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

I see no benefit to being premium other than to own mainland and I cannot see anything that could improve the value of a premium account without technical changes.

Phase out premiums and allow anyone to buy mainland. Smaller jumps in tier would be nice, but people should remember that they can rent tier from reputable businesses or rent out their extra tier to those same businesses which can ease the impact of the large jumps in tier. I did that for awhile when I was on mainland and it worked out pretty good.

You don't get it.

Going premium on an annual basis is cheaper than paying tier on the first 512 square meters would be without the premium bonus.

So where is the barrier?

well, you have to admit it sounded pretty bad!

Lot's of fine ideas here, but PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE think smart and ADD stuff to make Premium more attractive, don't SUBTRACT stuff from Basic to try to force people to take up Premium.
Learn from the OpenSim debacle, you can PISS OFF your customers and they can turn nasty.
OK thats my twopenny worth

So long as they do that in a way that does not increase the cost to ANY existing premium members, they have my blessing. But dumping a bunch of additional costs onto a second class of customers after the openspace debacle would be a poor move.

Nope!

You appear to be on a negativity roll at the moment, and that appears to have led you to jump to an unreasonable assumption and an antagonistic posting.

I will interpret your post as an apology.

QFT. I've been a little reluctant to speak out against the openspace/homesteads for Premiums because, well, let's face it, I'm chicken. But now that Cristalle, someone that I highly respect re: landownership, has said something, I'm going to stand up and agree with her.

Let's try to make the Mainland more vibrant and alive than it's been for a while; if everyone set up their own baby island, we'd be even emptier and lonelier than ever. I vote a strong NO on this openspace/homestead idea.

ETA: Someone a few pages back suggested a "platinum" membership; this is another good idea. Why not set up tiered levels of membership? Silver, gold, platinum, etc, wherein each level gets more stuff, and the final level, platinum, gets that openspace thingy? I myself would probably just stick with a silver membership because I get what I need out of the premium membership now, but I'm sure that there are others who would like to "level up" for added benefits.

Because renting land on an island can be as big a crapshoot as mainland. I used to be a big advocate of island land over mainland, and the island property that led me to take that position has remained a great experience (though I did have a scare when a new land manager sent me a nastygram by mistake), but it's not all been a bed of roses.

I've had island land pulled out from under me without warning, and all my content returned... and this was before coalescing, so every separate prim in the build I was working on was a separate "Object" in Lost+Found. I've had an island shift on the grid, so my beachside land went from open water, to being next to a glowing white temple, to water again, then I was forced to move to a different lot (yes, it was a better lot, but not worth the hassle of rebuilding everything), then harassed by someone else who wanted that lot who thought I'd gone behind their back, and then we moved again... and I was dropped next to a retail sim that caused so client lag I needed to set up an invisiprim wall to keep from dropping below 1FPS. THEN we finally got moved to a good location, with open water on two sides, and the sim was sold.

At least with mainland we've been able to "wait out" the clubs and camping holes, and neighbors have a limited ability to grief us compared to landlords.

Plus, we have still had the same kinds of problems on islands with neighbors. Not to as great an extent, perhaps, but islands are not immune to the ugly build.

ok.

Franz, how about you and I switch accounts? My monthly tier payments and Linden purchases are habitually routed through UK bank, with resulting fees for currency exchange, but I live in USA--last I heard, the HOME of Linden Labs. Errrrrr. Customer service s*cked, btw, and it's easier for me to suck it up and go through that level of abuse again. And yes, I spoke personally with somebody named Linden when it happened. Concierge, shmoncierge. Means little when it comes to $$ matters.

Things that would be nice to have with Premuium account:

- Regions where access is allowed only with Premium accounts. These regions will have stricter rules on buildings and zonings. Special clubs and shops can be built here.

- Free 20 monthly uploads

- Free tier for up to 1024 sqm. of mainland parcel (up from 512 sqm.)

- Free Inventory backup (up to 3 days?)

- Reduce annual subscription fee for consecutive years of membership renewal

- 1 free week of land advertisement per month (instead of 30L/week).

