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

Another simple one - enhanced profiles. Perhaps Premiums could be allowed links to more than one website, plus a 'public announcements' page on profile.

Re. extra groups - I can see that would be useful to a lot of people although 25 is enough for me.

Just to elaborate on what I suggested about mega/micro prims, I didn't mean that basic accounts couldn't own or use them, just that premiums could be able to rez them with the built in tools.

There's hundreds, or thousands of premade mega/micro prims available for free if you know where to look. It is just a PITA to go through to find what you need, and it's not always available exactly the size you want. And the object will always have someone else's name as the creator. None of these facts make it impossible to use now, but it would be easier if we could rez them ourselves when we wanted.

Hence, it would be a premium perk I'd be willing to pay for, personally.

-Atashi

hey!

agree, i use the stipend to pay my uploads.

thank you

I really like that the premium accounts now are a better deal if you buy in for a whole year vs. month to month. I like the ideas suggested in earlier posts that would extend that onto annual L$ and tier bonuses as accounts renew their premium memberships for an additional year.

Other things that I think would make premium even more appealing are (also suggested by others) an increased tier bonus (1024 instead of 512) & discounts on uploads.

I disagree - not everyone here is premium, but even if they are, it's just as important to keep their business as it is to attract new customers. Some would argue even more so - it is cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to get a new one, usually.

-Atashi

Brenda and I suggested this down in the Improving Orientation thread:

Bring back First Land. But change it, so that

1) All First Land expires after 1 month of ownership. It reverts back to Governor Linden, all objects belonging to the owner are returned, and the parcel is recycled to a new Premium member.

2) First Land is NOT transferable, sub-lettable, etc. It can be used and owned by only the new Premium member.

3) First Land parcels are grouped around stable Infohubs that are staffed by Mentors who have ban/eject rights on those Infohub parcels. This will create a sense of community for new users.

The thinking behind the 1-month expiration is that it gives new Preemies a chance to learn about land ownership, get a taste of it, then move out and buy or rent their own parcel. It also will avoid the old problem of people leaving SL and effectively abandoning their First Land, which both removed it from circulation and often created nasty eye sores, as auto-return was often not activated.

Greetings T! Welcome to the asylum!

Make Premium accounts worth having?
1. 24*7 Technical Support
2. Buy at least 1 or maybe 2 (or more) Open Space Regions without having to buy a full island first.
3. Discount (Maybe 50%) on classified advertisements in world.
4. Premium Member area on the forums for feedback so we can have discussions with less vitriol laced spam.

That's all I have time for now.

You don't have to be premium to read the blog or post on the forum. I'm sure they would love to hear from everyone.

I was premium for almost 5 years and dropped to basic. I didnt need the stipend, I didnt need the 512 tier.. I got rid of my land, its to costly along with tier. Now I simply log in once a week or so to visit friends. SL has nothing to offer anymore, its become a classed society. I would rather see something done for everyone, not a select few.

If you didn't have to buy premium account you could use that money to buy $L to upload instead...

And no, I am not premium.

Agreed, that is a current problem , as is unreliable link insertion and those random [size2] things that I have to go back and delete!
But why does another non SL site I use keep freezing until I shut down, while another is down quite a lot?

And a second related problem. If the stipend was too attractive and the number of premium accounts were to balloon, Supply Linden's ability to keep the exchange rate stable would be weakened. Worst case, sinks (the L$ fees for classifieds, groups, uploads, parcel search, partnerships) would have to be increased, or new fees invented, to make up the difference.

Since L$ in circulation represents residents' money, the stable exchange rate is a pretty big deal. Let's not mess with that too much.

Thinking holistically, or systemically as I say, is something Linden Lab have a real hard time doing, you've got your work cut out there.

Trust is in the gutter over the openspace issue, you simply can't keep doing this to people, it will seriously bite you in the arse. There has to be more respect if you want respect back and a premium membership lends itself to an issue of two way trust and you've just put a big gaping hole in that. Knee jerk decisions, and there's a whole history of them,(just go and take a look at the way the VAT announcement was handled for further evidence) keep happening again and again, lessons are never learnt.

As for premiums, I'm all for different premium accounts. Trade offs if you will, higher stipend but no free tier is one option. People who don't own land are offered very little via premium membership.

I saw someone the other day who has his real name, how much does that cost? You could offer that as part of a premium package if it's not cost prohibitive.

