Added benefits for premium accounts

If they were interested in that ratio I don't think they'd be pushing for N Million Members (cue Doctor Evil).

Why should they care if the tierthey get for a sim comes in via N premium members directly, or 1 land baron who gets rent from N basic members and takes on the customer service issues for them? Especially when new islands will get them 50% more tier than mainland.

I don't know. I'm not convinced either way. Premium members who own land directly cost them more because they have to support them directly. I don't know what the actual figures are, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that there are tier ranges where, on average, premiums with X tier are a net loss.

And how much does it cost to ignore help requests exactly? Ok, joking aside, I became a premium member 2 weeks after I joined, and this Monday was the first time I even pressed the help button (had some inventory vanish). And I'm sure there are some basic members that request help all the time. So on average it's probably the largest group that generates the most help work, and that would be the non-premium group. So I don't think you could say it's costs more to support premium members.

I understand...my how sinister! You're probably not wrong. I imagine that between (okay and here is where I expose my technical ignorance *cue laugh track) the database issues created by land ownership and the monthly fees, not to mention customer service issues; bug reports and the like, it would probably be much simpler for LL to deal with a few large land owners rather than thousands of 512 owners.

I'm not sure whether the intent of creating a land baron society was there, but I can imagine their pricing tier in such a way that encourages people to buy larger quantities of land, rather than smaller.

Yayyyy...I get it now.
Thanks J

1 basic owning a new private sim = $295/month
4 premiums owning 16,384m² = 4 * $6 + 4 * $75 = $324/month

I'm not sure how you're missing all the posts in Resident Answers that involve rentals either, and from what live helper friends tells me, people don't go to their landlord with problems, they go to Live Help to rant and scream about it.

How is a premium member costing them more than a basic? For one, the premium is actually paying for support, where a basic isn't, and from what I hear more Linden time gets wasted by people screaming they'll sue because their Xcite prim attachments aren't rezzing, than premium members who need help with their land.

Keep in mind that private islands are 100% owned one person...

But mainland sims have some percentage of "Reserved Land" (sometimes 20% or more). Providing land for 4 people at quarter sim tier requires more than one sim.

Also... consider efficiency... smaller tiers let people tune their tier level to reduce the amount of 'wasted tier'.

Larger tier holders may be paying for nearly an entire sim's worth of unused tier, depending on the situation. It would take a lot of small tier residents to equal the amount of 'unused allocation' that LL collects revenue on without having to support land for.

The 9% difference between 1-full sim owner and 4 quarter-sim owners could easily be swallowed up by either or both of those factors.

But the thing is it isn't as simple as that. I think Linden Labs absolutely love resident creativity. That's why they provide free sandboxes where anyone can build all they want. But at the end of the day, they also have to pay their bills... and unfortunately, that has to take priority, because if it doesn't, the investors pull out and the bailiffs go in.

Liek, gasp, 7 people owning 1/8th of a sim apiece, that'll get you your protected land and still have more tier payments than a full sim.

Still not 20% protected? Try 12 people owning 1/16th of a sim. 25% unused.

Or 102 people owning 512 sq. m. At $6 a month that's $612 into LL pocket compaired to $295.

102 people owning 512sqm, paying $6ish to $9ish a month (depending on plan) would actually be closer to $765 a month.

Now... let's see, each of those get L$300 to L$500 a week, roughly 4.5 weeks in a month... so LL pays out L$184,000 a month (roughtly). Which they could have sold on the Lindex for about $670 instead.

Woot... LL makes 'roughly' $97 bucks total off of a sim full of "no-tier premiums" with 21% of the land held in reserve. (and I didn't even factor in credit card transaction fees ).

Jeez, I'm an engineer and all this math is making MY head swim. Anyone wanna buy 6800 sm? I'm not sure I want it anymore... *looks confused*

There are some features that couldn't - easily - be implemented or added because they would increase the load on the grid too much (for instance increasing the number of groups to 50). Since there are far, far less premiums LL could implement those and only allow access to those features from a premium account. Once/if there are enough of those that would add value to being premium without taking away anything from basics (you can get by with 25 groups to follow the prior example).

In the "not so useful, but giving the appearance of extra value" category things like an "official" SL email address, or an LL hosted blog-like site that's templated to fit into the web profile tab wouldn't really cost them anything, but it could be a convenient addition for some.

I -really- kinda like Kitty's email address idea. It would be a valuable extension to resident communication, and for a lot of folks who flow offline IMs to their personal email address, would be a perfect place for those to go, as it maintains your in-world personna and keeps your private email address (and real name) private. (Not that I care much.. my real name is in my profile here, but many many folks do care about this)

That's the sortof thing I can get totally behind as a premium "perk".

zk

I think the free uploads are a great idea This would also encourage people to share textures for free with new players as it's not like it cost them anything to acquire them anyway.

And yes, I certainly agree there should be some kind of 'LindeX buyer/seller' discount -- maybe not for premium members, but at least for us concierge members.

