The Patreon is something I am glad we have and something I am proud to be a member of. But I think it has been forgotten about.
The Patreon seems to be inactive.
There have been no posts for over 2 years. I almost didn’t join when I saw how long it had been inactive. I think this is dissuading some from joining it.
Some rewards are not being implemented
The reward tiers state that a perk of joining is getting your name in the in-game credits. I have been a supporter for a few months now and I haven’t seen my name in there. This isn’t a big deal to me personally, but I think it would be for some people and may cause them to unsubscribe.
Lack of financial statements
In the about section of the Patreon it states
In addition to providing rewards, we will also regularly post a financial statement that shows how our income is being used in the game’s development. We want to give our patrons full trust and confidence, and we believe that being 100% transparent about how the money is being used is best.
I want to be clear, that I am not accusing anyone of misappropriation of funds. There are a lot of fine people in this project, and I am putting my faith in them. That being said transparency IS still important. Reading the above statement and then seeing that a Patreon making $1200 a month and having no posts for 2 years can be quite a bit of a red flag and a turn off for some people that are looking to join. This is what made me hesitant to join, but after interacting with the admin team, learning about the community, and falling in love with the game, I decided to join in spite of this and to trust the community leaders.
In conclusion, the Patreon has some issues. We all want more Patreons because we love this game and we all know that more funding means more development and supporting the servers we play on.
TL;DR I’m overworked, burnt out, and not mentally very well.
I don’t want this post to come over as a massive list of excuses, It mostly comes down to the fact that the Patreon is my responsibility, and I have way too many things like that. I have dozens and dozens of things rattling around in my head that I really need to do with SS14, I’m not good at prioritizing, and I have ADHD. Menial tasks like “regularly post updates” and “log into patreon to download the list of members to update the in-game credits” fall to the wayside way more quickly than whatever high-priority thing I feel like I need to deal with.
Specifically about the actual updates on Patreon: those used to be the actual Progress Reports we published to the site, when we still did those. Originally I put significant workload into those myself. Those Progress Reports have fallen to the wayside (in no small part because the project just kept growing and it was harder and harder to do).
It would feel kind of bad to me to just start putting Lilten’s update videos on the Patreon given he’s not exactly getting a penny from that, and I’m not sure what else I could put on there. The Patreon isn’t for “me”, it’s for the project as a whole. I’ve long had the idea that if I did like, make SS14 my full-time job (still no idea if this is even feasible), I’d post weekly updates on what I did myself that week. But well that’s not really what’s happening so it’s kind of in limbo.
I also feel the need to admit the Patreon just gives me massive anxiety, because I feel like I’m not taking it as serious as above. And that doesn’t make the executive dysfunction/ADHD any better. It’s also why this took me a month to respond to. I’ve been stressing about it every few days, it’s not like I forgot, it’s just hard to even get myself to properly write something out like this and address it.
I’ve also wondered if we could get an updated financial statement before. Not that it would have to be regular, but just some idea of how much has been earned vs spent on servers vs saved for later.