The 25 groups limit. It has been stated that this is related to technical problems. If this is the case, how can you provide more groups to premium members? Basic or premium, the problem remains. Either LL has to invest a lot of money or the "technical problem" is just an excuse.

What I'm afraid in this case is that LL tries to force people into premium accounts with functionallity that should be there for all.

And putting more professional features into premium accounts doesn't make it more attractive to the average. My suggestion is to provide a professional accounts with features specific to professionals at higher price and add value or lower the price on premium accounts. Added value could include things like a broad basic inventory stock, higher dispens than today, discount on tiers, free adds, access to premuim sandboxes and many other things.

Hope you got my message. Feel free to IM for further discussion.

Aside from that, I'd like to see the live chat in the support become more accessible. Put it back in the client, and make it easily acessible to any premium members. Also put it on the front page of the support portal, not buried 5 pages deep in solution finder.

This Jira page SVC-114 Meta-Issue: Inventory Loss: issues, fixes, development, reminds me of a war memorial where victims list the suffering of lost inventory.

On SL Exchange, a merchant has been offering www.SecondInventory.com, currently at about $50 US. That cure offered resonates poignant interest and distrusting chatter on the product's SL Exchange comment page. I suspect it will not be too much longer before other competitive developers offer similar outside solutions at a low monthly rate (or free).

I would prefer the sense of back up trust be provided by LL offered from the Second Life name brand. The current online db + an extra local drive back up on my own PC is the reassuring feature add most everyone would like.

For the LL engineers, please consider releasing (as an SL brand) the approved feature set that this outside Second-Inventory company is offering (I assume how this is best accomplished is the calculated decision of LL Engineering Development via perhaps acquisition, reverse engineering, or opening existing features). Also, if this project needs more internal LL department support, LL Engineering might mention to the SL sales/marketing department that such an added Local Drive Back Up feature could boost more Premium account revenue.

Thanks for the consideration, and good luck with it.

PM Sands

• Group creation should become the privilege of premium members only.
• Group membership should become the privilege of premium members only.

Note that the "strong" limitation on membership would make it extremely difficult to operate successfully as a merchant in Second Life unless you choose to become a premium member. If you are going to benefit financially from the game, I think it's fair to have to make a contribution to the platform. As a side benefit this may also reduce the activity of "direct copy merchants" and, as importantly, the time overhead that these individuals put on everyone else.

I believe that the above would allow LL to lift the constraint on group limits and solve the premium member issue in one go.

I have formalized these suggestions as a feature request under SVC-1653

Allow up to,say, 5 "Basic" Alts to be Linked to a Main Premium Account so Premium features are available to these legitimate "paying alts" These Basic "Linked Alts" can have some sort of hidden flag for scripts and the world to differentiate them from Non Paying Basics. Linked Alts should be free - inclusive in the premium membership. The only way a Resident can tell is by the number of groups these "Linked Alts" are in, or by savvy scripts , or even display Linked Alts as Premium accounts in profiles..

Enhance build tools (i've some suggestions but haven't submitted anything yet) i.e. Create subtabs in for example Texture and add new parameters to subtabs only available to premiums: Move Glow, Shininess, Bumpmapping to special subtab; add Dynamic Reflection (allow DR to be a prim parameter rather than a global viewer setting); Allow Bumpmapping Repeats per Face/Meter, Rotation, and Default/Planar application to be adjusted separate from the texture; separate the Horizontal/Vertical aspect Ratio for Repeats per Meter for Textures VWR-2889 and Bumpmaps... Basics: Enhancements Viewable but Disabled (tease); Premium and Linked Alts: Enhancements Enabled.

Build Restiction: Restrict "Contents" tab to Premium and Linked Alts only, do not allow Basics to add scripts to objects (this may cut down on "anonymous" grid-attacks).

Group Limitations: Basic: 10; Premium and Linked Alts: 255 (a nice round 8-bit number ("FF").. but really, is anybody going to be in that many groups anyway?). Do not restrict Basics from forming groups, however..

Inventory Limitations: Basic: 1500 object cap - not counting the default Library; Premium and Linked Alts: No Limit.

Financial Limitations: Basic: L$25,000 max. ; Premium and Linked Alts: No Limit. Allow Basics to sell objects and access LindeX for buying only, but cap their wallets. LindeX "sell" available only to Premium and Linked Alts.

Login Annoyance: Basic: Every 5 -10 Logins advertise Premium Membership in login sequence, delay world rendering 5 seconds.
Premium and Linked Alts: No Login Annoyance.

