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

One thing this thread has revealed, is the number of people that want more free land, free uploads, free tier, free this, free that, and free the other...

I don't want to sound negative, but if you want everything for free, there is a simple solution, download your own sim software from Open sim, use almost any browser, you can live in your sims rent free for as long as you like, free houses, free money, and you are the king or queen of all you survey. ( and you get 45000 prims and Giant ones too if you want at no extra charge)

But if you want to be a apart of the community called Second Life, we have to live as the owners dictate, and they are not looking to give free land, reduced tiers or cheap accounts, the object is to make an income for them and free stuff dont cut it. Realistic suggestions that T can consider weaving into his concept might stand a better chance of getting through.

Try to rise up from the greed pool and understand that free accounts are costing us all money as they dont contribute to SL, so our accounts have to supply the difference. Wise up, this is an opportunity to influence, don't waste it degrading yourself asking for the free stuff all the time.

Allmost forgot. Another JAGI: Why don't the lindens devise a code, that demands say, 5% of everything sold, and for a Vendor to be permitted to exist in SL, it has to contain the purchase tax script...

That way, those millions of vendors could all be supplying a little something back into the system instead of taking it out all the time.

Suggestion, let Premium members be exused the tax when they make a purchase. What more incentive for a premium member, escaping that purchase tax everytime they buy something from a vendor!


Woot, another good idea for free...

Perhaps I am more fortunate than others, but I sail, fly walk etc... all over SL, and have rarely met a griefer. Last one I saw was last year. He was trying to cage some afk campers at a mainland mall. I im'd the property owner and he came and ejected, banned and ar'd the jerk.

I can't remember the last time one was encountered at any of my properties, and I have them all over the place.

I have to say this has been a worry in the back of my mind since the OS price change. Even a few of the ideas mentioned above could pull the rug out from under anyone well invested here.

off topic... but T our new Product man... One thing that would help the whole grid would be an open/transparent plan for the future. With out this we will all flounder in uncertainty.

Business plans based on guess and enlightened assumptions are no more than plans for failure.

Allow premium members to purchase the overpriced Homestead sims directly from Linden. $125 is bad enough, but $150 or more in rent to cover estate owner cost and profit is insane.

Can we get Lindens to stop naming themselves with single-letter names? It's not cute, novel, or efficient, and it is annoying as hell to search for them in-world with People Search, as it rejects single-letter names in the search with an error message.

So, please stop.

On-topic: I'm fairly happy with Premium membership. Most everything else suggested here would be fluff that I wouldn't be interested in, but wouldn't mind it being offered. Increasing free tier for being a premium subscriber for longer would be nice.

So, all those content creators whose sales pay the tier to their estate owners which then gets passed on to LL don't contribute anything to SL as a whole???

Found T Linden in people search in world.

Although I would like to see this implemented for every SL resident, premium or basic, perhaps Linden Labs could at least start with the premium accounts? I refer to treating us as at least semi-intelligent people. Talk about an incentive to "buy premium." I realize that T Linden hasn't been around very long and can't be held accountable for all the questionable (I'm being polite) decisions that LL has made in the past, but it would be really nice for him to start-off on the right foot with SL residents. T, old man, if your intention is to get us talking about ideas for premium benefits, as one example, and for LL to do absolutely nothing about it, or to increase premium rates, or... whatever, then just stop now. Cynical? Perhaps. I've been using SL for three years now and I believe you'll find that Linden Labs' credibility is at rock-bottom.

Argent Stonecutter for SL President! And Ciaran Laval is no slouch either.

I am a Premium member, and for the first time I'm considering dropping it. The OS situation didn't help. Giving me some incentive to stay, and be glad I did, would. Thus far, I can't see anything at all that says I am in any way a 'valued customer' of SL. On the contrary, now you want to remove the stipend too. As things stand, I can see no justification for paying for a Premium around Christmas time (my renew date) when the economy is at such a low.......and it's worse for us who have to convert our dollars to US dollars.
The first rule of good business, is to keep the customers you already have. They are the loyal ones, and the ones who bring in new business. That's something else I have yet to see, loyalty on the part of LL and rewards to say 'thanks for sticking with us!'
I wish I could believe these comments will make a difference. Right now, I'm so jaded over the OS affair, I am cynical about anything we say making any difference whatsoever.

I'd love it if I was proved wrong!

When you first arrive at sl, you can literally get lost. Timing is so important on who you meet and where you end up, or if you want to come back. I was just leaving my first night when I met my best friend in sl to this day. If I had made a left and not a right, I'd be not here.

I suggest:

When you arrive with your free account, you only have access to certain area's, sims etc. Simple, these areas can also assure you recieve help and information when needed.

IF you want to further your experience and "level up" so to speak, you obtain a subscription.

Kinda simple.

