Maria Korolov has posted the results of the fourth annual opensim grid survey over at HyperGrid Business and the results are hard to make much sense of due to the small number of participants. However this doesn’t mean that the survey is worthless, but it does mean that the results should be taken with a pinch of salt in some areas.
654 responses were received by the survey and you need to bear in mind that most of the questions were aimed at people talking about the primary grid they use. That’s important because it means people are talking about something they are familiar with but it’s also likely to bring a large amount of bias.
I’m not going to go through the results in great detail, the linked post above has all the details you’ll need but I will discuss some of the results.
How do you rate this grid overall?
- Kitely
- AviWorlds
- Zandramas
I’ve listed the top three there, Kitely came out on top with a score of 4.93 from the 84 votes cast for Kitely. However AviWorlds in second place only received 16 votes and third placed Zandramas received just 10. Now those vote numbers are not what put those grids in those places, but the average score from those vote numbers did, hence why the margins of error here are going to be quite large. Kitely is a product I’m very keen on and I wish I had more time to spend there so I’m glad to see them getting such good feedback.
This theme of low numbers of votes and therefore large margins of error is a theme throughout the survey, although to be fair to Maria, she doesn’t hide this fact, talking of the community results Maria says:
“The startup social grid Zandramas ranked best for community but — with only 10 responses — this rating is also the least definitive.”
However parts of the survey were most definitely useful, one being the number of grids that are around being surprising to me.
A more useful stat from the survey, although not one that gives credence to whether one grid is better than another is in terms of the number of respondents who said they visited a grid.
What percent of respondents visited each grid?
- OSGrid 71%
- Inworldz 67%
- Avination 45%
- Kitely 36%
- Metropolis 33%
This is more in line with the sort of rankings I’d expect to see for a survey like this, although I was surprised to read that 26% of respondents had visited their own personal grid, I did not expect to see a figure that high there.
A very useful part of the survey are the testimonials. Maria points out that over 200 people made comments about their primary grid. When looking a the responses about Inworldz Maria says:
“It would take a book to print all the comments left by InWorldz residents. A couple of people complained about empty regions and support but, for the most part, respondents were overwhelmingly happy about community and many mentioned that they felt at home on this grid.”
Regarding Kitely:
“Many respondents pointed out Kitely’s unique pricing model as a major benefit. Kitely runs its regions on demand, in the cloud, and stores them away when they are empty. As a result, the company is able to offer dramatically more land and prims for very low prices. Respondents also pointed to the Kitely Market, the coming hypergrid support, and the easy OAR region backups and uploads as attractive features.”
Regarding OSgrid:
“Many respondents praised OSgrid’s openness and innovation, while some were concerned about content, technology, and community.”
There’s a lot more over at the linked article, including actual comments from repsondents as well as Maria’s comments. I feel that the comments are the most interesting part of the survey myself. However if anyone thinks these Opensim types all play nicely, think again, the comments below the survey article get pretty heated and last time I checked there were over 150 of them, although quite a few are from people posting multiple times, they are certainly not having a love in.
Overall I think it’s good that surveys like this exist but don’t read too much into the results, the real richness comes from the comments and discovering just how many grids are out there.
On My OSgrid times i can only say i did loved them!
Of closed grids only Kitely really impressed me cause it allowd to upload one of the regions i made for Osgrid and keep it running flawless without a single Usd sent, for almost 2 years already!
I login in there and i was amazed as the region was working as perfectly as on the 1st day!
Sure, its a small niche, some commercial grids will have to compete with each others and none has the potential that Sl still offers, for explorers and lovers of crossing sims, like me!
But to learn how to host several regions, via several diff computers, on Osgrid or any other that allows that, to try and create for a few time (need to put it up again, the hd where i had it went puuuf!) a private grid via diva distro, with hypergrid enabled, to explore several diff grids from Osgrid, was some i will never forget!
Ah good to hear of good experiences via OSGrid, I don’t know much about how it all works I will have to investigate further.