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

Oh yes, and make parcel-to-parcel an option, maybe a new tab (nobody on THIS parcel has to see anything on THAT parcel).

And mainland privacy. Even just skybox zones (SVC-2390).

These wouldn't be an obvious "premium" benefit but would make premium more attractive.

As it stands, the basic account has all the capability of a premium account, so a lot of people aren't going to bother with paying money they don't have to pay. Passing out free money or increased plots of land isn't the answer. No one's going to turn down freebies, but that doesn't really differentiate the product since whatever is given 'free' is coming from somewhere (the subscription cost).

Why not start by giving premium account holders more capability in world? After all, they're paying for it. Start by restricting basic accounts to only doing very basic building (cube, cylinder, pyramid, cone, sphere, and half-sphere). None of the more complex shapes, and absolutely no sculpty capability. Limit the feature set (no light, no flexi), and add some new goodies in for the Premium account holders, to create a significant differentiation.

Loosening up the prim size limits for premium account holders falls right in line with this as well.

Premium account holders shouldn't have to pay an upload/storage fee, they're already paying a lot of money.

Start charging a transaction fee whenever money changes hands, make that transaction fee higher for basic accounts, or no fee for premium accounts.

Some great suggestions in here …. Here is my two cents worth …

- Not only being able to buy Open Space Regions without having to buy a full island first. But also for those premium users that have/or will purchase a full island. Give us some sort of discount on the monthly tier.

- Premium users gain a small prim bonus on all land, even private islands.

- Lower upload fees (free would be nice)

- Higher weekly stipends as well as an anniversary stipend bonus!!!!

- Most importantly ….don’t cut the premium bennies alright in place …. Just expand on them and make them better.


/me jumps off his rezzed cube

Premium benefits I'd like to see:
- Significantly increased IM cap.
- I really like the idea of granting ability to create new megas/micros for premiums only.
- A limited amount of free web/mySQL hosting for all of those lovely things that you can't do natively with LSL, like name-to-key and check-account-balance.
- A new Premium-only library folder in inventory with unique, non-transfer stuff not available elsewhere. (Kind of like how MMORPGs give you bonus items for buying the collector's edition.)

Everytime the LL pot starts to boil over, we have another linden appear and jump into the fire. Today, we have T.

First, let me welcome you to the mess, T. Product configuration, eh? Wow, do you have your work cut out for you. And wow, are you going to get hit with your customer complaints in the near term.

I know what I would do in your shoes. I would keep the voidsims a single product, make them 1/4 the prims of a full, limit them to 1/4 the max avatars of a full sim (13), and price them at 90$ tier a month. No ifs, ands or buts. The extra 15$ a month goes directly into putting more ram in voidsim servers so the issue with Havoc4 using more ram than Havoc1 is resolved. People will accept this - pay for a quarter sim, get a quarter sim's abilities including maximum number of people.

I would also stop the silly attacks about what people can and can't build in the voids. If there are 3000 trees are 3000 cubes to make 10 homes, it is the same to the server. Many groups let two to four people have a small home and lots of space in the voids to pay for them. And four or fewer homes is NOT going to load your sim down. What kills the sims is the Havoc4 memory issue and the viewers not fetching textures from cache properly. Tell people that Openareas may have no more than 4 homes in it and you'll have happy customers once more. We aren't abusing the system, just trying to find ways to pay you the dollars you expect come payday.

In the end, we all paid big money in setup fees for a product. When you needed money quick, we came through for you. Now all we expect is our product, or a refund of the setup fees we paid. It's as simple as that. Give us the 1/4 sim with 1/4 sim's prims and avatars, or give us our money back. If you raise the price to 90$ a month in order to up the ram in the voids, we'll understand that. But we do NOT understand your taking our purchases away from us and leaving us with a product we didn't want, didn't purchase, and didn't have any say in. It is that which burns us the most.

Offer the quarter sim product at 90$ a month with caps on prims and avatars, and add some ram to those servers. What we build and put on our stuff really shouldn't matter to you so long as we aren't harming the system. What has been harming asset has been the cache fault rather than the voidsims. So stop blaming us simply because we followed your examples in Mos Ainsley.

It would also go far in restoring faith in LL if you told everyone who got rid of a void sim the past month that they could have it back, no fees, at the new price and configuration.

If the MBAs there wonder just how deep the wallets go, you now have a solid depth reading.

I'd love WoW style logins for many reasons, one account then you choose which avatar to go inworld with.

Er.. We're talking about premium and concierge accounts, right? Or is it just premium?

Like, when y'all say "premiums should be able to..." are you including people like Desmond in that? (dunno if he's actually premium or not - just using a well-known name that doesn't need to be premium)

Hmm, seeing as Premium Subscribers are the only ones who can purchase land, initially laid out by LL, regardless of who they subsequently buy it from, I think they make plenty of money out of us.