Maybe premiums could have a free classified advert upto value of x per week.

If you're going to sell homesteads direct you could offer a premium gold package that allows people to do that but if you're going down that route you should look closely at a reseller package. I've had PC manufacturers approach me at work and tell me they won't sell direct because they respect their reseller network whom we've used but they'll sell direct to others, they just don't undermine their own resellers in the process. The average consumer can buy direct from them but not at the same cost savings as a reseller can buy the product. Maybe you could introduce a premium membership option for such resellers.

Premium membership has to offer different things to different people to be worthwhile, the one size fits all method isn't appealing to all.

But LL has to make money somehow and charging people to live here is the main and most logical way. We shouldn't expect something for nothing. They need to attract more basic accounters to become Premium.

A few suggestions, maybe not all at once, but some things to consider:

- BIG agreement with the increased group limit for Premium accounts.
- Let Premium residents provide dwell. Scripted objects, and other avatars, can identify them as premium. (If they want to camp, let them, they are paying for it! )
- Scripts created by premium users are not subject to forced sleeps (even if owned by someone else).
- Another suggestion for the "increase avatar shape customisation ranges for Premium users" vote.
- Premium users can wear two attachments in each slot.
- Premium users' classified ads are placed L$250 (or some amount) higher than they actually paid for. This doesn't create any L$ because all L$ paid for classified ads are sunk anyway.
- Premium users cannot be kept out of a sim by non-Premium users.
- Premium users gain a small prim bonus on all land, _even private islands._ (Yes, I know this is kinda intrusive.)

Who cares, we are talking about SL. I doubt they would attempt to give thousands of e-mails and webpages out. Just another thing for people to bitch about when they break. With all things SL they will break often.

Just because you are basic doesn't mean you don't spend money (I have spent more than enough). Non premium members make SL a lot of money. M Linden even said premium accounts are not to relevant to their financial situation.

I think you have to approach it from two angles, because the answers for each are different.

1. How do we attract premium users?
2. How do we keep premium users?

Currently, the only attraction is being able to own mainland. The stipend isn't that big of an incentive.

For 1. These need to be benefits immediately available.
- more groups (as everyone has said)
- lower upload fees
- L$ stipend
- more attractive land ownership
- exclusive library items (maybe even an exclusive avatar mesh)
- exclusive access to some new premium-only area of whizzy stuff. (not a big fan of this...just brainstorming)
- upgraded inventory management tools. (maybe including a second inventory-type backup)
- a facebook/myspace type site linked to your SL avatar, and in-world friends list. (with direct picture upload options from SL snapshots)
- off-world storage for things like database applications to interface with in-world objects.
- business management tools. Many go premium to buy land and start a business on it.
- Extra tools to connect SL with other aspects of the user's online presence.

For 2. Anniversary gifts, or improvements are always nice
- Increased land allowance each year(as mentioned)
- L$ anniversary gifts, or exclusive anniversary items (has to be excellent quality though!)
- increased off-world storage space each anniversary
- different priority help queues


Those are a few brainstorm ideas. But you get the idea of where I'm coming from.

what could be done to improve the premium product, as compared to basic?

Well here's an idea. Why not look at other services, and see how they make their premiem membership plans more desirable.

Livejournal, is probably a great example of this. If we take away the issue of "ads".. (since thankfully SL doesn't work that way).. we can see that basic, freebie members get reasonably full access to the service.

Basic members may own a journal. Let's analogize this to land. Basic and premium can both own "land".. premium members get added perks. Perhaps the premiums get a 512 or 1024 of ftree tier, and the basics do not.

While their uploads are limited, at SL, we pay-per-upload in the form of a 10L fee. So differentiating the ability to upload files for premium/basic seems silly for SL. But.. how about a discount-per-upload for premium members?

One constant with LJ is that whatever the basics get, the premiums get MORE. While everyone can own a journal, the premium members get more userpics, custom mood themes, custom journal themes, etc. In this case, I'd like to analogize this to groups. groups are used in MANY ways to conduct business.. any mall you want to install a vendor in, has a group to avoid autoreturn. limiting us to 25 groups forces us to play group-shuffle and drop groups "we don't need now". Perhaps allowing basics to have 25, and premiums to have 35.. and then enabling premiums to "pay a fee" for every new group over 35.

