Reed Linden

Possibly! I can't make any promises here. I can only say that we're watching to see how Plus and Premium and Premium Plus all perform together very closely and using that information along with feature requests and feedback to decide where the next/best opportunities lie. I think mid-tier style plans could absolutely emerge as the 'winner' in that evaluation.

In order: We have only changed the VAT policy for membership levels (Plus, Premium, Premium Plus). We can reconsider it in the future! But we have no plans to do so at this time. We're moving into a direction where the various membership types are differentiated not just by price, but by function. Plus is intended primarily to democratize mainland ownership (and was released intentionally with a tier maintenance reduction). Premium, while currently being the 'jack-of-all-trades' subscription level as a result of it being the ONLY subscription level until very recently, remains the membership type for Linden Homes. My intent at the moment, is to move further toward enhancing those differentiators in the future. No. Same basic answer as above.

Y'all have sharp eyes. Behold:

Hi, everyone! There IS a web user group today. I'm hosting it! I think it may be useful to this discussion to talk a little bit about them. First, a little about me. I am the Product Manager for our web properties on Second Life, which includes just about everything within the secondlife.com domain (though, with an important caveat which we'll discuss in a moment), as well as many of our backend systems that talk to the web properties, like the billing engine and support tooling. I've been with Linden Lab for 11 years, starting on our Support team and working my way up through engineering. I accepted a Product ownership role 5 years ago. I am a resident and a Linden. Supporting y'all has been my passion since the first day I started answering phone calls and live chats on a busy overnight Friday shift! My focus is bringing the best tools and features to our residents that I possibly can, to make your Second Life experience as fun, fulfilling, and interesting as it can be. If you have questions about how the web properties work, or what new features we have planned for them, or want to talk about ways they could work even better, I'm your guy! And they best way to have that discussion with me is at the web user group meeting today. Our Web User Group meetings have been ongoing every first Wednesday of the month for as far back as I can remember. I've personally been involved with them for the past 5 years, and I inherited running them from Alexa and Grumpity, so I know they go back even further. As I described above, I am the Product Manager who owns our web properties from a functionality standpoint. Here's that caveat I mentioned above: what I don't own is the community policies. We have a few rules at our web user group meetings, the most important of which is that we can't discuss Governance related issues. It's not that I don't want to, or don't care, it's that I'm literally not qualified to do so. Anything I say would, while well-intentioned, almost certainly be wrong. So, while I personally care about your concerns with regards to the recent policy changes here on the forums, and I want to encourage you to voice them, I want to make sure you all have the right expectations. I will not be able to address them. That said, I will reach out to my colleagues and see if someone may be available to stop by and add some clarity where possible, but no promises. In the meantime, I welcome your attendance at our user group meeting today, and I look forward to sharing with you all of our recent web features and plans for the future! Cheers!

On the other hand, this seems like a neat idea.

Alright, I'm closing up for the day and the weekend. Thank you all for the discussion, the questions, and the suggestions. Most of all, I appreciate the civility of the discussion so far. You're the reason why we do what we do, and why we're passionate about making Second Life bigger, better, and more awesome. There's been some good suggestions in this thread. I encourage you to submit your feature requests through JIRA - our team reviews every request. If you still have questions about the fee update that are not answered here or in the blog post, please utilize your contact support options! They'll be happy to assist in any way they can.

Attention gotten! I won't personally rule out some premium feature tied to lindex fees in the future, but it's not currently planned.

I agree, and I appreciate your concern! It is our intention to give much more notice in the future.

To the first: it was a constant, static value that only had to be changed in a limited number of places and there was no logic change required. In contrast, the lindex had no concept of percentage based buy fees prior to this change, nor did it have the concept of a floor and a ceiling to fees. All of that had to be implemented from scratch. From here on out, we can now change the static values of those fields as necessary in much the same way as we did with Premium prices earlier. To the second: I cannot give you an explicit answer here. We would have preferred to provide more heads up to the community about this, and in the future it is our goal to do so. In this specific case, it was not possible to do so.

Since I did the work on both of those, I can say with confidence that increasing the Premium fee was comparatively easy.

There may be, but I think this is maybe not the right forum for that conversation. For the record, I don't think it's a bad question.

