So what do you all think to the Premium Plus package?

[Malayaa Morningstar]

3 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

 

Is the "bidding war" thing a real prospect for choosing Linden Home parcels, though? It seems this would require them to make Linden Homes able to be sold, or put up for auction—which would be kind of interesting, come to think of it.

For new regions of Linden Homes,  many sit out there "ready" and waiting without actually going into the queue to be assigned, for example in the new Sakura regions many regions are sitting there waiting until the demand catches up and they are needed in the queue.  For a new theme, you could go look at regions that are waiting and put in a ticket for a specific house.  

[Brilynn Roussel]

8 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Is the "bidding war" thing a real prospect for choosing Linden Home parcels, though? It seems this would require them to make Linden Homes able to be sold, or put up for auction—which would be kind of interesting, come to think of it.

To be honest, say I found a parcel on an unreleased section of LH home that will be soon to be released, I put my name in for it, but so does 20 other people , that would be similar to a bidding war without money exchanged. How do they pick who gets that parcel?

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

20 minutes ago, Atomic Infinity said:

I expect the actual mechanics of this are right now being tinkered with by the LLelves in the tech accounting web page division department

😜

Edited June 21, 2022 by SarahKB7 Koskinen

[Jenna Huntsman]

4 minutes ago, Brilynn Roussel said:

To be honest, say I found a parcel on an unreleased section of LH home that will be soon to be released, I put my name in for it, but so does 20 other people , that would be similar to a bidding war without money exchanged. How do they pick who gets that parcel?

Likely whoever's ticket is answered first; which, in an ideal world would be first-come, first-serve. Who knows if that's how LL handle tickets though.

[Liaa Nova]

Here is one blog on the subject:

Everything About Premium, Linden Homes, and Lots More with Patch Linden - Dreamer's Virtual World (dreamersvirtualworld.blogspot.com)

It isn't the official one from Patch, but has some info I missed

Edited June 21, 2022 by Liaa Nova

[Jenna Huntsman]

2 minutes ago, Liaa Nova said:

Here is the blog on the subject

Everything About Premium, Linden Homes, and Lots More with Patch Linden - Dreamer's Virtual World (dreamersvirtualworld.blogspot.com)

Unfortunately that article has some speculative content, for things which weren't announced (questions were asked, but didn't get a response or the answer was "we'll think about it")

Namely, the increase to Animesh attachments, as well as the blanket attachment amount increase.

[Love Zhaoying]

31 minutes ago, Brilynn Roussel said:

To be honest, say I found a parcel on an unreleased section of LH home that will be soon to be released, I put my name in for it, but so does 20 other people , that would be similar to a bidding war without money exchanged. How do they pick who gets that parcel?

"Lottery" (random)? "First come first served"?

[Codex Alpha]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned or said they want an increase in Li .

That is my main beef with SL. Not enough Li in relation to the land size.

I don't need a bigger land size. I can do alot on a 1024 sqm plot, whether it be a club, or a starter store area.

Part of the attraction of coming to a land would be the immersion and detail, and right now one runs out of Li long before they can do that.

I was recently visiting a friend on their Belissaria plot and they effectively have a 271 land impact house AND 351 prims on a 1024 lot = 622 Li? Is this true or did I miss something.

In any case I could really use 512-650 Li on 1024 plot land and it would be more than enough for what I want to do. When things are used and built to real world scale (x 1.1 or 1.2 multiplier scaling) you have lots of room to do all sorts of things.

For me, it is the singlemost restricting thing to building things for the last 10 years, and buying/renting a bigger plot of land at 2k just has the same problems = low LI per sqm.

I would have thought Premium Plus, and for that price would give an Li boost, whatever they decided relating to land size, etc - which would cause me to build MORE and then require free texture uploads, etc.

But at the current levels I don't need it

I use SL to build, create, learn and explore: Social not so much anymore due to reasons, so it's even hard to value the Premium account at this point.

Where's the builder/creators package..?

Edited June 21, 2022 by Codex Alpha

[Liaa Nova]

30 minutes ago, Codex Alpha said:

I'm surprised no one has mentioned or said they want an increase in Li .

That is my main beef with SL. Not enough Li in relation to the land size.

I don't need a bigger land size. I can do alot on a 1024 sqm plot, whether it be a club, or a starter store area.

Part of the attraction of coming to a land would be the immersion and detail, and right now one runs out of Li long before they can do that.

I was recently visiting a friend on their Belissaria plot and they effectively have a 271 land impact house AND 351 prims on a 1024 lot = 622 Li? Is this true or did I miss something.

In any case I could really use 512-650 Li on 1024 plot land and it would be more than enough for what I want to do. When things are used and built to real world scale (x 1.1 or 1.2 multiplier scaling) you have lots of room to do all sorts of things.

