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

When I started you had to pay for a Basic or Premium account after 7 days of trial, and if I hadn't been able to script during my 7 days of trial I wouldn't be here now.

Quoting myself here trying to be more clear:

I think that SL should focus more on Small Business. Make it easier to set up and buy in for us users that cap our spending to at $250 - $500 US a month.

It seems that LL is marketing their business end at only the large corporate economy, and ignoring small business alltogether. Making doing business more afordable and accessable in sl seems like it would stimulate both the economy and make the world more interesting to residents.

I think you're looking too closely at a particular case and trying to make llTeleportAgent solve it for you.

What I'm talking about is the ability to create non-linear builds. Having to wear an object before you can step through a portal is just crazy, when you're trying to build an "underground cave" in a skybox. You need to be able to teleport *anyone* who walks through the cave entrance to the matching room in the skybox.

Same for stepping disks, Heinlein's or Asimov's Doors, the portals in Hyperion, or just trying to build something like a tesseract.

Yes, you'd want to allow it for attachments... just like your own attachments can push you. But you ALSO need to allow it for objects owned by the landowner... like push.

Why?

I think there's already enough distinction in-world. If LL wants to enhance Premium accounts and encourage people to become premium and potential landowners, there's two ways to go... and I think they should do both.

First, any enhancements for premiums: don't base them on enhancements to the world. That's got a high level of risk, as any enhancement to SL has. Out of world improvements that make "premium" mean more than just "mainland owner", like the business-friendly ideas I proposed in my first message, are less risky.

Second, make owning land on the mainland more desirable.

When I got my first land, there were a bunch of little parcels around the edge owned by Governor Linden. I contacted Guy Linden through the Forums, and he came out and set them for sale to me because I was the adjacent landowner. Later discussions in the Forums with other Lindens brought up the idea... proposed by one of the Lindens (!)... that with their new Perl-based sim management software they could automatically set small parcels like these for sale to adjacent landowners. Obviously, this never happened.

Then we started getting Lindens coming out on support requests who denied that this kind of thing was ever possible... I'm not saying they were bing deliberately obstructive... they just didn't know. It became a crapshoot.

Later on you could send in a support ticket to request this, even up to 512 meters if the land was yours on three sides of an abandoned plot. Then they started quibbling about what "three sides" meant. Now it seems like they always go to auction.

And then there's the moles digging trenches through sims rather than try to make the roads match the builds that are there.

There's the whole adfarm mess, still going on. There's still adfarms out there, because they still allow people to set up these networks, but they're banning more than one for-sale sign per sim on normal sized parcels... even when those signs are flat on the ground and unobtrusive to the neighbors. I don't get that at all.

There's lots of stuff they could do to make owning mainland more desirable, but they keep missing the point.

Tom, go talk to landowners, see what bugs them. Start a new thread asking people why they bought into Mainland. And another one asking people what it would take for them to buy in instead of staying on the islands. And... just pay attention to the forums, get involved in them, and see what makes people tick.

Edit:

The one thing that I think would really help in-world would be to reduce the jumps in tier. I got an premium alt so I could tweak my tier in smaller jumps, but there's only so much you can do with that. The tier cost jumps are also pretty irregular and arbitrary. At the 2048 jump and the 16384 jump, the price per square meter actually increases:

512 $5
1024 $8 ($3 for the extra 512)
2048 $15 ($3.50 for each extra 512) ***
4096 $25 ($2.50 for each extra 512)
8192 $40 ($1.88 for each extra 512)
16384 $75 ($2.19 for each extra 512) ***
32768 $125 ($1.56 for each extra 512)
65535 $195 ($1.09 for each extra 512)

Please consider regularizing this, in a revenue-neutral way, with smaller jumps. It's just annoying and confusing the way it is now. But if you do... phase it in, perhaps having people switch to the new system when they change tier levels.

Ceera didn't need to *find* a negative. The whole idea of limiting Basic accounts is just plain negative from the get go.

By far the best suggestion I have seen yet in this thread.

A 2000L anniversary prize or 1024 free tier will not solve what you did to Open Space owners.

This is absolutely uninformed BS on every count.

I would like to be able to use the world without crashing.

I would like to NOT wait five minutes after every crash to get back in.

I would like have more than 25 groups.

