Update: The Lab has also now blogged on this offer, and also indicate that the Haunted House experience has re-opened in Second Life, which is open to anyone via the Portal Park.
Linden Lab has launched the latest Premium membership offer alongside a seasonal Halloween gift offer for new and existing Premium members.
The Premium membership discount applies to the first quarter of the Quarterly Billing plan (remaining quarters all billed at the full price of US $22.50 per quarter), and runs from now through until 08:00 SLT on Monday, November 2nd, 2015.
The Premium Discount is once again on offer, together with a set of Halloween gifts
The Halloween gifts come in three parts: a ridable flying dinosaur (with aviator helmet for the rider), which is clearly intended to link to the PaleoQuest game; two “ghostly” avatars (male and female) with HUD and alpha mask; and finally, a drone system, comprising a wearable iPad-style controller, a HUD, and an update system.
I’ve tended not to be overly enthusiastic about such gifts (with the odd exception, such as the sailing boat – which at least got me into sailing in SL), and to be brutally honest, these do little to break the mould. The dino and the ghost avatars have a certain yawn factor about them which had me rezzing to take a look, trying and deleting.
Playing with the drone
The drone could be seen as a little fun item, and has a number of interesting features. You can, for example, slave your camera to it, and fly it around, or you can set it to automatically follow you (or someone else who is within range) as you wander around (it’ll self-delete should you teleport out of the current region), while the radar function will list the names of other avatars in the region and their distance from your avatar. There are also options for customising the drone and setting its “mood”, and it’ll get a tad naggy if you forget it is there.
That said, I’m not entirely sure just how long the drone is likely to remain a novelty item for most; if you want to have a free-flying camera, a suitable controller and the flycam mode in the viewer are both far more efficient (as is alt-camming). However, it can be entertaining (I admit to having a giggle when it spooked a helo crew hovering next to my house), and could offer options in some RP scenarios, while the iPad and its associated animations might find a use from time-to-time, even if the drone doesn’t.
As usual, if you are considering the move up from Basic, might I offer some thoughts (as long in the tooth as they might be) as someone who has bounced from Premium to Basic and back again?
Previously appearing on a roughly quarterly basis, these offers / drives seem to have switched to bimonthly events since April 2015, which aligns them nicely with Halloween and Christmas for the purposes of gift-giving.
Of particular interest to Premium members is the “even better support” mentioned in the headline, which the post expands thus:
Starting today, Premium Members can now receive support by live chatting directly with the Linden Lab Concierge Support team. This is the same team of Lindens that Estate owners speak to when they need help, and now all Premium Members have access to this level of support.
For those not already a Premium member, the discount period runs through until 08:00 SLT on Monday the 24th of August 2015.
Note that the discount is only available when signing-up to the monthly billing plan, and is only applicable to the first month’s payment, reducing it to US $5.00 (+VAT, if applicable). Payments thereafter revert to the usual US $9.95 (+ VAT, if applicable).
This marks the second time the discount has been applied to the monthly billing plan, the first having been in April 2015, with the June discount offer switching back to the “traditional” quarterly plan. Whether this means we’ll be seeing the offer alternate between monthly and quarterly plans with future discount offers, or whether the Lab is simply gauging which generates the greater interest, remains to be seen.
‘Tis the time of quarter again – the summer Premium membership discount offer is up and running, and it is back to the “usual” 50% off of the first billing period when subscribing to the quarterly plan.
The announcement of the offer came via a blog post from the Lab, which also points to the (worthwhile) increased limit of 60 groups for Premium account holders, as well as the usual bits and pieces on offer to those upgrading: the L$1,000 bonus after 45 days, the weekly stipend of L$300, the opportunity to have your own Linden Home or piece of mainland, etc.
The summer Premium membership promo offers those interested a beach set
For those interested in the opportunity, the offer started at 08:00 PDT on Friday, June 12th, and concludes at 08:00 PDT on Monday, June 29th. As usual, if you are considering the move up from Basic, might I offer some thoughts (as long in the tooth as they might be) as someone who has bounced from Premium to Basic and back again?