For me, it is the singlemost restricting thing to building things for the last 10 years, and buying/renting a bigger plot of land at 2k just has the same problems = low LI per sqm.

I would have thought Premium Plus, and for that price would give an Li boost, whatever they decided relating to land size, etc - which would cause me to build MORE and then require free texture uploads, etc.

But at the current levels I don't need it

I use SL to build, create, learn and explore: Social not so much anymore due to reasons, so it's even hard to value the Premium account at this point.

Where's the builder/creators package..?

The house doesn't count towards the 351 LI in Belliseria homes

[Myntz Mysterious]

For myself I thought about getting Plus for a brief minute, but then my purse hit me over the head and I came to my senses. I just cant justify the cost. Currently I do Premium at $100 a year.

Plus in 6 months I hope to be deeply immersed in Bethesda's Starfield. So I'm saving my pennies for that.

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

Wondering what broad adoption of Plus would do to L$ sources and sinks. At first glance, it seems pretty one-sided, both increasing sources (stipends) and decreasing sinks (nuisance upload fees).

Absent any financial stats, we have no way of knowing how much sources are currently exceeded by sinks (all L$-denominated charges including Marketplace fees). Whatever that excess is must be the number of L$s the Lab ends up selling in Lindex tranches pegged to the target exchange rate.

The only reason we'd care is that it's assumed the Lab would never prop up the L$ by buying on the Lindex, but rather only sell to prevent the L$ becoming too dear as sinks deplete the money supply. If instead sources were to exceed sinks, there's no obvious mechanism to prevent L$ devaluation short of the Lab turning off the stipend spigot.

Back when there were statistics, sale of newly-minted L$s was surprisingly low volume, but that was before the Lab even owned Marketplace, let alone collected the L$-denominated fees it generates, so presumably there's a lot more play in the control loop now. Probably nothing to worry about.

Either way, the Lab monetizes the L$, whether by selling stipend-bearing subscriptions or minting some L$ directly to the Lindex, so it's a wash revenue-wise.

The fact is, we don't know because they don't tell us. I don't assume they "never" buy Lindens but only burn them.

I am trying to figure out currently why, in a week of the SLB19 when there is Shop 'n Hop and other resident specials, which would cause people to buy more Lindens, there is so much stacked up at 241 and the cashout is slow. It should be moving briskly. So it means maybe there aren't that many people? Except I can see anecdotally from the rate of pick-up of my free gifts at SLB19 that there is enormous traffic, more than Fantasy Faire. PS do people who pick up gifts ever then buy anything at your store? rent anything? make a tip at the land preserve? I think generally they don't at all, which is why you have to do it out of pure altruism. With the ban on the use of logos, I think merchants are less motivated.

Last year, I counted 1700 uploads in the month before Fantasy Faire, because the beta grid was broken (but I rarely use it anyway, it's not convenient) and because I'm an amateur who might take 10 tries to get something right and not nail it the first time. This year, I got that number in half by doing less, but still, the uploads are attractive. They aren't to someone who is highly skilled and making everything in Blender anyway. They are to people who have to work inworld making pictures for rentals, making stuff inworld, making avatar profile photos as a service, etc. Even if you use gyazo, you still use a lot of uploads -- sounds, too.

I predict there will be inflation, because the economy is still adapting to the sales tax imposition and now there will be way less sinks from power users, more stipend flooding in. There's the sink of the Linden auction, that might pick up the slack. I do wonder how much they scientifically calculate this. From everything I have read about game economies and artificial virtual economies, they tend toward inflation and impoverishment. 

What is inflation? When the sales are all 99L and not 30L and people can't afford them. When the mesh heads are 6000L and not 5000L. Etc.

If people use the extra 1024 after a Belli home to buy Mainland and especially to start a store, it could be beneficial.

 

[Katherine Heartsong]

4 minutes ago, Liaa Nova said:

The house doesn't count towards the 351 LI in Belliseria homes

True, but it's the equivalent of having far more prims than 351. On a "regular" 1024 that house would leave you less than 100 prims to decorate. I find that renting on places with double prims (Nautilus, Horizons) works out far better than a normal 1024 parcel.

[Katherine Heartsong]

16 hours ago, Sylvia Tamalyn said:

I must really be misunderstanding something, because I don't see how $249/year for 2048 sq. m. would be better than having two Premium accounts at $99/year each for that same 2048 combined. I don't need any of the other stuff being offered. 

Same here. Now if that 2048 had come with 1406 prims maybe, but I can rent on Horizons or Nautilus for that amount of prims for so much cheaper than this.

[Qie Niangao]

28 minutes ago, Codex Alpha said:

[...]