"You already have 37 groups. If you select join, you will be charged a signup-fee of 100L$. Premium accounts are permitted 35 groups free of penalties. To avoid this fee you must drop at least 3 groups before joining this group.

Membership has it's perks. So let's talk about some new features that might be good as "premium only". The infrastructure already exists to send an email to [email]UUID@lsl.secondlife.com[/email]. This allows any outside source of email to communicate with an object within second life. How about some new features for premiums..

[email]winter.ventura@residents.secondlife.com[/email]

This email could be autoforwarded to my email-on-file. (encouraging me to keep said email up to date as well). But how about this...

[email]winter.ventura@sms.secondlife.com[/email]

this email would appear to me, inworld, in the form of an instantmessage (and would be forwarded to my email if I was offline and had that function enabled).

I don't envy you your job. After all, regardless of what you change, there will be resentment. The trick is to increase the value of the premium account, while not lessening the value of a basic account. After all, most users will always be Basic. so you don't want to risk alienating the majority of the userbase.

I want a pony ... beside that I would vote for an adjustment on the tier fees by either allowing up to 1024 tier free or a sliding scale of tier by 512 sq m increments instead of the current huge leaps. Beyond that the mega/micro prim building ability would be awesome as well.

I don't think a prim bonus is workable - all land is owned by premiums anyway and in open-build areas like sandboxes it's a free-for all anyway! And the idea of increased prim limits for all land and vehicles is not out of the question in the future - we were able to make driveable 64-prim vehicles on Beta Grid for a while, after all. Such increases would negate any need for Premiums to have a prim bonus.

how about these:

- giving premium accounts the option of changing your last name... when you get married in SL or such... not for free, for a resonable amount to deter people from changing their name twice a day "because they can".

- for every year of premium membership, double the amount of tier-free mainland:
1 year: 1024m, 2 years: 2048, 3 years: 4096 etc etc.

- IM to outside SL (jabber comes to mind, someone already said that, I'm seconding that idea)

- more group slots (and not just 30 instead of 25... imagine a shop owner who needs to be a group member for every mall where he rents a stall...)

- IMs get capped after 100, not 25

- a safe way to backup your inventory to your local harddisk (encrypted, password protected, 4096bit key, you name it... as long as i can upload the latest snapshot i took in case i lose stuff.) might even be automatically so that in fact your own personal inventory IS on your local harddisk.

- email: [email]Lance.Corrimal@secondlife.com[/email] gets forwarded to the email address that i have in my profile.

- 500L$ per week for every premium, not just for oldtimers like me

Ack!!! Another single-letter first name. Y'all know search isn't happy with those, right?

I will not complain again about it (in this thread) if you send me a bear, though.


Make support consistant - usually iteam is really top notch but sometimes I want to say "can I talk to somebody who gives a damn, please?" Again, usually top-notch.

More tier levels - if I buy any more land, LL is gonna charge me an extra US$70/month. Or I can tier down and save US$50/month but I have to dump 1/2 my land. Those are my only two options.

Enable us to manage/police our land better - http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-835, "New 'Top Scripts on Parcel' estate flag for parcel owners to see script times on their land (and enabled on mainland)" for example.

Communicate better - most office hours can't be attended by people in the US. With a few exceptions, LL's presense here is either non-existant or write-only.

Make SLURL be less than 18 months out of date - less than 1/2 the mainland shows up on that map.

Update the forums - nearly 18 months since formatting got disabled here.

Rework the auction system - once an auction's done, you can't see who was driving up the prices. There's a grief vector here that LL seems to be ignoring. My cynical side notices that it's LL receiving the auction money.

Ask one of your UI guys how long it would take to add a preference switch to the UI that disables the display of ban lines - people have been complaining about not being able to do that for YEARS.

edit: and welcome to the fun, T.

Ok I arent a premium account holder and this is why...

As a UK citizen it is vitrually impossible to do without leading to extornitate costs, I'd have VAT to pay, foriegn exchange costs etc etc.

While I know LL can do little about the VAT problem with out taking over the EU they could allow me to pay in my local currency, after all you do have an office in Brighton and staff, so set a UK price for a premium account and I will sign up, simple.

Oh and yeah implement all the other great ideas that have been posted!!!!

Regards
Franz

Not true actually.

You can own land on a private island without being Premium.. in fact, you can own A PRIVATE ESTATE without being premium.