Upcoming tier changes

I've been meaning to rework the Patreon tier rewards for quite some time now to better reflect the current state of the project and what people value the most. The current rewards are largely unchanged from what they were at the very beginning over a year ago, long before the early access was even available. They were made for a different time and a different crowd, so a few slight adjustments are long overdue. Also, thank you to community member Harbinger for inspiring some of these changes!

For tier 1, there are no changes. This is by far the biggest tier and the rewards have been consistently delivered on, so it seems to work well the way it is.

For tier 2, I want to address the wallpapers, as these have been very scarce since last year for a few reasons. The placeholder dragon that you use in the EA was getting too associated with Dragontwin, which I want to avoid both because it can cause confusion and because it can have potential legal ramifications, since the license for it is limited for use in a certain revenue bracket. Even if it was replaced entirely in the final game, the value of old wallpapers with it could still be cause for issues as it doesn't get replaced in those. So I decided to not do any more of those until our custom dragon was ready for a photo shoot, but have since also come to the conclusion that even with that, it's not really possible to consistently deliver on this reward at this stage of development because there aren't enough art assets and environments to show off on a regular basis. So the change I will make here is to remove this as an explicit reward, and instead simply upload these wallpapers as a kind of bonus when there is something to show. This way no one will get tricked into picking this tier thinking there's a hoard of wallpapers on the other side, and may instead be positively surprised when they do appear.

For tier 3, there are also no changes, although it has been a while since the last poll. An idea I had for this is to have a poll suggestion channel in the Patreon section of the Discord server, where people can help come up with poll ideas to draw from so that these can be held more regularly.

For tier 4, the behind-the-scenes footage and feature highlights have not been frequently uploaded either because of a fundamental issue with this reward, which is that it directly competes with sneak peeks. If something has been shown in a sneak peek, then it doesn't make much sense to upload it again as a reward here. At the same time, excluding things from sneak peeks to instead show here means fewer sneak peeks and less visibility to potential new supporters, which isn't ideal either. So the change I want to make here is to instead merge these two into a new reward called "WIP previews" or something like that, which is a catch-all for random footage and screenshots of work in progress things that can be quickly put together but would be too unpolished for a real sneak peek. It would be the kind of things that might normally be shared internally to show what you are working on, unpolished and minimally edited footage that may appear in a more polished form in a future sneak peek.

For tier 5, there are no changes except for the signed wallpaper reward, for the same reason as tier 2, as well as this reward being intended for the size of the Patreon a year ago when there were a lot fewer tier 5 supporters. As with tier 2, I will remove this as an explicit reward to avoid spending all day signing wallpapers, but let it be known in the community lore that according to rumors, tier 5 patrons can still message me and request it should they want it.

From what I've seen in terms of interest for different rewards, I don't think any of these changes will have a significant impact on the value of a given tier. However, if anyone feels like this devalues their tier and no longer wants to be on it, you are free to request a refund to switch tier or cancel. Thank you!