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

Again, any attempt to "improve premium" by crippling Basics would be just plain suicidal.

Two ways to improve the premium account

1) Only count premium accounts in traffic.
If you do that you will eliminate all the load the traffic bots and camping causes to your system since those things will die out


2) Give more L$ so the premium account becomes a way of buying L$ (but keep the amount you give less than what they would make if they sold what they earnt)
Many people don't want to buy from the lindex and would much rather get their L$ from a subscription to their premium account
This is due to the mindset that SL is a game so they will happily spend real money on a subscription, but not on purchases from the Lindex.

The crippling i suggested is rather minimal considering the offset benefits added. Most suggestions are actually to enhance the premiums and occasionally tease basics (one annoyance every 10-15 logins is not going to send anyone's fist through the screen).
All suggestions as a whole really don't reduce all that much functionality.

Perhaps unlock contents->add script functionality after 30 days; Inventory Limitation lifted after 45 days; Financial Limitations and Group Limitations removed after 60 days; this allows time for noobs to vet in and yet helps deter some quick anonymous griefing.

Some of the suggested benefits would involve a complete reworking of SL, almost from scratch. Some of the crippling is so far from "minimal" as to be completely unacceptable.

If I joined SL and found that environment, I would not have upgraded to premium, I would have left.

When I came here it cost money to join, which I considered normal.
I bought a chunk of money, as that was what I'd been trained to do by other online whatsits.
Then I went premium as I wanted to live on the mainland, support the company, and feel part of the community and not just a tourist (that is, the premium helped me to feel connected, not that it was necessary). I got a $9.95 alt, then an alt during a $2.95 special, then a free alt.

What makes people go premium in other worlds? What do they expect and what do they gain? When someone arrives here today what do they consider normal and ordinary given their experiences in other corners of the 'net? I think we should look at the wider picture.

really, which ones would have deterred you?

just wondering

Well, "do not allow Basics to add scripts to objects" or anything similar would have ruled SL out completely. Also, "make Basics look like crap because everyone goes for the fancy new mesh" would have been a killer. Not because $10.00 a month was too much, but because not having the option of tiering down to Basic without losing everything would have locked me in to paying for premium forever whether I wanted to or not, and lock-in like that looks a lot like a prelude to bait-and-switch.

The building limitations are also particularly arse, even though implementing the microprims you want is more or less impossible anyway, because you'd have to rework the whole protocol and break everyone's client until they upgraded.

That's true, plus arriving at a place where the rules seem unkind would make me leave.

I suggest you do something, other than with land...They already get a reward on land.

I suggest you make some new products (in-game) for subscribers only..Something really good...Something that will get players to subscribe.

That's my suggestion. If you're wondering why I don't elaborate, it's because the plan is there, and Linden Lab would need to figure out what they would do with this plan.

Thanks,
DjJoe

Dnali's wishlist:

1. Agree with lowering tier as a loyality reward. The longer you are a Premium member, the more land you can have at your tier level.
(Further to this and I don't think this will be popular but could balance out for those in Europe who can't buy premium membership easily...same benefits to those who pay over a certain amount of tier).

2. Extra Library goodies..especially scripts

3. Precedent in logging in over bots/campers (Agree with premium members only counting towards dwell or showing on map).

4. Preferred access to Linden Office hours for premium and those over a certain amount of tier.

Basically reward those of us who put our money where our mouth is either by paying tier and/or premium membership.

Free accounts already have the benefit of enjoying SL for free and shopping costs are not the same as committing to land/tier/premium membership.

Renters who are established can arrange with their Estate Owner to share in some of these benefit...

And what of people who rent from mainland landlords and contribute to their tier payments? Do those people get nothing?

OK I have read through 4 pages of this and seen lots of duplicates, so forgive me if this one was mentioned before...

Premium users get a reduced fee (or no fee) for using the Lindex to take money in and out of Second Life. This would be a definite incentive for business-owners.

