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

Before I get to my big controversial idea to significantly increase Premium accounts, I'm going to offer my take on a few already mentioned.

Stipends need to stay at at least current levels for existing accounts. Reducing any benefit for the premium accounts, will lead some people to not renew. Plus, will reduce sign-ups, as those people would never know if the benefits that were important to them would be reduced or eliminated in the future. Stipends also help stimulate the SL economy.

Limits - On most everything with limits (when practical), premium account limits should be higher than on basic accounts, and should stay ahead as basic account limits increase. For instance, group limits should be higher for everyone, but the limit on premium accounts should always be, premium. And I have to also give special mention to offline IM caps. They are ridiculously low currently, and perhaps it doesn't make sense to have them high for seldom used accounts. But they should certainly be much higher for premium accounts.

Many have suggested increasing the free land tier as a loyalty bonus for maintaining a premium account. Adding 512m a year for a few years would be an excellent retention bonus. It would cost a little bit in decreased tier, but would both increase the demand for mainland land, and would be somewhat offset by people buying land in advance of their free tier. I'd be much more inclined to buy more land, if I knew that tier would be covered by my loyalty reward someday.

Someone suggested that premium accounts should jump to the front of the queue when logins are backed up. It's a good idea...

My big idea goes well beyond that and probably requires a fair amount of coding. But, it would provide a tangible benefit to almost every premium account holder. A variety of SL server processes could be coded so that premium accounts got priority in the process queues and/or execution. Normally, this would not be noticed by anyone. However, on heavily loaded sims, it could provide a noticeable improvement in performance for premium account holders.

As somone who has never payed premium has been running a fairly successfull shop, renting plenty of land and generally able to do go about my business quite happily with everything i need for the last 2+ years you are now asking me to help you find a way to make paying more to do what i do seem attractive ok well~

Please dont penalise existing free memberships although giving advantages to premium will in a sense already do this.

The only way id want to pay more to use SL than i already have to is if it can help me get more out and yea im talking money here.

So the crux is i dont really want to have to pay more to use SL than i already am i may not pay premium but i pay a lot in classifieds, land rental, uploads and ofcourse i create content for others to buy too which is my small contribution to oiling our economy.

Why is it that i can not already expect your help to improve things for me without having to pay you more since i contribute so much already? and yes i am already "loyal" to SL and am working towards making it a better more attractive place for existing and incoming users.

I do mean what im saying to be constructive i feel its all about perspective paying premium or not does not prove loyalty but i guess if you feel its a necessary function to have it within SL then as i said before whatever you do impliment should help me to be able to at least cover this cost if not profit from being premium that way it would ofcourse be a very attractive option.
Otherwise ill just not go for it and probably just feel a bit miffed that i cant have whatever features because it makes no economic sense to go for them.

Ok so i guess i should try come up with some specific suggestions that would make me want to pay you more! >.>

1. We all want a voice in SL and i think many of us feel often we dont have one. I may feel better about paying premium if i felt that my thoughts and suggestions on SL were being listened to and this would have to be in a far superior form than the frankly poor "discussion" forum posts we have right now. Although again i invest so much time and money already into SL why cant i have this anyway?.... hmmm

Actually at this point im going to duck out because as im thinking of further suggestions i keep going back to my point as to why i dont somehow deserve more improvements in functionality already from SL without having to pay more than i already do.. So yea i guess in short ditch premium because being premium is in no way an indication of how much of a contribution people are making to SL and i wont help you find more ways to charge me more sorry.

I use to have a Premium account but I didn't renew it because it was practically useless.
However, if you think that reducing the features and functionalities of Basic Accounts will emulate a higher value of Premium accounts and make me go back you're dead wrong. Reducing the Basic account's features would be a real slap in the face to those that contribute to the many communities here. What's the point of having a premium account when all those talented creators who only have Basic accounts are either leaving or restricted? I refuse to believe that the percentage of Premium account creators are higher then Basic account creators.

I'd rather leave Second Life altogether then pay for a Premium account to regain lost features especially after the OpenSpace saga. You want to increase the value of a product, not decrease the value of the substitutes/alternatives.

