Suggested for Discussion: Getting Settled in Kitely

[Constance Peregrine]

Please do not deliver by automatic means...ergh, I really dislike those systems, especially when I am intent on just rezzing in...

[oopsee joseppe]

Dumping a notecard into people's inventory is going to be missed by most people. Forcing people to receive notecards is annoying as is a forced welcome dialog in the world. The only option I see as relevant is a sign that either sends the user to a getting started web page on the Documentation wiki or sends them a notecard on request.

[Dot Matrix]

So that it's not lost with the page turn, here's Deuce's draft slightly tweaked. In the next post I will suggest a way of splitting it up so that it does not overload users with information.

Here is a completed draft of the proposed document:

Getting Settled in Kitely

Advice for new residents of the Kitely grid.

Residents of a new grid almost always face the same issues, no matter if this is their first time in a virtual world, or if they are Metaverse veterans.

When you first log into the Kitely grid, you are asked to chose between a male or female avatar. Then are placed into the Kitely Welcome Center world wearing a generic avatar and clothing appropriate to the gender you chose. You will have few possessions, although you will have access to a basic set of items from the OpenSim Library.

Your goals for getting started will probably include the following:

• Finding and wearing slightly less generic avatar shape, skin and clothing options.
• Finding places to buy or obtain for free the basic items you need.
• Finding other avatars operated by real people to interact with.
• Finding out where events are being held on the grid.
• Finding out where to get more information and where to get questions answered.
• Finding your first home on your new grid.

The specific order of importance for these goals may change from person to person, but nearly everyone will want to do these things early on during their time in Kitely. The following is some advice from experienced Kitely residents on how to best accomplish these initial goals.

* Finding and wearing slightly less generic avatar shape, skin and clothing options

If you are still in the Kitely Welcome Center, there are a few basic male and female avatar and clothing sets available for free. Proceed Northwest from the initial arrival point and you will find five different avatar/clothing sets for female avatars, and five sets for male avatars. Simply click on the desired set or sets and select buy. The price for each set is Zero Kitely Credits – they are free.

Note that you are buying the contents of the Avatar set vendor. There are no boxes to rez, the contents of vendor should be in your inventory. Assuming you purchased the male avatar set called Ian, there should be a folder in your inventory called “Ian Avatar”.

If you are new to virtual worlds, here is a fun trick to quickly change your clothes. Click on the Ian Avatar folder and drag the folder from the inventory and drop it on your avatar in the game window. (If you bought a different avatar, click and drag the folder you actually purchased.) Presto, change-o! Within a few seconds your avatar should be wearing the shape, skin and clothing of the set you just purchased. Don't be afraid to purchase more than one avatar set. You can buying them and trying them on until you find a set you feel you can live with until you find better stuff later on.

* Finding places to buy or obtain for free the basic items you need.

There are many freebies available to all users in Kitely. Much of this free content is from the Linda Kellie collection available throughout the OpenSim community.

Here are a few worlds that offer freebie content and are open to all Kitely users, even free account holders.

Freebie Shopping Mall Plus
http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Suz ... -Mall-PLUS

City Life
http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Joh ... /City-Life

Donnybrook Beach
http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Deu ... rook-Beach

If you are looking to purchase some non-freebie items for your Kitely avatar you can find several displayed in the Hall of Merchants in the Kitely Welcome Center. Simply walk Northeast from the arrival point to enter the Hall of Merchants. The displays in the Hall of Merchants provide links to the Kitely Market listings of the merchants on display.

The Kitely Market is an excellent place to find virtual goods of all descriptions to outfit your avatar in Kitely. Many items in the Market are also available in Export versions, which can be used on any other OpenSim grid.

http://www.kitely.com/market

* Finding other avatars operated by real people to interact with.

Your best bet for finding a Kitely world with people active in it at that moment is the Public Worlds page on the Kitely.com website. Login to the Kitely website and click the Public Worlds tab at the top of the page. You will be presented with a list of publicly available Kitely worlds. Whatever world in listed first –- in the upper left of the world list -– is the world with the most avatars active at the moment (or one of the most active worlds if two or more worlds are tied for most active avatars).

