Login preference to Premiums

If someone is a premium they should be given priority over nonpremium in the login queue due to being regular paying customers. Having 27k online at once would be alot easier to choke down the lag if the grid was more 'reserved' for premium access.

I realize some people rent on island and/or put cash in to buy lindens, but that is their choice, and does not equate them to premium in the manner of paying money directly to LL.

This is a simple feature that could be considered a benefit of premium, and help balance the cost versus just renting and buying lindens, and remaining basic.

I totally agree with you. I am a premium player and I have decided that I will not pay for another year of SL when I receive the same benefits as non premium players with the exception of the weekly stipend I receive and the ability to own Linden Land. I get the same lag issues, log in issues, same priority log in service, and all other issues that non premium players get. So tell me why I should?

Personally, I would rather see Linden Labs rise to the occasion and come up with more creative and constructive ways to reduce in world lag. I believe they are trying and things will eventually level out as far as the lag is concerned. I remember when 18,000 concurrent users made me nervous; things got bad and then they became better. There may be an uproar if Linden Labs plays favoritism with logging in priorities. Unfortunately, premium members are the minority in Second Life if I remember the blog statistics correctly. 57,000 Premium members? Regardless of that, there should be more to differentiate a Premium Account from a Basic Account. But, what can they change? Perhaps a new feature we haven't thought of yet. I'll be thinking.

Limiting logins to premiums will never work.......and I don't like that fact either. The problem is that the premium accounts are in the minority......as stated. But that could be fixed if someone at LL wanted to. I"ve been looking at other virtual worlds on the internet. Not one of them allow basic (or free) accounts the exact same features as paying accounts. There are restrictions.........the restrictions are there as an incentive to upgrade. LL has that backwards..............there are more incentives to remain basic. Only incentive left since all the new private sims have been created is "First Land". And there is not enough available to make that much of a lure..........in fact it's beginning to be a point of dissatisfaction for the new premium members.

Only feasible short term solution I've heard is to log off inactive users.........that would help a little but not enough to ease the server load I don't believe. The inactive avis are not doing much to put a load on the servers but removing them would at least free up their inventory that the client has access to. And any blingy stuff they might be wearing.

The long term solution (in my opinion) would be for LL to slow down the push for new members......not shut it off, just slow it down. Then put whatever manpower and hardware resources together necessary to address the problems. In other words.........fix it properly.

Replace "Premium" with "Verified" and I'll be right there with you.

But someone who pays Alliez Mysterio $40 a month for 8192 square meters of island is providing Linden Labs more money than someone with a premium account and 512 square meters of first land. Why should the latter get priority?

Two things:
It used to happen, but they added the debug menus and it's a client-side test. The server has no gaurenteed way of knowing if the user is active without involving the client as any such client interaction can be over-ridden with false information.
Heck, I know someone who wrote a mouse mover program that when run could easily give 4 clients the illusion of an active user. I think the number of mouse positions on the screen was about 20, so in theory, if one could run 20 clients and shrink the windows right they could run 20 idle alts.
Second: I don't think it'd actually reduce the load all that much either.

It's true taht a verified non-premium renting 8000 m2 of land on an island is providing more money that a regular premium. But its also true that a regular premium is providing more money than a verified who purchased 100 lindens once 3 months ago.

How about the system averages out your financial contribution over the last 3 months or so, and uses that as a priority indicator when teh server gets congested?

Simple Argent - Linden Labs can track the premium account's payments and the money goes directly to them.

A renter does neither. Even if he buys lindens monthly/weekly/daily, the premium puts more money -directly- in the lap of LL.

As for verified, I can see that, but premiums being a minority works -for- this argument. Less to account for and it keeps their nonpremiums ok too.

They can also see if the account owns land (or is owner of a group that owns land) on an island, they can see how many Lindens they've bought on LindeX, they *know* how much money they're putting in.

And really, the difference between verified and premium is MUCH less than the difference between verified and unverified. Unverifieds include the hordes of camper bots and greifer alts. Get them out of the grid when it's loaded and you'll get most of the improvement in performance you're looking for without discouraging people who are paying for land.

If login preference to verifieds cuts the load enough, problem solved. If not, you can still push for further limits.

But if the limit it to premium accounts only, Island owners won't be able to log in. If they include island owners also - then those renting these islands won't be able to log in. And if all the Island owners, premium accounts and Estate managers can log in and the others aren't allowed - who do we sell our wares to so we can afford these premium accounts and island?

I've got a crazy idea - Linden Lab goes back to their moneymen and get enough cash to set up servers that can handle the mess they created. The Class 5 sim owners seem to be footing the bill.

just let the unverified out, what will we lose, campers and escorts?

no big deal

I'm not sure about that. Quantity over quality - You have high-end products that sell at a fair price. Lots of folks have small gadgets that sell very low - and if enough of those sell ina day they can make as much as you do.

I don't think we should accept that this is a community problem. It is the service provider. The service provider needs to fix the problem without removing services from it's customers (online indicator)

Argent, I think for once we agree

Excuse me, but many escorts are verified users who spend a great deal of lindens on hair, skins, clothes, etc. They rent their own places on private estates and contribute to the economy. The virtual sex industry is a significant part of the SL economy and an escort earns more in 5 minutes than a camper does in an entire day.

