Premium Plus Promo

[diamond Marchant]

Just received via email. Note the lack of reference to a 2048 Linden Home (or any Linden Home).

Edited May 23, 2023 by diamond Marchant

[Coffee Pancake]

The offer is exactly the same.

Like .. ok, I know that tier exists, and I would be on that tier if it made sense for me.

It doesn't. It's expensive and offers obviously less value that two regular premiums. It's not even something I need to math out and contemplate (although I did spreadsheet it, because of course I did).

No the answer is not to jack regular premium up in price. That will have me drop multiple single premiums, move one account to this, and drop land over the side.

[CaithLynnSayes]

16 minutes ago, diamond Marchant said:

Note the lack of reference to a 2048 Linden Home

That is still 25 years out though.

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

The ad looks pretty and is clear and  simplified for easy consideration.

If the items listed benefit someone for the cost, great!

Yes, I see there is no mention of P+ LH homes.

 

 

I assume you weren't asking for my thoughts on whether I personally need any of that.  You, also, didn't appear to be asking what I thought of the price.  

 

[Sid Nagy]

I like the idea that they offer different packages, but premium plus has nothing to offer that justifies the upgrade for me, so this mail will not change a thing.
I'm simply better off with a normal premium account at the moment.

[Qie Niangao]

Just one of my premium alts got this, the one who gets L$400/wk stipend, not the accounts with L$500 stipends, nor the Basics. (I don't have any L$300 stipend Premium alts.)

Which may have nothing to do with who gets the email.

[Gwin LeShelle]

I was about to answer that I am hurt that I didn't get the email 😂...until I remembered that I am already premium plus. 

Don't do the forum while having fever ...but staying at home without work is so very boring (⁠╯⁠ರ⁠ ⁠~⁠ ⁠ರ⁠)⁠╯⁠︵⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

[Phil Deakins]

Claiming "Access to third-party Speedlight mobile viewer"  is totally wrong. It has nothing to do with Premium+, and, presumably, is intended to deceive, by appearing to be an extra that you get with Premium+. It's not! Imo, that part of the ad is dishonest.

Nobody needs a Premium+ account, or any other type of Premium account, to use Speedlight. What you get with Premium+ is  Speedlight's Gold account, which allows 24/7 login without any need to look at it again, but everyone can use Speedlight without a Gold account - and have multiple avatars logged in with it. Using (having access) to it has nothing whatsoever to do with any type of SL account other than Basic, which is necessary for logging into SL, of course.

The Speedlight viewer works in a web browser, so it can be used in a mobile/cell phone, which makes it mobile. I am logged in with Speedlight most hours of every day. Because I don't have a Gold account, it logs me out every 6 hours, so I log back in again. I'm a big fan of it, but when I want to actually do something other than IMs, chat and such, I have to log in with a normal viewer.

Incidentally, if you choose to use the 3D view, avatars in Speedlight are like pipe cleaner people. You can't actually see any avatars, including your own, as you see them in a normal viewer, and 'viewing' is very rudimentary. I don't use that part of it.

[Ina Fairport]

I was premium for a couple of years and this year premium plus. It will expire in December this year and I won't renew it.
The only reason I was premium was because of my jazzclubs at mainland. The last club was located in an alley in New York in the 50ties with music from that era

I don't run any club anymore and I don't need a premium account. I never liked the Linden Homes and prefer a parcel with terraform rights and my own house at one of the beautyfull private estates

[Maitimo]

I would only consider Premium Plus if it was cheaper, either in overall outlay or because of extra stipend, than two regular premium accounts.  But it's not. 

Free uploads looks tempting on the surface but it actually isn't: I'd need to upload 3750 textures a year, or 72 per week, to make it pay for the difference. There's no way I would ever upload that many, even if it was free.

[Alwin Alcott]

I had two P+ past year, for some of the benefits ánd the promessed SOON 2048 homes. 
After a year no sight on that... bye bye P+, never ever again. 
In heaven's name .. not able to make 2048 parcels in a year time?... except for uploadhoarders... ( in a good way!) it's a fishy offer.

taking a level higher tier instead of the normal 1024 saves you so many money that the uploads are paid already... extra tier 82 dollars for a 150 P+ .. come on.

[Ava Cartier]

So, Speedlight is $4.99? Although they did word it carefully in the promo, it just seems kinda crappy we have to pay for it, additionally.

[Paul Hexem]

Knock 50 off a year and that'd be a promo I'd take advantage of.

[diamond Marchant]

10 hours ago, Maitimo said:

I would only consider Premium Plus if it was cheaper, either in overall outlay or because of extra stipend, than two regular premium accounts.  But it's not.

