Expanding people's options is wonderful for the customer, yet at the same time, you have to be careful you don't leave too much money on the table. I figure that is one reason why tier levels jump up the way they do, and don't allow you to scale in finer increments.
I think the reason the Lindens have to have the huge tier jumps is because they bill by the highest amount owned per month. By having huge gaps, they prevent people doing more finely-tuned trading which would mean a higher volume of trading. I view it as a cap on trading. I don't know really how they can go on justifying it. One of the side effects of this gap -- or perhaps it is *the* intended effect? -- is that land dealers are constantly driven back to the auction to keep their tier filled up to justify the paid tier -- and they keep buying and selling land, sometimes getting stuck, of course. Then when they have too much and are too stuck, they dump some of it or drastically reduce the price in order to tier down. So come to think of it, this may be the Lindens' built in anti-baron mechanism at work, sure seems so.
One of the advantages of Ansheland is that she can offer more differenitated tier levels.
if the current Basic program isn't too much of a financial burden to LL, and they believe that it is fostering growth, then they should probably keep it for a while longer. After all, we are still very much in "early" stages here, both in terms of community and technology.
Well, more than two years doesn't seem so "early". And again, how is a basic account a financial burden when it leads to people switching to premium and tiering up? X percentage of these accounts move up. They probably pay for themselves in that fashion in fact. We just don't have the numbers.
LL will have to decide when it has the critical mass of membership, in world entertainment/content, and technical stability/performance that they can afford to start charging annual fees to all new customers (I'm not gonna touch the retroactive membership issue with a ten foot pole! )
Oh? But is this a game? Or some kind of common carrier/metaverse thingie? You don't get a lifetime charter membership in the telephone company with a built-in 4,096 free telephone calls. It just costs what it costs.