Introducing T Linden. What would you do to improve Premium subscriptions?

First of all, I would like to welcome you to the community of Second Life, Tom. I like your approach already... That you speak directly to the residents of SL.

1. I like Atashi's ideas. I think they are feasible.

2. I would also like to add the possibility to purchase Homestead estates as a premium customer. I feel these new Homestead products should only be avalable to premium customers, regardless if one is an estate owner or not.

3. Adult (adult as in age verified required places) areas should only be allowed entry by premium users. This also means that one cannot own an adult rated sim unless they are premium.

4. Expand premium required to not only to buy mainland but to buy covenant land too (even though we all know it is only renting.)

First off this isnt RL so the airport makes no sense when related to a game, yes a game.

SL could be compared to a country very easily. I have no problem if all of SL was premium, but we know what that would do to the holy numbers

All I have seen from people in this thread is GIMME!!!! I WANT!!!! Its rather comical.
Many didnt come to SL to make a few extra bucks a week playing the commerce game.

If you feel its deserved so be it, I happen to think ii isnt. If LL wanted to retain their customer base they would do it for all not a few that deem themselves somehow annointed for 6$ a month. I was premium longer than you have been in SL its just doesnt seem worth the effort anymore. I donated my stipend and my tier.

BTW I do fly first class as if it has anything to do with SL or LL.

This is the smartest post in this thread so far.

So far all I am seeing is suggestions that fit in well with existing premium members or resident's who have experience of SL. New members would probably be clueless as to why having more groups would be a bonus and the same with other suggestions.

It's more or less impossible to find delight in the topic of Open Spaces, Starfire.

/falls on sword.

hehe! touche!

Thank you for responding. I'm sorry that I still do not understand however. The airport analogy was just that - an analogy. An attempt to use one situation to explain another. I'm not even sure if we agree or disagree, I'm just trying to comprehend what you are saying.

So... All you see is people saying GIMMIE! Yet isn't that what T Linden asked for? Suggestions on how to make Premium memberships more attractive?

You say that you have no problem if all SL was premium - I don't either, really. It would be a great way to ensure that everyone was committed to the platform and supporting it fully. However, it is irrelevant here since the topic at hand is making Premium more attractive - if it's not attractive now, it certainly won't be attractive if it were mandatory.

I don't understand the annointed comment at all - SL is a service, and if paying another $6 / month will get me services I want, then I will pay the $6. Or $7.50 or $9.99 as the case may be. In any event, it is a case of paying money to receive desired services, and nothing more.

I do understand that you were premium and you aren't now; this is something we may have in common in two weeks' time. I'm premium now, and if nothing changes then I won't be come Dec 7th. That's because I do not believe that premium membership is currently worth the money. Which is the topic of this thread after all.

Cheers!

-Atashi

I am sorry hear that. I have had to use live chat several times, always with positive results. Also I will add that the inworld team has always come through for me in a timely manner when I had to ar some bad stuff happening to my parcels.

I am not a LL basher. I pay for premium, and am happy with the results. My fear is that the premium advantage will be diminished, or priced upward. As a mainland landlord, I have to maintain premium. Anyone familiar with my operations knows that I pass it on at little more than cost to my tenants. I am not here to get rich. I spread my good fortune far and wide. For me SL is more social, and my biz exists only to help support my addiction.

Sheesh. I can't catch a break! Honestly, we're just looking for some suggestions and you can be sure that anything we do here we will do with deliberation and transparency.

Atashi, I am sometimes very hard to understand and I appologize for that. I guess what im trying to say basically is why must LL have a basic and premium? To my way of thinking we should all be the same. But, that is what LL wishes I assume for the numbers game

Make a preference for people to disable the display of ban lines. Really - it's low hanging fruit. Personally I don't care about the option but anybody who has to live next to them sure does..

Honestly all i want is better support,The ability to remove overhanging prims if they encroach my land and if you wanna i think it would be incentive if you gave a bonus 20 free uploads per day.

Sorry T. my pesimistic side is showing. Please see my other posts in support of LL live chat et all.

I am very impressed with you T. You are up late monitoring this thread. IM me in world and I will give you a lm to Nirvana. I want to have your baby.

Love,
Jannae

No worries -- I'm sure the fact that I've been drinking can't help! I get what you are saying there, and I suppose that they don't *need* to have two account levels. But that's a decision they seem to have made many years before I joined up. Take it the other way, they could have five, ten different account levels, with enough granularity to have a niche for everyone. Or, they could have no account levels, but pay-as-you-go features, where you subscribe to the features you want... there's probably a dozen different ways to slice it.

