AviWorlds, the grid that’s up and down more than a yo-yo, is back again — this time offering 100 free full-sized regions.
Owner Alexsandro Pomposelli has shut down the grid more than a dozen times over the last seven years, and has attempted multiple different business models. It’s had free land, and extremely expensive land. It’s been both hypergrid-enabled and closed. He’s hosted it with hosting providers, and ran it with the help of partners. So far, all of these attempts have resulted in failure, going-out-of-business announcements, and the loss of residents’ content, and, in some cases, virtual currency holdings.
Josh and a few other people asked me to bring the grid back,” Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business. “So I agreed.”
Josh Boam is an OpenSim technology expert who has run his own grids in the past. However, Boam has never been able to attract the kind of traffic that Pomposelli draws.
The two buried their hatchet a year ago, after a tumultuous and acrimonious breakup in 2016.
The new AviWorlds will be hypergrid enabled, and the hypergrid address is  login.aviworlds.com:8002 — “For now,” says Pomposelli. “This may change depending on what the community will want to do.”
Hypergrid access allows OpenSim users to easily travel between grids, make friends on other grids, receive messages from other grids, go on shopping trips to other grids. Basically, it allows the entire OpenSim community to function as one, giant, connected grid. With the advent of the multi-grid Gloebit currency, and the closing of InWorldz this summer, the popularity of the hypergrid has only increased.
However, while AviWorlds has hypergrid teleports and the other hypergrid functionality in place, it won’t be using the Gloebit currency.
“We have our own currency AV and will be sold 500 for $1,” said Pomposelli.
Residents who have a Gloebit account will still be able to shop on other grids and bring their purchases home to AviWorlds, but residents of other grids won’t be able to teleport in and shop.
Free land
Residents with building skills can apply to receive one of 100 free, 15,000-prim regions.
For residents who are not able to build out a full region can get one of 100 free homestead plots, 4,096 meters square, with a 937 prim allowance.
“After these regions have been given out we will then think of a pricing strategy for the grid,” said Pomposelli.
Protect yourself
Given the grid’s history of unexpected closing, I recommend that would-be residents avoid creating in-world accounts, and stick instead with avatars they have registered on other, more stable grids.
Off the top of my head, I recommend OSgrid, Kitely, and DigiWorldz. They are the most visited grids, or rank high in our reader surveys.
In addition, if you do decide to build on the grid, do the actual building elsewhere, such as on a free, self-hosted DreamWorld mini-grid. Then upload the content to AviWorlds. That way, if AviWorlds goes down again, you still have a copy of all of your original content.
I also recommend against buying in-world currency. It’s not likely that you’ll be able to do much shopping on AviWorldz, anyway. And if you have Gloebit currency, you can shop almost anywhere on the hypergrid. And, of course, there’s always the Kitely Market.
If you ignore my warnings, and spend time and money outfitting an AviWorlds avatar and building original creations on the grid, and it folds again and you lose anything, then email me to complain, I will laugh in your face. “Bwa ha ha ha,” I will tell you.
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