Plan changes in Kitely

[Deuce Halsey]

Thank you for posting the SL grid data, Jean. As a resident of the SL mainland for the past five years I can confirm a lot of what was said about "Abandonment Issues".

I bought the land that became my Just4yucks HQ in SL in December 2008 from a developer who had probably bought most of the new Tikka region from LL. (Tikka was only a few months old at that time.) The parcel I chose had some frontage on Linden Route 7A, right near a junction with Route 7.

When I moved in there was an active commercial community along that Route 7A corridor. There was a Comedy Club just a couple of parcels south of my holdings and loads of stores of all kinds. Eventually I owned about 1/4th of the Tikka region, and tried to set up a "Humor Mall" with my Just4yucks Main Store as the anchor. This never worked out and I eventually reduced my holdings over time until the present, where I only own about 6000 sqm.

I've had all kinds of neighbors through the years, but now large swaths of land in my neighborhood lie abandoned. The TOS changes in September were the final straw for me. My stores will all be closing on December 1st. I will be abandoning most of my land before my memberships come due in mid-December. I plan to keep one membership and 512 or so sqm of land as an outpost at my old main teleport arrival point for at least a year. This outpost will explain that I've moved to Kitely and will contain info on getting to my new stores via Kitely, or via Hypergrid once that functionality is enabled. I'll leave out a few freebies as a thank you gift to my loyal customers over the years.

If the Kitely team could make available a kite, or other promotional/advertising item to SL merchants who still have stores or outposts in SL, I would be happy to rez such an item(s) at my outpost.

[Deuce Halsey]

I had intended to honor Ilan's request not to reveal this discussion to the public, but since the cat is already out of the bag...

I won't talk about any plan details that were discussed at the meeting yesterday, largely because it was all just theoretical at this point, and is quite liable to change anyway.

The most important thing I took away from that meeting was that under the new system visitors to Kitely worlds will no longer be billed for their visits - unless of course the World Owner sets an admission fee for access. This is a great selling point for attracting new members to Kitely who are fleeing the sinking SL ship. Something like this was going to be necessary anyway with the coming of Hypergrid access. Since there is no way for Hypergrid visitors to pay KC since they don't have Kitely accounts, the world owners were going to have to pick up the tab for these visitors one way or another.

This leads to the other main point. World Owners will still have the option to allow or now allow visitors to their worlds as desired. So those World Owners on metered plans cannot be forced to pay for access from unwanted public visitors. If you want to restrict access to your world to yourself, or to a select group of friends or colleagues, that option will still exist as it does now.

Given these two points I mention above, I feel confident that I will be able to find a plan under the new Kitely billing system that meets my needs. The free access for all visitors thing will mean that Kitely should grow even faster than it has been, and like the old saying goes, "A rising tide raises all boats."

[Ilan Tochner]

I'd like to clear up our current thinking without providing actual numbers as we frankly haven't done all the financial calculations based on the feedback we've gotten in yesterday's meeting:

First, we plan to continue having Metered World options that provide the max avatar capacity we can support, the max prim limit and up to the max world size. You'll be able to have as many such Metered worlds as you want without being on any type of plan (i.e. no fixed monthly charge) and continue paying for them at the same rates as we charge now (other than OAR-related operations which we will need to reprice as they consume on average more resources than we currently bill for).

We also plan to continue providing one such pay-as-you go region for free (i.e. no world storage cost) and we plan to provide new users with a certain amount of time in which to check out their new Kitely world without having to take out their wallet. We don't however, plan to continue providing additional free time per month. The world will remain (unless the user deletes it) but entering it will require KC or changing the world from being Metered to being on some unmetered world option.

We want to do that because Metered Worlds are a great way to get people to understand the value of our service and a great way for content creators to have a lot of land to build in (even if they want to make those worlds public and need to pay for other people's time inside them). There are currently several active Kitely users who are on the Gold Plan and subsidize people's time inside their worlds using KC. You can ask them, it doesn't end up increasing their monthly expense in any significant way (there are just too many worlds to visit and people don't stick around more than a few dozen minutes in a world unless there is an event there). What those world managers do is stay on the Gold Plan and buy KC in bulk for a discount so they know exactly how much they spend. Once the KC run out visitors are just prevented from visiting the world manager's worlds (while the world manager can continue to visit them due to them being on the Gold Plan).