Assuming you're not going to alienate your user base even more here are some suggestions (Some of which has already been covered in this thread)

* Second Life Email addresses - I like the idea but securing this feature from abuse will be a pain (Spam for example)

* More then 25 groups - Only excuse I've heard about this is the performance impact it will cause

* Increase free mainland tier from 512m to 1024m - I do like this idea, I'd like to see a Linden do something worth while with 512m. Whether it's feasible I have no idea

* Upload Fees - At L$10 an upload for an asset of varying sizes it's apparent this is not actually used to recoup costs of hosting the content alone so you may as well discount it.

* Stand-alone OpenSpace/Homestead Sims (Not having to own an existing island) - Whether this is feasible or not I have no idea, not that I would take your word for it anyway since you have already underestimated the demand and requirements of this product before

* IM Cap limit - I find it hard to believe you could increase this limit for premium users if you wanted to





Here is a list of things I am against:

* Restricting any existing features - I've already mentioned this above

* Restricting Alternate accounts - This is trivial to bypass, it will simply create an arm's race so don't bother

* Restricting Concurrent Accounts online - If you think this will stop bots or encourage more Basic users to upgrade you're wrong, this will simply harm legitimate users and alienate entire networks who all route through the same gateway (The assumption being that it will be IP limited)

* Premium only server-side scripting features - Doing this will simply create more elitism and will divide scripters, also, I think all the extra mechanisms to manage exclusivity will reduce performance

* Exclusive Library Content - Not actively against it but it won't be long until someone copies it and makes it available so there is no point.

Not only is this the worst idea I have ever heard you say Desmond (quite unlike you too), I would be one of the first to make a new viewer that had it ripped out. You would only be able to make it work client side anyway and 5 mins after it was introduced the bot clients would be able to bypass it.

No extra ads being forced upon us for any reason is my vote. If people want to stare at ads, let them opt-in to watching ads, don't make everyone have to look at them.

Because I would be amongst the first to make a viewer that ripped them out again - grrr what is this wish of people to see endless products all the time? You want that go stare at the shopping channel or something *shakes fist*

I get the impression that most of us, here in this thread, are already premium and are interpreting this as 'what additional benefits would you like'.
Whilst that is understandable, I suspect we are missing the big picture here.

Some recent comments come to mind 'Premium subscriptions are immaterial in our overall business.' - M Linden.
'The revenue we generate from premium subscriptions is largely offset by the stipends we pay out to these account holders, so this decline doesn't have a material impact on our business.' - Zee 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.' - Zee Linden
and then in this thread 'In one sense, the stipends are a bit like Premium Account Residents paying us dollars to get linden dollars. The lindex and third party exchanges are pretty good for this, me thinks, but I'd be interested to know if you look at stipends in subs as "just a low effort way to get lindens" - because there is value in not having to actively go get lindens. I guess that's like avoiding a trip to the ATM...:->'. T Linden.

Lets then look at this from Outside the box. What is the intent of a premium account?
When I took premium it was to Buy 'First Land' I was in no rush, I spent a month looking till I found the correct plot, then took my premium status.
The L$1000 sign up bonus payed for the land and bought me some nice (to a newbie) luxury items. I spent some time playing with the land till I was comfortable and then bought some adjoining land. The stipend guaranteed me a steady income and my tier fee was manageable. I tiered up again to expand the land but then hit a wall. If I tear up again I double my monthly cost and the whole benefit of Premium is lost.

My suggestion.

1) Grandfather existing Premium Accounts. this is essential to avoid a backlash.
2) Make Tier steps more linear, preferably in steps of 512.
3) Allow anyone to buy land.

If the Existing Premiums have little or no value to LL and Little or no value to Residents it should be a simple process to change your account type to basic, lose the stipend, but retain the land holdings. Tier payments for Basic Account holders should be payable in L$ if the Basic members can not or will not provide credit card information (this was the reason to allow basic accounts in the first place).

Yes I know the the above will effectively eliminate Premium accounts, but it meets the needs of residents and LL, in that Residents can buy land and steadily increase the holding in manageable steps. LL will no longer have to pay stipend to small land owners, and the status is unchanged for existing premium accounts.

I'll say this again just in case it gets missed - bots can click on stuff, this will not work!

Absolutely agree, the whole point should be to increase the value of a product, not decrease the value of the substitutes/alternatives (The Basic Account).