Click on worlds in the list until you find one with a description that looks tempting to you. When you find a world you'd like to try, click on the “Enter World” button near the upper right corner of the page. If you are already in-world in Kitely you should be automatically be teleported to the selected world. If you are not in-world when you click the Enter World button, you will need to start up your viewer and log into Kitely. Use the “log into last location” option. The Kitely website will automatically substitute the world you just selected for the last location you actually visited and you will enter the selected world.

It should be noted that as of early 2014 most of the people you will encounter around Kitely will be folks who are building their worlds. You will find that most of these folks are friendly and open to brief conversations about their builds, and/or about Kitely in general. The fact is that builders who are not willing to have conversations with visitors as they build usually close their worlds to the public until they are done building. So if you see a public world under construction, you can safely assume that the World Owner doesn't mind visitors looking around during the construction project. Do be aware of the fact that things can be a little weird in worlds under construction – particularly when scripted objects are being debugged.


* Finding out where events are being held on the Kitely grid.

Another good way to find other people to interact with in Kitely is to attend events in world. Virtually all public events are announced on the Kitely forums under the “Events and Activities” forum.

If you are coming to Kitely as the member of a work or school group, you will also want to check for private events hosted by your organization.


* Finding out where to get more information and where to get questions answered.

Kitely has a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) document:
http://www.kitely.com/faq

The Kitely forums are the best place to ask any questions not answered in the FAQs:
http://www.kitely.com/forums/index.php

There are Google G+ communities for Kitely specifically and for OpenSim in general. The communities are:

Kitely Virtual G+ Community:
https://plus.google.com/communities/111 ... 4656181042

OpenSim Virtual G+_Community:
https://plus.google.com/communities/116 ... 2234467612


* Finding your first home on your new grid.

Of course virtual avatars don't really need a home in the same way real humans do. But it is nice to have a private place to change clothes and rez items you obtain during your explorations.

Kitely members have access to at least one entire free metered region as part of their account. So building your own custom home on a 16 acre private island has never been easier or more economical.

Want to have your own private estate, but don't want the hassle of building it yourself? There are many free Opensim ARchive files (also known as OAR files for their standard file extension) available for download. One of the best places to find these files is the OpenSim Creations website:
http://opensim-creations.com/category/regions/oars/

New Kitely Regular Accounts come with 6 free hours to work on your new metered region. After that you need to pay for access one way or another. You can buy Kitely Credits (KC). These cost $1 for 300 KC if you buy at the best exchange rate (buy a minimum of $50 worth of KC at a time for the best deal). Accessing a metered world you own, or allowing other Regular Account holders to visit your metered world, costs you 1 KC/minute of access. This is charged on a per Regular Account avatar visiting your world basis. So if you and three friends gather on your metered world and you all have Regular Kitely Accounts, you will be using up 4 KC per minute. This equates to 80 cents per hour for 4 avatars visiting a metered world, which really isn't that bad.

If your world will only be used occasionally, and by only a few avatars at a time, the metered world, with its KC/minute billing option makes a lot of sense. But if you have a world that will be visited a lot, and particularly if the world may be visited by quite a few avatars at the same time, you might want to consider converting your world to Unlimited Access.

You can make any Kitely World unlimited access for as little as $14.95/month. That would allow unlimited access to the world by you, and by any Kitely account holder (Regular or Premium accounts). There are Prim limits and simultaneous avatar limits on the various virtual world plans.

Not all new Kitely residents will want or need to develop their own entire region. Some would prefer to rent a smaller space from someone who hosts an existing unlimited world. There are stores, apartments and land spaces available on existing worlds – some priced as low as.... free!

Johnny Magic is offering free stores and apartments on his unlimited access world, City Life:
http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Joh ... /City-Life

(Need information on other store, apartment, house and land rental offers on unlimited worlds.)

So there we go - my completed initial draft of this proposed document. Now it's up to the Kitely community to suggest changes, and to Kitely Management to decide when/how to publish an official version.

Ilan responded to the above with:

Hi Deuce,

Good draft

One thing worth noting is that we no longer call worlds Unlimited Free Access but rather Fixed-Price. So there are now Metered Worlds and Fixed-Price Worlds.

Also, it may be worth mentioning the Premium Account option for land ownership and the benefits it offers for accessing other people's Metered Worlds.