I still want a retraction, or at least a public apology. And seeing as I've had a private apology from someone at LL, I think my request is deserved.

this wouldnt make me want to go from basic to premium, it would make me want to go from basic to cancel. I dont need SL to survive in life.

Yeah I found the club when I was out there, it seems ridiculous that can not be an abuse issue. How can anyone else do anything in that sim? That's a seriously bad situation, I felt sorry for the person with the rental office.

The main thing that you could do to make Premium attractive to me would be to put 'Sexy Sadie's Massage Parlour' as the narrative on the credit card statement, as even that would be more attractive to my wife than me spending money on "that stupid game".

Even more seriously, you are going about this the wrong way. What is needed is to introduce something new for Basic accounts which "enhances" their experience in a way that encourages them to upgrade so the "enhancement" disappears. Like advertising. Real World advertising, maybe from Google, that slips almost subliminal messages in amongst public chat, or as blue "public service warnings" or even IMs from a Group you can't leave, nor turn off the messages from. Double whammy for LL, a more satisfactory experience for Premium members who don't get interrupted and the Basics can't complain because they are still enjoying mutually satisfactory intercourse with the intelligentsia of the global IT literate community.

Hell, Google might even buy LL with that proposition in view.

Pep (I have more ideas but you'd have to pay for them)

First step is to stop focusing on the "First Hour Experience", stop trying to revamp things that aren't broken, and stop breaking things...Like the client itself, which has grown more and more bugs that need fixing because of the "fixes" that came before it. Almost to the level of, fixing one bug means two more bugs will pop up. Look at the previous two releases of the clients (not the security update ones), and the list of bug fixes, which is 2 pages long, most of which were bugs that happened from "fixing" previous or other bugs.

I'm a first-time premium user, simply because support refused to help me with a more complex issue, but upon looking at all the bonuses of becoming a premium member, I now know why I was never one in the first place - You get virtually nothing. I'm not going to rehash and repost everything people have listed before me, because I love almost all the idea's (except the personal website space, we already have enough Myspace's, Facebooks, etc., we don't need another one for SL).

Just my suggestions here:

I am approaching my third year, now, as a premium subscriber and to be honest, like others, my plans at the moment are to cancel the subscription because it doesn’t really offer value for money anymore and doesn’t really offer any incentives to remain a premium member. I have to agree that the nature of whatever changes are made to the premium accounts should not come at the expense of the facilities enjoyed by basic accounts – so the basic account isn’t ‘downgraded’ feature-wise.

My suggestions would be:

1) Increasing the basic level of tier-free land to 1024m for premium account subscribers, with perhaps a staggered second increase (say to 1536m) for individuals who have held a premium account and been in good standing with the company for more than two years. Perhaps a third increase (say to 204 for premium members of three or more years?

2) Similarly, perhaps an increase in the weekly stipend for premium account holders of more than 12 months (say an additional L$50 – 100 per week?)

3) An additional bonus (say L$2500 ish) if you renew your subscription on an annual basis, paid at the time of renewal

4) Perhaps a discounted rate on the purchase of private islands / homesteads for premium accounts of more than 12 months

5) A decrease in the basic cost of uploads for premium members, say discounted down to somewhere between L$5 and L$8 (as compared to the normal upload rates)

6) An increase in the number of groups a premium member can join (perhaps to 40)

7) A higher capping rate for IMs received when offline (say to 150 or 200)

An overhauled inworld profile with more information slots than a basic one:
- A “Business Partner” slot and the ability to list more than one person as a partner (still with the usual associated costs)
- A specific profile page to list the premium member’s personal business/group/activity that is distinct from items listed under “picks”
- More opens under the “webpage” tab, allowing the individual to link to more than one site

9) A better system for managing contacts – allowing division into three categories (for example “Contacts”, “Friends”, “Business Contacts”)

10) Access to an offline IM management / response system, say via a portal on the website, allowing responses to incoming IMs without needing to actually log in via the client.

11) Prioritised log ins during peak hours & periods of very high concurrency – it is rather infuriating to be told you cannot log in during busy periods, when we know full well that there are bot accounts etc. cluttering up the grid. Premium accounts (and concierge level) ought to have a priority during busy periods – with basic accounts being queued. Ideally this problem would go away entirely, but I think this ought to be in place for when the grid is “full”.


Of course, I’m not sure of the technical feasibility of all these. At the moment premium membership is really only needed for people holding mainland and as said above, in other services, a premium level usually implies you get “more” of whatever is on offer – with either more storage space, better tools etc. If Linden Lab is sincere in their desire to expand and retain subscription numbers, whatever is decided must not only offer “more” to existing mainland holders and subscribers, but also seek to broaden the appeal of a premium membership beyond the ability to hold mainland and cry to a Linden in LiveChat when things are not working properly.