What is up with this obsession of gutting the Basic Account? Don't give me the "They use too many resources" excuse. Go through you inventory and check the creators of your stuff and see how many have Basic accounts.
I'm tired of the Bot excuses too, if Land owners didn't offer camp areas to try to gimmick the Traffic counter then it would be a non-issue.

I would like to be able to log in and be, to some degree, invisible. Not seen by any friends (unless i choose), not viewed as online in groups or on the website, no receiving group messages, and IM's report back "Sera Lok is offline." The mapping would present a problem, because you should always be able to see someone on a map... and i'm sure there are other hurdles, but some effort towards a seems like something you could market as a 'special' feature' benefit.

Perhaps a "Premium" tab in Preferences with a few additional benefits to add appeal - 'premium skins' for the viewer, maybe a direct link to the ticket support system. Having it as a tab would increase exposure to the benefits.

Free user can only use for a 1 hour and a message "To continue playing, click here to upgrade to premium account" will appear at the end of 1 hour. After which they cannot login for the next 1 hour.

Premium user can login 24/7/365.

YES to some great, great ideas.

NO if this means that LL are going to turn around and make Premium more expensive.

Don't do this to us again, please.

I just HOPE the idea is to provide a few perks for those who made some sort of commitment and not just to add a few bells and whistles...

... rather than do it and then go 'ooops this is costing us too much / people are abusing so we're increasing Premium prices by some astronomical amount' a few months later.

I don't like feeling 'immaterial'. And I do like my little weekly 'treat' plus my tier-free 512. If either of those things were discontinued and/or came at a higher price, then... no. My premium days will be over.

I've had nearly 2 years at Premium. The OS thing was a real blow, however (no point in getting into that) and I'm among those who saw LL in a whole different light after it.

Handing out 'treats' would be a great idea. It may not compensate for loss of faith, but human nature being what it is, it would help.

A lot.

People do swallow a few low blows, because they love SL. For some, the OS thing was the last straw. Screwing up on 'how to handle premium accounts' could be the last straw for a few more of us.

Or are we individuals ALL just immaterial in the face of nice juicy corporate workspaces?

Whatever the case, that little 'immaterial' comment was at best unfortunate and at worst, an extremely telling statement. I hope it's the former.

In-Game advertising are gaining popularity. While waiting for the games to load, advertisement are played within the loading time. It helps games developer in their work.

In-Video advertising are also gaining momentum.

I see no reason why advertisement cannot be served during teleporting.

If that was my first experience of SL, I got one hour then told to pay then I would never have logged in for that trial period. Nothing complex can ever be sampled properly in one hour.

No I think LL has that bit right with letting basic accounts do the majority of just "basic" things. You are far more likely to get hooked after a few days, weeks etc. Once that inventory starts to fill up with things then the urge just abandon it starts being resisted strongly.
Nobody using SL for an hour is going to feel that reluctance to abandon their av or be that adverse to logging out once they get your proposed message. They will for the most part be thinking "I didn't see or do anything that I would pay a premium membership for."

Popularity by companies, not by the user base. Most games cannot be altered by their users to rip them out and they have to put up with them or not play, those that can be ripped out often are - just like what will happen with an SL viewer that tries it. Yes ads in various parts of our lives are are increasing - it is a scourge that needs to be stopped and a trend reversed in my opinion.

From an objective point of view, it could impact performance depending on the type and size of the advertising content. However, If I were a developer who was going to add this feature I would add context relevant advertising. (Such as, advertisements of areas in the sim you are teleporting to)

From my biased point of view, I would personally take the openly available client source code and rip out the advertising-on-teleport feature and then release the binary executable for all to download. Last thing I need is more useless stuff to slow down the teleporting process.

Bread and circuses is not my idea of improving the SL experience, especially when it is likely we'll be forced to buy the bread. There is presently nothing of value I see in a premium account and since you folks took my setup fee by forcing me to abandon my openspace SIM I'm not inclined to trust your intentions in this area. Furthermore, censoring my quite polite but firm criticism in another thread tells me you really don't want to listen to people. Come April when my annual premium account comes due, I'm going basic and living for free. Why? I've done a lot of testing and bug discovery for you folks yet I see next to no improvements in that area. Random bits of code come out.

