Adding mostly because most of the replies I have seen so far are nuts, mine isn't so nuts.

My travel isn't want it used to be, and I missed getting Silver by 820 $/PQP last year. So no surprise, my discounted offer is about 880 or 88,000 miles.

[I note that one of my trips was to LAX and due to schedule, needed to do AA instead of UA. It was about $500 and would have gotten me a lot closer - but just couldn't get a UA ticket out or back that got close to working for me. I am pretty sure all of my travel last year was with my money as opposed to OPM in previous years.]

To me, Silver isn't worth much, certainly not $900/yr. "E+ at check in" generally means at best center seats and I usually travel with 1-2 other people, so can't even be together. and in my case, with a young teenager not eligible for exit row. I don't often check bags so the free checked bags doesn't mean much either (also have Explorer card so first 1-2 free anyway). It used to be low status levels led to better mileage award redemption rates but it seems they have made that for all Chase cardholders now.. So.. anyway, if the offer were around $400 I might think about it, but for $880 I can just buy E+ when needed (and count those PQP towards status next year).

One thing I was thinking about as Q4 rolled around was how if I had switched to the new Quest card, I would have gotten more PQPs than the 1000 I was limited to with my Explorer card. But wasn't sure it was worth the delta annual fee to get it. I might look harder at that this year, as the delta would have been less than $880 and I would have gotten at least 1000 more PQP just from spend let alone the PQP that come annually with the card.