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

In a Company ruled by The Tao? Vaguery is King.

The feedback/insights/suggestions that have been shared the past few days have been terrific, and is a testament to the passion that Residents have to improve the SL experience for everyone.

Since my last summary post 4 days ago, I wanted to share some additional takeaways. I appreciate all the time you’ve spent reading and commenting on this thread, and going forward we’ll digest all the great input you’ve provided as we continue to evaluate how we can make the Premium membership a more valuable part of your Second Life experience. We don’t have a timeline for this yet, but we’ll share that as soon as we can.

There were some new themes that have emerged in the last few days (in addition to strong reinforcement of many of the earlier themes that I summarized earlier). These can be described as:

*Improving communications with all Residents. This includes messaging to and reminding non-Premiums about the benefits of Premium membership such as live customer support, Premium-only forums that have active Linden participation, and visibility into longer term product planning.

*Premium product bundling that allows Residents to choose which benefits they care about, so that land owners are getting benefits they need while non-landowners are getting benefits they need the most.

*Enhancing Residents’ ability to connect with their real-life friends, such as being able to invite people from their address books or organizing their in-world Contacts list.

*Better orientation and acclimation for new Premium members, such as in-depth training taught by Lindens or certified instructors on topics like LSL, advanced tools, etc.

*Improved visibility into how a Premium’s land or business is performing in world, such as data on visitors and objects or APIs to sales data.

I also realize that few of you have had a chance to read every post on this thread, so I’ll recap some of the earlier themes that have been consistently reinforced in the last few days, including:

*Increased utility and functionality, typically in the form of higher limits for groups and offline IMs, and inventory backup. There were new ideas such as visual mute/invisible status, friends list organization tools, and priority login that certainly also deserve consideration.

*More land benefits, in the form of more tier that gets progressively higher the longer you’re a member, the ability to buy Homesteads/Open Spaces without have to own a private region, and higher prim and avatar limits. Other suggestions include zoned mainland to make it more attractive to Premiums and better server class for mainland sims (class VI).

*Increased monetary benefits, typically in the form of higher or progressively increasing stipends, discounts on a range of services such as classifieds, partnerships, and parcel search, and more free tier.

*Improved access to customer support, including 24*7 availability, priority queues, guarantees on response and resolution time, and live inworld support.

*Greater sense of identity, including real names, personalized email addresses, and domain names. More recent suggestions include personalized profile pages and the ability to change your existing avatar’s first and last names.

*Stronger support for content creators, such as content import/export tools, premium only sandboxes, server-side scripting features for premiums only, and free avatar meshes with more fine-tuning and slider options in appearance.

*Create more exclusives like unique Linden Lab content, annual gifts from Linden Lab that get sent in the mail (“even if it was hokey like a pendant”), premium only newbie skins, clothes and prefabs, cars, etc, premium-only land auctions in Linden designed places like Nautilus, or even a vacation area where premiums can spend 2 weeks in private, well-decorated tropical locations.

In addition, many of you have shared a broad range of concerns, including:

*Don’t “improve” the Premium product by degrading the experience of non-Premiums, i.e, don’t take away existing functionality for non-Premiums.

*Reducing stipends is only going to reduce the amount of L$ paid for advertising, uploads, and other services.

*There’s no need for a Premium membership and Linden Lab should consider creating a single class of Residents with equal rights and equal obligations (e.g, financial).

*Try to avoid to get trapped by excessive advertising, despite some Residents’ suggestions like “5 second ads per teleport for Basics unless you go Premium,” or “let Premiums advertise on the teleport page for free.“

Again, I appreciate the feedback and in the coming months you should expect to hear more about what we’ve learned and what we’re doing about it. In the meantime, I’ll see you all in world!

Going to split this topic on llTeleportAgent off into a new thread, for anyone who is interested:

/13/da/294646/1.html

I have no issues with Premium accounts, as they are.

My issue is with Linden Lab co-opting the innovations of it's residents for their own gain.

Co-opting GOM was shameful. Selling L$ used to take 2 days at most. Now it takes weeks.

Selling 70K USD of freshly minted money every month by Supply Linden..... not only competes with residents, but actually takes money out of their pockets, by causing them to sell far below it's real value.

Using freshly minted L$ for the Linden Prize costs LL nothing, yet undermines other resident's profitablilty.

Abandoned land was 100% automated. Land would pass from one paid tier directly into another with no Linden involvement. LL nerfed it because they wanted to profit from auctions. This gave rise to the ad farming epidemic, put residents out of work and needlessly increased LL staff workloads.

When a demand for land increases, LL cuts resident's throats by mass producing sims and flooding the market with featureless sims, mass produced for profit and little else. Driving down land values and stressing resident rentals.

Nautilus and the like, compete directly with landlords, driving down mainland/estate values, causing many to lose money or abandon the business.

Extortion is rampant. Seems the only ones unable to recognize it, are Linden Lab.

Auctions are rife with griefers and extortionists, bent on inflating prices to motivated neighbors or perpetuating the grief. Meanwhile LL is complicant to the transgressions while enjoying the profits.

Nerfing search, favoring land bots and eliminating normal resident participation was short-sighted at best, which robbed the livelyhood from alot to enrich a few. That was two years ago and despite platitudes to "make bots a bad business decision" remains nothing but an empty promise, said merely to placate residents affected by bad decisions.