Avatars: Basics: unchanged current Avatar; Premium and Linked Alts: Enhanced Avatar meshes/controls, relax current slider limitations, greatly increase Attachment points, and double HUD attachment points.

Limiting in-wold time on basic members will have a negative impact I think. Your prob going to lose quite a few residents. There are many residents that just wont pay, whether it's a budget issue and they figure they can buy $9 worth of Lindens instead, or a lack of credit card. They still impact the economy.

Limiting creation abilities will just hamper the progress of the grid. There are a lot of talented people out there that create content that are basic members.

I believe limiting avatar creation for basic members would be an improvement. Two per IP address I think is fair. It would put a strain on the ppl who create avatar after avatar just to annoy other residents.

Ability to link alt accounts would be nice and shouldn't be to costly to implement.

Inventory Backup is a hot topic. Where do you draw the line and how long till someone finds a work-around and duplicates no copy items. One of the fundamental ideas of this product is; everything is streamed to a viewer and doesn't reside on a users computer. Once you start putting objects in the end-user's control its only a matter of time before it gets abused.

An automatic daily transaction history download would be nice. Maybe a small program that premium members could download that automatically retrieves all the transactions daily.

Not only do you need ideas to pull in more premium member you need ideas for retention. Little perks like start a "Paid for Life" weekly drawing where if you are premium member you are automatically entered.

• Allow Premium accounts to view top scripts and colliders information grid wide. Not only will it provide an incentive to get premium service, but it will allow for ready identification and reporting of griefers, laggers & their toys. Result is more happy customers who won't leave the service prematurely.

• Allow Premium account holders to mute land parcels such that they don't actually see or hear any of the objects on the muted parcel. This is already provided in unofficial clients such as Able. Even bare granite looks 100% better than some of the horrifying builds and ad garbage that one is forced to look at.

• Allow concierge premium members to purchase a single low prim openspaces region.

• Allow premium account holders to do full backups of their inventory, and backups would be stored on a dedicated 'premium' server and greatly reduce the chance of lost inventory to premium members.

• For year or older premium account holders, provide a 20% tier credit on Island land purchases equal to 1 years tier. For example, if a resident paid $125 a month in tier for the past 12 months, they would get $300 in credit towards purhcase of an Island.

• While retaining the current public Help Island, create a Premium Help island and a premium only region size sandbox. In addition to less crowds and grief that a premium only island would provide, stock the Help Island freebie store with premium no transfer freebies. The preimium region size sandbox would also be an attractive incentive as it would allow people to work with minimal interruptions.

• Speaking of public sandboxes, outside of help island, restrict access to premium members or regular members who are 30 days or older. If a regular member wants earlier access to the sandboxes outside of help island, they need to get premium The result will be a huge reduction in sandbox griefing and increased premium members.

• Provide premium members an enhanced group tools capability. No restriction on the number of groups and extra tools such as muting group IMs.

Bump up all the land allocations per $.

Additional Land (over 512 sq meters) (In square meters)
Monthly land use fee*
FROM-----------------------------TO
512 m2 ---------US$5-$4--512-------(+512)--lower start-($4 teazer)
1,024 m2 ------US$8------1,536--------( +512)
2,048 m2 ------US$15----3,572--------(+512)
4,096 m2 ------US$25----7,680--------(+512)
8,192 m2------US$40--15,872--------(+512)
16,384 m2----US$75--32,256--------(+512)
32,768 m2-----US$12565,024--------(+512)
65,536 m2------US$195 -------gone

So that when u add on the 512 (especially for the lower tiers) u dont end up with an odd shaped lot (on average)

The steeper increase in land allocation per $ (above) will encourage much more upgrading to a higher tier, and be cost effective.
More people will sign on to become premium when they see the price decrease, and the initial hurdle will have been overcome for many of them to eventually upgrade to higher tiers.
Seeing land BECOMING more affordable (instead of more expensive) will also encourage this.

AV LAG COST
But as long as lag does not get better — then more features must be available to premium members with LESS to non-premium. (LL needs to know – and earn a $% — of Island subscribers for them to be treated better, in this way, as premium. And pay their share of LL's cost of fixing lag). Huge-prim-count attachments need to be included here .

SCRIPT LAG COST
With comprehensive calculation of script's effect on lag. Then maybe only premium members might be allowed to run certain high cpu scripts? And eventually, with full advanced disclosure of script performance, premium members might be made to pay for some script's usage?

