Tag: InWorldz

Yesterday, Beth Reischl, one of the founding partners of the virtual world InWorldz, posted a long message to their community announcements:

I know a lot of our residents are wondering what is going on, cashouts have been frozen for 2 weeks, support has been spotty and a host of other things. So this is probably the hardest post I’ve ever written about the state of InWorldz currently. I’ll start with the history so everyone knows what has been going on, and I’ve always been as honest as possible with everyone, so bear with me please.

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At this point, what all of this means is very simple: Without payment from the funds sitting in the UCC liens, RackSpace will be shutting our servers down. I’ve extended our servers out until Friday, July 27. I can not process cashouts, no payments may be sent out. For that, I’m truly sorry. The only thing I can do at this point, is the last power I have left under PayPal: to honor all disputes of monies paid to InWorldz during this timeframe. We will start the refunding process tomorrow morning, and go through as much as we can until PayPal shuts us out of the accounts. In meantime, each and every single customer can dispute the monies paid to us, and PayPal will honor all disputes on behalf of the buyer if there is no response from the merchant. It takes a bit longer, they have to give merchants 15 days to respond, however, if they’ve yanked our access, it may go faster. So whether you’ve purchased I’z or paid for your regions, please dispute them if you don’t see the refunds coming throughout this week.

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Every person can download their Inventory, but realize, it will not work on any grid other than InWorldz. You can do this via your login page on InWorldz, Inventory Backup. It will make a request to our Inventory Servers to provide you with that file. If someone manages to make the Backups work on their grid, you can get your inventory there.

I know many of you will be angry over this, my heart was broken Friday afternoon, and I know many of you will have harsh words for this decision. Do know, I tried my hardest to avoid this outcome. For 10 years, InWorldz has been my bread and butter, and now I no longer have that. It’s raised my children, it’s seen many of us come together in real life, it’s facilitated a community I never thought possible. I’ve seen so much goodness pour through this community for those who needed help and I’ve seen the worst of what can happen when group negative think takes over. I’ve seen the best of creativity brought to life, and I’ve seen the absolute horrid side of cheapness and fraud and greed. I’ve watched a community that has gone through inclusion and seclusion. Through all of this though, I know many friends have been made, contacts made from around the world, loves found (and some lost), heartache over loss of community members, outpouring of charity for various causes, and even for personal members who had no hope previously. I’ve watched those with social challenges blossom and grow and find inner talents they never knew they had. And now, I hope and wish that each and every one of you finds a way to continue your path, to continue to create, to love, to grow and to be the absolute best you can be.

I’m very sorry to read this, but I can’t honestly say that I am totally surprised by this decision. As I wrote earlier, InWorldz has been having trouble for quite some time already.

If you want the platform to survive, you’d better hurry over to their GoFundMe page. I notice that 80 people have already donated over US$11,000 of their US$17,000 goal in only 13 hours! The GoFundMe page states:

As many of you know, I posted this morning about current state of affairs in InWorldz. We have decided NOT to go down without a fight! But to do so, we need your support! I refunded most payments this morning via PayPal (there are still some needing refunding), and we will apply your donations to your region tier. We need $17k to get bank balance back to normal (because we paid off LoanBuilders one payment and Chase let it go through putting us in negative) and pay the servers for another month.

I will be honest, Cashouts will be put off until we get everything organized, but all older cashouts will be held to be first paid off as things stabilize.

I know InWorldz is a home to so many of you, and I was willing to close the doors on that as I had not seen any way out of the impending doom. However, if you can donate, we can get the servers going and we’ll get a new payment system in place that is not PayPal, but still allow all of our Domestic and European customers pay! I hope I can count on you and so do your neighbors! We will apply donations that match billing records as needed, just let us know which region and we’ll update accordingly. Remember, if we don’t hit our goal, you lose nothing! Let’s hit it peeps!

Who knows? Maybe InWorldz will be able to keep running a little longer!

UPDATE 12:54 p.m.: Well, InWorldz’s GoFundMe page has now attracted US13,843 by 110 people in only 17 hours, which is quite impressive. They may actually be able to collect enough money to pay for their server costs for another month.

The Hypergrid Business blog, which has had a sometimes testy relationship with InWorldz management, has reported on the issue:

InWorldz, one of the oldest and most successful commercial grids, is shutting down this week, owner Beth Reisch announced today, citing financial difficulties.

According to Reischl, travel-related communication problems, bureaucratic mistakes and other issues resulted in the shutdown of the grid’s PayPal accounts and the calling in of the company’s business loans.

“Without payment… RackSpace will be shutting our servers down,” she said in her announcement. “I’ve extended our servers out until Friday, July 27th. I can not process cashouts, no payments may be sent out. For that, I’m truly sorry.”

However, she said she will begin issuing refunds, as much as she can before PayPal shuts all access to the accounts.

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Typically, grids in this situation suspend services temporarily until the problems are resolved. It wasn’t clear from her announcement why she decided to fully shut down the grid instead.

As of May, 2018, InWorldz had more than 180,000 registered users. The last time other stats were available, May 2017, the grid had more than 1,200 regions and over 5,200 active users. However, active user numbers and region counts had been slipping.