I was recently visiting a friend on their Belissaria plot and they effectively have a 271 land impact house AND 351 prims on a 1024 lot = 622 Li? Is this true or did I miss something.

In any case I could really use 512-650 Li on 1024 plot land and it would be more than enough for what I want to do. When things are used and built to real world scale (x 1.1 or 1.2 multiplier scaling) you have lots of room to do all sorts of things

[...]

 

So this is why double-prim land is appealing. A 1024 in Bay City has a Land Impact capacity of 702. Why? Because the region designers allowed less than half the region to be sold, reserving enough fallow Land Impact in all the unsold "infrastructure" land area to be able to support that 2.0 "Region Object Bonus Factor" (at the top of the About Land window's "Objects" tab, set in the Region/Estate window's "Region" tab).

Something similar happens in Linden Homes regions such as those on Bellisseria: Only about half the regions are allotted to Linden Home parcels for Premium subscribers, with the rest being used for infrastructure including the home structures themselves (rooted outside the parcel so they don't count against the subscriber's LI capacity).

[Katherine Heartsong]

14 hours ago, Kris Spade said:

I think if LL needs additional revenue, one simple thing they can do that never made any sense to me as to why this rule is in place, is allow residents to purchase their own Homestead region directly from LL without the pre-requisite of having a full region.  It costs them nothing to make this change and offers a lot to the residents.

There's a certain sense of security that exists with having a region in your own name, and many simply can't afford a full one.  In my near 19 years here, I can't tell you how many times I've been screwed over by a land baron.

13 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

I've rented a homestead before from one of the larger land companies.  I paid less per month than it would have cost to own one.  Their full regions are only a few dollars more per month than owning your own.  No set up cost, full estate rights, no loss if you decide you can't afford it.  I only rent from long standing, well established companies, though.

These. I'd prefer @Kris Spade's solution for simply being able to name my homestead what I want. Despite all the rights a rental homestead might give me, naming the actual homestead isn't one of them. 

And for the amazing @Rowan Amore ... I can't ever find these unicorn landlords that are offering homesteads only a few dollars above the equivalent of $109/month in Lindens. (Bonus points if I can play them with cash, not Lindens.)

I recall seeing only a single one in the past two years and can't find them again. If someone were to PM a name or two, I'd appreciate that.

Edited June 21, 2022 by Katherine Heartsong

[rasterscan]

I suspect 2048 estates' in Belli will become a very popular 'des res' and much in demand.

[Marianne Little]

1 hour ago, Brilynn Roussel said:

To be honest, say I found a parcel on an unreleased section of LH home that will be soon to be released, I put my name in for it, but so does 20 other people , that would be similar to a bidding war without money exchanged. How do they pick who gets that parcel?

I think, I will take my lucky rolls and hope for a great abandoned parcel instead. It is a whole tread about them in the Linden Home forums.

I will be so disappointed when I don't get what I asked for. A good location that came totally as a surprise will be ❤️❤️❤️

[Quistess Alpha]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

probably lots of other stuff I'm overlooking.

LL takes a 10% cut off of sales on the MP, which most people (probbably?) pay in L$ (you can actually pay in USD if you want to, but you're ~much better off buying L$ and paying with that.) I'd imagine that's a much bigger L$ sink than all the annoyance fees put together.

[Yoofaloof Pacer]

8 hours ago, Chery Amore said:

I was hoping the plus wouldn't cost that much more a $150 to $175 a year rate sounded doable for me for the entertainment budget, but they shot way over what I'd be willing to pay.  It has benefits I just don't need.  I'm tempted to drop my premium account purely out of disappointment.  I feel like we've been waiting and hyped a long time for this.. boo. Unfortunately I have to decide by Wednesday whether to keep my premium or not so probably easier to keep it.
My linden home is great. I have enough groups with premium as is and enjoy being able to get into packed areas a little quicker. There is that..   

Anyway I guess it sound like it might be a good package for creators who upload a lot. Otherwise I'm just not seeing the benefit for the price. Oh well.

You and me both.

[Rowan Amore]

18 minutes ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

These. I'd prefer @Kris Spade's solution for simply being able to name my homestead what I want. Despite all the rights a rental homestead might give me, naming the actual homestead isn't one of them. 

And for the amazing @Rowan Amore ... I can't ever find these unicorn landlords that are offering homesteads only a few dollars above the equivalent of $109/month in Lindens. I recall seeing only a single one in the past two years and can't find them again. If someone were to PM a name or two, I'd appreciate that.

Check your messages  😉

It's now actually $114/month to rent a homestead from the company I've always rented from so only $5 more.  Not so bad.

