Han Held

No, this is a step in the wrong direction.

The whole deal with Kitely sounds like it's awesome for Kitely, and possibly for people who have a vested interest in restricting content, but pay-as-you-go is the wrong direction for the metaverse to go in.

This is doubly true once you consider that many ISPs are doing away with "unlimited" plans and are implementing quotas. This has the effect of penalizing end users twice (once by the isp for heavy bandwidth usage -and opensim is bandwidth hog- and then again by kitely's nickle-and-dime fees).

The facebook requirement is also counter-productive, and facebookies are not roleplayers and roleplayers are going to be very, very hesitant to slap their real life info up to get access.

Kitely is a walled garden surrounded by castle walls surrounded by a moat. I'm sure it would be awesome in it's niche (corporate meetings and product demonstrations and conferences) but it's my opinion that the metaverse needs to go in the completely opposite direction.

tl;dr I'm stickin w/ my $23 vps and multiple regions...if I get sick of DIY I'll go to dreamlandmetaverse...

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Hitomi Tiponi

I have always wanted to do a historical reconstruction for my local community, and hope to start it in a few months time - and for that Kitely seems ideal. If people come to visit I'll be so happy that I won't mind paying, if they don't it is a very cheap way of hosting my reconstruction for my own pleasure.

Osprey Therian

I don't remember what I had going on in Kitely but if I log in to the website to see will I be charged?

Ilan Tochner

Hi Osprey Therian,

When we turned on billing your existing Kitely account was automatically placed on the Free Plan which provides 2 hours of free inworld use each month. So feel free to access our website and start exploring Kitely again. I'm sure it has changed quite a bit since you've last logged in.

Ciaran Laval

Ilan, thanks for coming to the thread. In terms of having worlds that have free access for all users your billing info says:

Enabling Other Users to Access Your Worlds for Free

Normally, visitors to your worlds are charged Minutes out of their personal accounts, and you pay nothing. However, if you wish, you can enable other users to visit your worlds for free by covering this charge yourself. To do so, Edit the world, switch to the Access tab and set the price for the group of people you would like to subsidize to Free. When you do so, the selected group of visitors will pay nothing to visit that virtual world: instead, 1 KC per visitor will be deducted from your balance each minute that they remain in that world.

What happens when your KC's are all used up? Can people still visit?

Joshua Nightshade

User-hours? Wow, this is just like AOL!

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Ilan Tochner

Hi Ciaran Laval,

When you choose to allow people to visit your worlds at your own Kitely Credits expense then they are no longer able to do so once you run out of KC. When that happens, they'll get an inworld message and be removed from your world. The relevant world page will then provide a message instructing people to contact you if they wish to re-enter the world.

It has been our experience that people who reach such a world quite often notify the world manager so that he or she will be able to regrant access to their world. This can then be done either by getting more KC in your account or changing your world's configuration so that those people will cover their own visit costs.

Ilan Tochner

Hi Hitomi Tiponi,

I'm sure there will be people in our still small but growing user community who will love to visit your historical reconstruction. I'll be happy to tour it myself if you'll have me :-)

Ilan Tochner

Hi Han Held,

You're already paying your electric company and your ISP per minute to access your virtual world (whether you're on SL or your own VPS-hosted virtual world) - they just call it differently:

- You pay per kilowatt hour for the electricity used by your computer when you are inworld as part of your electric bill.

- You pay your ISP for the proportion of time you spend inworld out of the total hours you spend online during the month. This is true regardless of whether you are on an unlimited ISP plan, whether you use a free VW, you host your own VW somewhere, or pay for time on kitely. It all ends up equating to you having paid your ISP some average hourly rate for the time you spent inworld.

I agree with you that the requirement to use Facebook is not ideal for many of the people who would like to use Kitely. That is why we are currently working to remove that requirement and enable you to create an account using other means as well. For starters, we intend to roll out email/password based logins by the end of this month. Once that is done the FB issue should no longer be a barrier to anyone wishing to use Kitely.