There are some great ideas in this thread, for sure!

Kalderi

I know that this will not be a popular suggestion but to increase premium membership make it mandatory after a trial period.
A lot of my friends are switching back and forth from The World of Warcraft to Second Life and they have a ten day use it then pay for it policy and with a membership it said of over 10 million, they are doing quite well for not being a free game to play. So the argument of getting rid of basic accounts would be suicide has no merit.
If a person can pay tier to a private estate, then they can afford to convert some of that over to USD and pay for a membership.
Money talks and we all know what walks. Linden labs would not be discussing this unless they were looking for a way to increase their profit. Besides, it takes money to run a business and if Linden Labs cannot make money then we may log on one day and find that Disney World bought Second Life in some over night company sell off and well we all would know the rest if that happened. A family friendly Second Life.

I agree with this, makes it easier to create a new alt and link that to your main and use the alt to save L$ on.



I think the largest allowable prim size is 256m (to fit a sim exactly), but such size is limited to the size of the parcel you own. For example, OpenLife has prim size limits down to .001 and up to 100m




I agree, 25 groups is too limited, there are groups I want to join that I can't because of the limit.



Basic Financial limitations maybe should be lower, maybe L$25,000. I wonder how many people it would drive away with advertising.



For example, allow premium accounts to use Avatar 2.0. OpenLife is going to introduce this eventually, and Avatar 2.0 has an allowable 240 attatchment points.



Seriously, Going over 1 full sim, $97.5 is way too much of a jump, even as he says even when adding just 16m2 over a full sim! I suggest having the tier repeat everytime you go over one full sim, or at least in jumps of 4096m2

Any effort to limit basic accounts to not be able to buy or sell would be disasterous. You want funds moving - you don't care how they came in or go out, just make that money move.

In the end, you have to make the premium account look more attractive than basic. But you dare not do that by making basic look less attractive. That would cause your already dropping numbers to drop yet further. Instead, give people something for their money. Being able to buy land on the mainland -- big deal. I can rent as a basic and not be stuck with the land later if I want to move.

Give free image/sound uploads, 300L stipend, and the ability to make Mega's up to 100x100x100. That would entice me. As for the arguments about megas and griefing, I would like to point out that megas are already inworld in a variety of sizes. But sometimes the size I need isn't in the prebuilt units and I would like to make my own - 13.33m x 0.2m x 5.00m for example. Griefers, of course, aren't concerned about precise units, and they have access to the megas already. So the arguments about griefing are no more valid with megas than they are with any other size of prim.

When you do this and take better care of your OS customers, I'll go premium again. Today though, I have zero confidence in LL, and I'm voting so with my wallet.

Any business gains appeal once the consumers (or in most of our cases *subcontractors) have a sense of *ownership*
It can be as simple as meeting a Linden in-world or adding more groups *winks*. Each account holder wants to have that *feel* and it will tempt others to upgrade. Same with premium account holders....... We want to know that paying 72usd per year is for *something*. Not paying for what every other member can have for free.
Bottom line is that people want to be a part of changes that affect their business. Restructuring can be beneficial for a business but if not handled properly can also bring it down.

Sadly My premium account was paid for a 12 month period on October 10th. Had it been November 10th I would have canceled.
I think that the ideas here have been wonderful and I hope to see more positive changes from LL as the influx of new residents increases because the noobs have no clue ^^ BUT I assure LL one thing..... you must keep the client/consumers happy or as fast as they rezz they can rezz on another grid.........
EC~

I would like to see better secondlife.com website land management tools. For instance, I would like to be able to tell if a parcel is set for sale, how much if it is, when it was purchased, set it to sell or take it off for sale etc.... Maybe the ability to download land data to a spreadsheet....Also maybe the ability to make the land data public and some formatting capability....things such as this. Might be a good idea to have a myspace-like public profile anyway for premiums for things such as advertising and networking.

