"Premium Plus" Accounts Delayed

Last November, among an announcement on the upcoming option to change account names, Linden Lab also stated that there would soon be an option to upgrade their accounts to a level above Premium, called Premium Plus.

Changes are underway for Premium Membership. In 2020, you’ll see a new membership level, Premium Plus. This new option will join our classic Premium tier as an additional choice for Residents who want to get even more value from their Second Life.

According to an article written by Inara Pey, it seems the Linden Lab has delayed the rollout of Premium Plus. Grumpity Linden stated the two main reasons were wanting to focus more on the transition to the cloud servers, and with many residents hit hard financially by the Coronavirus crisis it was believed it wasn't a good time to roll out the feature.

We have made the decision to delay the deployment of Premium Plus based on two key factors:

1. We want to be focused on our Uplift project (move to the cloud) and to minimize distraction for our development, QA, and Ops teams. While we’ve laid a lot of groundwork, quite a bit more still remains to finish Premium Plus.
2. The pandemic has brought a lot of financial uncertainty to people all around the world and we know many of our Residents have been hit hard.

We are very happy that SL has provided an outlet for people where they can connect, escape, engage safely, and earn a living or supplement their income as well. But we also realise that introducing a higher-priced service level in this time would be really ham-handed.

It should be noted that a few days ago, Linden Lab stated earlier that there was a "Limited Availability" of new private sims due in part to their transitioning to cloud servers not complete yet. So that would be another reason to devote more time and resources to that effort. When the option of changing one's account surname was finally made available, one of the complaints was that due to the Coronavirus crisis, many wouldn't be able to afford it due to loss of income.

When asked when Premium Plus might be available, Grumpty answered that there were no guarantees, "but early 2021 is reasonable to expect."

Source: Modem World

Bixyl Shuftan