Kitely is extremely open, people can import their content and export it with as much ease, if not more, than on other OpenSim-based services. We just added a mechanism to filter out content that was not authorized for transfer off the grid by the person who created that content. Surely that is a good thing?

Kitely also enables anyone to create a free account and start using the service immediately - even getting their own free region with 100K prims within minutes of registration.

Anyone can create a free account on Kitely and easily import/export content whenever they want. In what way do you think we are a walled garden?

Sione

Whoah send in the troops.

Reselling cloud hosting using the same pricing model that you pay is never going to fly with the average virtual world user.

The majority of people don't even know what a cloud is and don't care about how you have to pay cloud server providers. They will look at those prices and go :O

Make your own cloud with your own servers and charge as you would if they were configured as dedicated servers and you will be more than competitive and still be able to throw around the buzzword.

Kris Ritter

Well, thanks, Ilan and the Kitely users who took the time to come and explain the Kitely model/philosophy at length.

I wish you well, but it's not for me. And I'm definitely not so invested in SL that I can't consider alternatives - on the contrary, I and a number of friends are actively seeking alternatives. But definitely not on a pay-as-you-go basis just to hang out!

Ilan Tochner

Hi Kris Ritter,

Thank you for your reply. You can hang out for free on Kitely for 2 hours/month on most worlds and, once those are consumed, you can continue to hang out for free on worlds in which the world manager has chosen to cover visitor costs. There are currently a few dozen such worlds on Kitely.

If you know how much time you spend inworld on average per month then you can also subscribe to one of our premium plans that covers that usage. A premium account will enable you to visit the many public worlds on Kitely, and have your own private or public worlds, while paying a fixed cost per month.

Whichever path you choose, if you open a Kitely account (even using our Free Plan) you'll have at least one world (full region, 100K prims) to call your own.

You and your friends are welcome to give Kitely a try whenever you like. I, or one of the members of Kitely's newly formed community-driven Mentors Group (which already includes 16 people) can even meet you inworld to help you get started.

There's no pressure to join, it's just another option we're making available to you, and maybe once you try it (for free) you'll decide that Kitely might be for you after all :-)

Kris Ritter

Trouble is, Ilan, that 2 hours is less than half of one evening's typical usage, and no matter how long we hang out in SL, it costs us nothing. And we don't need to move on somewhere else because our time is up!

But to spend 80 hours in Kitely costs me $20 a month. And if I go over that, it costs more. To spend 80 hours in SL costs me nothing.

As I said right in my first post - and the 'Wow' in the thread title, I think it's a great price for content creators and world builders.

But the vast majority of users of SL are not content creators - they're visitors and consumers of those content creators products. And you appear to be excluding them from your world by your pricing model, and unless the intent of your content creators is vastly different to those in SL, surely hurting your own users in the process?

I really don't need a region. I just want to be able to hang out and enjoy other people's work. Explore, have fun. I'm strictly a consumer, these days!

To be honest, the prospect of two free hours just isn't worth the incentive to even bother to make an account. Plus, I wouldn't be prepared to sign up via Facebook.

I really don't think so. In a time where more and more MMO's and VWs are going free to play, and we can hang out in SL for no cost, I really think that a pay-as-you-go model isn't going to fly with casual users.

You asked earlier:

I'm content to use SL for free. No one subsidizes my being in SL. I'm a consumer. I buy content creators products.

I, and tens of thousands of people in SL like me, subsidize the continued existence of inworld businesses and afford them the opportunity to continue creating content. We're not forced to buy it. If they create stuff we want, we will buy it!

But would I pay a per minute fee on top of that to Linden Lab for 'allowing me' be inworld to go support these content creators? No.

So clearly, Kitely is not for people like me, the majority of users of SL. Or for content creators who require consumers or visitors, as far as I can tell.

But on the flip side, your pricing model for content creators, makes it far more viable to build and create 'just for the fun of it' than SL.