As for the .35, I agree. Oftentimes (today for example), I found myslef with 0L having spent it all earlier on properties -- which is fine, I haven't found any others I want since. However, I forgot to leave myself 10L to upload a picture of one of the properties and I sure as heck am not going to pay a 0.35 premium just to get a few lindens

LL doesn't actually nessessarily make money selling L$ on LindeX. First, every one of those 102 would have to want L$ at the right price and when LL had volume they could sell AND no other resident priced to sell at the same price. LL's L$ sells last.

And besides, all that L$ they add to the market came from sinks in the SL economy, selling it actually hurts the economy in the long run, but I don't blame them for using it as a reserve to keep the LindeX market stable and active (as a side note, have you seen the guy who put up L$10,000 at a 1:1 sell? Or the 10million up at a 999999:1 buy?).

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/02/16/contingency-measures-to-ensure-service-as-second-life-grows/

Yay,

A benefit to being a premium member!

And not just premium, ANYONE who's paid money to LL via any means, including LindeX trading.
Looks like it's time for me to use that lurvly payment info I have onfile. I don't want to be shut out if the grid ever goes restricted.

I see your point, and I suppose it depends.

New Month-to-Month'ers get ~L$1350 in stipends over a month for their ~$9.50 a month fees. (143L per 1US of fees).

Old annual subscribers get ~L$26000 in stipends over a year for their $72 annual fees. (361L per 1US of fees).

Of course, LL needs to cover the cost of keeping that premium account's land online, however much that works out to, who can say?

I think the point is: LL can only mint so much money a month.
Some goes to stipends... some goes to the lindex.

If they pay less in stipends they can safely sell more on the Lindex, which, considering how many L$500 a week premiums are still around, would allow them to sell those L$ at a much better rate.

Back when this all came about in the first place, I was wildly opposed to the idea of LL minting new L$ to sell directly on the Lindex... I'm still not fond of it, but I have to admit, now that they do... having a stable L$ value seems to be a clear priority for LL.

Unrelatedly, the idea that a tierless premium could subscribe to an annual plan, and sell their stipends at a profit just seems very wrong, always has to me, and I'm sure it's been responsible for the creation of a lot of nearly pointless alts. I can't blame LL for lowering new premium stipends to L$300 a month to discourage stipend farming.

1) They can "print" an infinite amount if they so chose. It's just a number.
2) Take a look at sources and sinks. Last I checked sources (mainy stipend) was up around L$65,000,000 and sinks was at a mere $20,000,000 at best.
They have not raised the sinks in any fassion (meaning the 20 mil is stil 20 mil) while sources rise with new premium accounts (assuming) AND "all" the sink money goes back into LindeX ("LL will not sell more volume than total sinks in the last 30 days".

Sorry, I meant they can only mint and release a certain amount of money into SecondLife without adversely affecting the value of the L$. (I swear I typed that the first time, not sure how it vanished from my post.

Rules can change at anytime. If LL decides they're empowered to sell all the sink money for the last 45 days... or they need to curb it to the last 3 weeks... they will.

I like this one, with two million+ accounts, having guaranteed real-time (or at least far more frequent than other uses) back-ups of your inventory would be great. It would be expensive for LL to securely back-up every account's stuff, but if it were just for premiums then it's an incentive well worth happening just to know that if your sim crashes you won't lose something forever.

Private sim owners are premiums, so that's $301-$305 a month, but either way you're looking at less than 10% difference.

People do both. Bad landlords don't save LL much. Good landlords save them a lot. And don't forget, they can much more easily simply ignore problems off the mainland estates. They really do come and respond to problems there...

I've had Lindens come out to handle mainland parcel problems at least once every month I've owned land on the mainland.

1. I can't imagine a Linden coming out to help someone with a non-rezzing Excite attachment.

2. I haven't had to have Alliez Mysterio come out nearly as often, because she actively keeps problems from happening.

That's two ways.

Premium isn't a requirement for owning a private sim, there's 3 or 4 posts in Linden Answers confirming that.

You also missed the point: the 4 premiums owning one mainland sim is the break-even point compared to a private sim tier. As soon as 4 or more people own a sim's worth LL gets more money than if they were renting on a private sim. The extreme being 1 mainland sim of 512m² parcels giving LL $768-1280/month depending on monthly/quaterly/yearly.

Lindens do actively state that private sim problems should be directed towards the sim owner, but it still wastes their time just pointing that out because it's not until they for the sim name that they know whether they can help or not.

You don't have to answer all the spam that fills your e-mail box either, but it still adds up to a whole lot of time wasted identifying them and deleting. Restricting who can get to Live Help in the first place would cut down on a whole lot of the "noise" (wasting volunteers' time isn't really a workable or rewarding solution either) and leave more time that can be spent actually helping or assisting.

Just saying "go ask so-and-so" still saves them a lot of money.

Spam from people who ren't my customers takes maybe 100 times less of my time than spam from people who are.

At the bare minimum a landowner should always have access to the property they have paid for. Thus one perk of being premium should be the ability to enjoy their parcel regardless of how many campers are vegging out in that nasty box casino, whorehouse thats been built next door. To have a paying customer locked out of their own home because of some popular tourist attraction in the same sim is bad business. This shouldnt be an added benefit, this should have been added from the start.