The primary impact of Premium Plus has been to create drama among residents debating its worth. When  announced in 2022, I was expecting it to be awesome. When final details were revealed in June 2022, I was like "wut?". Annual cost increased by a factor of 2.5 but stipend increased only by 2.16. What should have been a no-brainer now became a complicated decision about worth (except for those who don't care what things cost).

The 2048 Linden Homes need to come out ASAP, certainly no later than SL20B. Lowering the annual to $199 would also be a good ideal (along with reducing the stipend to L$600).

[Persephone Emerald]

1 hour ago, diamond Marchant said:

The primary impact of Premium Plus has been to create drama among residents debating its worth. When  announced in 2022, I was expecting it to be awesome. When final details were revealed in June 2022, I was like "wut?". Annual cost increased by a factor of 2.5 but stipend increased only by 2.16. What should have been a no-brainer now became a complicated decision about worth (except for those who don't care what things cost).

The 2048 Linden Homes need to come out ASAP, certainly no later than SL20B. Lowering the annual to $199 would also be a good ideal (along with reducing the stipend to L$600).

I agree they could lower both the cost and the stipend. 

I don't think anyone inworld concerns themselves with Premium Plus though. I think it only creates drama on the forum.

After looking at data on the Bonniebots website, I saw that 21.5 % of active user accounts are Premium or Premium Plus. Premium Plus is a much smaller number. I think most users inworld don't even know it's an option.

[EliseAnne85]

11 hours ago, Maitimo said:

I would only consider Premium Plus if it was cheaper, either in overall outlay or because of extra stipend, than two regular premium accounts.  But it's not. 

Free uploads looks tempting on the surface but it actually isn't: I'd need to upload 3750 textures a year, or 72 per week, to make it pay for the difference. There's no way I would ever upload that many, even if it was free.

Did you watch the newest video from LL on PBR?  It's on the front page of the SL website for university something or other.  But, in this video (for his ugly table, not my taste, sorry) it costs 120 L just to upload for the textures of the ugly table.  PBR is going to be expensive.  They are going to need some kind of subscription that helps resident creators with upload costs.  And, in the video and I guess for the university thingamagig, it's about SUBSTANCE PAINTER which is $50 dollars a month.  Costs of SL items will go through the roof if they don't come up with a package to reduce costs for uploads plus help creators find a less expensive alternative to SUBSTANCE PAINTER.  

 

[Gwin LeShelle]

28 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Did you watch the newest video from LL on PBR?  It's on the front page of the SL website for university something or other.  But, in this video (for his ugly table, not my taste, sorry) it costs 120 L just to upload for the textures of the ugly table.  PBR is going to be expensive.  They are going to need some kind of subscription that helps resident creators with upload costs.  And, in the video and I guess for the university thingamagig, it's about SUBSTANCE PAINTER which is $50 dollars a month.  Costs of SL items will go through the roof if they don't come up with a package to reduce costs for uploads plus help creators find a less expensive alternative to SUBSTANCE PAINTER.  

 

I think things won't get more expensive the creators would just not use it. I remember how long it took for materials to be really widespread, one problem was of course that many people with older PCs are in SL and don't have AL turned on anyway. That changed through the years and since then more and more creator's used materials, and if we are honest not many creators are utilizing them really well by even now.

So I expect when this hits, some creators making mirrors, and some bloggers taking pics with mirror effects or water. I sadly really don't expect much at all to happen. But I will be happy if proven wrong

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

That add does not sound enticing to me. Reminds me of one of those cards that fall out of a magazine you always have to pick up.

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

That add does not sound enticing to me. Reminds me of one of those cards that fall out of a magazine you always have to pick up.

I usually slip on it and fall down.

[EliseAnne85]

22 minutes ago, Gwin LeShelle said:

I think things won't get more expensive the creators would just not use it. I remember how long it took for materials to be really widespread, one problem was of course that many people with older PCs are in SL and don't have AL turned on anyway. That changed through the years and since then more and more creator's used materials, and if we are honest not many creators are utilizing them really well by even now.

So I expect when this hits, some creators making mirrors, and some bloggers taking pics with mirror effects or water. I sadly really don't expect much at all to happen. But I will be happy if proven wrong

The thing with the PBR when it's ready, it's said ALM will always be on with no way to turn it off.  At last I read, reflections would be able to be turned off but not ALM which I think could be a costly mistake for SL.  We will have to wait and see.

But, what I'm saying is if creators do go with PBR, creator costs will go way up and so we need a package (subscription) that will help our upload costs and it needs to be realistic, not silly nor with empty promises.  I don't want any mainland for one thing but help with uploads, sure.