Ciaran Laval

It depends upon where you hang out Kris, if you go to lots of different places, then Kitely may not be for you, but if you and your friends just hang out in a few places you build yourselves for a few hours a week, even 20, then Kitely does have very appealing options if you do the maths, of course lots of folk don't want to have to do the maths and just want somewhere to go.

what I like about the Kitely plan is options, but for my roleplaying sim, it wouldn't really work. For a hangout, it would.

Ciaran Laval

Every single premium member and landowner subsidises you being in SL for free Kris, the Kitely model makes this more obvious. The Kitely model has pro's and cons, I certainly don't think it's appealing to everyone but someone somewhere is paying for you to visit SL sims.

Beebo Brink

I wish I could say that SL costs me nothing.

What I want most from SL is a playground, a sandbox. I want prims and land. My "content creation" is almost entirely the assembling of items into a pleasing place to live and walk around. Quite a few of my other friends are also very creative in that way: decorating and assembling their own world -- trees, houses, art, furniture -- from the content other people sell. This is a creative endeavor in its own right, although in SL that kind of activity pegs you as "just a consumer."

The problem is that land is so damn expensive. So in order to have a place to play as a "consumer", I'm spending upwards of US$150/mo on land. The only reason I can afford that is that I create enough "original" stuff to pay most of my tier, but the minute I stop that effort, my income stream dries up and my hobby burns a hole through my pocket.

Lately, I've been tired, so very very tired, of making stuff just so I can sell it to cover my tier, in order to do what I really want to do all the time: Play.

$20 a month to play on multiple-regions? That sounds like pure heaven to me.

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Beebo Brink

For over four years now, I've had a very popular hangout called the Duchess. It's been my very good fortune to have generous patrons who tip me enough to cover most if not all of the land charges; they are footing the bill for everyone else who uses the Duchess without ever tipping. Every parcel in SL that isn't owned by a Linden is being paid for by someone, regardless of who actually uses or spends time there.

When tips dry up, as they've started to do more and more over the last year, I'm the one who is on the hook to pay for all that "free fun" my patrons are enjoying. When store sales drop, as they have started to do more and more over the last year, I'm on the hook for the tier that not only pays for the store parcels but for every other land project of mine.

This evening in particular I'm feeling stressed over tier. It's a double-edged sword of loving SL but feeling increasingly that what I'm doing in SL is working instead of playing, because playing is too expensive without the supplemental income.

I'd happily pay a much smaller fixed sum to have all the land I could dream of, and to be able to take some time breaks now and then without bringing down the entire house of cards.

Ilan Tochner

Hi Beebo Brink,

Thank you for your feedback. As Karima Hoisan said previously in this thread, once people have free land to play with they tend to start building stuff. Those that stick with it can develop to be very professional builders. Take Karima for example, her 5 Kitely worlds are very impressive and she wasn't a builder on SL.

When you can have as many worlds as you want to build on (each with 100K prims) you can let your imagination go wild without having to scrap things you've invested a lot of time building just to build something new.

Please open an account on Kitely, we'd love to have you as part of our growing inworld community. If the FB requirement is holding you back then please join after we roll out non-FB based logins. If there are no unexpected delays, then you'll have the option to use Kitely without FB by the end of this month.

Ciaran Laval

To be fair to Kris, she says she buys content, people who buy content are also helping to subsidise the free usage of Second Life as their purchases filter through the chain and of course Linden Lab get a slice of their Linden dollar purchases, it all adds up but nothing in Second Life is really free, someone is paying the bills.

Kris Ritter

And for people like you, Beebo, I agree that Kitely is possibly an attractive proposition. As you say, you want prims and land, so yeah, you are a paying customer of SL. If all your friends are similarly creative, maybe you can convince them all to move to Kitely and mutually benefit from the reduced fees.

How are you subsidizing my being in SL, Ciaran? I may be being thick, but I don't get it. It's everyone's choice to either have tier or not. Depends what you want out of SL. If you want land and prims then you have to pay for it. If you have a business, you surely want customers? How many would you have compared to now if LL charged them per minute so that you could have your land and prims cheaper?