The goal of the yet-to-be-defined new unmetered world options is to allow us to offer very cheap fixed-price worlds that world managers can use to have people over without anyone needing to pay for time. We want to be able to do this while still providing enough prim and avatar capacity in those worlds that people will find useful.

The multiple unmetered world options are designed to have a sliding scale of maximum prim/avatar/world-size quotas that people can choose from (probably not in a make-your own deal kind of way simply because many choices reduce conversion). The prices for those options are intended to be lower than getting an equivalently sized Unlimited Free Access world now. Please note that people who want to retain the current 100K prims/100 avatar quotas can order now (you know you want to ) and have those worlds with that feature set and price grandfathered in if/when we change our existing offering (they'll be able to change to the new options if they wind up preferring them).

Again, prices of most unmetered worlds will go down from what they are today but so will the limits they provide (the Ultimate World option, or whatever we wind up calling it, will likely remain at $100/month). The reason for this is to allow us to reduce our hosting costs for those lower priced worlds thus maintaining a profit level that can help our company continue growing.

Those are the main changes we're considering. What happens to the existing Free/Bronze/Silver plans is really secondary to first finding the main path we want to pursue.

[Jean Swashbuckler]

When I moved in there was an active commercial community along that Route 7A corridor. There was a Comedy Club just a couple of parcels south of my holdings and loads of stores of all kinds. Eventually I owned about 1/4th of the Tikka region, and tried to set up a "Humor Mall" with my Just4yucks Main Store as the anchor. This never worked out and I eventually reduced my holdings over time until the present, where I only own about 6000 sqm.

This mirrors our Mainland experience to a "T." When Nautilus City and the Blake Sea were announced we were some of the very first parcel owners. LL was smart about how they handled the auctions in rolling out parcels over about a week process. There were some huge L$ paid for these 1024X1024 parcels. People loved the theme and there was a lot about the theme that tied to Atlantis. That quickly began to change as mainland does. Non-theme builds were the primary reason. Interestingly enough, the parcel value has remained higher than I expected and much higher then other Mainland areas with the exception of Bay City. The downside, all of the themed non-Linden owned structures are now gone. In fact, most of the buildings on the ground are gone. The big thing now is skyboxes. This experience was one of many that taught me LL has lost its way. Like you, the TOS is another.

As an aside, today most Nautilus City 1024X1024 parcels sell for L$45,000 to L$ 100,000. You can do the math with the exchange rate at roughly L$244/US$1. You then have monthly tier on top of the purchase price. Kitely is a cost-effective, and efficient business model that can and should grow because it is a smart way to approach immersive worlds.

Kitely and the Kitely community have a novel opportunity. Following up on what Ilan posted in this thread, the more people we can get over to Kitely, the more activity that takes place on any of our regions, the more free access people have with a chance to roam among our worlds...the better for us a community and Kitely. We should all want Kitely to grow exponentially and have the resources to do so. To do that, we need more people helping to buy land....yes, that's exactly what it is. We are renting server space, efficient server space at a tremendous cost-benefit, to build our worlds. Each of us that owns a sim is a landowner. No two ways about it. Just because our sims or worlds are not contiguous, does not mean we are not all Landowners. The more people we have coming into our Kitely worlds, the more landowners we have, we grow the Kitely grid for all of us.

A number of you have stepped up to make Kitely what it is today. You have put in the hours to create the new Welcome Center. You take the time to go to the mentors meetings. You make this an active Forum. Most importantly, you have helped Kitely get to this point.

Now we all can take advantage of this opportunity to grow Kitely! Ok, off the soapbox.

[Selby Evans]

That is why I specifically asked the people who attended the meeting to not discuss this with people who didn't attend as it was obvious that without us providing actual pricing and feature details this entire discussion can only create fear uncertainty and doubt amongst people.
.

I apologize for mentioning the discussion in public. I missed the request, perhaps because I had to leave long before the meeting was completed. I should have said nothing in public without waiting for more information.
Selby Evans/Thinkerer Melville

[Rikku Cosplay]

It's a forgivable mistake Selby, I should have clarified it earlier in the meeting. The meeting was VERY long and quite confusing with all the simultaneous conversation threads going on. It was hard to track who was saying what to whom so my request could have easily been missed if you were busy typing while I made it.