Edited June 21, 2022 by Rowan Amore

[Brilynn Roussel]

6 minutes ago, Marianne Little said:

I think, I will take my lucky rolls and hope for a great abandoned parcel instead. It is a whole tread about them in the Linden Home forums.

I will be so disappointed when I don't get what I asked for. A good location that came totally as a surprise will be ❤️❤️❤️

I agree Marianne, like in RL I am not willing or wanting to enter a war with other residents over a home. I will stick with what I have and take my chances with my rolls.

[Kyrie Deka]

41 minutes ago, Codex Alpha said:

In any case I could really use 512-650 Li on 1024 plot land and it would be more than enough for what I want to do.

Hear Hear!  

Price jump is just far above what I expected to hear.  

My last Premium Upgraded Support response took 3 years to fix an advertised functionality (for a list of users) broken during shift to the cloud.  3 years. Of no communication. And I suspect it was accidentally fixed (only recently) when they worked on something else. Couldn't know for sure, as not one communication was sent to me, and in fact they shut the support ticket at one point as Resolved when it was not, so we had to reopen the ticket.  So in my experience, being Premium gave me freebie-user support level response, and certainly don't feel I got Premium Upgraded support response. And that was over three Premium renewal payments where both Upgraded Support (minimals) and Marketplace invoice search were in practice not available to me. Very sad to me because even an auto-generated "we're still working on it" every few months would have been enough for me to feel I received support of any level at all. How easy would that have been.  So this is what I rely upon, and what I will receive, as support response at any level.

Am I willing to pay 2.5 times that over possibly another 3 years when something breaks/remains broken as if I am an expendable-spender?  I'm a fan, and I want to say yes - I want to say *yes*-but I would feel an idiot if I said yes.  And I don't come here at any subscription fee level, to feel like an idiot.

I can understand those that say hey post-Pandemic folks are now easily paying $20+ month for entertainment like HBO, Amazon Prime, etc. And we want some o' that!  Sure!  Those services have never failed to give me just/only what was advertised for that price at time-of-purchase.   

Final comment:  Are Premium now to be pushed below Plus when entering events?  So the benefit Premium gets admitted TPing in more often/rejected less often, is now going to move me-Premium well down that list of "let em in" ?   If land maxes don't change admitting avatars to an event, and I am now as a Premium user pushed well down that list of "let em in"s, I am now feeling like that isn't much of a Premium benefit anymore and - will I then be a "middle/second-class Premium" user?  What of support reports - do I then move all below those in Plus in the priority queue, even longer than 3 years response time then?

I applaud the many who work very hard to get things done and keep what does work working.  Thank you.  But if I paid that 2.5x Plus, with any list of benefits, I would expect my support tickets to be attended to pronto and yes above Premies.  But that leaves me in practice as a middle/second-class Premium user with a new level of "special" class inserted above me in support and usage.  And I heard not any mention of any support staff upgrades after the Plus packages start bringing in the additional dough.  

I want to love it.  I do not love it.

[diamond Marchant]

I am still struggling with the WHY aspect of Premium Plus as presented on 6/20. One of the fundamental issues of Second Life is "barrier to entry"... that is, all the hurdles one must clear in order to have a full experience. Premium Plus appears to make this problem worse because it is not obvious if you need it. So why does it exist?

The first question Saffia asked Patch (on 6/20) was about GDP. That was MY question and it was intended to be a two-parter... what is GDP and why did you talk about it in your SL19B speech? Unfortunately, part two was omitted. (As expected Patch defined GDP as user to user transactions).

If asked, Patch might have said that the GDP-talk was just to promote Second Life as a vibrant virtual economy (which is true). I suggest a more relevant motive might have been to promote Tilia to any actual metaverse press that might be listening.

With this perspective, Premium Plus comes into focus. Stipend is increased to L$650/week and the signon bonus is L$3000. Recall that Premium offers much less (L$300/L$1000). Premium Plus is a LOWERing of the barrier to spending Lindens because it automatically puts more Lindens in your account... no bothering with having to go buy them when you actually need them.

Business owners like to see growth so that $650 million GDP number needs to be BIGGER in 2022. Premium Plus is a GDP stimulator.

I am wondering if the Tilia tail is wagging the Second Life dog.

[Yoofaloof Pacer]

4 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

You mean US$ not L$, right?

Yep.  But wouldn't if be great if that was the case? 

[Reiki Mystic]

Absolutely no! the price is crazy already 99 $ I find it too expensive for what they give (they should increase the weekly lindne for the same price) but 249 $ if you then calculate that many countries have to pay us VAT (for example in Europe an average from 20 / 22 up to even 25%) I would say absolutely no n it would mean that you will never renew my premium subscription again and I might even think over time to leave SL