seriallos

Raidbots support for Patreon will end in Jan 2024

Raidbots is moving away from Patreon and existing pledges/subscriptions will stop working in January 2024.

You can seamlessly migrate to Raidbots Premium directly on your account page - if you switch, make sure to follow the instructions on that page to make sure you properly cancel on the Patreon side to avoid being double charged.

Raidbots supports many more payments methods than in the past including:

• Most credit and debit cards
• US Bank Accounts (ACH)
• EU Bank Accounts (SEPA)
• iDEAL
• SOFORT
• Bancontact

I will continue to add more payment methods as possible.

However, PayPal will not be supported - it would require a significant amount of technical work to work with the Raidbots subscription model. Raidbots is still just one person (me) and I will be focusing the billing side of things on Stripe's payment platform. I believe that most customers are able to use the provided payment methods so in most cases you should be able to continue to access Premium.

Moving away from Patreon

TL;DR: It's best to sign up for Raidbots directly on Raidbots, not here. Patreon will be dropped at some point in the future. Please do not use Patreon messages for support.

As a heads up, Raidbots will likely be moving away from using Patreon over the next 6-12 months. I will post more as the plans become more specific but I recommend switching over to using Raidbots Premium directly on the Raidbots site.

You can sign up for Raidbots Premium directly on your Raidbots account page - you get more rewards for signing up directly on Raidbots and most payment methods are supported there. There are a few gaps right now but those will likely be fixed up.

In addition, all support is handled through the support@raidbots.com or billing@raidbots.com email addresses. Patreon messages are not regularly monitored so please do not use them for support requests.

Edit/Update: I am planning on adding additional payment methods to Raidbots directly which is why the timeline for the Patreon deprecation is so long. I haven't provided details yet because I'm not sure about the specifics - but likely additional payment methods are things like US bank accounts (ACH) as well as various EU/global options (SEPA is already supported and I'm likely to add some additional ones).

Raidbots Premium, Smart Sim, and Bigger Sims!

I've launched some new stuff in the last few weeks! Here's a quick recap of what's new...

Raidbots Premium

You can now support Raidbots directly on the site itself, get 10% higher limits than when using Patreon, and have more flexible options for managing your subscription (choose 1, 3, or 6 month periods).

You can visit your Raidbots account page to take a look or read more about Raidbots Premium on the blog.

Smart Sim

Raidbots now defaults to "Smart Sim" mode which was directly inspired by AutoSimc.  Smart Sim can run large Top Gear sims significantly faster and also provides more consistent results for all other sims.

The basic idea for Top Gear is to run some fast-and-loose sims on everything, remove poor performing set, increase the precision, and then do it again. The top performing sets will be run at high precision and the whole thing is way faster.

This is now the default mode that Raidbots runs in so you don't even need to do anything to use it.

More details on Smart Sim 

Bigger Sims for Premium/Patrons

I've also increased the iteration cap for all Premium members and Patrons so you can run larger sims and include more gear at once.

For patrons, the new limits are:

Epic: 11 million (up from 2.6m)

Heirloom: 3.6 million (up from 1.3m)

Rare: 1.35m (up from 660k)

If you switch to Raidbots Premium, you'll get about 10% more than these numbers.

Ready for Battle for Azeroth

Raidbots is pretty much ready for all the new systems/gear/etc in BfA. Azerite Armor support is in Top Gear and I've updated all the databases. SimulationCraft has basic support for most everything but tuning will continue at a fast pace from the amazing SimC devs. As with any new patch, evaluate sims with a large grain of salt as things will take a while to stabilize.

Hope to see you in Azeroth!

Raidbots and the Patreon Service Fee

TL;DR: You'll pay slightly more, you'll get slightly more

Hello folks!

Patreon is making some changes to how pledges work that will result in your monthly pledge being slightly higher (probably in the range of $0.30 - $0.50 per month) as a way to make sure creators get a bigger share of pledges.

In light of the new service fee, I've increased iteration and simulation time limits by 10% for patrons at $3 or higher.

Specifically, the new limits are:

• Rare: 660,000 Top Gear iterations, 5.5 minute time limit
• Heirloom: 1,320,000 Top Gear iterations, 11 minute time limit
• Epic: 2,640,000 Top Gear iterations, 22 minute time limit

You may need to reload the site to get the update.

Also, I do have some plans on allowing even higher limits in the future. I'm hoping to tackle the root technical issues in the next couple of months. So keep an eye around here, the blog, or the Raidbots Discord whenever I actually have some progress to share!

For reference, here is the specific information from Patreon:

• Blog Post 
• FAQ 

Guild Discord Bot Access for Epic Patrons

Lithium_ and I worked to get the Discord bot to provide free skip-the-queue for your guild Discord server if you are an Epic Patron.

The quick guide - if you pledge at the $10 Epic level and invite the Discord bot to your own server (of 100 of fewer members), you can run:

`!raidbots -assignrewards

This will register your server to your account and anyone in the server will skip the queue.