In many ways I am a very literal and focused person... LL want my money, I want some features / benefits, so I'm looking for ways to 'make a deal' with them. The 'bigger picture' of why they want to do this or if it is the best way for them to proceed, doesn't automatically concern me.

One thing I am a strong believer of is fairness, and another is getting what you pay for. Whether everyone pays the same or not, I am happy as long as everyone has the same opportunity to choose to pay more or less. And if everyone who chooses to pay more, gets what they pay for, I am happy there too. At this point I think I'm starting to babble a bit and my coherence level is probably dipping, so I'll stop. It might also be veering off topic.

Anyhow - take care, and thanks for the discussion!

-Atashi

I am also a bit tipsy, so maybe that is why your statements are so spot on. Pay and play.

And I'm no SL (LL) basher either. I'm premium (been that way since 3 years.......this month in fact) and have had relatively few problems. I don't own a business (don't even sell stuff on the side). All I really do is play.............with friends when they are on, or shop (which is play too). On weekends I try to find live music events. During the week I usually make textures for clothing or building which I upload and try out..........I give my "creations" to anyone who wants them.

But, when I get griefed on my own parcel I have to submit the abuse report........which never solves my problem. The monkey prims still fall on my land using up my prims. I initate a live chat.............and get "file an abuse report". Okay..........do that and log off since my land is useless until the monkey prims are gone. It used to be I could call "live help" and get a Linden there to clean up the mess.

All that is fixed with "no object entry".......but now I have to be online for some of my friends to rezz their vehicles so they can play on the Linden Protected Land that surrounds my parcel. That is sad. Just a little immediate help when we need it. Make it a perk..............pretty simple really. I'm sure there are more than a just a few residents who would volunteer to help out if LL can't afford to hire people. I know I would.

But, overall, I don't have many problems with SL.....or LL. But, I really think their customer service sucks. Sucks ugly green pond water. I'd just love to see that change.......soon, very soon.

I don't understand about the monkey prims. Set auto return. Friends can rez and move on, and griefer prims soon dissapear. this is a model I use with some success.

Object entry can be a problem. This is something I saw on this thread earlier. LL needs to address this issue. I hate turning this off on my parcels, but hate having my objects auto-returned even more...

A subject for a new LL thread.

SL once explained that the number of groups per avatar is limited because every time every moving avatar crosses every parcel line, the land/group/access relationship has to be checked with the server... big resource drain!

SL needs to find a way to split group designation. Groups that have nothing to do with land, should have a different identity than a Group that has been "graduated" to having a relationship with land parcel(s).

If SL can accomplish that, then at the moment an avatar crosses a parcel line, the system would ONLY have to crosscheck to the limited "land groups" data instead of the humongous "all groups" data.

Once SL fixes THIS design, then they CAN offer 50 groups to each premium member. And I believe this would be the ONLY perk needed to get a lot of people to have premium memberships. Myself included.

Sorry, if you need more groups make a free alt. Not a big selling point as far as I am concened for premium.

Sadly I don't have the energy to read 22 pages of this thread or watch it closely enough to see if there's a reply so I'll just fire my suggestions into the void and hope they get seen.

Firstly, I'm assuming that you want to increase the number of Premium subscriptions, not that you want to make existing premium subscribers richer.

The replies that I have read all seem to be from oldbies suggesting that oldbies should get a bunch of extra free crap. This is the exact opposite of the right thing to do. Someone who has been premium for 6 months is hardly going to change their mind about cancelling if they get an extra 512 of tier or a stipend increase of L$200. Those tiny numbers are meaningless to most of the long term residents and won't affect retention.

What you need to do is to encourage new players to make that leap into premium status which gently encourages them to own land, increases loyalty, gives them a little spending money and whatever else. As a result, if we're to think inside the box, I'd suggest some or all of give players a larger stipend for the first 6 months, maybe let premium status be free for the first 3 months, bring back the first land program which was utterly awesome, free uploading for the first month. If we're to look a little outside the box then maybe have resident run helper groups that only new premium members can access, some sort of land purchasing subsidy program so that new players can buy cheaper land from existing mainland or perhaps put it towards rent on an estate, access to concierge level help for the first month of premium membership.

Good luck increasing subscriptions I hope we seen a huge improvement in retention as a result of these changes!