Longer term bonuses for premium level members should be considered as part of the ongoing development of the platform too. These could be things like a better avatar mesh, more clothing layers for the avatar, better inventory sorting tools etc. Things that wouldn’t particularly detract from the experience of the new user, per se, but add layers of extra functioning and benefit to those who do commit to making a monthly/annual subscription.

Nothing new to bring to the table, but I'd like to voice my support for the following ideas:

- more granular tier levels
- increased tier-free land each year of membership
- "temporary" first land, to give new premiums a taste of what land ownership is like
- reduced upload fees, or free uploads

I agree, this is what I would like to see too

No. He wasn't talking about tier. He was talking about the US$72/year premium fee. That's it. Not tier. Not anything else. Just the US$72/year that they give back US$60 of. Not tier.

True, "premium or better".

Yes.. They owned most of that region before the club showed and ended up buying an island because the sim performance was so horrible when they could even get in.

It's literally like that all day, every day and has been for over a year.

We're talking just premium I believe but part of that discussion should involve estate owners who aren't premium. What could be added to tempt them to become premium?

As both a premium account and a private estate holder and a multi-year SL resident who has considered giving all of it up, it's quite simple what is needed:

Fix it.

I am regularly losing inventory, attachments, etc. Prims drift as do landmarks, teleports work on a "sometimes" basis, land permissions sometimes work, sometimes don't, scripts stop running "just because", etc. Before you even THINK about making a "Premium" product (even though you already have one), you need to make the basics just plain work so as to stop people from leaving (or consider leaving).

Once you get that, THEN we can start talking about adding complexity with flexible profiles and abilities. I have a long list of stuff that you can do for Premiums, but I refuse to even put that list forward because I'm afraid you'd pile more cruft on top of the cruft you already have.

I wholly agree with that statement. those tools and resources would be wonderful. what I would absolutely love, would be the option to register a "corporate web adress" next to the user web adress, so that people could advertise their company off-world and have the appropriate domain name to go with it. (which, it should be said, should be allowed to contain mature material, since many companies do offer those kinds of products. that however is subject to discussion. I could use it well, but Im not sure about any repercussions with the law)

I dont go premium because I rent my land, and really dont have /any/ use for a 512 tier. giving us corporate management and advanced communications would be wonderful.
An increase in max groups would also be VERY welcome, as a business person i find it very hard to make do with 25 groups (friend groups, mall groups, anything else.. I hit my limit today), and 50 or more would be most welcome
I would quite gladly pay a premium membership for that, it would provide some handy tools for me which I can and would make use of. Im sure there are more things, and im not sure about the ease of implementation, but that would be my opinion about a useful premium membership perk

For me it is all about land and tier levels. As things stand now, I will not be buying any more land because I am maxed out, even with the group bonus, and the tier jump from 1.5 sims to 2 sims is just too much. In actuality, ALL the tier jumps are too much but my bank account says 1.5 sims is all I can afford.

However, changing the way tier is calculated so that you pay a certain, REASONABLE, amount of tier per 512 on a sliding downward scale the more land you own instead of such huge jumps would certainly be seen by me as huge added value.

Giving premium members the benefit of tier free land on each anniversary would be great too. New premium =512 no tier, 1 year = another 512 (1024 total) no tier, etc.

Another thing I would love to have is more performance and content information about my parcels. Especially since I do not own one entire sim anywhere but I do own the majority of two different sims and am often puzzled as to why they have performance issues when the rest of SL is not otherwise freaking out. Like others have said, being able to pinpoint laggy scripts and or otherwise diagnose where a problem is originating and things like that, would be great.

Another land related thing would be land auctions. I don't know if it's possible or how much trouble it would be but any parcel under 512 that will be auctioned should be offered to landholders in the same sim FIRST before being placed for auction.

The land/tier issues have the most meaning for me as something that would be an incentive to remain premium and/or buy more land, especially as the economy gets worse and worse.

Yep I can agree, get rid of free accounts to and charge every account $5 for 5 alts and the botting problem will be solved too.
Other than more tier graduations so we don't need to pay for 1/2 a sim to own 1/3 of one.
I'd rather have the stipend dumped completely and just pay less per month too.
1024 land allocation, and perhaps ability to build bigger prims and be in more groups, maybe limit free acounts to 15 groups and bump premiums to 30.
I don't think cheap/free uploads are a good idea as the asset derver has enough red brick wall textures already, perhaps raise the upload price on free accounts instead.
Linking of the 5 alts to the main so the main has responsibility for all the creations etc and transferable inventory. But ability to change the displayed names of the alts.

In the SL sense of "ownership" only the private estate owner really owns the land on a private estate, the other people on a private estate are actually leasing from the estate owner because they pay the estate owner tier in the hope the estate owner pays LL. In my experience, only on the mainland with a premium account can anyone "own" less than a full sim and pay tier to LL.

This was actually floated by a Linden as one of the things the new perl-based land management tools could do for us, like, two years ago.

Adjacent landholders first, I think, then other landholders in the same sim.