I don't own mainland, nor have any interest in owning mainland.

I have no idea what is tier, nor any intent to find out.

I would like to meet Lindens in world doing things - not just the extremely sweet and outgoingly wonderful Watermelinden Torley at his office hours. (e.g. I have never seen a Linden in a build class and I have notes from over 100 classes).

I would like the WIKI to not suck, and really give useful scripts that beginner script users and writers could understand.

I would like to believe is hooey (unfortunately it isn't) a plan to certify builders and scripters in Second Life as well as "provide accredation to prim schools inworld" - which really means "control content." I wouldn't have believed it either, but it's on the SL Wiki - and I sat thru a meeting of 28 educators in SL the other day all of whom were most upset at the sudden take over, command and control attitude towards primschools.

I would like to believe that all of us little people out here mean something to the corporation. But I have had an unfinished and unsolved Help Ticket since October 23 on which there has been more dialog about format and how overworked your people are than any form of solution. After all that, and quite frankly the longer the problem continues unsolved, the less faith that the corporation even knows who we are -- let alone cares.

Excellent advice.

T, we've pre-recorded the notes for you at http://jira.secondlife.com/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?mode=hide&requestId=10225 and http://jira.secondlife.com/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?mode=hide&requestId=10362 though more actual discussion would be great too.

The one thing I hear from everyone is more than 25 groups thats easy to fill up if you Role Play or have multiple stores

Adding restrictions to Basic accounts does not make Premium accounts better. All it will do is run off a large swathe of the vast majority of Second Life users. Basic accounts are not freeloaders on the system. Basic accounts buy and pay tier on island land. Basic accounts purchase L$ on the Lindex. Basic accounts create content. Basic accounts help form communities. Basic accounts are the majority of the consumers in Second Life.

If you want to wreck the SL economy, breaking Basic accounts is the way to go.

The benefits of premium membership were you could get help if you had a problem and you could buy land. LL has made owning mainland pointless by waiting until problems become disasters before you address them and because it does not seem to have the technical ability to consistently stabilize the game. *Support* has little value because more than half of the time what you get is a copy and paste of an information page and a smug attitude. If you're answer is usually going to be Buyer Beware and Should Have Read the Fine Print we don't really need *support* do we?

I just dumped my premium membership. I stopped owning land directly about two months ago -though I'm still getting billed for it - and I've just notified the owner I won't be renewing on an openspace. Not because you didn't give me a nice treat with premium membership because you -a lot of you at LL - seem to have an if you don't like it screw you attitude. Guess what? It shows. Fix that first , fix the land, get the prices right, have more people spend time in the game so you have some idea what's going on. Do the basics and get them down before you worry about membership treats.

Well, as I said, I was thinking in terms of how you could limit griefing a bit, so that Linden *might* implement it. So long as the argument is "well, people can use it to grief, like they do with push", its never going to happen. Its possible other solutions could be used. And, yeah. I would like there to be some way for objects to do this, but "that" still brings up a problem that not every such device is **going to be** owned by the land owner.

OK, let me try to explain by example:

Someone walks up to you, and says that they will sell you a hat for $120 dollars. They say that if you give them the money and wear that hat every day, that at the end of each month they will pay you $10 dollars worth of non-expiring coupons for free meals at local restaurants. So after a year, you get all your money back, in the form of coupons that you can use for free meals, or that you can sell to anyone else at face value. Would you do it?

Why?

Would you do it after considering that the person selling you the hat will put your money into the bank and earn interest on it all year, while you get no interest income from your money?

Would you do it after considering that it costs the hat seller very little actual money to give you the coupons? That he effectively gets to keep most of your money, in exchange for something that only has value if someone else is willing to accept it at its marked face value?

Would you do it if the hat cost you $1,200 dollars up front, and you get $100 in coupons each month, because you wear 10 different colors of shirts, (10 alts) and he wants you to get a hat for each of them?

Would you do it if you didn't even get the hat???


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Would you do it if he was pointing a gun at you, and said that if you don't accept his "offer", that he will steal your watch, your car, and your money? (The equivalent of severely restricting non-Premium members, by denying them abilities that they have today.)
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Do you see the parallel?

I can afford the hat, sure. But why should I give him my real money, in exchange for coupons worth the same value, when I won't get most of those coupons until much later in the year? Why should he get the use of my money, and the interest income from my money? Why not just pay cash for the meals as I need them?