Throughout its eight-year history, InWorldz was frequently the most popular OpenSim grid, and was one of the top grids when it came to attracting new users to the OpenSim platform. The grid has also donated code back to the open source community, both patches to the mainline OpenSim project as well as the full code base for Halcyon, its own version of OpenSim.

As the most successful grid, InWorldz has also been a target of criticism, including on Hypergrid Business. But, on balance, it was a major positive for the community, and will be missed.

Well, InWorldz may indeed be able to pull off a last-minute Hail Mary pass, but now that word has gotten out, I believe that they are going to have an even harder time attracting consumers and creators than they did before. I hate to say it, but this may be the death knell for InWorldz.

SECOND UPDATE 5:38 p.m.: Less than US$1,000 away from reaching their goal, Beth Reischl has posted an update on the GoFundMe page:

Wow! Everyone has been amazing! So here’s where things stand. I asked in discord this afternoon, once we hit our goal, then what? What about next month? After much agonizing and upset, it was suggested by the residents that we use these monies to start a new grid. We’ll be able to move OARS, profiles, groups. Inventory can only be taken that can be put in a box to be OAR filed. We’ll be opening the sandbox for people who have no region to place their items and can get them back.

If you are NOT ok with this, I urge you to please withdraw your support on the page. I do not want to take anyone’s money who is not ok with this! Otherwise, please start boxing your items up on your region or ask a friend or tomorrow I’ll be opening the Sandboxes up for people!

Every single one of you simply amazes me!

Help spread the word!

So, InWorldz is indeed shutting down, but with the money raised, Beth plans to start a new grid. The official InWorldz Discord server is simply buzzing with chatter tonight! Lots of discussion, debate, confusion and argument over the best course of action. Jim Tarber (who appears to be an InWorldz technical support person) said, “The servers will go down on Friday. When that happens, we lose all inventory and all assets. We are scrambling to save what we can before then.” This is going to be a massive undertaking!

InWorldz was founded in 2009 by three people: Beth Reischl, John Arnolde, and David Daeschler. From a 2010 interview with the founders:

Q. Tell me something about the history of InWorldz.
A. It started out at the end of 2008 / beginning of 2009 with a few of us in a chat room discussing  if we could even DO a full virtual world, it was a testing phase for us. Then we had people who were actually interested in seeing if we could really pull it together, and lo and behold, we had a live world. I had the time and dedication to devote to it, so we started looking at what could be used, worked on, where it really was in grand scheme of things, and by February 2009 we started our testing, and by April 2009 we actually allowed residents to come in and take a look for themselves. We got our first paying customer that same month, talk about our celebration, we were amazed!

Q. What are your goals and aims for InWorldz?
A. First and foremost, to become a viable platform that is comparable to Second Life. Then move on to advancing that platform. This will include things that we’ve spoken about as far as physics, meshes, and so on. These are all things we’d like to tackle later on to improve the platform.

I usually lump InWorldz in with the OpenSim-based virtual worlds, although Talla Adam, in a comment to this blog,  notes that the InWorldz software has branched off from the OpenSim project:

Inworldz, by the way, is not regarded as Opensim anyway, although its roots are in OpenSim. InWorldz runs on the in-house developed Halcyon platform while OSGrid runs on current OpeSim.

InWorldz has been one of the more popular and commercially successful OpenSim-based virtual worlds, not as popular as Second Life, but an attractive, cheaper alternative for many people who were tired of high virtual land prices in SL. Many Second Life vendors set up branches of their businesses in InWordz, and other people built new businesses from scratch. The virtual world uses its own currency, called the I’z.

Unfortunately, InWorldz appears to be going through a period of some growing pains. There are reports of users leaving the platform, and some people are expressing concern. In January 2018, Hypergrid Business reported that a group of InWorldz’s content creators were concerned about the grid’s future:

“I am in InWorldz where I have a shop and we have seen a drastic decline in sales and residents,” one merchant told Hypergrid Business.

The merchant requested anonymity.  “If Elenia [grid owner Beth Reischl] doesn’t like what any of us report, then she could ban us from the grid because she has done that in the past,” the merchant said.

Residents have also complained on social media that the founders haven’t been paying attention to their concerns. Of the top managers, owner Reischl moved to Panama and founder and CTO David Daeschler has mostly moved on to other projects.

In an apparent effort to stem the flow of bad news, the grid shut down the public discussion forums a couple of years ago and stopped publishing monthly user statistics last spring.

According to the owners, there was too much drama in the forums and moderation would have been too expensive.

“Our forums have literally cost us thousands of dollars in customers,” Reischl said in a forum post in 2015.

Staff developer Jim Tarber followed up with a very confusing statement about why InWorldz doesn’t need to have a public discussion forum.

“It’s not InWorldz’ core business, we are not a social network like Facebook, we’re a software development organization providing an online service,” he wrote.

There has been some worried discussion among users about InWorldz’s future in their Residents Corner (thread one, thread two). But InWorldz, unlike many other OpenSim-based grids that have foundered along the way like Avination, keeps moving forward.

To learn more about InWorldz, visit their website or their wiki. InWorldz founder Beth Reischl also has a YouTube channel, with episodes of her show, called iNewz.