Free accounts do contribute to SL. Free accounts can buy L$, LL makes a profit on exchange fees. Free accounts create and develop content and make SL a more varied place. Free accounts own land on private sims, the estate agent acts mainly as an intermediate, passing most of that onto LL. Free accounts provide a larger market for premium accounts to sell to, thus keeping premium accounts in-world longer and money to expand their land holdings, etc.

The focus of this, at least, I thought, was to improve premium subscriptions, not to limit free accounts to the point that premiums look better. You get new premium accounts from free users, and you're not going to get very many if you discourage free users by running them away with limitations--you end up with another debacle like the Openspace debacle.



Granted, it's not an everyday occurrence by any means, but I've had to deal with griefing enough on the mainland that something like this would provide a very good incentive to reupgrade. And unlike changing tier, stipends, etc. the only people that would be negatively affected by this would the griefers (and maybe a few Lindens, but hey, there's worse jobs, lol)

put my vote down for "Increase stipend". If I pay any other game/website, they provide me content for my money. But LL doesn't produce the content. A stipend that actually matches what I'm putting in would allow me to go buy the content I want from the creators who provide it. LL would still benefit because most creators ultimately give the money back to LL in upload fees. More creators would survive and keep things flowing. If only it were so easy to inject more circulating money into real world economies.

Off-topic: I miss Macromedia. Used to eat/sleep/breathe Director. Then Adobe trashed it. Now they think they can trot it back out like anybody will care. Not that my opinion is worth anything, but I think you made a wise career move T.

As a premium member, I would like the ability to have an 'SL will' - the ability to name one other avatar (in my case, my partner) as my executor, so that in the event of anything happening to me (not just RL death, but any form of incapacitation or inability to get online, such as accident or illness or even extended periods of time without internet access) he could log in as me and deal with such things as paying inworld rent, or to deal with Linden Lab on my behalf in such matters as tier etc.

Currently it is against ToS to give out one's login details to another avatar, but in exceptional circumstances I think it should be permitted, as long as the allowed avatar is named, and perhaps even given a special password that will only work for the account they are temporarily logging into (as opposed to that avatar's usual password).

This should obviously be limited to one named avatar and only to a certain number of times this could happen, to avoid abuse. But it's one thing that has concerned me since becoming both a landowner and content creator, and it's a perk that I would like to see, as a premium member.

The problem with that is that a lot of people won't become a premium member until they find their niche, something they really like to do in SL, something they get "hooked" on. Because there's so many things that people might fall in love with on SL, there's no way you could encapsulate the experience in "certain areas".

Well unless you paid the full setup fee upfront when you rented the land, the estate owner is not making a profit....only trying to make up the setup fees. 315 usd at 25usd a month...that will take a while...

Think outside the box here:

Redesign the entire system from the ground up to allow genuine improvements to the services one group can receive over another, both client-side and server-side, and go with that. The current SL design is too clunky through and through to provide genuinely differentiated services at this point.

Think in terms of Agent Domain vs Region Domain (vs whatever) services, with premium accounts getting different kinds of services than are available right now. If the Open Grid Protocols are the future of Second Life, then LL needs to start designing a business model around THEM, not around an existing system which obviously isn't sustainable as it stands now and will go away in a year or three anyway.

One example: premium account members in an open grid system could rez "full perms" (marked as meant for the open grid) items anywhere off of second life. They would basically be paying for access to SL asset servers in another grid.

Tourists (non-premium accounts), on the other hand, wouldn't get anything more than the bare minimum of support from LL for grid hopping. Content creators would also be included in this scheme: a premium account in an open grid allows a creator to use LL's asset servers to distribute his/her/its commercial items outside of LL automatically. If the original creator of a no-copy/no-transfer (or moral equivalent for open grid) item isn't premium, he/she/it can't mark items as distributable elsewhere.

There may be flaws with these suggestions, but they should be used as examples of what might be done, rather than a specific suggestion.

Other uses for premium in an open grid might include better handling of email, groups, and other services that will cost LL some extra $$ to provide for users throughout an open grid.

This goes back to the Agent Domain vs Region Domain services. Rather than a one-size-fits-all premium account, there could be multiple services offered either singly or as packaged deals.


Just tossing these ideas out as food for thought.

Hence my suggestion, which was on the first page of this thread, for something that doesn't involve Linden dollars in any way... but would be a solid benefit nevertheless.

When I put "T Linden" into Search, People tab's "Find:" field and click enter, I get a message saying "Your search query was modified and the words that were too short were removed. Searched for: linden"

You can then click through several pages of names and you will get to T Linden, but it's annoying getting an error dialog that requires you to dismiss it and page through several pages, compared to the result you get when you do a search in which the search terms are all at least the minimum searchable length long.

Since People search wants search terms two or more characters long, Linden names should have to be at least two characters long, else change the People Search tab's behaviour.