Thanks, Oryx. I would equate a "platinum" membership with concierge level service, and allow anyone who is concierge-level to purchase OS/homestead sims. That would be my sole compromise on that issue. Concierge-level people are more often than not land developers anyway and the openspace/homestead would be in their purview, since it generally no longer makes sense to own them unless you're running a rental business.

I do think that we can open up mainland ownership to anyone and still keep the premium account. I think that the premium account would then have greater value from a comparative point of view, because then you would have the added perk of free tier and a little stipend. If someone who wishes to buy land that no one can pull from under you other than LL, the benefit of a premium account would become much clearer when you can buy a little extra land (512 now, but hopefully at least 768 in the future). Annual bonuses are a great idea too.

I will still push the idea of an extra 2-3% on the group land bonus for every premium account that donates tier to a group. 5 premiums donating to a group would be able to own 10% - 15% more land than a group with no premium accounts donating to it. It would soak up the yellow, encourage larger land ownership which would in turn foster more organized (and possibly better-looking) communities and create actual demand for mainland.

Decide this before I have to decide whether or not to renew for another year.

At the end of the day, all I really need or want is stability. The last two weeks, with all the restarts and failures and shut-downs, has been a disaster. My earnings are off 50%.

I would also prefer to be thought of as a customer of LL, rather than a resident of SL. The last thing I need is another landlord/tenant relationship, which is consistently the worst business relationship in this culture. Yes, LL owns and runs SL, but I'm tired of the pats on the head, being told not to complain and to sit quietly. I'm tired of threads getting locked as soon as LL has had enough.

Hoping for the best, T, but this ain't my first rodeo.

I have to disagree with you on this. I do have multiple avatars.

One reason is because 25 group membership slots is enough. 25 wasn't enough back in the days when we were limited to 10, and it isn't enough today. There are far too many things to do in SL that require yet another group membership. So I have created alts to actually be able to join the groups I need to join. Also I have alts to make it more logical. For example if I'm going to roleplay in a medieval themed sim, I have an alt for that. No need to change clothes, change group tags, any of that stuff, that alt is a medieval lord, period. To have that alt's inventory scrubbed every 24 hours just because it's not my main account is ridiculous. Same with the one I created as a DJ'ing account, etc.

Also regarding 4a), premium account holders do have valid reasons to log in more than one avatar at a time, for short periods of time. One example is in the bdsm community. Somebody's wearing a collar. You want to add one of your alts as an Owner on that person's collar. Well, the person with authority to do so (your main avatar) must be online for that, in order to issue the command to do it. But it won't add anybody to the collar if they're not physically present in sensor range. So this means you have to have both accounts online at the same time. There are other examples where it's needed too. So we can throw out 4a) as absolutely unworkable.

On the other hand, if I had to pay $10 a month for every alt I have, the burden would be great. So I should be able to pay ONE premium membership fee, have all of my avatars included under that umbrella, one of them gets the weekly stipend and not the others, fine. But I should be able to freely transfer my L$ between any of them so that other alts can be equipped with whatever at will, the DJ'ing account's earnings can be funneled to my main or any other alt, etc., and yes, I should be able to log in with two of my accounts at once. Perhaps limit how long. An hour? If I can't wrap up whatever I need both online for in an hour, something's wrong.

Well another piece in the puzzle of moving from a userbase to the more profitable business base. Bring in the businesses to enhance SL. Yup.. while driving the stake through the heart of the people who really made SL what it is today. So go toot your horn "T". Have fun and hope your business expertise can really make SL what we all want it to be.... A world of businesses. At the users expense of course.

Just my opinion.

id pay over the roof to get the send e-mail button working on live help

I'm just hoping the focus on bringing RL businesses into SL will force LL to improve stability. If I were a company trying to hold meetings in SL, the last two weeks would have been completely unacceptable.

I would like to see LL treating RL companies the way they treat the rest of us. Do they tell IBM, et al, not to complain?

It's not just me, then.. Been a while since this worked.

