Second Life – Page 228

October 16, 2012

Kitely Offer Unmetered Regions

This much needed rest from Second Life blogging is going to bugger up my end of the year review, I think I’ll just have to raid Inara Pey’s blog and take it from there! So a lot has happened, which I’m not going to cover, much … it’s time to look forward not back but something has been happening over at Kitely.

One of the big criticisms of Kitely was their pricing structure,which was pretty much based upon how long you, or your visitors spent in Kitely. This meant folk with popular venues would baulk at the costs, whereas those who wanted to spend a small amount of time there could get a whole region, or multiple regions at low costs. Swings and roundabouts and all that. However, during my absence Kitely have not only changed their pricing structure, they’ve also introduced a new unmetered option too.

Kitely developer Oren Hurvitz explained the new unmetered option on October 3rd in this blog post. This is in my view a big plus for Kitely and they now offer options for users to work out what deal suits them best, the pricing for unmetered monthly access is as follows:

1 Region $40 per month.
4 Regions $60 per month ($15 per region per month).
9 Regions $80 per month ($8.89 per region per month).
16 Regions $100 per month ($6.25 per region per month).

As you can see, the more regions you pay for, the lower the cost of each region.

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October 16, 2012October 16, 2012

Linden Lab End Affiliate Program

So I go to Majorca for a holiday and whilst I’m away topping up my tan and enjoying Pina Colada’s on the beach followed by seeing way too many replays of Nicki Minaj singing about starships in bars, all hell breaks loose and Linden Lab decide to end their affiliate program!

I don’t know why they’ve done this, it may be to do with the Steam connection, or it may be that it wasn’t very successful, either way you have until the end of business today to remove those links, LL sent out a nice email about this:

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July 12, 2012July 12, 2012

SLCC 2012 Looks Like It Will Be Just Like Blizzcon 2012

The Second Life Community Convention has been fraught with controversy in years gone by, although it has also been a roaring success, take a look at last year’s event here. Alas this year it looks like the drama, criticism and lack of support from Linden Lab and the wider Second Life Community has finally took its toll.

Fleep Tuque has a long and informative post about the hazaards of organising the Second Life Community Convention, this comes in light of the news that Avacon won’t be organising the event this year.

Fleep points out that the organisers were chewed out for not making the convention more like Blizzcon, well it looks like this SLCC 2012 will be exactly like Blizzcon 2012, because Blizzcon is cancelled this year, but will be back in 2013, will SLCC? I think something may have been lost in humour there, I doubt that anyone at Linden Lab seriously expected an event like Blizzcon, but maybe they hoped for an event that would involve musicians, meetings and fun? Blizzcon has a massive budget so I don’t really think that criticism was intended to come across as bluntly as it sounds.

Fleep also points out that organisers were left feeling jaded due to criticism, this will have been in many forms, there has been criticism over prices, venues, dates, choice of hotel etc. in the past. However this is part and parcel of organising an event, people will always be critical, the way to answer them is to organise a successful event and from what I’ve read of SLCC in the past, they were largely successful but there seems to have been a competiton in values too regarding whether it should be a convention or a conference.

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June 18, 2012June 18, 2012

Kitely v Second Life And Finding A Happy Medium

I think it’s fair to say that Kitely’s pricing model rubs some people up the wrong way. People look at the pricing plans and feel that a metered based world is not a good place to socialise, and perhaps they’re right. Kitely’s pricing plans look like this:

Monthly Plan Cost Minutes KC Free Worlds

Free Plan Free 120 0 1

Bronze Plan $5 1200 300 2

Silver Plan $20 5000 1000 10

Gold Plan $50 12000 3000 30

Platinum Plan $100 Unlimited 5000 100

Now compared to Second Life, this looks both great and bad, depending upon which end of the spectrum you’re coming from. Social users on a premium plan of just USD$72 a year can use Second Life unlimited, have a small plot of land, for free you can use Second Life unlimited anyway. However people who like to build, well the Kitely Silver Plan gives you 10 sims, 100,000 prims each sim, costs less a year than sim in Second Life does for a month and there’s no upfront purchase cost. Ok you haven’t got unlimited access on that plan, but it’s still over eighty hours a month.

Ideally, I can see the Kitely model complimenting Second Life, rather than competing with it.

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June 18, 2012June 18, 2012

SL9B – I Know Nothing

Second Life’s ninth birthday celebrations have kicked off, and I know nothing about them! I’ve not seen any previews or been to visit any of the sims. Work, WoW and Euro 2012 are eating my spare time, although I have time off work so I may get to see some of it!

However, I know a man and woman who do know about SL9B, so if you want to get the skinny on the lowdown, go read:

Inara Pey’s in depth guides to what’s going on.

Crap Mariner’s Performance Schedule, complete with Google Calendar awesomeness so it should update nicely.

Visit the SL9B blog.

I’ve also figured out how to add the events calendar! See below the cut for that.

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