Hi, RunawayBunny I think your question is valid, but I agree this isn't the place to ask it. I am not a lawyer, and I have no idea. I would encourage you to reach out to our support representatives who might be able to direct you to a better resource than little ol' me.

Potentially. I don't have the information on that personally, so I can't speak to it. I do know it's actually fairly hard to quantify exactly how much it costs to run a single region. We have a general idea, but so much of SL is bespoke and each individual region has different needs and requirements that while we can say fairly confidently how much a given machine costs to rent, the rest of what goes into maintaining a region is much harder.

Good question! The answer is that this fee change was a lot harder to implement than we expected (so true of pretty much everything we do here) because the lindex is so intrinsically connected to so many pieces of the overall Second Life product. Pretty much every system needed to be touched in some way or another, including (to our surprise), the Viewer itself. Wrangling the expertise and manpower to get all of those pieces in motion and in the correct state without also breaking things over in, say, Profiles or Groups at the same time was a rather more monumental effort than we anticipated. We didn't want to make the announcement until we had a solid date we could pin to for go-live (none of us like missing announced dates, either), and by the time we had that, we had less flexibility with the rollout timing than we'd have liked.

Hi, Adam As I mentioned above, we remain committed to making land ownership as accessible as possible. That effort is ongoing and will continue!

This. I cannot stress enough that this stuff is not easy. This is well put and illustrative of the type of challenges that leveraging the opportunities that AWS provides presents.

We did consider a more phased rollout. In the end, we made the decision that if the intention was to end up in the same place regardless, better to rip off the bandaid all at once, rather than prolong the pain over time. This is why we took such pains to ensure that the pain would be distributed as equitably as possible, and do our level best to leave the most vulnerable residents unaffected.

This is exactly the type of thing we're excited to reinvest in and leverage. More functionality for less! But the road from here to there takes effort and expertise. Not overnight and not free. The future is bright for Second Life!

1. It's not a 1 to 1. The updated transaction fee will help offset some costs associated with the move to AWS. To your point, one of the ways we will be reinvesting this revenue is in leveraging the new options the move to AWS gives us to provide exactly the types of benefits you're talking about. 2. I can't comment about the potential benefits associated with Premium Plus - those will be announced when they're finalized and we're able to commit to a release. It's possible! 3. It still might! We remain committed to lowering the barrier to entry for region ownership as much as we're able. Changes to our revenue model (such as increased transaction fees) are part of that process. 4. We have considered many potential avenues of revenue increase, and we're working hard to balance the impact to our residents vs. our own operational costs and needs. It's a very narrow tightrope!

There are no current plans to raise the cost of premium membership.

I have a lot of ideas, but nothing is set in stone yet. With a product like ours (more accurately, many separate but intricately related products), much care needs to be taken to ensure that moving a widget in one place doesn't completely bork something in another service entirely, so our scope will (initially) be limited, I suspect. My (admittedly biased) focus will be on protecting payment methods and account security (passwords, email addresses, RL info) first and foremost, so that would be mostly web-based. I want this thread to stay on track, so that's probably the last question I should answer about my personal wish list for 2FA. Thank you all for your interest! I'm excited about the possibilities for it, and I'm glad to see y'all are interested, too. Back to buy fees!

You might be onto something there!

Hi, Kimmi! This is slightly off topic, but I opened this can of worms, so I'll own it. I am still scoping out how I expect this to work so there's nothing set in stone, but my intention is to keep it as non-intrusive as possible. I envision it being opt-in.

Hi, Bitterthorn I'm the payments product manager, and I have my grubby hands in a lot of our backend stuff, but not much front end, so the new onboarding stuff is not on my desk, so to speak. I wish I could tell you more about it, but suffice to say that as a company, we're very excited about it and that means we're going to want to share it with you all as soon as we can and in big bold text. Stay tuned, I guess! For me personally, I'm super excited to be working on Two Factor Authentication this year, and some updates to our web account management to give you all more options to interact with your in-world avatar/region/etc from the web.

Hi, Prokofy! We remain committed to the stability of the Lindex exchange, and we will continue to monitor that rate closely with this change. I don't have the concurrency:spend ratios available, but I can say that we're very proud to be at an all time high on premium accounts for the month of March, 2021.