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

[LittleMe Jewell]

LL has always balked at increasing groups very much because they are apparently extremely problematic performance wise.  Why in the heck did they double the number of groups for PP then, rather than roughly 1.5 times?  If a high number of groups really is a big performance issue, why not 100-105 instead of the full doubling to 140?  Or are they expecting few enough PP accounts that it won't really matter overall?

Edited June 22, 2022 by LittleMe Jewell

[Rowan Amore]

2 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Or are they expecting few enough PP accounts that it won't really matter overall?

THIS^^^

 

[Chris Corvinus]

How Premium+ came to be

Linden Lab employee: Creators are asking for free texture uploads.

LL: Oh no, not again.

Employee: We could put that feature into the premium plan and raise it a bit.

LL: Yeah, no. Premium is already going to be increased. I have a better idea. Lets put that feature into another tier and call it Premium Plus. Offer a bit more than Premium and overcharge creators but not call it a Creator Tier because we want everyone to buy it.

[ST33LDI9ITAL]

Yea naw... no thanks. Nothing seems "plus" about it to me but the price. I do like the waiver of upload fee's.. seems like a nice motive. But it's just not enough to be appealing to me. Rather see no stipend and higher land use..  All in all I think they need to up all the land tier bases... 1024 is just pathetic imo. 2048 should be base for regular premium. Prem+ should be 4096...  or even more.. They too greedy with their virtual pixel real estate.

If they looking to do different sub models imo should have a "Creators" sub with ALL upload fee's waived. 

Putting group limit behind a paywall is just robbery. I despise that so much.  

I miiiight would consider $20/mo for it as is.. But at $25 I'm out. Hard nope.

Already been debating not even resubbing prem cause the linden houses are too laggy or too restrictive to enjoy. 1024 mainland is even worse cause by time you build a house or shop or whatever you basically out of li.  For now, only thing that I even keep prem for is groups.. and I've already made up my mind that just ain't worth it and not gonna support that any longer so, meh. One day they'll get it figured out... maybe. Doubt it though, since they haven't by now.

If that's true that they limit groups for "performance reasons" then they need better infrastructure, seriously. There are plenty of messaging protocols and servers out of box and open source that support millions of messages a second. Groups shouldn't be that much of an impact attt allll. If it's cause of the client.. well, even more of a reason to thread the UI and improve client performance as should have been done years ago. With an active population of users at like 40k... I don't see how groups are even relevantly considered a performance issue. If they are, then fix it. 

Edited June 22, 2022 by ST33LDI9ITAL

[Qie Niangao]

In case anybody else was wondering too, I asked at the Concierge and Land User Group meeting a few minutes ago and confirmed that the 2048 Linden Homes are planned to be exclusive to Plus subscribers, not available to non-Plus Premiums by adding tier above the 1024 "bonus" tier of that subscription.

What I didn't ask was whether there's any throttle or cap on the number of free uploads a Plus subscriber can generate. When stuff is completely free, there's a temptation to divide by that zero—and a business motivation: Say a Plus-connected "scripted agent" will upload all your .pngs to textures delivered to your Inventory for a low monthly fee. How many non-Plus subscribers might be recruited, making that agent's Plus subscription profitable while simultaneously undermining the market for Plus subscriptions?

[ST33LDI9ITAL]

2 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

What I didn't ask was whether there's any throttle or cap on the number of free uploads a Plus subscriber can generate. When stuff is completely free, there's a temptation to divide by that zero—and a business motivation: Say a Plus-connected "scripted agent" will upload all your .pngs to textures delivered to your Inventory for a low monthly fee. How many non-Plus subscribers might be recruited, making that agent's Plus subscription profitable while simultaneously undermining the market for Plus subscriptions?

That's actually a really good point to make... I definitely see that getting abused for bulk uploading at half cost or whatever.

[Lucia Nightfire]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

In case anybody else was wondering too, I asked at the Concierge and Land User Group meeting a few minutes ago and confirmed that the 2048 Linden Homes are planned to be exclusive to Plus subscribers, not available to non-Plus Premiums by adding tier above the 1024 "bonus" tier of that subscription.

What I didn't ask was whether there's any throttle or cap on the number of free uploads a Plus subscriber can generate. When stuff is completely free, there's a temptation to divide by that zero—and a business motivation: Say a Plus-connected "scripted agent" will upload all your .pngs to textures delivered to your Inventory for a low monthly fee. How many non-Plus subscribers might be recruited, making that agent's Plus subscription profitable while simultaneously undermining the market for Plus subscriptions?

