No more first land.

The first land offer was just too little land for anyone who wanted to build and keep. I had forseen that it was doomed and it finally has collapsed. In doing away with the first land though the most important reason for becoming premium has taken a small step backward. I say small because you can still own land and you still get the 512 tier discount. In doing away with the Firstland program SL now needs to replace it with special,premium account only programs. The Lindens are asking for suggestions and now is the time to speak up. These are my suggestions:

1. A sandbox for premium account holders. The griefers are now mostly non-premium account holders. If they had premium accounts they would stand to lose more in suspensions or bans.

2. Premium events. Concerts and training events open only to premium account holders.
(maybe even be given special teeshirts at these events that are exclusive to that event.)

"I payed for a premium account and all I got was this T-shirt" , hihihi

That was pretty funny. lol

If they changed the traffic rules to only count premium account holders in a location's traffic, you'd see both of these pretty damn quickly.

Hmm, premium only traffic could do with coinciding with the stupid 'ban unverified from parcel' option being removed. With traffic no longer counting unverifieds then places would have to have some genuine appeal to get traffic.
IceDragon's Playpen island has become such a disgraceful sorry sight now with camping chairs galore. It has an avatar limit in excess of 60 (dunno how, I thought the hard limit was 40) and the games there never have pots bigger than a few hundred L$. Last four times I went there I had over L$50k on me and no desire to put more than a pittance into a pot where chances are I'd lag so badly the game wouldn't even end anyway.

/mini-rant

I do however agree that premiums could still do with something more. I'm still big on a chunk of internal web-space for use with llHTTPRequest() that has no throttle and has basic PHP and a MySQL database. Even 10mb would be plenty of space for a scripter to make some killer things, but not so much appeal for the other premium users.
Someone in another thread (Suzanne?) mentioned jokingly I think secure inventory back-ups, but giving premium accounts more regular inventory back-ups would be incredibly useful and real nice to have knowing that an important item could just be a live-help call away rather than lost forever from a sim crash.
Priority for support requests definitely nice.
Priority log-ins to simulators (lower max av limit by say 10 on all sims, and allow up to ten premiums to 'force' their way in if the sim is full).

But the biggest feature of all when I think about it, would be the guaranteed right to be heard on important issues. There should be a separate premium-only voting tool where issues that are voted on enough by premium members will be looked at by Lindens without fail when the proposal reaches a threshold of votes (or maintains a high vote rating after X days and Y minimum votes or whatever).
Getting to know new features before work even starts on them would be plain awesome, we're the ones paying just to play the game, let alone the land we own, any changes to the game are likely to affect us more than the vast majority of basic account holders, so knowing what's next and being allowed to suggest or outright complain about it in the early stages would be a very good thing.

Please don't lump *all* of us free account holders into the same batch.

I am a free account holder. I am not a griefer and anyone who knows me in SL will tell you that I am a valuable contributor to the SL community. I have space available to me for a vendor and I have an established business which does not require me to own land as I am able to set up my studio on a donated section of land.

I never went to a premium account because (a) there was never first land available, and (b) I'm not trying to make real money out of the game. I'm content to keep the money I earned in SL within the confines of the game. I have no need to convert it to USD.

So why should I become a premium member?

The only issue with not is that to solve the problem of unverifieds groups need to be made and distinguished and find a way to limit one group to prevent abuse. :-\

"Please don't lump *all* of us free account holders into the same batch."


Lolita Pro, Believe me I never meant this to sound like anything against non-premium account holders. I only insinuated that if there was a sandbox for premium sccount holders as a premium perk, Then it would be more of a bite if someone would be suspended from a paid account. Please accept my apology if I have offended you or anyone else in SL.