2021 Patreon Overhaul/Update!

As 2020 is coming to an end in just a few months, and with it will be coming a few changes to the Patreon for the start of the new year. I'll be going through the upcoming changes here. I'll first list off the all the changes, what's going away and what will be added in their place, then below that I'll go through each change individually with more detail and my reasoning for the changes. 

The Changes

- Tiers: The Archivist tier will be going away entirely. The current plan is to just keep the $1 and $5 Tiers, though the rewards for them will be rewritten to be inline with the new content planned.
- Patron Commissions: Patrons of all tiers will get early access to any commission openings as well as a discounted price, starting their second month.
- Content: Content may become less frequent, as I'll have time to tackle bigger projects, even personal ones. But this does mean that there will be more comics, animations, early access WIPs, and other such goodies.
- Patreon/Discord Redesign: Ongoing plans to redo the landing page of the Patreon, as well as reworking and tidying up the discord server. 

Tier:

The $20 tier (or $10 if you were grandfathered in before the increase) tier will be going away, as stated above. I will making sure that everyone in those tiers gets the illustrations they have paid for, including those that had been saved from prior months. There may be a few ongoing multi-month rewards that extend into 2021, but nothing new will be started after December. 

I haven't tried removing a tier before, so I'm not sure how it works exactly. I'll post a reminder to everyone to reduce your pledge to a lower tier so that you aren't overcharged.

The Library Card Holder ($1) and Indexer ($5) tiers will receive new benefits, but they'll be listed below under 'Content'.  

Patreon Commissions: 

Any time I open up commissions, All patrons will get the opportunity to claim a slot before they are announced publicly. As well, all patrons will get a discount on any commissions starting on their second month (to avoid potential abuse). The intent of this system is to be more flexible, both for myself and for patrons. For me, it allowed me to control how many I take at a time, to ensure I don't over work myself.
For patrons, it:
- allows more people a chance to purchase art beyond those that were able to grab an archivist slot
- no longer requires patrons to pay the full tier price just to keep the slot, even when they did not have ideas for an image that month
- provides the option to get more types of images than the Archivist tier allowed. Such as comics, headshots, etc... or getting color and/or sequences without the need to space it out over several months. 

Content: 

This one's the hardest to determine. One of the things I've learned over the past year is simply... I'm really impulsive. And I work best when embracing that. I originally set this patreon up to a very rigid structure and have tried my best to follow it, with lackluster results, especially for the lower tiers. So going forward, I'm going to be kind tossing a lot of that out the window, and providing whatever content that is my focus at the time. 

The goal is to provide more content of higher quality, though the actual content itself will likely be a lot more varied and less consistent. In the sense that one month, I may be in the mood to animate, meaning as a patron you'll likely see a lot of Work-in-progresses, or rough animatics that I make as practice. The next month, I might be in the mood for a "vote for the change" and release a ton of polls for patrons to vote on, and the next might be just a lot of individual images that patrons get early or exclusive access to. So while the rewards itself may change, there should be more there overall. 

Patreon/Discord Redesign:

It's no secret that both my Patreon front page, and the discord server are a bit of a mess. The more flexible schedule should provide me the time to refine them into much better versions. One of the things that I've always been bad about keeping up on are 'official' images. Stuff like emotes, icons, banners, commissions sheets. But guess what. I'm gonna try to get better at those too next year. (and perhaps finally even make custom twitch icons for stuff like alerts, chat badges, the points/digital-dragon-hoard, etc.) 

And that's really about it, honestly. If you've made it all the way here, well... thank you for reading the whole thing! ❤ I really hope to provide you all the best content I possibly can next year!

-Ryu/WhenWolvesCryOut