On the other hand, I've yet to see a griefing newbie running around with his freebie cagegun that WASN'T an unverified account.

I've seen this on lots of other online games or worlds or what have you: Keep the free newbies option, but disable the account after two weeks if the user hasn't subscribed; two weeks should be enough time for anyone to decide whether they want to continue in SL. I'm not saying that this would totally fix things, and I'm sure that people would find ways around it, but it MIGHT help with lag. I know several SL Oldtimers who are leaving SL altogether because they are disgusted with the way things are going. We need to prevent the brain drain caused by unlimited access... I know this sounds elitist and snobby, but face it, didn't we all know we wanted to play SL after the first two weeks?

Everyone pays registration fees for their cars; can you imagine the state of our roads if 99% of all drivers never paid for the privilege of using them? Same concept with SL. Forcing a decision after two weeks will benefit everyone involved.

Oh, and btw, this L300 weekly stipend is silly. I'd rather they kept their money and used it to buy more and better systems. Even tho it's not real money.

YES I AGREE. We need SOMETHING to encourage people to go premium. It would also give them access to places they aren't allowed to go because of land restrictions. The lack of premium features is why i went back to basic. I would gladly go back to premium if there was some "Service" to go with it. Owning land and getting more then 50 a week in stipend just isn't enough in this ever changing world.

If it went back to L$500 a week, that'd be an incentive. Right now $10 will buy you L$2500 or so. That same $10 spent on premium gets you L$1200 and the right to buy up to 512 sqm of land.

I think I'll keep my $10 and spend it on LindeX. Or maybe a two cases of liquid crack (Mountain Dew).

I created a new thread under Feature Suggestions with some ideas I have to give extra incentives for people to go/stay premium, involving exempting premium accounts from extra upload and money transaction fees. Would love to see what other suggestions people have. Maybe, just maybe, a random Linden will trip across it and a light bulb will go off. Or am I too optimistic?

Basic, verified, and loving it. I was premium for two years, but the degradation of the mainland (ugly builds, griefers, incredible lag, etc) made it pointless to live there. So I moved into rental land, dropped my tier and I live comfortably on a nice huge plot in a class 5 island sim. Let's see, endure the mainland Hell or go to an island where you know all your neighbours, there's no 28,000 sqm. blingtard club+thrift shop next door, and every control you need is at your fingertips.... yeah, definately the latter.

Am I contributing nothing to LL? Well, I pay rent for my land that in turn gets paid to LL for rental of the sim itself.... So the answer is... YES!

So don't say that just because some of us artists that went back to Basic to escape the mainland clutter and are living solely on island rental plots that we're not contributing something to LL. We still pay the island rent, albeit through a medium, and, oh yes, all the shining reviews of LL with pretty pictures and movies of attractions in SL to promote the product, well, they gotta come from somewhere, don't they? Hence that's why we're here.

Dividing the residents into different classes is a horrible solution. Every account type is needed for the world to run. Several of today's "freeloaders" will become tomorrow's great land developers or fashionistas or gadget gurus.

This proposal is the equivalent of treating the symptom, not the disease.

Give the developers time to fix the underlying instability, and the major problems will go away. It's not an instant fix. They need time to fully implement it.

Maybe I misinterpreted the proposal incorrectly, but I don't think the original poster meant to allow only Premium members in and no non-Premium members. I interpreted it as when lag or database load gets to a certain level, to cap the number of non-Premium member logins but allow Premium members to log in.

Maybe if lag and server load get to an even higher level despite capping non-Premium member logins, they can cap the number of non-Verified member logins.

Maybe then we won't have 29,000+ users online and SL grind to a halt, ruining everyone's day -- Premium, Verified, and Unverified alike.

I understand the argument that a Verified non-Premium member may pay more into the game than a Premium member with only their 512 m2 First Land. However, it can be seen as a benefit of being a Premium member to get preferential treatment. After all, if a Verified member has the money to afford a huge land rental and the tier fees, they can afford a monthly, quarterly, or annual Premium membership.

It would be nice if the databases can handle 29,000+ users all TP'ing around and tossing stuff around their Inventories with no lag and nobody paying for a Premium membership, but with a finite amount of server capacity, Premium membership may be the way to better distribute that finite resource.

Back when I started, 5000 was a big deal. And when we crossed that, things got unstable. But they fixed it, and the concurrent population grew to 8000 and things got unstable. But they fixed it and the concurrent population grew to 10000 and things got unstable. But they fixed it and the concurrent population grew to 14000 and things got unstable. But they fixed it and the concurrent population grew to 18000 and things got unstable. But they fixed it and the concurrent population grew to 20000, then 22000, then 25000, then 28000, then to now 32000. They'll fix it.

Determining an arbitrary cap where a *majority* of residents become a second class caste of citizens isn't the answer.

Several months ago, LL finally came to the conclusion that a permanent fix needs to be developed (granted, in the meantime there've been some bandaid patches to quell immediate issues) so that we can handle massive growth. They're working on it, and it needs to be taken care of in the next few months.