What is the benefit of a Premium Account?

I've been a premium account holder for some years and to be honest, I think I have received very little benefit from it. This post is not a whinge .. if I don't like it I can always become a basic account holder. But .. what ARE the benefits of being a premium account holder? Digging around I find

1) ## you have to be a premium account holder to own land##
This is a myth and a misquote of the real position (and yes, the Lindens misquote this line sometimes). I've owned land for about 2 years .. but not on mainland. I now share a homestead with my partner.

The true statement is 'you have to be a premium account holder to own mainland'. Land is available to basic accounts if you go to a private estate owner. We bought off azureislands and were pleased with the prompt and efficient service they gave us.

2) ##Only premium account holders can submit a ticket##
Hmm. Hands up how many premium account holders have done this? If we had a problem with our estate we went to the landowner. I came to these forums and the knowledgebase to solve other problems. (Note .. I'll also link the other benefit into this 'Can initiate Live Chat sessions' .. comes under the heading of 'enhanced support')

3) ## You get paid a weekly stipend of lindens ##
Umm .. I pay 11 quid a month and the lindens give some of that back to me. Never understood this but I'm sure it made sense to a Linden once upon a time

4) ## ?? ##
.. er ... what else?


That's it. That's ALL a premium account gives you

So .. questions for the Lindens. Why should a new person become a premium account holder? What proposals do you have to enhance the premium account? Answers on one side of an A4 sheet of paper please

and some questions for residents.
a) If you are a premium account holder .. what were your reasons for upgrading your account?
b) What should LL do to make premium accounts a more attractive proposition?

its worth noting that a basic account doesnt even need to buy or rent estate land from an estate owner. they can buy it direct from ll. i am both an estate owner and a basic user.
a basic estate owner can not only submit a ticket, but they can access concierge as well.
the stipend does make sense as it is a stimulus of sorts to the grid economy.

i was premium at one time, but reverted to basic for reasons i am sure you already understand.
anything ll could do to make premium more worthwhile are changes they will certainly be unwilling to implement, so i have no motivation to detail them again (and again and again)

Tom Hale asked for feedback on exactly all that a few months ago. To date there has been no visible activity resulting from that.

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for me at this time (and anyone else who still gets the 500L stipend) SL pays for me to play (as long as the exchange rate stays around this level)

Other than that, I like it for being able to own on mainland.

I do not like the idea of "renting" land on an estate, but that is just me, I am sure for others is varies.

I can not afford to own an entire sim, so for now, I own mainland and have for almost 3 years, the same place actually, and I like it that way.

I guess, technically, for some value of "own", LL is correct in saying that one must be Premium to own land.

That is, "owning" an Estate parcel is only very slightly different from renting (Estate or Mainland), which becomes evident when one tries to sell the stuff (with very rare exceptions).

Of course, "owning" Mainland (or a whole Estate) is a bit fictional anyway, so LL's claim is valid only for a mighty narrow and specialized definition of "own."

Eroding that even further is the ability to solely control a Group that owns Mainland through rented tier. The only practical difference between that and owning the parcel as an individual is that Support wouldn't be available to a Basic whose group owns land through rented tier.

You don't own the land, you rent it from an estate owner. They can set restrictions on what you do with that land, and sell it out from under you at any time. Most are ethical, and don't do this, but the risk is there.

Arguably I don't own my mainland either, I rent it from LL. But the only way I'd lose it is if all of SL failed, in which case we're all screwed.


It makes sense to me. By committing to a year (or quarter, or month) of SL, you get some L$ on top of the other benefits. Back when stipend was L$500, you got more money back than you paid in (buying membership by the year). Free money! When it was L$400, you roughly broke even (before VAT for European customers). Even at L$300, you get over half of your money back.

I'm not sure where you get "11 quid a month" from. Even paying monthly, and including UK VAT it's only 11 *dollars*, about £7.50 at current exchange. If you paid yearly, you could have 2 premium accounts for a little over £9 per month.

You also get free tier on your first 512m of mainland, which would otherwise cost $5 (plus VAT) per month. That's over £45 'value' per year, if you use it.