I have lots of innovative ideas, but I will never impliment a single one, ever again, for fear of LL co-opting me, yet again.

I operate one of the few legitimate microparcel businesses in SL, yet am on the threshold of abandoning it entirely, because of LL's failure to allow business to thrive, without co-option, favortism or poor policy making. A once profitable business with millions invested, is not worth a plunk nickel today.



If it's broke.... ignore it. If it works....break it.

you overlooked my greatest gripe about premium:
as an estate owner and business owner, premium membership is a liability. if for some reason i cannot make a payment, i am locked out of the lindex and and my $L stolen, my estate is stolen, my inv is purged, my av is destroyed... once locked out i cannot transfer $ from an alt, cash out $L on the lindex to pay the fees, cannot have a mate pay on my behalf, nothing... this is a huge problem.
there needs to be a better way of dealing with these circumstances.

yes, ll sees someone making a profit and they will do whatever it takes to make that profit their own. i think that by its very nature of being a private business it makes anything resembling a true free economy a pipedream.

One other tiny suggestion: add a couple more spaces for picks in our profiles. Whether we use them to advertise our businesses, share our favorite places to shop, write about our favorite friends & loved ones, or as an easy way to get to our most-visited locations, who wouldn't benefit from a couple more?

Oh, so this is just muddying the waters, then? No real plans? Somehow that doesn't surprise me.

Good thing I've learned not to have high expectations anymore.

I VOTE FOR THIS ONE - as well as Premium Members being able to purchase OpenSpace or Homestead without having to own a Private Region.

Too late for voting, friends. Tom's been and done his summary and missed that important point.

I have faith that he didn't miss it.

Why, in this day and age, does it take a week to process credit card transactions?

1. The amount is removed from my account at the time of the transaction.
2. I am an overseas customer and the exchange rate can alter the origianl amount considerably.
3. I am using a Visa Debit Card not a credit card.
4. A couple of times the card has been overdrawn because when the transaction is eventually processed the amount debited is more than the original transaction because of the fluctuation in the exhange rate.
5. An overdrawn Visa Debit Card attracts a AUS$35 penalty.

Fix it!

Sunspots.

Hi Mr. T,
your knowledge about flash plugins sounds interesting. I have opened a jira for the new feature of SL at this link:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-10727

Get free tiers !

I shouldn't laugh since I have been caught out with the same problem, but that was actually funny...

A reward for staying preimum is a good idea. I have been in SL for over three years.
Some kind of bonus for renewing each year. Also, I would like to see an increase in the number of pick list you can have and groups you can belong too.

I have thought maybe it's the sharks chewing on the trans-Pacific submarine cable.

Ugh ... when I upgraded to premium my CC company had LL listed as a con/internet gaming site. It did not exactly help matters that I am in the US and they were billing out of the UK.

Is there a Jira for this?, as it gets my complete backing...
LL Fix this! The risk is simply too high.

Sorry if I not made it clear. Say you could buy a First Land Pack for 3 months or 12 months or whatever period you allowed to. The Land you get you dont own. You just renting it of LL. So while you got First Land you dont need to pay Tier or get Bonus Tier.

When your times up you can buy other land and pay Tier like everyone else, or just rent off someelse if you want.

I don't understand why you're trying to treat this as a special case. If you're premium, you get the bonus tier. If you get the first land, you obviously have to apply your bonus tier to it if you don't want to start paying extra... and your bonus tier is exactly the amount to let you own that land, so I don't understand what's wrong with just doing that.

The net effect of this is actually you do not own your land, the contents of your land and inventory, even if you are the creator.

You also cannot log in-world because your account is disabled, not even into these forums.

All is wiped out if the account cannot be attended to in 30 days from the day the account is due.

I pay for a premium account a year at a time. This saves me money. I like this concept. I'm in for the long haul, I'm making a commitment to their product YET am treated no different than one who pays month to month and creates more billing and paper work for the lab.

What statisticly needs to be done is look into how many people paying on a yearly basis own more than 512m2. If this is a direct correlation as to people who pay yearly are serious, have more land, and pay more land tier than adjust incentives to promote yearly pay offs.

One of the problems with free 512 lots or first land 512 lots is that they sit indefinatley and unused. I notice that some of the 512 lots that I ask people about and never get responses have older avatars and the land sits. Look at the 512's in Samoa for example. What is the point of this? Free 512 lots scattered across the Mainland are not attractive.

The 512 group bonus thing or 1st 512 for free doesn't matter much to power users.

I like the idea of only premium account members owning land. Because there is a huge rental market for people who don't want to pay for an account and use Estate services.

My suggestion. You are doing more paper work to bill monthly and using more office resources this is a fact. Especially with ACH billing and fees, card batches, follow ups for rejected cards, outdated cards, etc.

Read on:
Create a grid for noobs. Give the noobs a free 512 lot around a regulated and zoned LInden build. Think like a Nautilus for Noobs. only. You can only have your Noob 512 lot for 3 months. This teaches people to build, create and be part of a community and a place to call home. They can have a prefab Linden Noob home on the lot.

After 3 months they can take a member ship out on a quarterly or yearly basis. With no discount or stipend except for yearly membership. If taking a yearly membership up the tier reduction to 1024. To promote land sales.

I haven't been able to find a JIRA for this, though this one is poignant:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-726

"Closed: misfiled"