[Selby Evans]

Dumping a notecard into people's inventory is going to be missed by most people. Forcing people to receive notecards is annoying as is a forced welcome dialog in the world. The only option I see as relevant is a sign that either sends the user to a getting started web page on the Documentation wiki or sends them a notecard on request.

Or both. The more paths lead to your page, the more traffic you will get. People get started on the Kitely site, so put links there. On the public worlds page, and/or on the bottom menu. Or anywhere you have a page where you are telling people why the should want to come into to Kitely. The "Getting settled" page is a value-added feature for some people, so you want to put it in front of those people, preferably before they decide to go somewhere else.

Definitely not in an automatic giver in the Welcome Center. Probably in an easily found sign: "Click for tips on getting started in Kitely." The sign could deliver a notecard with summary info and a web link.

I will blog about the page in some way after it is out, with a link and instructions on how to get it inworld.

SE

[Dot Matrix]

Belt and braces is good. However, a wiki page needs Kitely involvement which might take a while (after all, it's been 2 months since this thread was last looked at -- but they were busy with other things). So let's see if we can work out a way of including this information in KWC 1.3, perhaps via clickable boards giving notecards -- then people will be able to consult the notecards even when not in the KWC.

I'll take Deuce's bullet list as a starting point:

1. Finding and wearing slightly less generic avatar shape, skin and clothing options.
2. Finding places to buy or obtain for free the basic items you need.
3. Finding other avatars operated by real people to interact with.
4. Finding out where events are being held on the grid.
5. Finding out where to get more information and where to get questions answered.
6. Finding your first home on your new grid.

Points 1 and 2 are about sorting out your avatar. Others have commented on their frustrations in trying to bring friends into Kitely, and not being able to easily find freebie places accessible to Regular account holders. The information needs to be visible and easily accessible in the KWC.

I suggest changing one of the info boards so that it gives a notecard with the first two sections from Deuce's draft, including landmarks or web addresses of various freebie worlds for avatars (possibly include whether they are General or Moderate?).

Points 3 and 4 are about finding people and events. The information about events will need updating in the light of the new events board. The rest, giving tips about finding where people are, might need to be expanded a little, since there is another option currently under development.

Point 5 is about finding information and getting help. Clicking on the current KWC Questions board opens up a web page for these forums. Perhaps that will be good enough for this stage? Though Deuce's draft does give some useful alternative sources of information -- this could be placed on a notecard.

Point 6, about making a home, is an important one -- it's at that point that people are likely to commit to upgrading their account. It's also the section in the draft that needs most revision -- witness Ilan's note, quoted above. But it could be done.

So, summing up, this could be covered by four clickable boards in the KWC, each giving a notecard based on particular sections of Deuce's draft.

The notecard method is practical and doable with current resources. But we would need to check the messages with Kitely before implementing them.

[Dundridge Dreadlow]

However, a wiki page needs Kitely involvement which might take a while (after all, it's been 2 months since this thread was last looked at -- but they were busy with other things). So let's see if we can work out a way of including this information in KWC 1.3, perhaps via clickable boards giving notecards -- then people will be able to consult the notecards even when not in the KWC.

Wiki hard ?

[Dot Matrix]

No, wiki is not hard. Finding time for everything is hard.

[Graham Mills]

Unfortunately all three freebie worlds listed are M-rated and accordingly not available to all.

I suggest changing one of the info boards so that it gives a notecard with the first two sections from Deuce's draft, including landmarks or web addresses of various freebie worlds for avatars (possibly include whether they are General or Moderate?).

[Dot Matrix]

Are there any freebie worlds that are general rated?

If both ratings are included that should help everyone, shouldn't it?

[Ilan Tochner]

Please note that some of the link texts in the description are not proper URLs and should be corrected when copied to a notecard/wiki.

Please add our official Twitter and Facebook pages as well and remove the one for OpenSim Virtual G+ Community (sending people to two separate groups in the same social network decreases the effect of a joint community).

I do not want to explicitly promote for-profit land businesses as this can be viewed as favoritism. It's okay to direct people to worlds where they can get free parcels, shops, etc.

There needs to be an explanation about Premium Accounts and their relation to (a) affordable hosting and (b) world access. Without this info new users may not understand why they can't visit all Kitely worlds.