What does this comment on stipends mean?

I know I'm rather late to this thread and no one really cares anyway but if LL stops giving me my 500L a week stipend I will stop giving them my $72 a year subscription fee. Why? Because the only reason I went premium in the first place a few years back was because they were about to cut the stipend paid to new premiums from 500L to 400L (and then quickly to 300L) and I realized the math on this was simple. 500L a week for 52 weeks gives me 26,000L a year. Not a lot really, but more than enough to sell on the Lindex for $90+ and at least recoup my $72 with a very tiny profit. Which is all I care about really, being able to use SL without actively losing money.

As for land, I own the same 512m parcel I bought under their First Land program for 512L and will never buy more so any change to tier won't be an incentive for me to keep paying a subscription fee. I'd just sell that land for whatever I could get for it and rent a small house/parcel in some cheap mainland rental area if I felt like I actually needed a place to call home.

So yeah, in my case there's pretty much nothing they can do to make being premium attractive enough to keep paying for if they cut out the stipend. I'd be just as happy being a basic user with no land and no support (heh, like they actually provide me with any support as it is.)

Like we ain't got that already

LL knows removing stipends with nothing in return will make premium nearly worthless...
They also said they recognize that the stipends paid out to premiums are L$ that could potentially be "purchased L$", instead of handout L$.
To me, it sounds like LL is looking for ways to preserve whatever "value" the premium account has AFTER they remove the stipends.

The only two things I've ever wanted from LL to make premium really worth it for me are:
1. Get rid of the damn tier brackets! They already know how much land is held in a month... why not use that multiplied by X amount per squareM to figure tier fees? "X amount" can easily be figured out depending on whether the land is island, grandfathered, mainland, homestead, OS, etc.. or combinations thereof added together...
2. Recognize that most paying landowners value privacy, control, creative freedom, and stop playing the high dollar elitist games when it comes to true land ownership. Subdivide an open part of the grid and release 8192sqm (1/8th region) and 16384sqm (1/4th region) private islands. Full land controls with reasonable hard limits on AV's, scripts, temp rez, anything that could cause lag across shared server space. User ability to restart region and the same non-concierge level support you would normally get for that amount of land. LL should really learn a thing or two from their recent OS fumble... even if it's NOT part of some corporate mission.

I think the tier's going away, but they'll learn from the openspace nonsense and give us a "magician's choice". Want five more groups? You can buy that for $150L/month. Want unlimited uploading? $500L/month. HTML on a prim? $300L/month. We've already show that we'll spend above the annual premium for land tier and spending money, and the cable television model of nickel-and-diming is an unexploited model for them.

While I'd love to see this, it seems to me that the decisions on openspaces showed that this is *exactly* what LL *does not* want, for some reason. They went out of their way, drawing considerable flak, to kill off openspaces for such a purpose (limited sim with control), forcing people to convert them into more expensive rental businesses.
It seems to me that LL is very deliberately sending the message, "If you're not turning a profit, get off our servers". The only reason I can really see is to cut down on support, farming it out to landlords supporting their tenants, rather than users supported by LL.

Using the Openspace fiasco as a template, we can safely assume that whatever Linden has in mind will result in the customer paying considerably more for less.

For example, they're already suggested that premium membership are not important and they'll likely dispense with premiums by trumpeting the availability of land to any and all - no membership required! Just pay $9.95 a month for up to 512 sqm of land and for an extra $4.95 a month, you can obtain dedicated chat support. Of course the stipend would be gone, you pay extra for support, and there's no discount for quarterly or annual membership.

Another likely option would be to eliminate a few tier levels. For example, the next tier level after 512 sqm would be 2048 instead of 1024. So if you owned one of those deluxe double prim 1024 sqm plots in Nautilus, you would end up paying $25 a month in fees with the option to buy another 1024 plot at that tier level. They'll try to soften the blow by throwing in free chat support at that point.

Finally, I would imagine they would find a way to dispense with the 10% group tier bonus, either by eliminating it in whole or charging a group maintenance fee that would offset the bonus. Plus they would gain a new revenue stream in group membership fees, and they'll sell this one by increasing the number of allowed groups from 25 to 50.

yes, see this is indeed how the lindens think hey.

I'd say don't give them any more ideas, but I'm sure they can come up with much worse all on their own. This openspace fiasco makes me wonder what evil is lurking in the bowels of Linden Lab, and I don't expect anything good to come of future announcements.

My customers are getting chased out of SL with the openspace increases, and if my stipend goes away and the land tier fees stay as high as they are, I don't see my business surviving in the long run.

For me premium membership has only 2 selling points, stipend which pays back part of the premium fee (most of it if you are on a long term payment plan) and the extended support for which I rarely ever have a need. Any enhancement of premium membership tied to mainland ownership is completely unappealing to me because since I find most of the mainland to be ugly. I'll just cancel my premium membership if they touch my stipend. If Linden Lab "enhances" premium membership by further restricting basic account features depending on what those limitations are I'll probably rarely log into SL if at all. I wouldn't be surprised if that is what it does though. It's consistent with the double talk it has engaged in in the past even though it would not be enhancement at all. Cutting off the legs of basic members doesn't make premium members taller.

Considering that subscriptions are immaterial to LL's business, a position stated by M and backed by Zee (as well as parroted by Katt), it makes absolutely no sense to use *any* resources on making them more attractive.
So either the talk about making them more attractive is to be taken as a reversal of the earlier statements, which I hardly believe, or it is a way to seed the ground and build acceptance for upcoming changes.
I may be stuck in the openspace groove, but I can't shake a suspicion that LL is going to introduce some "enhancements" to the premium subscription to justify a price increase.
This would have the twofold advantage of getting rid of all the barely-breaking-even subscriptions who currently have access to support, and beginning to actually make "material" money on the subscribers who remain.
-The enhancements may even genuinely add value to premium subscriptions, but any such value will probably come from funneling a part of the resources from the lost subscriptions to the ones who remain, giving a net total of freed resources and better value for the higher-priced premium.