This quarter’s offer of course wouldn’t be complete without the Premium gift box. This one has a decidedly summery feel to it, with a package of beach oriented items including wearables such as Elton John style sunglasses, a pic-er-nic basket, Boo-boo and sun hat; there’s also a picnic spread, beach towel and sun shade, sandcastle, beach ball, sun lotion and a colour-changing surfboard you can ride. As gifts go, they’re pretty much on a par with what we’ve seen in the past – which is to say a mixed bag. I can see the surf board getting use in those beach regions which allow rezzing; the picnic set could be good for romantics, again in places that allow rezzing. The rest? Well …
And as a final reminder (also in the official blog post), if you didn’t make the Premium meet-up with the Lindens on Thursday, June 11th but would like an advance copy of the SL12B avatar, don’t forget you have until midnight on the 12th June to snag one from the vendor.
We’re all familiar with the Lab’s periodic Premium membership offers: every once in a while one will pop-up offering a discount for those who up their membership from Basic or who are signing-up to SL for the first time.
I’d actually been expecting such an offer to pop-up around mid-March. However, it was announced on Friday, April 3rd, with a blog announcement, and runs through until the Monday, April 13th, when it expires at 08:00 SLT.
As the blog post notes, there is no Premium gift offer this time around, instead the lab point to their recent announcement of a Premium perk:
Being a Premium Second Life subscriber carries many benefits – from weekly L$ stipends, to your own Linden Home, expanded live customer support options, exclusive gifts, and more. Just last week, we added a new perk for Premium subscribers, and we’ll be adding even more benefits and features for Premium members throughout the year.
This time the 50% discount applies to the first month’s payment on the Monthly plan
None of this is what makes the offer particularly interesting. As I’ve noted, they do pop-up periodically. What is interesting however, is hinted-at in the body text of the post:
If you’ve been waiting to upgrade to a Premium account, now is a great time, because today we’re kicking off a great new sale: from today until April 13, 2015, you can upgrade to Premium subscription for less than $5 for your first month! That’s a 50% discount off the regular rate, and this offer won’t last long. Upgrade today and start enjoying Premium benefits at our lowest-ever monthly rate.
Up until now, these offers have applied to the Quarterly billing plan, where the 50% discount is applied to the first quarter’s billing, reducing it from $22.50 to $11.25 (excluding VAT, where applicable). However, this time the discount applies to the Monthly billing scheme, as the notes at the end of the blog post further confirm.
Quite why the switch has been made is unclear; while I’ve never myself been convinced as to how well-received these offers are (that’s purely supposition, without any basis on fact), I’d say that the Quarterly plan discount represents a more appealing offer than just cutting the first month’s fee. Perhaps the Lab were finding that even with the first quarter’s bill cut by half, people weren’t overly enamoured with the offer, and are trying to mix things up a little. If so, I’d venture to suggest perhaps offering two months on the reduced rate might be a tad more appealing.
But really, the problem with Premium membership is not so much how much it costs – but what it brings. For the majority of people who can otherwise enjoy and contribute to SL free of charge (emphasis intentional, as “free” doesn’t equate to “feeloading”, as is sometimes made out to be the case), Premium membership really isn’t that attractive. Hence why the Lab have in the past tried to spice it up with gifts. The problem here is, as I’ve recently explored, actually coming up with a Premium package that does offer the kind of incentives that are likely to have really broad-based appeal among users actually isn’t that easy.
In the meantime, if you are a Basic member and are considering upgrading, might I offer some thoughts (as long in the tooth as they might be) as someone who has bounced from Premium to Basic and back again?
Update, April 3rd: This article has be slightly overtaken by events. The discussion relating to SL Go as a Premium option has been negated by the fact that on April 2nd, 2015, Onlive regretfully announced their streaming services would be closing on April 30th, 2015, following the sale of their core patents to Sony Computer Entertainment America – see my report here.
On Monday, March 20th, the Lab announced A New Perk for Premium Subscribers, which saw the cap on delivery of offline IMs you can read raised from 25 to 50 if you’re a Premium account holder.
Premium benefits are often hard to quantify in terms of value (although the “new” in the current Linden Homes ad really needs to be dropped nowadays…)
While the rise in the limit did result in some amused comments in various groups about it being an early “April Fools” joke, and some sarcastic feedback on the forums, it is at least indicative that the Lab do have Premium accounts, and the need to try to improve the offerings associated with them, on their collective minds.
Indeed, this increase in the cap for off-line IMs had been informally mentioned at a number of the Server Beta User Group (SBUG) meetings in recent weeks, while a server-side deployment that went grid-wide in week #12 included “internal improvements for premium users”, which were described as offering the means by which the Lab might be able to offer new perks to Premium account holders in the future, should such opportunities develop.
Of course, we can argue as to whether or not such a modest change and the IM cap update deserves heralding in a blog post of its own – but how else is the Lab supposed to get the word out in a manner that will be spotted?