• number of inventory items (first 5k free, I guess)
• read & write access to a small database, depending on size
• disk-space and bandwidth for audio and video streams, webspace with perl&php&mysql
  ...and so on...

LL could make a lot money by offering us residents what we want, and this is something that is different for different people. So, stop offering a bundle called premium that only serves as a long time bond. Of course, a reasonable backup system I would consider essential for all users.

Premium Members Should

1. Be allowed more than 25 groups.
2. Faster and Better response to in world issues i.e. return of live help in world and make it easy to find!
3. Group Formation should be limited to Premium Accounts
4. Better and Faster grid updates ( we that pay dont like sitofting in the dark when the grid is down)
5. No limit on Avatar Creation, We pay for these accounts allow us as many as we want!
6. More control over terrain editing on mainland parcels, Once again we pay for it why not?
7. As always customer service could be greatly improved. Response to problems could be sped up!
8. While its true that an increase in the stipend may be see as money for nothing, A stipend increase based on account age would have
advantages, Like a raise for us that have stuck it out with all of SL's whoas and difficulties with growth yet have stayed loyal! That would be nice I think for some premium account holders even now to act as a stop loss of those current accounts! Feeling a little linden love back for our investment would go a long ways I think.

To be honest right now there really isn't much of a advantage other than owning land to haveing a paid account! Its up to LL to Sell us a package worth haveing. And rewarding loyal long term accounts goes along with that.

• Group creation should become the privilege of premium members only.
• Inventory Limitations: Basic: 1500 object cap - not counting the default Library; Premium and Linked Alts: No Limit.
• Financial Limitations: Basic: L$25,000 max. ; Premium and Linked Alts: No Limit. Allow Basics to sell objects and access LindeX for buying only, but cap their wallets. LindeX "sell" available only to Premium and Linked Alts.
• Ability to link alt accounts.
• Allow premium account holders to do full backups of their inventory, and backups would be stored on a dedicated 'premium' server and greatly reduce the chance of lost inventory to premium members.

I would also like to see some limitations put on alts in their first few days in SL - even one week might be helpful, as newly created alts are often used by griefers.

I am opposed to the idea of limiting group membership to premium members only. This would be counterproductive to businesses and other groups in SL.

Also the stipend is actually the user paying for themselves rather than from Linden Lab as Premium members is billed every month., but bringing back the 500L weekly stipend for premium user is a good idea.

Next, i agreed on some of the Premiums here on allowing more than 25 groups, like 50 group atleast for Premium members.

In addition, i would like suggest that a dedicated premium servers for Premium members to logon to reduce lag and avoid collision with basic account members.

Last but not least i also agreed on the suggestion that full backup should be available to the premium members on a dedicate server.

Thanks again, i will make my decision whether to stay a basic or not based on the progression on this issue, so, Linden Lab, do you see another potential income is coming to your way??

I think the First Land system was a good incentive but it's implementation was flawed. First of all, when a user upgrades to premium they should get a 512m plot for free, tier free and locked to that user so it can't be sold. The plots themselves should be sectioned in premium only sims so all premium members would be guaranteed that their parcel is next to other premium members. These sims should be aesthetic, terra-formed and free of ad-farms.

I would also like to suggest several other features that would be enormous incentives to become premium:

1) Thumbnail views of textures in your inventory.
2) The ability to upload custom skeleton systems and avatar meshes.
3) The ability to apply full scale sculpt maps. In other words, if a premium member uploads a 128x128 sculptmap - they would have a checkbox to instruct SL to render that sculptmap in full detail, without the reduction to 32x32. This alone would make me go premium in a heartbeat. Lag will not be an issue, it will be mitigated by users.
4) The ability to create prims larger than 10x10x10m. A premium member, should be capable of creating prims up to the size of a sim (256x256m) and as tall as the sim itself (4096m). This would remove the need to use megaprims created by other users such as Gene Replacement. I would rather have MY name on those objects.

I think the whole point of being a premium member - either in Second Life or any other online service - is that you can DO things that non-premium accounts cannot. This does not mean placing arbitrary limitations on free accounts, it simply means to give premium accounts more abilities that are only obtainable by being premium.

Quite frankly, I know that I have wasted 2 years of payment of premuim account money and unless LL pulls its collective finger out and starts thinking of how to give real benefit to premium account members I aim to downgrade my account and strongly recommend to my friends to do the same.

I would never recommend to a newbie that they purchased a premium account. There is NO benefit to it.