The expected premium offer has arrived, A discount on a quarterly membership of 50%, meaning it will only cost USD$11.25 … I think! Now, if you’re cute with the Lindex, you can get someone else to pay for this in three months time, if the L$1000 bonus is included, you can get someone else to pay for this and have enough left over for a coffee from a company who may well divert the profits to avoid paying tax, but that’s a whole different ball game.
There’s also a new premium gift, as announced on the blog. A new airplane, with which you can fly in a premium only airfield. Personally I’m not that keen on the concept of premium only areas beyond sandboxes. I think it’s a good idea to give premium members exclusive early access to places, I’m not so keen on exclusive perks like airfields or even the wilderness. However if it works in keeping people premium, then fair play to Linden Lab.
Premium membership isn’t that bad a deal, you get 512m tier or a Linden Home, with mainland parcels so cheap these days a parcel may be a better option, Linden homes have restrictions on events and those parcels can’t be group owned, which means you may miss out on some features. On top of that you get a stipend of three hundred Linden Dollars, unless you’re a returning oldbie whereby it may be four hundred Linden Dollars, although if you’re a really old returning oldbe, it may be five hundred Linden Dollars. I don’t know if they still put you back at your original stipend level, they certainly used to.
Some people will be miffed that there’s yet another offer aimed at quarterly premium membership, it always seems to be an offer on quarterly membership, rater than monthly or yearly. Of course yearly membership works out cheaper than a year’s worth of quarterly membership, even with this offer four quarterly bills would be a few US dollars more expensive than a straight yearly membership. However another cute option would be to take up the quarterly option then go yearly, if you can do that then you’d save money on fifteen months membership!
There are always suggestions on how to improve premium signups, people ask for a bigger free tier allowance, technically this happens on Linden Home sims as the home has its root prim on another parcel, meaning you get a home and 117 prims, those prims have to come from somewhere, so spaces have to be left that are empty of prims, which isn’t the case on a standard mainland sim.
Personally I think they should offer more options, such as no stipend and more tier free space or no tier and a higher stipend.
There will also be people wondering why only new premium signups are being offered these discounts, where’s the discount for long standing loyal customers? Unfortunately this is the way of the world, my ISP do this all the time, although right now I’m quite miffed with them as I can’t bloody download stuff without getting an NSIS error. Apparently there’s a fault in my area, so I’ll see if a repair fixes this, I can’t even update my graphics drivers!
Getting more premium members is good for Second Life as a whole, so I support Linden Lab’s efforts here, but I’d like to see them making efforts in other areas too to reflect the changing face of commerce and the inworld experience, they need to get a handle on that.
I actually went premium to take advantage of this offer. If I did my math right, using the current exchange rate of 248/1, you get L$3900 ($15.72) in weekly stipends but if you include the L$1000 ($4.03) signup bonus the total you get for the quarter is L$4900 ($19.75). That translates into an $8.50 profit before transaction costs and withdrawal fees.
The beauty of it is that unlike the L$50 stipend us oldies get each week, and I’m pretty sure you fall into that category as I do Ciaran, you don’t even have to login to get the premium stipend so it is in effect free money and all for the cost of an $11.25 loan to LL.
A note for anyone who wants to attempt this though, after the upgrade goes through, you can and should immediately hit downgrade. You won’t immediately downgrade but that’ll set the system to downgrade you at the end of your billing cycle (February 14 if you signup today) and that will make sure that they don’t try to rebill you lock your account for unpaid fees.
Yes in terms of Maths, you’re right on the money, for want of a better phrase! Economically it makes sense to at least give it a go as even for those on L$300, it’s pretty much neutral cost and if the bonus is included, they’ll come out ahead.
I’m not bored enough to figure out all the transaction fees but you make a buck or two off of it without the bonus but I can’t imagine that they’ll stiff you on the bonus because they don’t have any one time only or other clauses in it. That being said, if you’ve taken advantage of this offer in a previous quarter (they seem to be doing this once a quarter) I wouldn’t be surprised if you had to fight for it.
Since you mentioned the old stipends, here’s the downgrade warning that’s now on the membership type selection page.
“Downgrade Warning: If you choose to downgrade from Premium to a Basic membership, all Premium benefits will be lost, and re-upgrading to Premium at a later date will gain whatever premium membership benefits are in effect at the time the membership is upgraded. Original Premium benefits will not be restored.”
Now that doesn’t mean that they won’t pay the old benefits to oldies that go premium again but they certainly don’t guarantee it and are actively warning people off of expecting a restoration of benefits if they downgrade now and benefits are cut again.
Ah interesting, as I said in the post I don’t know if the old upgrade back to premium trick still works, maybe it won’t work for those who downgrade now but they are bound by some older terminology to honour the older stipend payments for those who downgraded previously.
Thanks for quoting the warning.
I reviewed the biplane yesterday. It’s OK, but again, nothing that cannot be had from the Marketplace, often for free and at better quality. Certainly not enough to warrant upgrade for its own sake if you have other considerations to hand.
The airfield is a tiny bit of a let-down simply because of the way it has been slapped on to the end of a group of sandbox regions – but it does offer a great little area for Warbug aerial combat!
The one potentially good thing of this year’s “theme” to the premium gifts is the transport theme. The boat, railcar and plane in particular encourage people to get out and travel SL by more conventional means and make use of apsects they might not otherwise ever see – the SLRR, Blake Sea, etc. The sail boat offered at the start of the year has recently got me into sailing, which I now love and enjoy and which has in turn encouraged me to alter my grid exploration habits.
Admittedly, the biplane is unlikely to do the same for me personally as I took the plunge into flying a few weeks ago and have Steve “Cubey Terra” Caver’s most excellent Stringray (free on SL Marketplace), which not only flies beautifully, it’s amphibious & can function as a boat / sub.
In terms of Premium itself, my personal view is that it is more than worthwhile for those who have minimal land holdings – such as renting a 1024/2048 parcel on a private island. Providing they are willing to live in a Linden Home, then Premium makes good economic sense – particularly at the annual rate. In my own case, I’d downsized private holding to a point where abandoning the last of it meany that Premium effectively plays for itself within 4 months (nearer to 3) on the basis of saved tier.
I don’t think I’ve ever flown a vehicle inworld, nor outside either but anyway! I am happy with Argent Stonecutter’s flight feather.