{"id":2285,"date":"2012-11-14T23:01:05","date_gmt":"2012-11-14T23:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=2285"},"modified":"2012-11-14T23:01:05","modified_gmt":"2012-11-14T23:01:05","slug":"new-premium-offer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=2285","title":{"rendered":"New Premium Offer"},"content":{"rendered":"

The expected premium offer has arrived<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

There’s also a new premium gift, as announced on the blog<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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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!<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Personally I think they should offer more options, such as no stipend and more tier free space or no tier and a higher stipend.<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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