More details (including some nice quality of life features in the bot) are on the Raidbots blog: https://medium.com/raidbots/discord-bot-updates-new-epic-reward-a681eb8545cc

Patreon/Raidbots Synchronization Bug

Hey Patrons!

FYI, you may need to reconnect your Raidbots and Patreon accounts at https://www.raidbots.com/account (and/or wait until Patreon fixes an issue).

The Patreon systems I use to synchronize between sites broke at some point yesterday and it caused quite a few of you to get flagged as non-patrons. You should be able to quickly connect at the link above if you were affected.

I've made sure that the problem doesn't grow any more right now and have also reported the issue to Patreon.

I super duper apologize for the inconvenience and will take another look at bits of my codebase to make sure something like this doesn't happen again.

Discord Bot

Raidbots now has a Discord Bot!

Invite the Bot to your Discord Server

lithium_ and I teamed up to convert his SimCraftBot into the new Raidbots...Bot.

The Discord Bot can hang out in your own guild server and make it easy to kick off Quick Sims, Stat Weights sims, and more.

For patrons, you can skip the line like usual as long as your Patreon account is connected to Discord and you’ve gotten the Patron role in the Raidbots Discord (this server acts as the “primary” server to determine privileges). 

For more details, check out the post on the Raidbots blog 

Top Gear and New Patreon Level

I just launched Top Gear on Raidbots! It's now far easier to select a bunch of items from your bags and automatically compare all variations of them (requires latest 1.7.0 version of the SimulationCraft addon or the SimPermut addon).

I think the feature will be pretty awesome - it makes a lot of common gear comparison tasks even easier since it doesn't require manual input and also brings the complexity of setting up large trinket/legendary compares down to almost nothing. SimPermut and SimcTrinketComparison are addons that provide this kind of functionality but I'm hoping that Top Gear goes a little bit further and makes it even easier.

The big challenge with Top Gear is providing enough simulation time to compare all the items you want.  The amount of combinations of pieces of gear quickly explodes into huge numbers. I'm also looking at building additional tools to provide other useful constraints to make sure only sets you care about are being simmed (2/4 piece tier being the big one).

By default, the limit is 200,000 iterations (or 20 combinations at 10k iterations). This is generally enough to compare a few items in a bunch of combinations.

Patrons at Rare or above get an increasing number of iterations that should generally fit within their time limit. I've added a new tier, Heirloom, that gets double the time limit and 800k Top Gear iterations (as well as skipping the line and removing ads).  Folks at Epic and Legendary get a small bump to time limits and will now have a full 4x increase over the default (it was previously just a little over 3x) and corresponding iteration increases as well.

Please hit me up with any feedback! I'm usually in the Raidbots Discord and love to hear about ways to improve the site, bugs you run into so i can smash them, or just chat about WoW.

Happy simming!

Huge Week! Thank You!

Pledges just sailed past the $600 goal over the past few days which means 32 CPU servers are on the menu!

Huge thanks to everyone pledging and using the site. I'm super happy that I'm able to build something that folks find valuable.

I'll be looking into getting the 32 CPU servers up and running as soon as I can. The main thing to figure out is how to solve some scaling issues that the site has been running into (Raidbots uses cheap servers that are not always available - I have some ideas I need to explore on widening the search and/or falling back to more expensive servers if there are no cheap ones available).

The beefier servers also make the chance of some features (specifically "best in bags" style tools) feasible so I'm hoping to start exploring the idea in the months ahead.

Other Recent News

Since I don't post here super often, here's a roundup of some others new stuff / info about the site in recent weeks/months:

• I kicked up the Raidbots Blog  for some longer form writing about the site (updates, deep dives, tips, etc)
• There's now a Delicious Progress Donut on the site
• "Use as Template" is available on many report pages to quickly set up a new Sim based on a previous one.
• Saved Gearsets are available in Gear Compare - handy for common "base" sets you want to reuse.
• Some style love to the reports page
• Lots of bug fixes and stability improvements

Passed 300/month! Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who has pledged! It's looking like between patreon and ads, I should be about breaking even which is fantastic news for keeping the site running. It's been my hope to be primarily funded by you all so I can focus on building the best site for players, not a site focused on pushing ads. And it looks like that first step is complete!

Hopefully the site can continue to grow so I can afford more/faster servers. I was able to make some big strides in cost management this month which is why all sims are running 2x as fast now.

Thank you again!

Raidbots and Patreon linked

First pass on automatically upgrading your Raidbots account when you pledge is in place as long as you use the same email on both sites.

Your account should be upgraded within 60 minutes of pledging if things go well.  There will likely be bugs and edge cases which I'll be manually handling.

Soft Launch!

Getting the Patreon kicked off so I can figure out some API shenanigans so that getting your rewards is as easy as pie.

FYI, if you pledge now, I'll need to manually set up your Raidbots account with your reward level.