But what the heck, some suggestions for a true premium account:

-Raise the free land grant to 4096sqm. There's a mainland crash going on and maybe your dwindling premium account holders might find that an incentive to go to the mainland and do somethning constructive on it.

-Eliminate upload charges. Premium account holders tend to be the creatives anyway, so make it easier for them to do so without penalty.

-Waive the setup fees for one SIM and/or 4 POS SIMs per year (where P = openspace, homestead, etc). Premium account holders deserve to be remediated for how badly you folks trashed their finances.

-Give some free advertising services. Same reason as above.

Probably repeating others ideas, but not gonna read through 25 pages.

1. Priority Logins

2. More groups

3. smaller jumps in tier levels

4. Only allow premiums to count towards the traffic and picks related metric in search.

5. more advanced avatar.

6. special "premium access only" sandboxes.

7. special sticks to smack basic accounts around with when we are feeling lagged.


Other than this list, I cannot think of much else since you already give basic accounts too much. You would need to create a new premium only product or feature.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes!

Every time someone says "take stuff away from Basic accounts" I want to slap them.

Ok, this is my second post in this thread. I suggested earlier that LL might want to just get rid of Premium Accounts altogether. Now, before flaming me for what I am about to say, please realise that I have read ALL previous posts.

Most posts talked about increasing the free tier limit of the Prem Accounts. I have to admit, having 1024m is alot better than 512m. You can barely rez a half decent house with furniture on a 512m plot. Increasing the free tier to 1024m is a sensible move to attract more people to the Premium Accounts.

There are also lots of calls for increased stipend. Some people are suggesting 500L per week. This is a good thing for the SL economy from the point of view of stimulating transactions. From reading the previous posts, some people evidently wouldn't go out of their way to buy L$, but are happy to recieve some every week and spend that amount.

However 500L is 2000L per month. That would be approx US$8 per month, almost the premium account fee in itself. Combined with just 512m of tier LL would be at a loss. Increasing the tier to 1024m would mean LL is missing out on US$5 or US$8 per month in revenue. So an offer of 1024m in free tier and 2000L in stipend would put LL at a loss of US$4 to US$7 for each Premium Member.

I think someone said that there were 90,000 premium accounts already. If the above offer was put into place now, then LL would be US$360,000 to US$630,000 out of pocket each month. That is without any extra premium accounts being made.

To compound the issue, some only take up premium accounts for either the stipend or the free tier and mainland ownership.

But what if tier and stipend were sliding scales? If you have no land, then you recieve 100% of the stipend. If you had 1024m or more of land, then you would recieve no stipend. When your land holdings decrease, you stipend increases accordingly.

To make the premium account more attractive, you could be offered 1024m of free tier for use anywhere on the mainland, special Premium account only auctions for land in Linden designed places like Nautilus, and other special inworld opportunity offers from LL. Perhaps some Linden designed places like the Nautilus Estate could be made available for ownership to Premium Accounts only (with businesses submitting an application for exemption of this requirement).

Of course I would still love to see the entire mainland ownership opened to everybody. I would also love to see the tier fees restructured into 512m increments up to a full sim. The whole mainland is a public space and it is a shame to see basic accounts unable to purchase any of it or excessive tier hold back creative ownership.

The Premium Account could become a way of providing a mixture of US$8 of tier and US$8 (2000L) of stipend. The extra US$1.99 could just go to providing support and more Linden Designed purpose built sims.

That to me is still great value.

hopefully this was a joke, If not could and probley would hurt the bottom line of what the lindens are making, I am a free account and also an estate manager so would that be fair to us that have an important role? I am not going to start a debate on this, but honestly that would happen there would be no need for me to be here and spend my hard earned RL money in here would just move onto someplace else. so lets not even think along this route.

It's a growing industry that isn't going to go away anytime soon and would boost Linden Lab's coffers if implemented correctly. This is an area Linden Lab need to explore but any sort of pop ups would be problematic, it needs to be done in a way that doesn't force residents to do something.

An advert on the teleport or startup screen really shouldn't be problematic. An advert that you have to click to complete your teleport would be problematic.

I had a premium account. I cancelled it.

I cancelled the account because financially the stippend did not make sense, i'm not a land owner, and I can get more than 300L for the same money by buying it direct.