He needs to give me something more useful than a hat and coupons, to make it worth my investment up front. And that is what this thread is supposed to be about. What can LL offer to make it more worthwhile for people to become Premium Members?

What he needs to AVOID doing is threatening people with a reduction in what they have now, if they don't sign up as Premium members.

There have been several suggestions that cost LL very little, and that don't penalize those who choose not to go Premium. I hope the Lindens take some of those ideas to heart.

By the way, some of the worst Griefers in SL history have been Premium Account holders. Yes, the script kiddies and low-end griefers use lots of throw-away alts, now that they can get a free account so easily. But back before there were any Free accounts, we still had plenty of griefers. Returning to a "members only" state won't make them go away. It will just get rid of the weaker ones.

And you would lose a lot of the content creators from SL.

GOOD MOVE </Sarcasm>

People DON'T use push to grief any more, they didn't to any significant extent before the last round of nerfing... unless you count "security orbs", which Linden Labs doesn't consider griefing.

Given that restricting push to objects owned by you or objects owned by the landowner has been effective in limiting its use as a griefing tool, there's no reason not to apply the same restrictions.

Further restricting it by ignoring teleport requests from landowner objects for some period after a teleport is completed would prevent people using "security devices" to lock someone into a teleport loop, and that pretty much closes off the possibilities. IF it turns out that isn't enough, THEN they can limit it further. I don't see that would be necessary.

The same thing is true for push-based elevators and rides, no?

To be honest, no. You lost me with all the ramblings about hats, restaraunts, guns, coupons and what not.

I was referring to accounts in SL. We are all here by choice. When I was created (I'm an alt or whatever you want to call it) I was born as a premium account. So's the original account. I kind of like being a citizen.

Got no problem with freebie accounts (some of my best friends, etc...), but I think that you ought to get something a bit more for being a premium. Like I said:

1. A throw away benefit like some free uploads each month
2. Better access to live support

Doubt that we can expect much more for no increase in fees.

IMHO, LL made a huge mistake when they created the two class system by allowing free, unlimited accounts. I am guessing that they may be thinking twice about this as well. Given their recent history of trying to rectify past mistakes with clumsy solutions, this thread may be the first step in their attempt to get rid of the free account as we know it.

I haven't kept up with the recent discussion, but this idea came up again with a friend last night...

Aside from more groups for one account (which everyone wants, not just premium members and probably costs too much), how about enhancing the transactions page?

First though, it would need to be changed to retain 31 days of transactions instead of one day less than a month as it does now!

Then a great feature some members might find it worth paying for would be an ability to sign up so their monthly transactions are automagically emailed to them once a month!

Hi T, nice to meet you.

I didn't read through all these pages of suggestions but I have a very easy one that won't cost the lab a dime. Just tell them OFTEN that the money they are paying you is appreciated and that it all helps to further the lab to hire coders, liaisons, etc etc.

Nothing is worse then paying a company faithfully as many have every month only to have the CEO of the company they are paying talk down to them and make comments that imply what they are paying does not really make a difference. For some of these people that 10 bucks a month is hard to get at times.. there is something to be said for feeling like anything you are doing is helping further something you love. LL lost sight of telling it's residents loud and often that the small and large things they do to help LL out (and ultimately comes back to help them in the long run) are appreciated by LL.

So.. appreciate that 9.95 as if it was the last 9.95 some had to give in their entertainment budget and say thanks. Say.. "thanks to premium account payers we were able to invest in X or fix X, etc." I think you get what I mean.

By all means.. sweeten that long over due pot so people get something back for the 9.95... but show them they matter and it helps and that will go pretty darn far.

Good luck with your new post.

I would get a Premium Account if:

1) it came with a faster way to file DMCAs.
For example, an email address I could send a PDF to instead of paying $1 a page to fax the damn things at Staples.

2) Customer service reps were more skilled. My experience with live chat is that it's not worth using. Asking residents on the forums is more useful.

3) More groups! Between deeding things to land, getting access to private sandboxes and trying to join update and tutorial groups, I never have anything free. That's a luxury I'd pay for.