Hmm.. if they did away with stipends, I'd definitely see the need for major bennies to keep paying for premium. Especially if they decide to also increase the monthly fee.

Here's my list of demands: (Yes, demands. This would be the only way to entice me.)

1. Free unlimited uploading for textures.

2. Access to backups of all inventory that I created. I've lost entirely too many textures/outfit pieces to their bugs and these were items that I created from scratch.

3. 24 hr/next business day answer to ALL support tickets, regardless of how stupid/silly/inane the ticket might be.

4. Proper procedures for handling banning and refutes for banning. And handling process should be 24 hr/next business day.

5. 1024m of land tier free.

6. LL stops hinting that we are "not necessary financially."

7. Immediate response from governance team for abuse issues that CANNOT be resolved via our land tools but affects our parcels. (There's not many, grant you, but encroachment is not fun and often hinders our ability to use our own parcels. I'd settle for the same 24 hr/next business day on this.)

8. Re-centralize the blog. Easter egg hunts should only be done during Easter.. and rarely on the internet. Wikis are NOT a form of communication! They are a research tool!

9. JIRA. Make it more average user friendly.

10. If SL is having issues or high login loads, logins should be queued for being able to log in in this order: Estate owners/Premium accounts, Payment info used, Payment info on File and last, NPIOF.

11. Neck attachment points! (Okay, so this wouldn't be just a premium thing.. but I felt it had to be said anyways.)

Firstly, I'm not being difficult... I did go that extra bit and am being impossible. But this is pretty much what would entice me to stick it out and not rent from a private estate instead.

Predictions:

1. LL will indeed end stipends but if you already get a stipend, you will still get it even after new premium accounts no longer include a stipend.

Reasoning: This is how is has been done before, therefore it's the most likely way it will be done in the future. They will grandfather in exsiting stipends, including Lifetime Memberships... because they already have once, no twice actually, when they went from $L500 to $L400 to $L300 and when Basic accounts went from getting $L50/week to getting nothing..

2. LL will do nothing to enhance Premium membership. Instead they will lower the value of Basic membership.

Reasoning: See Openspace Sim changes. There has never been a time LL has given more without charging more. More tier, more support, more anything that you pay for. Never.
Expect the greatest changes to be in Basic accounts and the lowering of the level of service you will get for free.

3. LL will not charge more for standard Premium accounts to be created nor will they end free Basic accounts from being created. Instead, they will offer add-ons to Premium membership in the way they now have different levels of tier fees. You'll pay for those add-ons, of course.

Reasoning: You want free, cool, it helps fatten up those sellable concurrancy numbers. You want more, you're gonna have ta pay. Want more support? $5.95 a month, please. More groups? That'll be $3.75 per group, thank you very much. That will be on top of your current Premium membership fee.

Premium membership accounts might be inconsequential to LL's business plan, but other then pumping up thier concurrancy numbers, free Basic accounts mean even less to them.

Premium accounts pay LL directly, free Basic accounts do not. Who would you piss off?

Sounds like it to me stipends are a sink LL dosent want and going by what they have done in the past.. stipends are gona be outa here prolly in the next 6 months at tops.

ps: I'm kinda supprised they stayed as long as they did really.
Its gona be if you dont pay to play you cant cash out I'd bet on it.

Thanks to the tier level jump, I made my alt premium so I could buy "a little bit more" land. And to be truthful, the calculation of if it was worthwhile included the difference in the tier jump, the cost of the membership and the "stippend" while not significant in amount was figured into that calculation!

Make Premium accounts worth having please.
Give premiums a 50% discount on classified ads in world.
Odds are excellent there would instantly be no more complaints about stipends vanishing.

Given that anything charged over the minimum for classifieds is to push you up in the listings against other people's classifieds, all this would do would be to cause an immediate inflation in classified ads. And the minimum is, what, L$50 a week?

I would DIE from a heart attack if they did even ONE of those lol
It would be nice yes .. but ya like they would even do one lol

well I will start phasing out my rl money from sl

if they removed stipends I would miss it very badly.
More groups for premium members or improved folder management would be a wildly wonderful thing, but I am not sure that estate mangers renting islands would like it. That would have to be discussed with them a lot.

"Originally Posted by M Linden
We are currently in the process of evaluating ways to make premium subscriptions more valuable to Residents and less dependent on Linden dollar stipends."

The answer is now obvious: Provide premium members with free land and a house.

That's certainly a new Premium benefit, but (as far as I know) it has not resulted in the elimination of the weekly stipend.

Nah, that's just the triple-failed first land program rehashed and repackaged for a new decade. Plus, you dont really get the land or the house, you just get to squat there in Pleasantville

I wanna see this on my dashboard:

[x] Enable http://secondlife.com/users/Argent.Stonecutter (configure)
[x] Enable IM for Argent.Stonecutter@jabber.secondlife.com (configure)
[_] Enable email for Argent.Stonecutter@slmail.secondlife.com (configure)

You want to open things up for social networking. OK, how about using the social networking tools that are already out there?

That's crazy talk.

Reading this, I got all hot under the collar for a minute. Thank Heaven it's only a necropost.

Still I need to go lie down in a dark room with a couple of slices of cucumber on my eyes and a loop of soothing whale song on the stereo.