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

I regret, that given the Linden's recent actions this blog can only be an advance warning that, somehow, they are about to hike the premium membership price under the realisation that people who pay something can always pay more.

Asking us for our comments means some will stupidly suggest things which will cost extra, those will then be included in the membership and the membership fee will be hiked up for everyone whether or not you need the add-ons.

For God's sake Lindens, can't you leave us in peace with a bit of financial stability for just a few months.

You run your company and treat your customers as if they aren't real, but there is a real person behind each avatar and those of us in the UK have seen prices go up by 30% just on the dollar strength and on top of that you insult us by charging UK customers 17.5% VAT when you should easily be able to find a work-around.

Worried, worried, worried about what comes next.

Well, a better Mac experience, for instance ?
Mac users are still second rang, second life viewers citizens ...

(

Wow River, judge much?

This is straying way off topic from the original post, so I'll try to keep this brief. I don't know what your use case for SL is, but many of us came here for the opportunity to provide a creative outlet for our imagination. If I want perfect little houses with white picket fences, I can turn off the computer and get more than my fill (not to take anything away from the great builds that provide that feel ) I choose the mainland for the freedom. That means that I occasionally have a neighbor with a very different vision from my own, but so much the better. Perhaps we can each learn some new things.

In short, don't feel sad for me. I'm perfectly content without a nanny or a neighborhood association.

I don't think the average user is going to want to put out that kind of money each month. Be realistic. LL wants to improve premium so more accounts will sign up. Think in terms of things that would benefit average users.

Owning a parcel in a private estate, and with a parcel on the mainland, the difference to how abuse was dealt with was night and day. In the private estate, I could IM one of several managers to eject and ban a griefer any time. On the mainland...it was fighting cages and physical and particle spam long enough to fill out an AR report, then having to tp away from my land, because the AR wouldn't be responded to.

If I pay for a premium account to own mainland, I don't want to have to retreat elsewhere because of griefers. I want someone in charge to take care of the griefers, not have to run and hide because of them--it's my land.

Even if I'm elsewhere on the mainland, it's always bugged me that when someone is griefing, the policy is to AR and run and hide.

If LL gave premium users someone live and in-world to call to protect residents and stop griefing as it is happening, I think that would win a lot more residents to premium accounts. Moreover, it would make the mainland more friendly to everyone, which would encourage people to stay longer and get more involved and contribute to SL.

Sorry, OS=Open Sim disaster.

You should be able to use your present land control options to deal with (or more importantly prevent) most casual griefing. I have seen fewer sim or grid wide attacks lately, but my experience in the past was that the inworld team was pretty quick to respond.

Well, some suggestions:
It would be fine if it would be possible to make back ups of your inventory and the things you make on your own PC.

Also the friends list could be improved. Just look at chat programs like msn and other and you can see how much there is to make it better.

Also make commercial and non-commercial areas in the mainland. Many users just want to build a home, own some land and have some fun with friends etc. They don't want commercial activities all around.

Find a better solution for the red lines. They make it impossible to have fun with SL at many places.

I think LL lost any hope of inserting ads for non-premium accounts when they opened the source. With the ability of someone adjusting the viewer to skip the ads, I don't see this happening.

Like can be done with MySpace yes. Or more structured like Facebook and Bebo. I dont mind. Comments, friends list, bestest friend, piccy folders, personal blog, music player, yada yada. Yes we got a profile page but its not like what the 2D worlds give us and I think that it maybe should.

I just look at it as a way to help bridge the gap between the worlds maybe. Something I can relate to while I'm stumbling around in the first few weeks. Something I can put my other world interests onto. Because thats all I've got when I enter this world as I dont have any SL interests. I dont even know what they are. Apart from gawking at just about everything I see. (which I still do quite often even after a year now =))

So, at least with a page I can do stuff I know how to do, like frenz bands and community groups like greenpeace and stuff like that. And put up some piccies of "heres me riding an orca" "and heres me getting drowned when I fell off =)" or "look my kool boots wooohooo !!!" So that when we inworld and look at each others profile then maybe we see we have something more in common to chat about, other than our bafflement as to what it is we "really" supposed to do here.

Also to my otherworld friends can relate to me (my avatar) personally. Looking at a photo of an avatar doing stuff is OK but it becomes far more interesting if is someone you know personally. Same as family photos I suppose.

And a fully-personalizeable page is something that I think many creators would find useful as well, given how many have created external blogs and webpages of their own to help them inworld. Seems to me that it would make a lot more sense to bring them in as well, as much as possible anyways.

The next logical step for LL would be not make premium owners able to buy openspace sims in all their diffrent styles without owning a full sim, but to do this for all Second Life users
and before july 2009

You are assuming that only premium account/land owners are the ones who run businesses and have large inventories of "stuff" and would like tools for managing and evaluating the activity and objects on their land holdings? Check in to some office components. There are many tools available in world for storing large numbers of inventory items without having them "in" your inventory (ProLine file cabinets, for instance).