However, the general response perhaps indicates once again that coming up with the right balance of Premium benefits isn’t as easy as we might like to think. The problem here is that we’re such a rich and diverse group of users, that trying to find something that will have a really broad basis of appeal, and which is relatively easy to implement, isn’t so simple a proposition as may appear to be be the case. Even the ideas we ourselves put forward might be said to be of limited appeal or aren’t entirely straight-forward to implement. Thus the Lab tends to be caught in something of a cleft stick.
Gifts have been a staple part of the Premium account offering. While well-intended, and something liable to have reasonably widespread appeal when compared to other ideas, they’ve not really endeared themselves to users as well as might have been imagined
An example of the potential narrowness of appeal came up at a recent LL-led meeting in which the question of Premium benefits was raised. The responses given, which related to things like additional scripting options, special file stores, etc., undoubtedly sounded good to those making them, but, when taken as a whole, really only held appeal to a very narrow group of users, making them hard to justify as a “benefit” everyone might appreciate.
Other ideas, while sounding obvious, may suffer the same issue of appeal and bring with them problems of their own which could easily offset any potential benefit they present. Take the idea of increasing the amount of land offered as either part of a Linden Home or as free tier from 512 sq metres to 1024 sq metres. Sounds simple enough on the surface, but it belies the fact that many SL users, Premium and Basic, don’t see the appeal of either Mainland holdings or Linden Homes.
More particularly, increasing the amount of land available to Linden Homes brings with it problems of its own, as it essentially means that all of the existing LH estates would have to be rebuilt from ground up in order to both provide the additional land per unit and preserve the necessary protected land per region in order to be able to supply each home with it 117 LI – and that’s a big task, one that would include something of an increase in the overall number of LH regions to boot. It would also mean the need for those already occupying Linden Home to have to relocate, causing additional disruption the Lab may not feel happy about creating.
Increasing the parcel size for Linden Homes to 1024 square metres sounds good, but brings with it headaches of its own when you consider the amount of re-working required to make all LH estates fit with the new parcel size
While this issues are perhaps smaller, the same goes for upping the amount of free tier offered Premium accounts from 512 sq m to 1024 sq m. Does the person currently using their 512 sq m actually have enough land around them to benefit from the increase in free tier? Will they have to move to make use of it? If they deed their land to a group, does the group have enough land from which to benefit? Then there are the necessary changes which need to be made to the billing system to account for the change.
Obviously, these are not insurmountable problems, and those relating to free Mainland tier might even be regarded as edge cases. But, the fact that they do raise questions marks over their ease of implementation and may not deliver the hoped-for levels of increased appeal do make them that much harder for the Lab to consider as potential solutions.
Even ideas around offering SL Go as a Premium offering, while simple in concept, are potentially less-than-simple to implement
The same is true for ideas for combining Premium accounts with other offerings – such as SL Go, as Jo Yardley has suggested, may potentially be non-starters. While the idea sounds great in principle, it perhaps overlooks a few things.
At its most basic, it is hard to see how such an arrangement would offer a decent level of return for OnLive. As it is, it would seem the service has already gained sufficient critical mass for the company to enjoy a meaningful revenue stream from it without any such partnership; ergo, it’s hard to quantify any real gain that might be made in wrapping the service as a part of LL’s Premium membership.
More practically for both companies, however, is that the idea would seem to introduce numerous additional billing requirements which will take time and effort to implement and which, once done, might not be matched by the overall pick-up in interest SL users have in the Premium account offering. Support issues also rear their head as well. Currently, SL Go stands as a service independent of LL. Bundle it with a Premium offering, however, and users are going to expect the Lab to support it, regardless of OnLive’s own support activities, and are probably going to be unimpressed when referred elsewhere.
Thus there are a broad range of issues which would have to be addressed for such an arrangement to come about. While they may not necessarily be insurmountable, they do nevertheless call into question the overall benefits of such a partnership when compared to the overall effort in making it happen.
Premium sandboxes have proven popular among premium members for providing relatively quiet and griefer-free building locations
One idea that could have appeal is that of increasing the number of groups Premium members can join. Given the ongoing improvements being made to the entire group chat mechanism (which had previously been impacted, performance-wise, by the sheer volume of group-related “management” messages the system had to deal with), this could well be something the Lab could provide in the future.
Another idea has been that perhaps the Lab could offer a range of options users could then chose from to build their own “Premium package”. However, this again brings up the question of management and support for such a system, as well as the sticky issue of ensuring all that is offered represents equitable value across the various combinations of options users might pick.