Seeing as I also considered the possibility of someone making an appropriately named Premium Plus uploader bot account that charges "pennies on the dollar" for such a service, I bet it will attempted by a multitude of users.

Not saying it will be dozens or hundreds, but enough to "compete" amongst them selves.

I don't think LL could throttle uploads amongst any of them enough to shut down the entire "industry" that would arise out of it.

Such an industry would be kind of dangerous to operate, considering what kind of "imagery" bots could be uploading for others.

Edited June 22, 2022 by Lucia Nightfire

[Anaiya Ahren]

Quote

So, for a little over $6 per month extra for Premium plus, you are getting twice the land size, way more group space, free texture uploads and other tidbits. Not a bad deal at all !

It kind of is a bad deal for probably most premium account holders considering they can get most of that for $3.08 extra per month by making an alt premium...

 

I have never come near my group cap with my premium account so that's less benefit to me than spending $3.08 per month to get the premium group cap on another account that is running up against the basic account group-cap.  I think that's kind of only useful for a small niche of the user-base (like if you've got a store in lots of events, or are a blogger or something) but if it's going to negatively impact group chat performance, is it really even a good idea for SL generally?

 

 

So far as textures are concerned, I have a history of once having scripted a corset to texture switch 3 1024s in a constant loop , and they've since added a whole materials system - so the first thing I did with scripted mats was script a skirt and HUD system so customers could buy add-on texture HUDs that allowed them to put a different texture in every texture slot on each of three faces - yeah they can put 9 1024s on a single skirt, and I actually thought that was a good idea at the time - it's not even a long skirt - it barely covers my butt....

 

And having looked at mod perm items I've bought over the years, I'm not in even in the "worst offenders" category (seriously people do some mad things with textures).

 

No one should want me anywhere free texture uploads.  I don't want me near free texture uploads.  And I'm not confident everyone that will buy premium plus should be allowed anywhere near free texture uploads either.

 

 

[Aria Aurelia]

15 hours ago, diamond Marchant said:

On Changes To Linden Homes

In the past at SL Birthdays, I have asked the Lindens "what is the Bellisseria secret sauce?"  The common answer is "community". I believe this is not true. My experience is that community in Second Life is everywhere... or at least where two or more people share a common interest. The secret sauce of Bellisseria is a combination of value (Linden Homes are a great deal), a lowered (SL knowledge) barrier of entry to home ownership, and fairness. The fairness part is a combination of everyone being treated equally and the covenant, which gives some protection from annoyances.

The only change I would advise for current Linden Homes is to devote more resources to governance (fairness) and to  improve the allocation protocol.

@Abnor Mole has said in this forum that all Linden Homes are different but each has something special. There should not be any bad ones (and if there are that should be fixed). The current allocation protocol for homes allows for specification of a home theme or sub-theme. Why not improve the protocol. For example,  allow more selection attributes  (e.g. elevation or proximity to another resident) or change the retry algorithm so you don't get a home you have previously rejected.

Introducing an ability to select a specific home would erode the practice of fairness, in my opinion. It is not immediately obvious to me how this would even work.

Introducing larger Linden Homes would also be a mistake. Residents already have the ability to have any size home they like. It's called mainland. Why go down the rabbit hole of designing a whole new class of grander homes to solve a problem that does not really exist.

In summary, make no changes other than to fullfill the promise of governance and improve the allocation protocol.

 

Personally you couldn't ever pay me enough money to live on mainland.  A larger linden home for me would be something I would keep going if I decided to part ways with secondlife as I've done in the past for several years only logging in now and again.  I'd have readily saved money, a place to rez, and a home to live in without having to spend anymore money or worrying about having to sell land afterward if I decided to stop the payment.

[Coffee Pancake]

27 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

What I didn't ask was whether there's any throttle or cap on the number of free uploads a Plus subscriber can generate. When stuff is completely free, there's a temptation to divide by that zero—and a business motivation: Say a Plus-connected "scripted agent" will upload all your .pngs to textures delivered to your Inventory for a low monthly fee. How many non-Plus subscribers might be recruited, making that agent's Plus subscription profitable while simultaneously undermining the market for Plus subscriptions?

Allowing something to go infinite is always a problem.

 

How about this .. a website and you can upload images (etc) to that, that's tied to a single PP account that does the uploading to SL and passes you a FP item & UUID in world. You get a full visual catalogue of all your assets online that you can browse from anywhere. Cost to you - 1L$ per upload.