4) Let OpenSim/Homestead owners be allowed to change estate owner to people who are premium members. I think the last thing I read on this is that you aren't allowing estate owners to be changed anymore, unless it's back to the original. I'm not saying let the Premium users buy and own homesteads, but if you made it so that premium users can get access to them through regular sim owning friends, that would be a great incentive.


Note: I'm not a land owner. I don't ever plan to own mainland again. The reason for this is that having little control over your neighbors sucks and it has nothing to do with LL.
But I would pay a small subscription fee for the above stuff.

Also as a basic account content creator who files DMCAs too often... uh the people who steal from me own sims. I don't even own a sim yet. The thieves would buy premium accounts if it meant they could make money.

I know it's been said before in this thread, but on the off-chance T is still reading:

For those who actually know how it works, there's an enormous, deal-breaking disincentive to being a Premium member. If a Premium member should be incapacitated or otherwise unable to attend to Second Life long enough to miss one of the times Billing screws up (which it does, eventually, to every Premium member), the consequences are not just losing all the land and everything on the land, but also losing the entire contents of the account's Inventory.

But that doesn't happen to Basic accounts.

So, any resident with anything they value in Inventory should immediately sell all Mainland and downgrade to Basic to prevent this from happening. You just never know when something might happen that will keep you away for a few months. And you certainly can't predict when LL Billing and your credit card company will quit playing nicely together.

It's really not in LL's interests to penalize their Premium accounts like this. Fix this first.

So am I. That "rambling" is called an Analogy. Sometimes a situaition is more clear when placed in a different context. I was trying to explain why tying up your money in someone else's activities just to get the same value back over the course of a year is not a good deal.

Instead of "Someone walks up to you, and says that they will sell you a hat for $120 dollars. They say that if you give them the money and wear that hat every day, that at the end of each month they will pay you $10 dollars worth of non-expiring coupons for free meals at local restaurants. So after a year, you get all your money back, in the form of coupons that you can use for free meals, or that you can sell to anyone else at face value. Would you do it?"

Read it as "Linden Lab offers to sell you a premium account for $72 dollars. They say that if you give them the money and remain a Premium member, that at the end of each month they will pay you $6 dollars worth of Linden Dolars. So after a year, you get all your money back, in the form of Linden Dollars. Would you do it?"

Or even more simply put : "Would you give Linden Lab an interest-free loan for a year, and allow them pay the money back to you as 12 installments, in Linden Dollars?"

To become Premium, I have to tie up $72 of my money in a way that earns no interest, to get L$ that I will just turn around and cash out. I don't see the benefit to me in doing that. It's giving LL an interest free loan, and getting nothing useful in return.

I am already an active, contributing member of the community. I already support the SL economy and its growth in many ways. If the Premium Membership offered me some tangible benifits that I could see as useful to me, like free texture uploads, or better asset/inventory management, or a free name change, or an ability to link my alts and transfer inventory freely between them, then I would consider it. But I'm not going to buy it just for the warm fuzzies of having helped to support Linden Lab, while getting nothing more in return than I wouldn't get if I didn't buy that membership.

I would happily pay for things like better technical support, but their tech support is abysmal.

I would happily support the idea of all alts having to have payment info on file (all mine do), and having to pay a one-time fee for them (Like the $9.95 USD per alt fee that LL has on the books, but refuses to make it possible for an honest person to pay it), if that fee also allowed the alts to be linked to a main account, with some sort of benefits like unrestricted inventory transfers between linked accounts. (Provided there was a grace period for paying those registration fees.)

I don't want to pay for free tier on mainland or for a L$ stipend, because, for me, those hold no value. It's just giving LL an interest-free loan.

YES YES YES YES YES!

This is why I pay annually and keep another year's payment in my US$ credit as soon as I can pull it together from in-world sales. So I've always got at least a few months lead time before Linden Labs has to go ask Paypal for money.

At this point I'd *pay* Linden Labs a fee for "account insurance", to ensure that if I didn't pay my account would immediately tier down to Basic instead of becoming locked out and destroyed.

I don't understand why they do this. If they trash the account, they're never going to get paid. If they make it impossible to pay (as they sometimes do, if someone has L$ enough to pay but hasn't sold the L$ for US$) they're never going to get paid. If they keep the account on hold, people will be more willing to pay to get it back.

Yes, Tom, please look at this situation and ask yourself, does it make any sense at all?