Private Island owners who also own Open Space / soon to be "Homestead" Regions are paying far more in monthly maintenance per square meter than premium account holders owning land on the mainland. Add to that the initial investment of the set-up fee! Do premium account holders pay set-up fees for their mainland land--I think not. For the same 65,536 Sq. Meters, a private island owner is paying $90.05 more per month in monthly maintenance fees to Linden Labs--how about some "Premium" perks for us?

And why is there a discussion about this when there seems to be an huge and unresolved product related issue surrounding the recent "new" product called the Homestead? Do the math on the price per square meter -- and more importantly the price per prim -- on that land!

Perhaps I've misread your post, but the way you've worded your response leaves out a whole "class" of landowners who saw past the "premium" account (because there were no real benefits) and opted to utilize that $9.95/mo. toward the private island fees.

Wake up Linden Labs! Resolve some of the other open product issues instead of diverting attention from them by opening discussions on less pressing matters.

This will get read and reposted around the internet before the Linden Censors get to it so....

Why don't you try treating the residents (you know the ones paying the bills) with some respect?

Quit ripping us off with your ludicrous price increases.

Quit suspending the accounts of people who happen to disagree with your whitewash.

Perform like a company that "has" customer service.

...and what is this blog post for anyways since M Linden already declares that premium accounts really don't matter to Linden Lab. You people are such a bunch of "Hippocrates."

My suggestions are repeats of what others have said, but I want to get my 2 cents worth in. These are the things that will keep me at premium.

Premium memberships gets:
#1. X number(20 would be good) of uploads for free. Then maybe
$5 fee each upload after that. Or, completely free uploads.
#2. The ability to color code files in my inventory. (If this is doable
via the debug menu, I have no clue how..lol)
#3. Increase the free land by 512 sq.m for each year of
membership. And maybe after X years of continuous premium
membership, get a free island or free sim.
#4. Make owning land more enjoyable. The mainland situation is
horrible(I'll never own land there again). I can't afford my
own island. If there was some way to have a smaller island,
(say 1/4 the size and therefore 1/4 the price), I'd jump at it.

Those are the biggest things for me. Also, I agree with cutting back on a free membership. I have one Premium avi, and my alt at Basic, and from my user experience, there really isnt much difference.

To my private estate friends;

In truth, I don't think LL thinks about you very much. Their focus is mainland, and the pricing bears this out. They love to sell you those sims, and get the fat tier payments each month, but I do not believe that they really understand the nature of the product. This became very obvious with the recent OS saga.

This would only be correct if Mainland were available at the full-sim rate to all tier levels, and if the Premium fee net of stipend were 0. In practice, the average amount residents pay on the Mainland is about the same as Estate fees, per sq.m.

This is not to take away from the larger point, however, that Estate dwellers (both owners and renters) conduct in-world business and shouldn't be excluded from business tools such as expanded accounting and inventory functions.

Such tools should be universal, not a Premium perk, unless there's really a push to get Estate-dwellers to also be Premium accounts, in which case there would need to be a *lot* of additional perks to make that compelling.

True, save for the fact that they can un-open-source it by adding very minor changes, unless say your account was flagged 'premium.'

On the scale of milquetoast-to-audacious, making a viewer change ranks pretty low compared to, say, raising prices 66% and bankrupting dozens upon dozens of estates on the grid whilst driving unprecedented numbers over to OpenLife.

I don't see much stopping management from doing anything these days, really.

* * * * *

Ciaran you have a point re: GoDaddy and the wholesale market, but that would require that we have the vast numbers here that would enable wholesaling on that level to survive.

One of the biggest questions in my mind is if the entire private estate land market will be wiped out with one blog post in the future. A few simple tier tweaks would do it.

I dont see much differend in with ore without a premium account to play/work SL.
If the price is lower more will take an accound.
I wold like lower price for upload, with my accound.
I wold like lower tier ore a few m2 free of tier with my accound.
If you need more pay accounds, lower the price, and you can let new avi's play for free for 3 months than ask if they like SL, and ask them to enjoy.(with an accound)

Hi Tom and Welcome to Your World; Your Imagination

On the Brink since 2004! Sowy, just can't be enthused about yet a hundredth survey of premium improvements I have to believe we'll never see.

This should be implemented anyway. It will only apply to Mainland which requires a premium account anyway. LL's excuse for not charging a simple fee per square meter is that "it would be confusing to new residents." Give me a break, please. This should be implemented anyway.

A serious virtual world hosting company will offer these services de facto.

For the sake of argument, I'm going to assume you mean Homestead sims. This is a good idea if they support 1/3 (5000) prims, 20 avatars, and run two to a processor for $125/mo. This is an excellent idea.

Good Luck ~ We're all seriously hoping you're The One.

Little things mean alot ... and with other venues now opening, Linden Labs needs to increase retention.

