Why am I less of a person than you?

I recently started playing SL about 6 weeks ago, and love it. I knew I was moving so I delayed upgrading my account because A) I saw no point in paying for something that I am not using and B) I really wanted to keep a cap on all my expenses until I was moved.

So now I come back and am about to upgrade my account to premium and I find that I am not worth as much as everyone else in the world. I will get a L$400 stipend as opposed to everyone else gettting L$500. Now the L$100 is not really a big deal from a monetary stand point, but I find it to be amazingly insulting to find that I am paying the same amount of money as everyone else for less of a product.

I have played online games for years and have never heard of such a policy. Other games have implemented forms of 'veterans rewards' for people that have been paying customers for longer periods of time, and that is fine. That is something that they have earned... and given time I can earn as well. But for me to be told I am a second class citizen and that I will always be worth less than everyone else is insulting.

I truly am saddened knowing that everyone is not equal in SL. There truly is enough of that in our first lives.

Who let you in on the lindens secret plot? *cracks nuckles* I ALWAYS knew the lindens were behind it all! You have confirmed it for me, mrs. Chung is a perfect example of how the lindens don't care about anyone else but the richies! All they care about are their flashy Lz and thier rich land baron who is making so much RL and SL money she's even on the news (no offense rich land baron woman!)!!

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Sometimes I wonder why the Lindens seem to have such a contemptuous attitude to their customers, and then I read a posting like this and understand.

Just hope that you get a decent sim when you buy land. You can end up paying the same as anyone else for a piece of shit lagfest that isn't suitable for doing anything. I know, my land is in one.

I came into SL a couple of months before the change, but I absolutely agree with you, Stewart. IMO, stipends should be the same, in each membership category, across the board. If LL wanted to cut basic stipends they should have cut all basic stipends. Lowering the premium stipend to L$400? Lower it for all premium accounts. There should be no grandfather clauses.

It's a difficult dilemma for Linden Lab.

They want to lower the stipend however you can't lower the stipend of those who have L$500 without most of them complaining.

Taking that into consideration, what would you do?

Go mixed L$400/500 new residents will feel a bit left out.
Go all L$400 the older residents will be up in arms.
Go all L$500 get the economy complaining.


What I would rather do is keep the L$500 for everyone and find new ways to create sinks.

If they lowered the stipend for the older premium accounts, the results would have been pretty bad for them I think. Likely a *lot* of people would have canceled their premium accounts, and even sold off their land in protest.

The effect of cutting the Premium stipend for new users though, is equivelent to raising the price of a premium account, (That is, newer premium users don't get as much for what they're paying, and LL gets to sell that extra $L100 a week on the lindex themselves, meaning that they make more money.) without raising the cost of a premium account for existing users, which again would likely have seen a lot of people canceling their premium accounts, and dropping their tier.

That said, I think that lowering the amount that is paid to new premium accounts *is* a bad idea. Getting someone a premium account is how you get them into land ownership, which is how you lure them into paying tier, which is where LL's real money comes from.

In this and in a fair number of other decisions that SL has been making lately, I'm seeing a real trend of PHBism [1] coming into play at the managment levels in SL, and I find it rather worrying, personally.

[1] Pointh Haired Bossism, as from Dilbert.

All it means is if you want to get the same number of Lindens, you pay what, one or two more US dollars a month for your account. So its just that for you the price has gone up.

But if you don't need the $L, you don't have to pay the increased price. So you actually have MORE freedom to choose how much you spend than you would if they had just raised the base price for everybody.

This is a good point - more and more i think why bother being premium at all.
It probably works out cheaper to just rent land and buy lindens when you need them than pay the monthly premium.

Sometimes I wonder why I don't like certain lindens and why I do like certain lindens. Its because I've tried to play nice with them, I've tried to be cool and calm about it all, but you can see it, that never works, you just get pushed aside, stepped all over by the gaint LL boots of big business. Hey, worlds not perfect, deal with it,I know I am.

Actually, there's more options available:

For example, they could give everyone 500L through the end of their current term, then drop them to 400L. That would suck most for monthlies, since they're paying the most for the lindens.

They could have a grace period for everyone, so when the last 500L annual account ends everyone goes down to 400L. They may actually do this next July.

They could give everyone 500L through the end of the current term, then give them the opportunity for 3 months(or so) at 400L but for a 20% reduce price (as a loyalty bonus?).

They could get rid of "premium" accounts and just sell tier and "subscription" purchases of Lindens through LindeX, get rid of the 512 square premium bonus tier, and give people a "loyalty bonus" tier through the end of their current term.

All KINDS of options. Some of them would piss even more people off, some might be surprisingly well accepted.