Will Burns, far back in the mists of time (OK, February 2013), pointed to one potential for Premium accounts, and that would be to revamp them as “Professional Accounts”. He’s nipped and tucked the idea since then, but it is an interesting concept, and one that has significant logic behind it. However, it is also one I rather suspect the Lab is considering (in some form, at least) with regards to their next generation platform, rather than “retroactively” applying to SL.
Or perhaps the solution needn’t be that complicated, and we’re simply looking at the issue too hard. Maybe a simple increase in the weekly stipend back to its old level of L$500 might be enough of an enticement (money talks, as it were, despite potentials sinks), particularly if, going forward, it is part of a package of visible in-world options … such as a higher group limit, raised cap on offline IMs, etc.
In terms of the raising of the IM cap – and to bring this discussion full circle – one of the criticisms voiced directly at it is that it seems a trivial change, and should have been higher. Perhaps so, but as was pointed out to me when discussing the change, notifications have to be loaded each time you log-in, and people are really bad at clearing down their saved notifications. Thus setting the limit too high could result in some people’s log-in being impacted as the notifications file is loaded, and so it might be that the Lab is erring on the the side of caution in order to see how things go.
But be that as it may, the fact remains that the Lab are at least trying to offer more useful benefits to Premium members. It may well be that given the state of things, all they’ll ever be able to do is twiddle at the fringes in order to try to make things more attractive. If so, then hopefully as small as it is, the IM cap change will prove the be just the tip of the iceberg, and in time we will see a broader range of perks and tweaks sufficient to give us all some measure of satisfaction with Premium accounts.
On Friday July 18th, the Lab launched the latest off of its Premium Membership discount offers, together with a new Premium Membership gift.
These seem to be run around July / August each year, and also in November. As usual, the offer is 50% off of membership for those upgrading, but only if they opt for the Quarterly billing plan, and the discount is applied only to the first quarter billing period. The offer runs from 08:00 SLT / PDT on Friday July 18th 2014 through until 08:00 SLT / PDT on Monday August 4th, 2014. The usual Premium Benefits are part-and-parcel of the offer.
The Premium Membership offer banner
I’m a Premium Member; I re-upped several years ago after having been basic, and I find it moderately useful – for I time I lived exclusively in my Linden Home and didn’t find it that bad; admittedly, I managed to land on my feet with the one I had, but I did spend a fair amount of time mulling things over and settled on the exact style I wanted ahead of time and then dallied until it came around on the booking page (not all variants of the various styles are available all of the time). I was then very lucky that the first one I saw was in a location I liked – however, moving between Linden Homes is relatively simple, providing you follow some simple rules. So if the first one you are assigned doesn’t fit the bill, location-wise, it’s easy to hop around.
Even so, I’m still (as always) irked by some of the stated benefits that come with Premium, and wish the Lab would clean-up some of the wording – “More Land and Privacy?” – how, exactly? Basic members get to enjoy both of these as well; not as cheaply, perhaps, but they can have them. I’d also like to see more thought given to the benefits in general. some of the gifts are fun … but none of them are that inspirational.
The Premium Gift pirate airship includes a premium prim count / land impact
Which brings me to the latest Premium gift itself. The gift on offer this time is a “new interactive pirate airship, the Linden Marauder.”
Pirate, eh? All I can say is avast … land impact goes into this vessel; 502 in fact (although the physics weight is admittedly only 18-ish), so it’s not something you’ve going to want to keep rezzed out somewhere. It’ll sit a number of people – Captain (owner) at the helm, who must board first, then the “First Mate” and then passengers (or “scurvy crew”, if you prefer and keeping to the piratical theme. Flight controls are the usual : PAGE UP and PAGE DOWN to ascend / descend, LEFT ARROW and RIGHT ARROW to turn. UP ARROW and DOWN ARROW to accelerate / slow down. A nice touch is SHIFT LEFT ARROW or SHIFT RIGHT ARROW to run-out the port or starboard cannon on the gun decks and fire a broadside.
Quite a few were trying the latest Premium Gift out for size, if only briefly
Handling-wise the airship is OK, firing the guns at another passing airship can be a bit of a giggle – the first time. Other than that, I don’t have anything to say on it, other than when it comes to the idea of Premium gifts and offering something of value and which is likely to be of real benefit, this kind of offering leaves two words floating inside my head: “missed” and “opportunity”
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 