About your text:

But I still feel betrayed: a 2 year relationship, that you _know_ is dying. You still wish to fix everything, mainly because of the effort you put into it, because of you’re used to it and because of the mutual friends you now have, not because the butterflies are still there. You keep trying, attempt to be bedazzled again, but the other party just f*cks it up, each time. Eerrr… overreacting, me?

Is kinda sad, but i think you described the general feeling of a lot of people, specially after M arrived.

And why can’t we have property insurance like iRL? If a thief robs my house the insurance company I pay will give me some recompense. There is also the chance that the authorities will be able to recover the property. Why not in Second Life®? An unrecoverable loss last year set me back over L$10,000 just in animals (Dragons from Wynx Whiplash, horses from AKK, other ‘pets’, etc.) plus more for avatars, clothes, and other items. Now I’m slowly replacing the items as my stipend and other meager income permits.

Yes, I could buy some $L and replace all that I can now, but since the losses continue I refuse to put too much RL cash into the virtual economy.

I wholeheartedly agree on your view of Tom Hale’s post re: “marketing” more than anything else…hence why I didn’t comment on his whole “background story” element - that was clearly intended to simply draw people in in the same way as all good marketing tools.

As to the rest…see my post under the new accounts piece!! :)

When I said T Linden’s post was a brilliant communications one, I meant that in the ‘marketing’ sense of the ‘communications’. He really nailed all the principles down. And it awaits to be seen if he can deliver upon promises made. :d But well, I may dream out loud about improved premium functionality, it’s my blog after all, no? ;)

As LL has proved in the past (openspaces) they have no problem with ‘downscaling’ their products, I think it will end up something like this:

*was pretty long and ended up leading it’s life as a blogpost on it’s own*

I’m being the total pessimist here; Tom Hale’s post sits totally at odds with Mark Kingdon’s assertion that Premium subscriptions are “irrelevant” to LL’s business.

That is - they bring in zero in the way of income to the company, and as such, he (Kingdon) has effectively written them off.

Therefore, while the ideas (such as those posted here) for making Premium accounts more attractive to users may be good, they are simply NOT going to be implemented in any way or form by LL if they requires financial (direct or indirect) outlay on their part.

And in this, you can take “indirect outlay” as meaning the necessary time and effort to develop, test and implement the code changes inherent in many of the suggestions you outline here.

Why? Simply because a) Kingdon will not see the effort as being worthwhile given premium subscriptions are “irrelevant” to his business model; b) even if they can be justified in terms of increased user satisfaction, he’s still not going to OK them, because the up-front cost will outweigh any perceived bottom-line financial returns to LL.

As such - Like Kat Linden’s (un)memorable first post back in April - Tom Hale’s post is simply hot air.

Remember back in April? Persisent daily Asset Cluster failures leading to transaction failures around 2-3 times a day - WITHOUT any form of in-world notification from LL; major Tp issues, login server issues…..Then our vaunted new “Resident Communications Manager” makes a post about the forums & blog being her immediate priority, rather than something meaningful like actually TELLING people when things are going wrong.

And where are we seven months down the road from this? Communcations as bad as ever, and even the means to quickly and easily find information on the website suitably obfusticated - some might say BURIED - by LL. Job well done, Kat.

True, in-world notifications did return (for a week) after some of us (myself included) fairly bombarded Kat with messages to get it sorted while things were so particularly bad; but as soon as the requests to see in-world notices stopped…the notices themselves stopped. Once again, the exercise became a tick-in-the-box for LL, little more.

In this, Kingdon’s interview is much more revealing for what is both said and not said - and his views on Hale’s role as well, which sit at odds with Hale’s blog comment.

So I think it fair to say we can forget high profile ideas for Premium accounts, however worthy we may consider them to be. They simply don’t feature on Kingdon’s roadmap, other than to stir up “discussions” on the forum & give people a further (false) sense of involvement in the SL decision-making process.