1. On the Profile, under Account .... How about a Premium designation?

2. Annual increase in weekly stipend

3. Object bonus for owned land ~ before the furor starts, this admittedly would need some planning.

4. The afore- and oft-mention reduction in tier rates.

5. Advanced Training ~ most of us already know how to open a box and fix our hair. How about in-world in-depth training opportunities taught by Lindens or Linden-trained teachers, and leading to Linden Certification, on subjects like: LSL, using Advanced tools, experience enhancement, .... any of the things that currently we are learning by trial and error. This could only improve content and lead to increased retention.

6. Live in-world support with knowledgeable staff who do more than file a ticket and get back with you.

7. An inventory backup-to-local-disk utility

8. Limit the inventory of non-premium members. This would necessarily be a grandfathering process. New unpaid visitor/residents would have inventory limitations. Current unpaid visitor/residents would have inventory frozen at current limits or frozen beyond a yet-to-be-determined limit.

I hear merchants screaming. However, when you consider that the cost of a premium membership is relatively low, I think people would chose to become a premium member rather than forego the newest design by their favorite designer.

* I strongly believe in "pay to play." People who use Second Life and refuse to make even the token gesture of support that paid membership indicates are often among the most vocal of critics. Other online communities of similar quality charge substantially greater monthly fees and require you to buy the client. I am speaking here of venues such as WoW and EQ, where you buy the game/client for a substantial fee and pay for upgrades under the guise of "expansion sets."

Second Life offers not only a free client and free upgrades, but a community with wholly user-created content. Second Life has given users many opportunities. Before Second Life, how many among us ever considered trying our hands at creating textures; designing houses, clothing, or furniture and then converting them to a 3-D object; learning a programming language; or creating a world from the blank slate up to our wildest fantasies?

Second Life's great strength and appeal is not its corporate clients. It is in the individuals who have come here and created a new world. Other venues who have chosen to concentrate on corporate users to the detriment of individual users have faded and ended with a whimper.

Until now, we have been in the forefront of a great experiment. Now that experiment is expanding to other platforms and venues. Second Life must rise to that challenge if it is to remain the premier environment. As a company, Linden Labs must make enough profit to satisfy its investors and to reinvest in its own growth. It must retain its core of dedicated users and attract new users.

Above all else, Second Life must remain true to it's initial uniting vision (from The Tao of Linden):

"It's our mission to connect us all to an online world that advances the human condition."

Rose Mackie
10/12/2006

1. Visitor Statistics (Part 1)
2. Object Statistics (Part 2)
3. IM’s don’t get capped.
4. Access to ‘import and export tools’ from different 3D software tools officially supported & maintained by Linden Lab.
5. The guarantee that on Virtual Death / Suicide I am allowed to donate my complete inventory - be it no-trans items or not - to another avatar.
6. Account Babysitters
7. More than 25 Groups!
8. Communications in (one off) my country’s official language(s)
9. Automated Sales Data Access API hooks + key to automatically process sales data, and use it for whatever we see fit.
10. A Vote!

Full description of each one at http://www.vintfalken.com/second-life-they-come-go/

Add the to that the ability to actually post LINKS here in the forums.

Yes, but my land control options apply only to my parcel. The problem is, attacks affect the whole sim, slowing physics, creating lag, etc. etc. And yes, while I can always mute the attacker, turn off particle rendering, etc, etc. Guests or customers won't have, so when they teleport to the parcel, they will be barraged.

Moreover, this still doesn't address being away from my parcel elsewhere on the mainland, traveling down one of the Linden Roads(yes, there are those of us that actually drive on them ), having a conversation at an infohub, sailing on the lakes and oceans, etc. Someone who pays for the "privilege" of having a premium account should have someone they can call for help right then and there, not run away and let the griefer have full reign.

Unlike a lot of proposals, it doesn't involve a bunch of new features, shifts in tier, raising the stipends which would create inflation, etc.

Yes, that is a major possibility. The original intent was to sell a high priced product to those with enough pocket change to own their own "private island".

As with much else, this was enthusiastically turned into a new business opportunity. Unfortunately, this business is in direct competition with LL's mainland sales, and also is a contributing factor in the decline of premium account sales.

Probably the big exodus to the OS's was an eye opener to LL, and the main reason they killed them.

If you look at the recent moves by LL (clean up ads, public works, themed sims, now this move to enhance premiums) the direction seems clear.

Expect to see more avis like T inworld. They are trying to figure out how all of this stuff works. After years of the inmates running the asylum, the staff is attempting to regain control.

The merchants you hear screaming are not the ones who may not sell something to a basic because the basic has their inventory limited. No, the ones screaming are the merchants who are currently basic accounts, living on estate land with their shops also on estate land. Limit their inventory and they will simply stop creating and walk away from SL.

Unless there was some VERY large incentive to buy that premium account. And, nothing I have seen proposed so far would provide that much incentive to those people.