It just did not make sense to carry on paying for a subscription.

Yup Yup.. my thought exactly.. When I read the Immaterial comment I felt insulted and like a second class customer.. And yes the OS debacle coloured my impression of LL as well (and i'm not an OS owner).

Hi [Enter name of new hire], Welcome to Linden Labs.

I recycled the above, I used it for a whole bunch of other people who have come to the forum and said “I am new but we are going to change things for the better, we need to listen to you, give us your ideas”.

And we do, we give you all ideas, concepts, suggestions. Some good, some awful and some not worth printing, and every now and them, we come up with a terrific idea and somehow, after all is said and done, it turns into just that, “Just Another Good Idea” (JAGI).

Your product has a lot of rough edges, is sloppy in some parts and is broken in others, the JIRA tells you that but I understand it will cost money and brains to fix a lot of the issues and that could detract from immediate income generation. So a new JAGI needs to not detract from Income Generation while at the same time, fixing something that is broken.


Your ideas over the past two years have been perplexing, Windlight, Voice, Banning Gambling rather that create local servers, updates needing a whole package to be re-downloaded instead of a module for that package (huh!) so a new JAGI would have to have a value and a point and that could be implemented with minimum disruption.

You product has a huge addicted user base. No matter how much you mess up (and admit for once that mistakes in judgement are too frequent), we are still here. If you ever had a company that needed customer generated feedback, it is this one, but it seems no one at Linden Labs listens to their customers here. So a new JAGI needs to come from listening to us, your user base. (We are for the most part friendly, but remember, we outnumber your stakeholders a million to one).

To round up, a JAGI needs to continue to generate income and hopefully improve it.

A JAGI needs have value that does not require disruption or a change in infrastructure.

A JAGI needs to be easy to implement, (Those are the best kind, low outlay, huge return)

And a JAGI has to be borne from your customers.


Here is my JAGI


Premium Accounts

The value of the premium account is miss understood when compared with Non Premium account holders. I would change little for the premium account holders. I would make a change to non premium account holders to widen the gap between account holders and non account holders.

1) I suggest that non premium account holders, Alts, Bots, Campers, Greifers etcetera are rewarded with in inventory scrub every 24 hours. ( yes, remove all created and or purchased content). Reason: if the account is to be used to sample SL then it is no loss, allow the character to be persistent but with an inventory cleaned out after 24 hours.

2) Allow non premium account holders to forcibly expire after thirty days. With the name being locked for 30 days more against re-use. How many times do you need to log in and explore before deciding you want to retain inventory and a name?

3) Remove the option to hold funds from non account holders. That way they can’t be ‘gifted’ funds from other avatar accounts and buy weapons or other things that can be used to reduce the quality of game play for those of us who invest into Second Life.

4) If the account is an ALT account, and the account is riding on the strength of a premium account, then for account purposes, it should be part of that account and counted as the main avatar. So if there are 40,000 logged in and 10,000 are ALTS camping or taking up numbers, the true account of logged in accounts should be 30,000.

Or

4a) If an premium account is logged in, and an alternative account for that holder tries to log in, the premium account avi should be bumped off. Restricting one avi to one user. If the second account is a premium account, then allow the second avatar to add to the total number of avatars on line without bumping off the first or primary avatar.



Remove negativity

I am not suggesting Camping Avi’s should be banned, but if you want to set a dozen or forty avatars to camp to swell the numbers for your sim, then pay premium for each one, then we will see how ineffective campers are and Linden Labs will make a tidy sum in the process.

I am not suggesting that people create alts for negative reasons, or for attacking those who have displeased their owners, but if you had to pay premium for your avi in order to attack the other player, then losing your accounts upon detection would be a far more costly process.



Resolve

Simple changes, they have defined values, they increase the revenue for Linden Labs and go some way to creating more visible numbers with more accuracy. It means little or no change for the vast majority of users who already contribute heavily to the success of Linden labs, and the removal of some free accounts ability to grief, camp or clutter, would be an impact appreciated by every premium member that ever existed.

Please vote for my JAGI.

ref: http://rivers-rock.blogspot.com/2008/11/just-another-
good-idea-jagi.html

What about a reduced LL commission on Lindex exchanges for premium members. Easy to do