No need to keep all your textures in your inventory, just grab the ones you need in the moment, easy sharing of assets with other users of the system, the whole visual catalogue that you can sort and order to your hearts content and it costs you practically nothing.

Oh, and it entirely replaces Gyazo as the place to publish screenshots almost by accident because you can just share a URL to your images and they are pulled right off the Linden CDN.

 

And that's just the least nefarious idea I could come up with in the time it took me to read your post.

[diamond Marchant]

18 minutes ago, Aria Aurelia said:

Personally you couldn't ever pay me enough money to live on mainland.

This is an excellent point. Many people are repelled by mainland. The one's that are OK with it might be in skyboxes or have enough land to provide a buffer from their neighbors. Also, there are places that are mainland-ish but have covenants to protect you from annoying neighbors. Several are surrounding the Blake Sea.

I don't know how to fix mainland. Maybe LL will die on this hill.

But... the fix is not to stratify Bellisseria into haves and have-mores. Understand that Bellisseria is NOT scaleable under the current administraion. It takes months/years to build out because it is done by contracted humans. Actual high tech companies figured out in the 1990s that the way to scale up is to build a platform and let the USERS supply the content (hello social media). LL is more like a game/entertainment company in that it feels compelled to create content. Not good.

 

Edited June 22, 2022 by diamond Marchant

[Kadah Coba]

2 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

LL has always balked at increasing groups very much because they are apparently extremely problematic performance wise.  Why in the heck did they double the number of groups for PP then, rather than roughly 1.5 times?  If a high number of groups really is a big performance issue, why not 100-105 instead of the full doubling to 140?  Or are they expecting few enough PP accounts that it won't really matter overall?

LL would know how what group slot utilization regular Premium users are at and likely based it off that. Not everybody joins the maximum number of groups they can, only some. The few percent of users that get Plus and then join that many groups is going to be a very small.

Almost everything about groups is broken and in need of an extremely overdue overhaul. Any time I check for repo on BUG-40824, offline group notices still fail to deliver anywhere from 20-95% of the time on any group or account tested. And that's one of the lesser apparent forms for group fail; almost anybody would have dealt with all the various group chat issues over the years.

38 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

In case anybody else was wondering too, I asked at the Concierge and Land User Group meeting a few minutes ago and confirmed that the 2048 Linden Homes are planned to be exclusive to Plus subscribers, not available to non-Plus Premiums by adding tier above the 1024 "bonus" tier of that subscription.

What I didn't ask was whether there's any throttle or cap on the number of free uploads a Plus subscriber can generate. When stuff is completely free, there's a temptation to divide by that zero—and a business motivation: Say a Plus-connected "scripted agent" will upload all your .pngs to textures delivered to your Inventory for a low monthly fee. How many non-Plus subscribers might be recruited, making that agent's Plus subscription profitable while simultaneously undermining the market for Plus subscriptions?

It feels like bot uploading of assets would be against TOS already...

[Leighton Dakota]

NO!This PP is nothing for me.LL only looks  to Creators with this PP.what the hell should i do with Hundrets of Groups?And if i need 2048sqm Land i can have it with two normal Premiums and get 10%Bonus on Top.Im a Landscaper i need a own Homestaead.But LL thinks only for Estate Owners not for People who can`t Pay for a Full Sim.Im sick of overpaying Estateowners.I iwould better pay it to LL directly and can Name my Sim.It was my big Hope that PP Members can buy one HS per Houshold.Until this happend i will not Pay so much Money +VAT for things i dont need.

[Setsuki Takeda]

13 hours ago, Tabby Snookipuss said:

A lot of add on pets, babies, tails and ears are animesh these days.

If you use bento "bits" tails pretty much need to be animesh because they attach to the same "bone" and a tail will deform if you have *other parts* that are also bento.

 

12 hours ago, Cinos Field said:

Mainland is specifically what I want so I don't get suffocated by the building codes on Belli. I'll take floating billboards and assorted crap over uniform faux-suburbia any day.

Some kind of balance between the two where you can build anything as long as it has some effort put into it would be ideal but alas, they probably don't have the time.