I have a permanent home which I built myself. It's right beside a Linden protected route (road not built yet - please hurry up LDPW!)). I know that nobody can take my home away, although I can't do much if someone builds something horrible next to it.

None of us like parting with money, that's our instinct, but speaking rationally, I'm quite prepared to pay LL a modest sum for the pleasure I get from my hours in-world.

Renting privately has the risk that the landlord will chuck you out or, if they get into difficulties themselves, you'll automatically be evicted. Although I imagine the big commercial landlords like Azure are probably almost as safe a bet as LL.

I'm not a maths genius but I worked out this:

I pay my Premium subscription annually.

It works out, in British currency, as £4.55 per month.
I get L$400 stipend per week, which works out at £4.04 per month.

So my net payment (excluding my tier, which is a separate issue) to LL is 51p per month - about 75 cents US money!

I just went premium - only because I wanted to be on mainland. That's the only reason I would ever go premium, otherwise I'd just buy $10-15 worth of L every month. As for why not rental... I'm too lazy to deal with a landlord, pfff screw that xD The randomness of mainland has a certain charm, anyway.

Back when I first started playing SecondLife I quickly signed up as premium once I realised I was going to be here a lot. It just seemed like the fair and reasonable way to pay back Linden Lab for the enjoyment they were giving me.

Since then, of course, I've built a decent business off arbitraging tier and flipping land so I'd say I get lots of benefits from being premium.

I have rented estate land and owned mainland. I had no bad experiences with either, but I'm more comfortable owning mainland. The tier is automatically deducted and I don't have to remember to pay someone.

There are no bills in my world, my imagination.

I have a premium account, because in spite of all their flaws, Linden Labs provides a good product and should be compensated at least in some small way.

Same for me however I do use Live Chat often to get official answers. As far as owning land, I no longer do, I just donate tier to what I feel is a worthwhile cause.

I'm premium just to own Mainland. Not to sound negative, but I believe that I'll get better treatment from the Lindens than from an estate owner over the long term. I "own" my land, can protect it as I wish, and am lucky enough to have a 512m and a 1280m parcel, both in "nice" neighborhoods with good neighbors and in line of sight of the water.

My co owners are my alt and my pet (who is dropping her Premium account, which she no longer needs since I'm Premium and all the land is group owned).

I know people feel strongly about rent/lease from private estate owners, and for the most part this is a good way to go. I just don't want to come in some day and find that the estate owner has suffered a RL disaster and has dumped the property on me, just my personal preference.

If you do not own the entire private island/estate and pay your tier directly to LL, you do not "truly own" it, but are renting from someone else. Therefore, if you want to own land, but not an entire estate, you need to buy mainland.

Additionally, I did all the calcs one day -- if you want to increase your land holdings a bit, it is often cheaper to add a premium account than increase your tier level. This only applies to amounts less than a full sim, maybe even a bit smaller and assumes no VAT. I'm more than happy to post those calcs if anyone cares.

You don't even need to be premium to own mainland, someone in the group will need to be premium but you don't all need to be premium. Elanthius rents tier to groups for this sort of purpose.

They have been for some time discussing what to do about premium memberships to add value to them but in terms of plenty of other online worlds and game 72 bucks a year isn't bad value, especially when you get part of that back inworld via the stipend.

I don't know how well live chat performs for premium members, Concierge Live chat is bloody marvellous most of the time.

This

And actually, I'm not even sure if you have to be premium if you "buy for group" and the group already has the tier available.

I rent almost all my tier from Elanthius now. I found that while the calcs showed adding Premium accounts was cheaper than bumping up tier, it also showed that renting the tier is even cheaper. Lil is still Premium, but I have downgraded my other accounts to Basic again.

Yes, I am renting tier as well - very good value compared to other methods of land ownership. I think it should be possible for all in the group to be basic if you are renting tier because the way it works is an alt joins the group and donates the tier, so they would be the necessary premium member.

I am still premium - not sure why really. I have used support tickets, but mostly for sorting out billing problems on my premium account

I quite like the L$300 each week. I know it would be cheaper to just buy some L$ but it means I always have pocket money for those impulse buys.

I'd like to see free (or 1/2 price) uploads for premiums and perhaps a larger tier-free allowance.