Frankly, there were a few times I felt I was in an Albert and Costello sketch

[Deuce Halsey]

It's a forgivable mistake Selby, I should have clarified it earlier in the meeting. The meeting was VERY long and quite confusing with all the simultaneous conversation threads going on. It was hard to track who was saying what to whom so my request could have easily been missed if you were busy typing while I made it.

Frankly, there were a few times I felt I was in an Albert and Costello sketch

VERY long only begins to describe it. I left at the 4 hour and 45 minute mark, largely because my brain had turned to mush by that point. I knew I was incapable of making any kind of useful contribution at that point and might unintentionally add to the confusion. So I left. Who ended up on first?

[Dot Matrix]

I'll admit that this thread is worrying me. The different time-based plans, with their mix of regions and inworld time, have proved ideal for the sort of storybuilding that I and others have been indulging in over the past few years.

Is the idea to switch to a system whereby one pays for all inworld time using KC? So no included minutes?

And how much will it cost to host multiple time-based worlds in the future? It is the monthly hosting costs per region I'm interested in. Will it work out roughly $1 per region per month, as now?

[Marstol Nitely]

Hi Dot,

The idea is to make it so that world managers always pay either a user-time-based fee or a fixed-monthly fee for each of their worlds and that people visiting those worlds won't have to worry about Kitely charging them for time. Under this considered change, the concept of Minutes will be eliminated from Kitely. If someone pays for time-based usage they do it using KC. Premium Account holders (see below) won't pay for time they spend in their (or anyone elses) time-based (AKA Metered) worlds.

Our current thinking is that we won't cancel the Gold Plan option. We'll likely keep it under a different name. There will be normal accounts (the default) and Premium Accounts (what is now the Gold Plan). Premium Accounts will continue to provide 20 free time-based regions and unlimited personal time in Metered Worlds. They will even be improved, if you are on a Premium Account then no-one pays for the time you spend in your or anyone else's Metered World (unlike today where world managers who provide free access to their time based worlds pay for time regardless of whether the visitors has unlimited time).

The world storage cost of time-based worlds (Metered Worlds) will remain the same at about $1/region/month. So will the 1 KC/minute/user cost for usage. The only thing that we will need to change is the OAR load/save/download-related operations that are currently charged at a rate that is too low to cover their cost to us in most cases (OAR operations are very CPU and IO intensive, involve multiple servers, and require upload/download to/from Kitely for which Amazon bills us). The size of the world is not what defines the amount of work and we want to keep this predictable and not some variable rate that we can't provide the user in advance. We're considering a fixed 150 KC per such OAR-related operation instead of the current 10 KC / region rate. Unmetered worlds will continue to provide OAR related operations for free (so a fixed cost world remains a fixed cost world).

[Boo Rojyo]

Hi Ilan,

I do see the logic of no cost to anyone entering a sim, and in principle I support it, it would make Kitely fall into line with most other Opensim worlds.

Can I ask however if on the metered worlds the ability to limit access will still apply?

I've kinda risk accessed a metered region and it's a little scary. Pontentially there's a risk of 100 avatars on a sim, so a charge to the owner of 6000KC an hour times the number of sims owned (At 1KC per minute per avatar). Obviously that's extreme and totally theoretical and would require a planned attack and I really don't think it would happen, but even the exposure to 4 a 5 avatars hanging around on your sims would soon add up to real life substantial costs. I think the fear of uncontrolled expense will force metered world owners to make their sims 'closed' which is a shame and a loss to the community. Unfortunately, in those circumstances, those world owners might begin to think a standalone Sim-on-a-Stick might be a simpler and cheaper option.

I'll try not to give just problems but offer solutions too Personally if I have metered regions under the new pricing plan I think I'd set up a very limited access to my group only perhaps, and grant access to visitors on request when I'm online. Failing to do this would risk my KC balance wiped out overnight if people are inconsiderate. 'Open days' would be a nice idea if it were possible to have a separate KC pot just for visitor access, but I realise that might be a complicated solution.

If my grasp of the 'metered worlds' is incorrect then I'll apologise and await a formal offering. I do like Kitely and I do realise that economics force change but all change has consequences in my experience.