Hoping against hope.....

[Sudane Erato]

I've been hoping against hope that now that Phillip has returned to LL, a degree of intelligent relatedness to their customers would finally sink into the Linden Lab "ethos". Well... I'm still hoping, but the evidence isn't good.

LL has just now announced a new Premium membership product, Premium Plus.

Premium memberships are where you pay fees to Linden Lab for your avatar account, and get perks that free accounts don't get... standard operating procedure in this day and age. For me as an estate owner, the biggest reason to pay the US$100/year is to get 90 days worth of transactions stored in LL records... CRITICAL when trying to keep the books. So I, Rudeen, and my SL New England land manager Odysseus Elytis all have premium accounts for this reason. The other perks have never made much difference to me.

But now you can buy an even more expensive Premiums membership, for a whopping US$250/year! $150 more. Yes, lots of useless (for me) extra perks. But one thing stood out. FREE uploads of sounds, textures and animations (notice they DON'T include mesh uploads). I, and I'm sure every builder in this community, upload TONS, hundreds, maybe thousands, of textures per year. They cost us L$10 each to upload. So I thought I'd do the math.

The exchange rate has hovered around L$243/US$1 for the last year. The increase in this premium membership is US$150/year, which is equal to approximately L$36,450, not including the exchange fees. So to break even, a builder would need to upload 3,645 textures per year to have the upgrade pay for itself.

OK... you say... but they also increase the stipend. Yes... it goes from 300 to 650, THEY SAY. But that's actually wrong. I, Rudeen and Odysseus actually get a stipend of 500/week (why they publish such inaccuracies, God only knows...). So the increased cash-back is $150/week or L$7800/year... 780 texture uploads. So then 2865 texture uploads to break even.

What do you think is going on in the minds of this deranged bunch? When are they EVER going to understand their own product and how it works? And devise expansions which really have some value? I am ALL IN FAVOR of Linden Lab being profitable, but my God people... use your brains!

Sudane.........................

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

Regarding stipends, that's not really inaccurate. L$300/week has been the rate for regular Premium for years. Your accounts are at a grandfathered rate that I haven't seen in my 10+ years in SL.

EDIT: Out of curiosity and to verify my own memory, I looked it up. The stipend rates for Premium accounts are L$500/wk for accounts upgraded prior to 7/21/06. From 7/21/06 - 11/1/06, it's L$400/wk. For those of us who upgraded after 11/1/06, it's L$300/wk.

[Han Held]

It's a shockingly bad deal, if you have two $11.99 premium accounts then you get nearly the same perks (stipend, land) for the same or a lower price ...except for the "free" uploads (you're not the first to notice that mesh is omitted!).

I say "shockingly bad" because I, personally, am shocked at how anyone could think this was a compelling deal. I upload a lot of textures, but nowhere near enough to make this work for me.

[Han Held]

Regarding stipends, that's not really inaccurate. L$300/week has been the rate for regular Premium for years. Your accounts are at a grandfathered rate that I haven't seen in my 10+ years in SL.

Right. Before I cancelled them I was getting L$800/week for Han and for my 2005 trial account. Someone's mentioned it to the lab so don't be too surprised if the grandfather stipends end up getting nerfed in the future!

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

Right. Before I cancelled them I was getting L$800/week for Han and for my 2005 trial account. Someone's mentioned it to the lab so don't be too surprised if the grandfather stipends end up getting nerfed in the future!

That may be in the works already! If I remember correctly, they've said that if you have a grandfathered stipend and upgrade to Premium Plus and then go back to regular Premium, you won't get your old stipend rate back.

[Rosie Gray]

I think that it may depend on how you look at things. I've been thinking about this Premium Plus since it was announced as well. It seems a pretty outrageous amount, and for me to include the exchange rate from Canadian to American dollars makes it extra expensive. But, on the other hand, I spend money in SL too, and I upload a lot of textures and sounds. My stipend is L$300/week, so an increase to L$650 seems not too bad.

Then I looked at how many L$ I've purchased in the past year, and included my Premium Membership fee. (Yikes, why did I want to go and do that!) Anyway, suffice to say that if I went to Premium Plus and did not purchase L$ after that, keeping it as my budget, that I would actually be spending quite a bit less. Hmmm.... something to think about.