For me, the math is simple: I don't pay LL any fees. You can't really beat that, however you do the math. But that's my situation (albeit also the same for a lot of people I know). Clearly it differs from some of yours.

I heard of Kitely by way of someone who also pays a fair amount of SL tier, and was all like 'OMG I can have a HUNDRED regions in Kitely for $100 a month! I'm sooo going there!'. The trouble is, she soon realised that her friends were not going to follow her to Kitely to pay per minute to hang out with her there.

Which is why it's my view that Kitely is restricting itself to a particular type of customer with its pricing model.

But I'm sure it's a model that offers a welcome alternative for some. Especially for those of you who believe you're somehow subsidizing us freeloaders because you wanted land and prims - surely all the more attractive because us freeloaders are very unlikely to follow you there!

Sione

That's the thing.

Land and prims may be a draw card. But how many people are going to pay $100 just to sit and build by themselves? You can do that with your own OpenSim for free.

moe

I will not have a facebook account so this leaves me out. oh well. sticking with the better VW known as SL.

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Ilan Tochner

Hi Sione,

Our $5/month plan includes up to 25 hours/month inworld (and 2 worlds). The $20/month plan includes up to 100 hours/month inworld (and 10 worlds). You really don't have to spend $100/month to do serious building on Kitely.

As for being alone in your Kitely worlds that really depends on what you want. There are small communities already forming inside Kitely. Most of them do it in private worlds but some are starting to venture to public worlds as well.

People have visitors from SL come over. Admitedly not many as we've yet to remove the requirement to use FB but that is about to soon change. The people who visit from SL do so using the Free Plan and, if they want to continue sticking around more than 2/hours per month then, either the people who invited them to come visit their Kitely worlds cover their costs or those visitors pay for themselves (most casual visitors prefer to buy the $5/month plan). Even world managers that invite their friends over from SL at their expense have yet to have needed to pay more than what they would have needed to pay in SL for the same amount of land (with significantly less than the number of prims they get on Kitely).

People visiting other people's land on SL are not doing it for free, they are simply passing their own costs to the people who own the land they visit. As land owners in SL start seeing that they can do what they enjoy doing on SL but for a lot less on Kitely they won't be so happy to continue paying a lot for land on SL so that other people will be able to continue going inworld for free.

There are more worlds being built on Kitely each day and some of the people who manage those worlds order premium accounts. The number of people who can therefore hang out in other world manager's worlds and pay for their own usage is steadily growing. It won't be too long before SL communities will start moving their main hangout place to Kitely. It really doesn't mean they can't still hangout with friends inside SL if they wish. This isn't either or. You can be an active SL resident and an active Kitely member at the same time.

Ilan Tochner

Hi moe,

If the FB requirement is what's holding you back then please give Kitely a try after we roll out non-FB based logins. If there are no unexpected delays, then you'll have the option to use Kitely without FB by the end of this month.

Sione

That is a pretty big assumption and I am sorry but I can't agree with it. Are you seriously trying to compete with SL? Those freeloaders that you are using as a sales pitch contribute a hell of a lot to the SL economy.

People are drawn to SL for the whole experience. The sheer size and openness of SL allows the freedom to explore, socialise, roleplay and do serious shopping at your own pace at a cost that suits your requirements. There is a lot more to virtual worlds than just visiting friends.

A lot of land owners have sustainable businesses paying their tier so they won't be interested. People on free accounts who don't own land will definitely not be interested. It seems the only people who would be interested are those who sit at home and don't go anywhere. The IM system also plays a big role in socialising in SL, it seems you would be isolating people from that as well.

If people go to Kitely and invite a few friends over, those friends are likely going to tell them to just log in to SL because it's easier and they don't need to watch the clock.

I am really interested to know who your target demographic is because to me it looks like a step backwards from SL and not very sustainable long term after the honeymoon period is over.