Virtual Ville back up, now with higher prices

Update 10/25: The new grid, now called AviTron, has changed its prices yet again today. For some reason, though this is a commercial grid, Pomposelli is calling the rents “donations” and it starts at $10 per month for a 15,000-prim region and goes up to $200 a month for up to 500,000 prims on a dedicated server. Full info on their land rental page. Again, the new business model does not seem realistic or sustainable, and users are urged to be very cautious before investing, and make sure they have off-line backups of all builds and inventory items in case of sudden shutdown or business model change.

(Image courtesy Virtual Ville.)

After shutting down Virtual Ville on Tuesday, and promising that he was done with running grids and we’d wouldn’t see any more of him, Alex Pomposelli has brought the grid back, with a new pricing structure.

The loginURI and hypergrid address — login.virtual-ville.com:8002 — seems to be working, the Virtual Ville Facebook page is back up. but the website doesn’t seem to be up and running yet. He said that the website is currently being redesign to reflect new prices.

Alexsandro Pomposelli

“The plan here is to maintain Virtual Ville land quality, performance and power along with offering the latest most advanced version of OpenSim plus our own tweaks,” he wrote. “That is the difference between our grid and others.”

As of last week, there were 50 regions on Virtual Ville, 370 locally registered users, and 652 active users. There are more active users than registered users because Virtual Ville was open to hypergrid access, allowing avatars from other grids to teleport in.

That made Virtual Ville the twelfth most popular OpenSim grid last month.

“Once again folks I do apologize for what happened,” Pomposelli added. “I should not have made land prices so cheap trying to compete with the other grids. We need to maintain our stability and quality.”

Land price increase

Residents who were previously paying $5 for a 15,000-prim region will now see a price increase to $15 per month, he informed residents this morning. Those who were already paying $15 a month will continue to do so.

Residents who were getting free regions will also need to start paying $15 a month, and the prim allowance will be increased to 25,000, he said.

Residents who decide to take their regions down, instead, can get an OAR file export. This is an export of the region’s terrain and builds, useful for people who want to move their regions to other grids.

Just a couple of days ago, Pomposelli said he would not offer OAR file exports because of content protection issues. He didn’t explain why he changed his mind.

“Anyone desiring to leave the grid and wants a copy — OAR — of your region; must contact me via email at arpholdings@gmail.com requesting your region backup,” he told residents. “You have three days to do so or your region will be deleted.”

Prices will be much higher on our new website being re designed at the moment. These prices will not affect the residents with the current pricing scheduling mentioned above. Only new residents, new buyers.

Maria Korolov