Yeah, I love the ability to create what I want, from Zen gardens to Shinto shrines to a nice little well appointed home with a yard. I don't even mind the spaceport across the street, though the giant cube of double-sided privacy screens on the rental place is hideous (from both sides, amazing people pay to be inside a "forest" and "beach" that ugly) to look at. It would be nice to dispose of all the air-clutter with minimum build height for skyboxes, have a zone there (say 500-1500, nobody's private stuff needs to be in that area, you ground build is below it - well out of chat range so nobody is listening to your private conversations that high up - and any reasonably placed skyboxes are above it) where you can fly and the security orbs and ban lines won't bounce you or give you a zero second TP home, the thing that makes the mainland great to be able to build whatever you like also makes it a terrible place to explore... Not to mention every tiny little almost identical deserted strip club along the Linden Road spams you with landmarks and notecards since they all seem to set their "greeter" to include drivers.

[Structura Finesmith]

 

@Patch Linden

A La Carte option planned, I hope?

As a mainland landlord, I don't actually need "unlimited free uploads" or 140 groups.

I create groups so infrequently that I don't mind L$100 each and not the proposed L$10 each.

Increased message cap is nice, but I can work in the existing limits so far, and have a mailbox set out at my business, so that's not a necessity. 

Increased stipend, also nice, but that's not a necessity either.

......Land tier, OTOH, now *THAT* I can use!

But it's not worth 2.5x the current Premium fee for just the 2x land that I'd see out of it.

 

Having "Plus Packages" aimed at different use cases would be a pretty good idea, actually.

[kali Wylder]

I wish everyone would stop saying that they are going to raise the price of regular premium.  They haven't said that.  They've only raised it once in the time I've been here, since 2009, and that wasn't that long ago, so I don't see why everyone is so sure they are going to do it again.

[Sparkle Bunny]

10 minutes ago, kali Wylder said:

I don't see why everyone is so sure they are going to do it again.

Because premium plus is offering 2x the features for 2.5x the price, and this does not make sense to anyone unless premium goes up in tandem.

[Paul Hexem]

23 minutes ago, kali Wylder said:

I wish everyone would stop saying that they are going to raise the price of regular premium.  They haven't said that.  They've only raised it once in the time I've been here, since 2009, and that wasn't that long ago, so I don't see why everyone is so sure they are going to do it again.

Because it's the only way this whole thing makes any sense.

[Tabby Snookipuss]

1 hour ago, NanashiNyx said:

If you use bento "bits" tails pretty much need to be animesh because they attach to the same "bone" and a tail will deform if you have *other parts* that are also bento.  

I also have to use animesh cat ears as i use the evox head and their ears and add on bento ears do not like each other lol  Animesh work fine along side them....

 

1 hour ago, NanashiNyx said:

 

 

 

[animats]

You have to be really into groups to need Premium Plus, looks like.

I have IMs forwarded to an email account, where some email filters sort them automatically. So I don't need a deeper IM queue within the SL system.

[Nalates Urriah]

5 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

LL has always balked at increasing groups very much because they are apparently extremely problematic performance wise.  Why in the heck did they double the number of groups for PP then, rather than roughly 1.5 times?  If a high number of groups really is a big performance issue, why not 100-105 instead of the full doubling to 140?  Or are they expecting few enough PP accounts that it won't really matter overall?

I suspect the performance of somethings is much better because of the uplift tot he cloud. The ability to scale up by spinning up additional hardware when needed may have made the difference.

HOWEVER... twice as many groups could mean twice as much spam. I have enough now. Thanks.

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

Twice as many groups also means it will take you twice as long to move between sim regions when crossing their borders.

When crossing a border, your avatar, inventory, friends list, your groups (and all their members) data is passed from one region to the next.  This is why there was a limit on number of groups in the first place, to keep those huge lists of group members down to quicken sim crossings.

Edited June 23, 2022 by SarahKB7 Koskinen

[Eirynne Sieyes]

10 minutes ago, SarahKB7 Koskinen said:

Twice as many groups also means it will take you twice as long to move between sim regions when crossing their borders.

When crossing a border, your avatar, inventory, friends list, your groups (and all their members) data is passed from one region to the next.  This is why there was a group limit in the first place, to keep those huge lists of group members down to quicken sim crossings.

*Groans*  Inventory inventory inventory. I wish I could detach it and leave it somewhere safe for events. Think detachable suitcase! Please add that to the wish list Linden Labs.

 

[Chris Corvinus]

I just wanna ask.... Have they fixed group chat? Because upping groups makes zero sense if they haven't fixed group chats. 

[Setsuki Takeda]

1 hour ago, Chris Corvinus said:

I just wanna ask.... Have they fixed group chat? Because upping groups makes zero sense if they haven't fixed group chats. 

I use them for in-world discounts, most of the chats are blocked, too many "Is a CSR on?" at 2am when the member list is visible and they could just check the #^$% titles...