On January 1st Kitely finalised their new pricing structure. This provided new fixed price options, but worryingly took away the two free hours a month from free accounts. New accounts will get six hours of free time, which once used up, means they will need to buy Kitely Credits to visit their own metered world, those six hours don’t need to be used up in one month. However on the plus side free accounts no longer have to buy minutes to continue exploring. I have some concerns about how this will pan out and things didn’t start well when I tried to login.
That was due to trying to login to the last world I visited. This world must have set their world to not allow free accounts anymore. So I decided to head home ….
So now I can’t visit my own free world anymore! This took me a little by surprise, I thought they may have allowed people a month with a little free time at least. However as there’s pretty much nothing on my own world, this is no great loss. So what next? I decided to explore and this is where the new pricing structure could well work well because now I can explore without worrying about being charged Kitely Credits for doing so.
This freedom to explore could well be a boost for Kitely, although it’s far from perfect. The worlds a free account can visit are fixed price worlds or metered worlds where the owner is willing to pay for visits.
The thing is Kitely’s billing systems remain a tad confusing, but certainly worth considering. Kitely have different account types and different world types. The account types are regular and premium. The regular account is a free account in reality. However the restriction on a regular account is, as I said earlier, other sim owners will be charged when you visit their metered world. However regular accounts will be able to visit fixed price worlds all day long …. understand?
However if someone has a Premium account they can visit metered worlds and those visits won’t cost the region owner a penny, so if you have a metered region you may want to restrict access to premium account holders only. A Premium account costs USD$19.95 a month and comes with five free metered regions. Now this means that other Premium account holders could visit those regions without the region owner having to incur any more costs than their premium membership fee, but costs will arise if a regular account is the visitor.
That brings us nicely on to the difference between metered worlds and fixed price worlds. A fixed price world can be open to any visitors of any account type and the sim owner will incur no extra costs for those visits. Therefore fixed price worlds offer a less worrisome experience, but obviously come at a price. What are those prices?
- 1 Region – USD$14.95 a month
- Up to 4 Regions – USD$49.95 a month
- Up to 16 Regions – USD$99.95 a month
Now bear in mind that this isn’t Second Life, so don’t expect performance levels of Second Life. There are also restrictions on the number of avatars per sim that are lower than in Second Life. However the options are much cheaper than Second Life, so really it depends upon what you want to do.
My advice is to start off a Kitely adventure with a regular account, you’ll get a free region, although it will cost you to visit there when your time runs out, however you can visit the many public worlds without having to worry too much, it won’t cost you anything.
Kitely offers options, some may feel they offer too many options but in my view, options are always good.
Thanks for visiting Evergreen, sir, an honor to have you.
And yes, it’s on the house. 🙂
The snapshot didn’t come out as well as I’d hoped, there’s a far more steampunk look there that I need to go back and capture but it’s a really nice build.
Hi Ciaran,
New accounts get a free 1-region Metered World that will remain available for access indefinitely (it doesn’t require you to pay any world storage fee). You get 6 free hours in-world to try out this world and you don’t need to give us your billing information to get this free trial period. This means people can continue to go to Kitely and start building their own world within minutes.
Once that free trial period is up they can decide whether to get Kitely Credits to be able to pay for their time inside that world, upgrade to the Premium Account to get unlimited time inside all Metered Worlds (including that one), or switch the world to one of our fixed price options. They can, of course, also opt to not pay and continue to allow other people who have Premium Accounts to access that world. In other words, they get free unlimited hosting but just for people on Premium Accounts, anything else costs something.
As for world types, they all provide at least the amount of server resources you get in a private SL island (prim capacities for the entire world, not per region, are: Starter World = 15,000 prims, Standard World = 60,000 prims, Advanced World = 100,000 prims). Avatar capacity compared to a private SL island is different but even the Starter World gets 10 concurrent avatars and the Advanced World gets up to 100 avatars.
Hi Ilan, as I said there are pro’s and cons to the new deal but the pro’s outweigh the cons in my view. As someone who is not a new user I don’t get the six free hours so I’m a bit snookered there until I pay up but on the plus side I can happily go exploring other worlds and that’s a really big positive.
What do you mean by “Now bear in mind that this isn’t Second Life, so don’t expect performance levels of Second Life.” ??
I’ve found performance at Kitely to be better than SL, at far lower prices. Faster uploads, faster rezzing, virtually no server side lag at all. OS is different (terrain tools, scripting, access settings, search, attachment points, logins etc.) than SL, yes, and takes some re-learning. But not worse – if server-side resources are adequate, which they are in Kitely, performance is better than SL, expecially SL mainland.
Personally, Second Life rezzes faster for me but of course, people’s mileage will vary. I’ve also never saw a large type event in Kitely to know how it would work.
However my point was more to do with the size of the relative companies and therefore the fact that LL will be working on more issues than Kitely can because of staffing levels, this is definitely reflected in the prices of the two platforms. Kitely offers excellent value for money, but it is a smaller operation.
There are many ways to measure performance of course.
One might be lag. Another might be region-crossings. You might find it quite interesting to compare those elements of SL and Kitely, Ciaran.
There are others too, of course. SL will win some and Kitely will win some.
Personally, on the things I can think of that I would list under “performance,” I think Kitely is going to win over SL easily just about every time.
And as for them being better able to react, when there are a lot of complaints in SL about a particular issue, how quickly does LL move on it? When there are a lot of complaints in Kitely, those guys move fast.
Kitely is a much smaller place of course and if size matters, SL is going to win on most things…except where smaller is better. 🙂
If you say SL is more successful than Kitely, I won’t argue it from a business standpoint. But if you say SL is better than Kitely…there’s lots to argue about. 🙂
If it were me and I was defending SL, I wouldn’t start with “performance.” 🙂
“Better” is of course a relative term. If a platform meets your needs at a price you’re happy with, then you will overlook quirks and stats because it delivers what you want.
Kitely wins hands down on pricing, but in terms of numbers SL wins hands down. Neither makes one better than the other, it depends upon what you want from your virtual world.
I didn’t mean to imply that performance in Kitely was poor, but I do wonder how well an event such as Fantasy Faire would fair in Kitely as opposed to Second Life with all things being equal in terms of visitors and builds.
However again, people do different things. Kitely offers a lot of potential.