More on InWorldz…
If you’re used to Second Life, InWorldz will be a familiar and yet…different…world. Search doesn’t result in hundreds or thousands of entries with traffic counts of 5 figures. Stores tend to be very large yet mostly empty. You might find half a dozen products and a ton of empty space, sometimes even from fairly established creators. It takes time to import and re-script everything, basically.
Some businesses are truly up and running, like Sculpty Republic and that animations store (the one with the pink and blue av models in the pictures–I forget the name). Heck, SR might be one of few to look identical to its old self, which is kind of a feat, but I guess they had a master plan. 😉 Tobrin’s is open, although I haven’t been to check it out. Avatar Bizarre is up and running, and the owner was in there when I visited. Medhue is there but sparsely populated. My skin is from Pulse, and that’s in good shape. Some merchants have groups there but no stores, which is terribly frustrating.
When SL started, everyone was new. No one was anyone (apart from the Lindens, who hung around residents then). InWorldz is a little different. Presumably every single resident is from SL, and some of the early adopters are also major creators, so while it’s a new world of possibility and has that old-fashioned community atmosphere, it’s not starting at the level of the basic prim and system hair. The sculpts come in fast and furious. Everything has a current SL quality from the get-go. And the sims are cheap! They also seem to have built in the ability to buy money in-world (and changed the currency?) since I joined.
Many of InWorldz’s residents aren’t just trying out a new world and a new source of income. They’re there because they’re escaping Linden Lab. The tier costs, the teenagers, and the insane decisions. SL is believed to be stagnant by some, and the concurrency would suggest that is true. Of course, my warning is that SL started out how InWorldz is. All things have the same destiny, folks. 😉
Relm's Ramblings 
Jan 09, 2011 @ 10:16:47
True, IW consists of mostly–if not all–SL refugees. Seeing as there’s no orientation program or “gateways” in IW and it seems to be hit or miss whether there’s a greeter to help you in the “Desert Island” where you first land, it’d be really tough for a total newbie to virtual worlds to figure out what they’re doing.
As for SL starting out the way IW is, Peter Lioncourt of Elf Clan (one of the oldest SL groups), who’s been there from the beginning, replied to me on the Elf Clan forum thusly: “InWorldz being like SL in the beginning? No way. It was and is so much better and more developed given the limited time of its existance. That may be the result of being fully devoted to developing its program (InWorldz) against being fully devoted to obtaining as much money possible in as short a time possible, thereby neglecting ones customers (SL).”
Jan 09, 2011 @ 11:02:34
Yes, but was SL devoted to that in the beginning? Didn’t sims cost less? Although I know they did charge to sign up at one point. SL was started as a social experiment, per Philip. But of course, they needed to cover their costs. People talk about the “good ol’ days” of SL when it was just one happy community of people building and developing a new world, which implies that it wasn’t always all about the money. The Lindens used to hang out in sandboxes with people and build, too. But money is a dangerous animal. While I’ll never get rich off my store, its sales have gotten better, and it changes one’s thinking when that happens. One starts to think about how to at least maintain that, if not increase it, because it’s so much more painful when the number is smaller. I mean, when it’s 2 sales versus 4 sales, who cares? But when it pays the rent, you start thinking it’s kind of nice and wouldn’t mind seeing that continue. 🙂
Jan 09, 2011 @ 22:32:14
You really should check out the Elf Clan grouply site (found, aptly enough, at http://elfclan.grouply.com) for the full history on their move and troubles with LL from the beginning. In particular, this blog and the comments document the problems with LL: http://elfclanvr.grouply.com/message/1019 (It does sound like the greed was there from the beginning; it just snowballed.) Maybe Elf Clan is being too optimistic with InWorldz, but so far, the founders do seem dedicated to working with their clients, and everybody I run into there seems happy and relieved to be rid of LL. If IW stays up and running and continues making the improvements they’ve been making at the rate they’ve been doing them, one thing is for sure: Finally SL has a viable competitor, and that should keep prices down.
Jan 10, 2011 @ 09:30:07
Apparently, two of your comments ended up in my spam filter. Maybe because you were posting links. *shrugs*
Jan 10, 2011 @ 10:33:11
Oh, no wonder they didn’t show up. Why don’t they tell you you’re not allowed to post links? (At least you got them anyway.) And actually, that link wasn’t correct anyway … there should have been a “vr” attached to the end of “elfclan.”
Jan 09, 2011 @ 22:34:32
Hmm,, I just posted a reply, and it seems to have vanished. Primarily, I was suggesting you might want to take a look at Elf Clan’s grouply site for the history on this (yes, greed has been a problem from the beginning), and this blog documents some of that history: http://elfclanvr.grouply.com/message/1019