Retaining premies is also something they need to consider. Hence some long term benefits are in order Elanthius.

Your devoted,
Jannae

First, a big THANK YOU to T Linden for actually replying frequently. Certain of your colleagues could learn a lot from your example.

NO. Having a Premium account in no way verifies that you are actually an Adult in RL. Heck, 100% of the KNOWN kids on the teen grid are REQUIRED to cough up someone's credit card info, just to get access to the teen grid. You think beign Premium is any proof of age? Not even close.

By your idea, I would have to pay for 12 Premium Memberships for my main and 11 alts to all have access to the same adult parcel? Clearly you've only ever considered having one or two accounts yourself. While I MIGHT be willing to spring for one Premium account as a "land owner", or to be the one to call in for live help with, there is NO WAY I will pay for Premium membership for all my Roleplaying alts. That would be totally insane.

No, no, 50,000 times NO! Do that, and over 75% of the residents in SL have lost their homes, because they will NOT pay a Premium membership fee on top of their existing maintenance fees for their Covenant land. Do that, and you may as well require Premium Membership to play SL at all. And that would also lose a huge percentage of the avatars in SL.

Hi there!

I think I’ve read almost all of the posts. If I have missed some, forgive me.

Thank you all for taking the time to share your thoughts – there are some great ideas here, ranging from “oldies but goodies” to some great ideas at least that I’ve not seen before. And while I did see *a few* allergic reactions from Open Spaces pollen, I want to thank you for all being so welcoming.

Just to set expectations, we’re not on the brink of announcing anything, we’re simply looking for a few good ideas.

There were a lot of common themes, tho I set off a micro-flame by picking a post about stipends to respond to first. Bad Frog!

Interestingly enough, there was a division on Stipends: some - Nimue Jewell, Sindy Tsure, Poppyseed Poppy, Viktoria Dovgal - didn’t really see the value in the convenience of stipends, while many others felt it was a critical benefit, especially for non-business owners (one of whom just wanted to “spend spend spend” – sorry, Littleme Jewell, couldn’t resist) or to make sure their L$ balances didn’t go negative if they stepped away from SL for a while.

This highlights another theme that emerged for me, tho only a few piled on. That is “different strokes for different folks”. Noobs, oldbies, business users, creators – all had slightly different needs/wants/desires. “Don’t take away basic benefits” also emerged as a theme.

Here’s the list of suggestions, roughly categorized, and in no particular order:

Monetary benefits: either increase stipends or let me get more L$, discounts on uploads

Increased utility: such as increasing group limits, better inventory tools, inventory backup, account linking with a shared L$ balance, bulk save to hard drive for textures, larger/smaller avatars, two attachments in each slot (!)

Identity: real names, email addresses, domain names

Land benefits: more land, progressive land tiers, open space regions without the full island requirement, ability to buy covenant land, land auctions being offered to other folks on a given sim first/only, more prims for premiums

Support: 24*7 Technical Support, Priority support queues

Progressive Benefits: the longer you are a premium, the better the benefit – free transfer fees, name changes once a year

Business benefits: discounts on advertising, business management tools

Communications/Marketing benefits: web hosting, Jabber/IM gateway, profiles

Creative/Builder benefits: Rezzing mega/mini prims, Premium only sandboxes, special tools, scripts created by premiums not subject to forced sleeps

Exclusives: Exclusive library items (maybe even an exclusive avatar mesh), unique LL content, special tutorials

Exclusivity: Adult (adult as in age verified required places) areas only accessible to premium users, zoned spaces,

Nice things: birthday bonuses, a "best of second life" weekly email

Big ideas: get rid of premiums, make only one kind of account (free), make only one kind of account (paid), standalone “personal” grids, A point system that transferred to US$ into a resident account for how many L$ generated by that account, Premium users cannot be kept out of a Region by non-Premium users.

I’ll continue to check in on this thread, and we’ll keep the information flowing – thanks again!

It is not that simple. Your argument assumes that if stipends were somehow eliminated (presumably via a poor management decision), that the money the represent would be replaced by purchases on the Lindex. That's not the case. Many (if not most) people would simply buy less. Some people would get disgusted and just drop their Premium accounts. There would be some increased demand on Supply Linden, but not anywhere near a 1:1 ratio with L$ taken out of the system from a loss of stipends.

This is the case now. Premium accounts get access to the web-based chat help and support ticket system. However, this benefit isn't as well promoted as it could be.