, if you simplt extrapolated that out to include "anyone who has payment info on file", as getting better performance than "no payment info on file/completely anonymous" accounts, you might have something there.

I actually think the OP has a good idea. Money = Performance pretty much universally. I'm thinking graphics cards, cars, motorcycles, electronics, musical instruments, etc... why not virtual worlds? Rather than the shiny shinies like land/tier/Inventory/Groups/etc, make Premium accounts a priority in rez time.

Yes it would bum out those who rent big parcels, but there really does need to be a reason to buy Premium accounts.

This.
I think the only reason I have a premium account is to throw my 512 into the group land holding.

The saying "membership has its privileges" doesn't apply to SL

Just because it doesn't show on the profile doesn't mean the sim doesn't know.

It might possibly not be able to make the distinction between 512m²/1024m² free tier basics and a premium (charter accounts are a special kind of premium so those are fine to include) but in the general case "no mainland tier = not premium" works just fine.

I'm not technologically savvy, but I wonder if the addtional computational resources it would take to prioritize users would actually add enough additional lag that it would be contributing too much to the problem it was meant to cure.

Still not enough for me to go perm.

I agree with Amity. I suspect the overhead would simply slow things down for everyone - maybe not a huge amount, but adding any more overhead to an already taxed system (for probably little noticable improvement) doesn't seem to be worth it.

Yeah, I wonder how much of a consideration this is, in designing Premium membership: doing something that Estates couldn't imitate. I suspect quite a lot.

I'm quite sure that competing with Estates is the real reason Homesteads aren't available except to owners of at least one full-prim private sim. Estate owners are extremely nervous about this ever changing.

They'd really cry foul if LL introduced Premium-only benefits unavailable to Estate dwellers, as long as Premium enables Mainland ownership.

Of course, that may be the problem: maybe some sort of paid subscription is needed that has nothing to do with owning Mainland.

For that matter, maybe everybody with payment info should be able to own Mainland without paying any subscription fee other than tier. (Actually, I think that would hurt Estates much worse than would allowing Homesteads for Premiums, but I'm not sure they'd see it that way: they currently deal in Homesteads, not Mainland, which they mostly consider worthless.)

That's not what I meant.

What I meant was that people would be much more reluctant to set up venues with RL connection, meetings, etc, in SL if they knew that all of their _attendees_ would have to subscribe to SL long term, or face lag.

And in a sense, yes, it would need to be a "conspiracy". If it's just a priority thing then, well.. Suppose there's a sim with a regular crowd of 20 people. If none of them are premium, none of them "go first"; if all of them are premium, all of them "go first" - the resulting performance would be the same either way! For someone to go premium would only have the effect of hurting everyone else!

Under the Rosedale Egalitarian regime, what you propose would be a horrifying thought. However, now that Lord Kingdong rules the roost, it isn't such a stretch.

Your edit is quite important, I know as an estate owner who rents land to non premiums where I'd want to tell LL to shove such an initiative. There's a lot more estate land than mainland, this sort of idea has little benefit to estate owners.

Increase the amount of free tier from 512 to 1024 would be a good start. I know that wouldn't encourage the estate owners, but for those of us on mainland, it'd be nice.

Inventory. I would love to be able to restore my inventory when something goes completely AWOL. I'm not talking items that have be deleted by the owner either.. but items that have gone AWOL due to inventory glitches. Maybe unlimited restores of items that are not transferable and maybe a once off restore for items that are? I'd rest a lot easier if I knew my dragon collection and my own works weren't likely to go "poof" on me or if they did, that I could restore it via support. (I'd make my second alt a premium for that!)

Those are two off the top of my head.

How about converting a Premium account to basic automatically when there is a billing problem, rather than suspending the account then destroying the inventory before the account owner can deal with it? That's not so much a benefit, as it is eliminating a pretty big disadvantage.

I knew there was a thread here somewhere needing a link to http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1961.