How would the premium members get the non-premium member's merchandise if the non-premium couldn't transfer it to them?

You mean non-premium members couldn't even give people stuff, non-scripted?

That's beyond ludicrous.

Just be most happy if you would,

Find my inventory, improve the camera, & improve user stability thus when doing business, creating or learning or sitting at an event we don't crash or freeze when we need you to preform the most.

Well then, perhaps a difference between trial account (brand new resident) and basic account.. an interim such as a place where someone who has invested time and vested interest sticks around pays a one-time fee equivalent to one month Premium and gets the the limitations lifted.. therefore there will be the same place a canceled Premium will fallback on. Keep the enhancements but lose the land ownership. I do think in any case, land tier should have a deduction for continual Premium payment..



It's happened before, it broke nothing.. there was no protocol break, just a breach in some checkpoint somewhere.. remember? That's how all these new packs of Megaprims appeared in a week's time... a so-called "bug" in the client and server codes simultaneously allowed for Megaprim creation for days.

Hmm. Yeah, that would certainly do it. Mind, this does add to the overall lag, no matter how its happening, since if the client has "lost" the texture, it has to request it again, so...

But, yeah. Like I said. Lots of odd decisions in the initial design, some hard to fix.

1. Reward loyalty

2. Fix those crazy tier increments (they are truely bizzare and prevent the beautification of sims).

Well.. I am looking at this from a "permissions" and "limiting griefers" issue, and the context of RP, not just teleport in general. Its not likely to be allowed if any fool and mess with were you teleport to.

Also, you looking at several "kinds" of gates, if you look at it form the perspective of a set of RP sims. (And, the may not be "gates" technically, just something that acts like them.) You need:

A) Entry gates. These could be linked to "any" existing network, so when you dial into say CoLA (though I doubt they would install one), you get *only* the gate at the entry point for the RP regions, where the rules are.

B) Inter-zone gates. These could dial "out of" the sim, but also inside the linked regions. The point being to allow for "official" places you can arrive at. This could even be used with an existing system, since you couldn't "dial in" to any of these "sub-gates", unless you first dial into the main one.

C) Faction gates. This can be anything from personal transporters, magic gems, etc. These need to be able to do two things that the regular gates "can't". They have to be able to allow those who "have them" to teleport to set locations, even if a hub would normally force them to land at the entry points for each region, and they have to be able to cross region boundaries, which something like a sit teleport "can't".

The last one could be a rezzed object, or some such, but an attachment is "much" easier for some types you might want to make. And, as I said, the advantage of an attachment, to allow overriding hubs, or such, is that you wouldn't have to say yes, every single time you use some access point that employs that teleport system.

Sure, there are ways around it, if we had the main "llTeleportAgent" function to start with, but most of them involve someone doing something "after" they arrive, to get to where they intended to be in the first place. Oh, and some means to "override" would be nice, just for the simple fact that someone can rent land, which you put a gate on, then decide to add a teleport hub, which destroys the operation of the gate, since now you don't arrive "at" the gate any more.

Basically, the hub system is useful only if you want to either a) make everyone arrive in the same place, or b) allow everyone to teleport anywhere. There is no in between, and the moment you put someone in the lands own group, they gain (b), even if all you wanted to do is give them a larger number of (a)s within a sim. There is no way that isn't seriously limited, requires extra interaction from the user, doesn't land people that shouldn't even know they are in the same sim in the same room first, or otherwise undermine the "intent" of having inter-sim, faction based teleport systems, which keeping everyone else from just teleporting in any place they want, at the same time.

Its a bit like the tier land system people have talked about here. Its either or, with no granularity in between.

The person I was replying to was talking about doing it to reduce thefts of intellectual properties (skins, clothes, etc) and reselling them. I was just pointing out how restricting them from putting a sale price on it wouldn't work, they would have to be restricted from redistributing (giving) them altogether. It wasn't my original idea.