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

Im off on a another tangent ... again =)

I just started thinking about why account membership is tied to land at all. If it wasnt then LL could sell packages of services as well as land. So when you come into SL for the first time you get a free Avatar Pack pretty much like you get now as Basic Account.

If you wanted to you could buy a First Land Starter Pack for 3 months or whatever and you get a place rented to you by LL and also get a training course that teaches you how to manage the land controls, terraform, make a garden and build a house with some furniture it and stuff like that. Maybe you also get a stack of linden dollars as well in the Pack.

Or you could buy a Designers Starter Pack that gave you a whole bunch of clothing templates, textures, etc and lessons on how to get started on that. And a lindens stack as well.

Or a Scripters Starter Pack.

Or you could buy a Business Pack on a renewal basis that gave you things like more Group slots, uploads at Business rates, and so on.

There are any number of things that people want in the way of services that have little or nothing to with land. For example I want a personalised webpage and a email. If LL packaged and sold it to me on a annual basis I would be happy to pay for it. Other people may not, and if its sold as a package they dont have to pay for something they dont want. Unlike if it was bundled into a Premium Account for example.

Mainland and Islands you should be able to buy anytime you want. You just pay whatever the Tier and setup fees for the land you have.

I Avatar, I suppose. I buy or rent what I want when I need it, linden dollars included. I dont need to pay an Account Fee to get it given back to me in stipend or bonus tier. It doesnt make sense. Nor should I have to pay a fee for the right to own land. If I want land I should be able to buy it for what its worth, pay the tier, and thats all.

If someone creates a JIRA for this, I will vote for it. I gave up creating them. They just get closed with lame excuses.

Coward.

/me adds http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1961

Since most of the stuff suggested in this thread of T's is already in JIRA, I'm not hopeful that this new JIRA will be productive. I added it anyway though, so go vote it up!

Of course, you can also buy these things in SL from people other than Linden Labs.

However, you have managed to bubble another one of my periodic musings to the forefront of the viscid swamp of my mind, so I might as well let it drift ashore here...

I have wondered, in the past, why I can buy IMVU money at the local grocery store alongside iTunes, eMusic, and Napster bucks, Home Depot and Bed Bath and Beyond gift cards, and the like... but I can't buy Linden Dollar gift cards the same way.

Hi, I would like to see the following improvements as premium:

1) Transactions history is now limited to 30 days. That is *just* to short for monthly financial transactions I do inworld. Please increase to 45 days, or better, 65 (covering 2 months).

2) Buying land at an auction: all my land is group-owned, and in my group I can create tier to buy groupland. But buying auction land requires me to buy on my personal account, and increase my personal tier. Then transfer it to the group (which has tier space) and lower my tier again. Rather costly. Please allow "buy for group" at land auctions.

3) The obvious: higher weekly stipend... and hold more land tierfree, like 1024 m2 instead of 512 m2.

Think of a future when everybody will be able to have his own sim which is running on a home computer, I will happily pay the same amount I am paying for a premium account for a connection to the maingrid. Land is not a product nor a service. Start selling the connection to main grid as service.

Just after a simple sum of things, I found out that I will be running sims MUCH more efficient than Linden Labs in various datacenters all over the world.

Sell that and you will get my recognition Mr. Tom Hale.

Caz, Iustinian, Tom is no longer reading this thread. The current discussions are just "winding down" side issues.

make that e-mail and agreed.

Linden Labs e-commerce is run by Fred Flintstone

Linden Labs is one of the most difficult providers to pay in the online world. And once you have subscribed their renewal does not work without a lot of manual intervention. I wonder what the rate of premium subscribers lost to frustration is? When your renewal fails your account and everything you have built or uploaded is destroyed. How mad are you? Do you ever come back or do you just create a non-subscriber account having accepted that a year's work is lost?

Stop the Monthly Banana Republic Dictator Proclamations

The Terms of Service are a contract and should remain fairly constant. The Lindens are destroying roughly one business class every three months through policy changes and it is making much of the business community wary if not outright hostile. Every time they do this they say it only affects the businesses run by a few accounts, but the end result is that these users often quit using Second Life and their cash flow is removed from the economy and their land is sold for cut rate prices or sits abandoned until their accounts expire. And the rest of the business community looks at their commitments in the world and cashes out as much as they can rather than continuing to invest.

Throttle the Robots

Do something about robots in the land markets. It is easy enough to add a delay to the financial transaction, this often happens anyway when you buy things other than land. Even a one minute delay would seriously limit most of the robots by cutting down on the speed with which they could do transactions. If you can throttle HTTP requests you can throttle robot land purchase requests.

Examine how tiers work

I regularly encounter premium subscribers who own no land at all because 512m is insufficient for what they want to do so they rent land or negotiate for the use of private spaces in exchange for services. I know tiers work just fine for the lab financially, but they are a regressive tax and they should probably be based on actual square meters rather than arbitrary binary values.

I would like to see a discount on tier for owning more land. Most businesses offer a discount for buying in bulk so why not offer a tier discount for owning more land. The last thing I would like to see is the ability to let residents auction off their mainland lots and let residents bid on them. I'm sure both would make you more money as well so it would help you and the residents out both.

Thanks so much everyone for a great and productive thread packed with your great suggestions on what we should do to make Premium accounts more valuable.

I've quoted T Linden's last post, (scroll back about one page to see it) where he summarizes your suggestions, and of course says we don't have a timeline at this point for any potential changes, but will share it as soon as we can.

Thanks!

-- Katt