/me again suggests that there's low-hanging fruit in the form of bug fixes that would make our slives better..

Disclaimer: I have a premium account, and I do intend to keep it.

Tier Issues:

I currently pay $195 a month in tier, my land is split of two adjoining regions. Recently I've had to pass up buying more land in either, simply because I can't afford the next "jump" in tier. I make a little money from my land ownership but that doesn't get anywhere near my tier costs. So that $195 comes out of my pocket.

I'd love to see the tier have smaller jumps, or perhaps no jumps at all. Simply a sliding scale for land ownership, (numbers pulled out of a hat because I can't be bothered working it out).

You own 4512 sqm, ok thats going to cost you $1 L$ per metre in tier, you want 72,000 sqm, ok thats going to cost you $0.25 L$ per metre.

I do love the suggestions of sliding scale for tier bonus too, oh and don't even think about dumping the group 10% bonus!

Land Ownership

Allow anyone to own land, but only premium members get free tier, 512sqm to start, and then maybe a bonus on their premium annual renewal.

I honestly believe that if you let free members own land then SL is going to have another boom time and lots of new and interesting builds will come along. ((Side Benefit: more $US for LL))

1. Give all premium members 25% extra prims to use
2. Make all premium members part of the Linden Lab (shareholders)

...Avoid all sims where every premium member has 25% extra prims.

???

That is not what I said.

Let me repeat:

"The only way LL could appear to be losing money on Premium accounts is if they somehow structured their internal accounting such that L$ stipends paid to Premium accounts are booked as an expense to one cost center (ignoring the fact that they print them), and the US$s paid in Tier are booked as income to a different cost center. Thus, on paper, Premium accounts might be shown as somehow "costing" the company money."

In other words, the amount of US$s gained from land tier paid by Premium account holders is an order of magnitude larger then any potential losses of sales of L$ on the LindEx.

Most of us SL'ers are "small fish" in comparison to the big landowners, and a lot of us own land on the mainlands. By changing tier limits, adding anniversary land bonuses, eliminating upload costs and increasing--if posible--the weekly stipend, LL, I suspect, would stimulate mainland rejuvenation. You'd certainly see me developing more properties in the two sims in which I currently "live" and "work.

Currently, I am maxed out at what I can afford [most of us can't afford a full sim--mainland or otherwise]. More land would mean I could expand what I've created (I have themed mainland properties which I hope will draw people particularly those with an historical bent).

One caveat: whatever you do to increase premium account benefits, don't just focus on what stimulates SL business operations.

Those businesses need real customers. Those customers need other attractions to draw them into SL and keep them. So build in some benefits that promote developing the land to attract others and keep people coming to SL.

Welcome T,

As the only difference between premium and basic subscriptions is the out-world cost to receive the L$300 per week stipend and the ability to own 512 sq. m. of mainland without additional charge...

What could make a premium subscription (“ps”) truly premium?
1. Increase the stipend and land holding values or cease stipends and increase land holdings or reduce the subscription cost if point 1 is not amended
2. Reduce in-world charges for uploads/group creation and reduce out-world LindeX charges
3. Ps use only land (e.g. sandbox or themed region for socialising and networking)
4. A pre-approved in-world SL credit card
5. Prizes, awards or bonus Linden/LDPW content

What would make the experience a delight for you?
1. Being a member of a Ps group which receives privy to information
2. Getting more for less or value for dollar
3. Not scrapping the Hau Koda info hub for Bay City
4. The ability to teleport to Linden only regions for exploration
5. Being Magellan Linden’s first mate and/or God Mode

Although I have been sitting on the ruted.com domain for a few months, I am planning to offer Residents access to a free* e-mail address and online/real time collaboration tools (powered by Google) for their Second Life. Please IM Spencer Diesel if you would like to alpha test.

* conditions apply - Residents must join and remain in the Rx group to retain e-mail/collaboration access (the purpose of the group join is so Rx can request Resident Help Network Group status by researching and collecting information for the advancement, beyond the ‘first hour’ resident experience).