[Gwin LeShelle]

1 hour ago, EliseAnne85 said:

The thing with the PBR when it's ready, it's said ALM will always be on with no way to turn it off.  At last I read, reflections would be able to be turned off but not ALM which I think could be a costly mistake for SL.  We will have to wait and see.

But, what I'm saying is if creators do go with PBR, creator costs will go way up and so we need a package (subscription) that will help our upload costs and it needs to be realistic, not silly nor with empty promises.  I don't want any mainland for one thing but help with uploads, sure.

Well in this case they already have it. Premium Plus. When the textures for PBR are 120L like you said...boom it's even more reason for LL to offer their P+ to creators XD they don't need to offer anything more than that, at least from LLs POV XD 

And the AL ...I always go everywhere on ultra already with shadows and advanced lightening turned on, usually a draw distance of 128 sometimes more (in pretty forests or such). And I bet many do have AL on constantly by now, at least when I compare the material "whoopsies" that I encounter in world (like super shiny metal heads and buns) with the ones I encountered like 1 or 2 years ago. It's a really rare sighting by now.

But PBR will take a while, even with them forcing the AL on everyone. The grid will smell like baked potato then. I hope not too many people will be affected by that I'm all for progress and moving forward but I think I should decide if I want to turn such graphic options on or not...out of principle. 

[Phil Deakins]

16 hours ago, Ava Cartier said:

So, Speedlight is $4.99? Although they did word it carefully in the promo, it just seems kinda crappy we have to pay for it, additionally.

No. Speedlight is free to use for anyone. Anyone can pay for a Gold account, which you can use for being logged in 24/7, but you don't have to. Without a Gold account, anyone can log into SL with it, but it logs you out after 6 hours. You can log straight back in if you want to. There's no forced timeout. With P+, a Gold account in included - nothing extra to pay.

LL's statement in their ad that P+ gives you access to Speedlight is totally wrong and, imo, intentionally deceptive. It does get you free access to a Gold account, but everyone has free access to Speedlight.

Edited May 27, 2023 by Phil Deakins

[belindacarson]

46 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

does get you free access to a Gold account, but everyone has free access to Speedlight.

Let's be aware that your I'm is stored on their servers unencrypted unless you are premium plus or pay for their gold account.

[Qie Niangao]

Thank god  ALM will finally be on for everybody so creators will quit wasting so much laggy surface geometry in their models and move it to the normal map—which they could have done all along with the old "Blinn/Phong" materials system and improve overall SL rendering performance for everybody but they didn't dare because there were so many crippled ALM-disabled viewers. PBR comes with fundamental changes in rendering to speed it up for everybody, but those who really suffered with ALM enabled may choose to turn off both reflections and shadows. Also, Linden water rendering used to be dreadfully wasteful so it's been somewhat simplified to improve performance. (I don't see a change in how it looks but supposedly it's not quite identical to the laggier version we've all come to fear.)

I think Boston Blaisdale's video "tutorial" on PBR materials may have added more noise than light on the subject. He barely mentioned that all PBR's glTF materials creation can be done natively in Blender (or in a bunch of other tools) but jumped right into Substance Painter, the most implausibly expensive approach, reminiscent of the Lab showing Mesh creation done exclusively in Maya at first.

On the plus side, he didn't really mention that L$120 upload fee—rightfully not because it only arises from the very laziest of workflows where every possible map is uploaded. What exactly is emissive about any of the three surfaces in his little table (and how many creators have ever used the Emissive alpha mode we've had for years)? For that matter, why are there three separate surfaces in the model at all? And why would this perfectly smooth sheet glass need any specially-uploaded maps at all? Really, there are L$30 worth of textures being uploaded to create this PBR material: the wood surface base color, normal, and occlusion/roughness/metallic maps. Everything else is stock, and thank goodness real creators won't be uploading all those extraneous maps and bogging down viewer texture downloads with a gazillion identical maps (which would each be 1024x1024 in the process demonstrated in the video, despite having precisely one pixel worth of information uniformly replicated a million times per map).

[Phil Deakins]

1 hour ago, belindacarson said:

Let's be aware that your I'm is stored on their servers unencrypted unless you are premium plus or pay for their gold account.

If my memory is correct, and I think it is, with Speedlight, you can log into SL either directly, or by going through their systen. I'm not bothered about going through their system, but others may well be. I have a several avatars that I've logged into SL with Speedlight, and they are all offered to me when I open it up, so their login info is stored. But I could type it in each time and bypass their server.

Anyway, I didn't intend to turn this thread onto Speedlight. I'm merely pointing out that what LL says in their P+ promotion simply isn't true because the promotion makes out that P+ gives access to Speedlight. It doesn't. P+ doesn't give access. Access is available to everybody all the time. P+ isn't needed.

Edited May 27, 2023 by Phil Deakins