Big Changes Coming to NRW

Are you ready for big changes to hit NRW? You’re going to see lower subscription rates, easier ways to navigate through your favorite locales and more Ecommerce for all your home shopping needs.

With the good comes the bad. Good: more vendos, great art and new locales to explore. Bad: Yep, thanks to NRW you could end upspending more and more time online, never returning to reality!

With partner radio stations such as Washington D.C., Phoenix and Honolulu on their way, how could our virtual world get any better? Believe it or not, you’ll be surprised. Some of the cities considering the leap into NRW cyberspace are: Seattle, San Francisco and Kansas City. And guess who else has been checking out building space in NRW? Baltimore, Toronto, Houston, Boston, Miami, Chicago, London, Dublin, Lisbon and Frankfurt.

Is your avatar’s head spinning yet? Confused about what all of this means? Relax. Take a deep breath and get ready for the most fun you can have…real world or virtual.

Club Connect will undergo a facelift in the weeks to come. A lot of the CC partners will be moved to the north end of town and others will be moved to different cities altogether. “Some of CC is being relocated both to make CC more navigable and to place some locales in more geographically correct places,” Ben, WorldsAway Manager, said. “CC will be the large northern rectangle.”

All of these changes will give NRW residents more locales to visit with great new art plus, everybody’s favorite, more vendos. You can expect to see one new city a week starting in just two weeks. “I hope to keep that up at a rate of three or four a month until we are at 25 cities,” Ben said. “And it’s not only cities. We have some plans for inworld special areas and features too.” Each city will also have a new local feature, a Museum with both inworld art and URL links to a Museum. The new radio stations will be available through Real Audio or other such systems so you can listen to your favorite station down the street or across the country.

For those of you making the trip to the Grand Opening of these cities, you’ll be eligible to receive special prizes and bragging rights. But there’s something else we can all benefit from by having NRW grow into a more interactive community. More Ecommerce will become available with extra incentives to buying online. “It is our intention to lower the subscription fee as the Ecommerce grows. So if you want to buy a book online, buy it here and help us lower the subscription cost,” he said. “Our intentions are always two fold. One is to grow NRW to make it commercially viable but, at the same time, to make the use of the world enjoyable to our citizens. Anything we can do to that end we will try.”

Keep an eye on the events schedule because you don’t want to miss the Grand Openings headed our way. Speaking of events, you’ll also be able to find some new interactive items for inworld announcements and new ads. They will work along the line of the dancing holiday tree that was in Winter Wonderland. (one is over Cliff’s right now and another is in front of Xoom). Also, be on the lookout for a very special ad early in the week of January 18.

Don’t think you can’t contribute to the success of NRW either. You’re not walking down a one way virtual street here. “Keep those e-mails and suggestions coming. We are always happy to hear from everyone.”

Now that you know there’s so much more coming to NRW, there’s got to be one more question on your mind. With these big changes, there’s going to be times when NRW has downtime, right? Wrong. Don’t expect to lose any time from your favorite home away from reality. There’ll probably be a flood of new users but who can’t use more friends?