Search All with the People category selected accepts single letter search terms. This inconsistency is annoying. Of course, expecting consistency from LL or the SL software is kind of silly.

Holy catfish, Batman! 32 pages since yesterday morning??

Seriously, I'm glad you're actually reading and responding, T. We've had several of these threads that got abandoned by Lindens 3 or 4 pages in... it's nice to see that you're still here.

I think that Nika was right... we need to know what YOUR priority is before we can really offer some decent and well-thought suggestions.

Is it new premium account attraction?

Current premium account retention?

Less bitching by current premium accounts?

Most of the suggestions here are awesome, but wouldn't be all that clear to new users who were considering going premium. (non-sleep scripts for premium members? Sounds neat but a newbie would have no idea what that is, and it certainly wouldn't really entice the average newbie to buy premium.) If your goal is to attract new premium accounts, then you need to focus on the in-your-face stuff like First Land, stipends, etc. We've had SO many people come into the forums as new preemies, wondering where their First Land is, and they feel cheated and disappointed.

So my suggestion is: FOCUS YOUR DIRECTION: Retention or attraction? Which is the priority? Work on one, perfect it, then start on the other. Don't do both at the same time.

i like this idea.maybe Jira it?

Do premium account mainland owners get to lock down their borders to prevent camming in? Do they get to set custom terrain? with custom textures? Set region default sun? Full terraform? Object and script tracking and weighting? Bonus prims? Sell land in search without really losing ownership? Buy OS or Homesteads? Restart the region themselves? Request a move? Request a sim rename? Have the immediate area around them automatically become a no-buy zone for others? Etc.. Etc...

"how about some perks for us?" you ask?




I agree.. most of the popular suggestions involve something that either has a real money amount tied to it, like land...or the presence of it has a cancelling effect on profitability, like stipends and tier. Probably won't be LL's first choices for sure...

Like I said, why live on mainland?

I like this idea. This one comes with Merit and rewards those that have paid for their accounts every year faithfully. But to ammend this idea it would have to be First Year Second Year and third year as you already get a 512 to start.

This would also make residents be motivated to keep a mainland presence and purchase more mainland parcels.

well i can't offer solutions for all of those, but...

Top scripts on a parcel would fix one. Top colliders would be nice too.

A visual mute feature, by the parcel, object, or owner would fix another. If it worked in reverse, visually mute MY parcel from everyone, it solves the privacy issue(camming).

With windlight the sun angle is arbitrary. What we need is the ability to share WL settings.

Restarting needs to be handled at the estate level(even mainland estate) or we will be inadvertently crashing each other. But i see no reason why a mainland sim can't be renamed, as long as all land owners agree. Some names are soo goofy they are embarrassing to own land in.

mmm Bonus prims....How about the ability to buy more prims for your parcel? This would work great in regions with empty governor linden land. Surely 2000 more prims could be squeezed out of the code, if no such linden owned land is in the region.

At the parcel level i am not sure what can be done for terraform and said textures.

Please don't take this negatively, as I completely understand your point. Just offering up some ideas to close the features gap.

Frankly I see very little real benefit to having a premium membership besides the ability to own land. And Yes, I am premium and own about 1/2 sim of mainland.

Dump premium membership and open land ownership up to all accounts. I would wager that LL would make up in tier what it would lose in the premium membership fees considering that with the stipend, the perceived gain to LL for premium is about $5 usd.

I see encouraging mainland ownership as one of the biggest challenges, holding some of the greatest potential. Right now, land ownership on mainland appears to be headed to an all time low. Open the map anyplace and you see land for sale all over and the purple seems to be spreading like a virus. By removing the premium fee to own land, I think land ownership would take a big jump to the positive.

Change the tier structure slightly for mainland so that there are breaks between 1/2 and Full sim ownership. At least one at 3/4 would be very helpful. Leave the concierge level benefits alone and encourage land ownership by basing the tier exempted land on the period of land ownership or amount of land owned.

To make this work, there would need to be a minimum land ownership level set, such as 1024 or 2048. There would be no tier free land until level was reached.

An example based on time of ownership: For each year you continuously own a minimum size parcel of mainland (say 1024m2 above the bonus), the exempted amount would increase by 512m2 up to a limit of say 2048. This would pertain to either land owned by the account, or land contribution to a group.

An example based on amount of land owned: After 8192m2 all individual land owners would get an additional 10% tier bonus the same as groups. Groups would receive their normal 10% bonus, but contributing individuals would see the bonus added to their contribution.

Since the whole idea behind free accounts is to encourage more people to use SL, and that the whole Premium vs. Free seems to encourage griefing and a class structure, I see premium accounts as a kind of an anachronism that is no longer needed. Rather than exacerbate those problems, why not just eliminate the premium accounts?

Just my random thoughts.

DRD