Changes to Tiers, Rewards, and a New Server (Patreon)

Hello all,

As you may have heard in the previous post, we're making some changes to our Patreon, rewards, and how you're able to communicate with the team.

The Problems

It's no secret that we've been HORRIBLE with communication. That's always been a thing we've struggled with at THG; sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse when things are slow. But for our Patrons who are supporting this team financially every month, communication has been more important than ever. Sadly, we've dropped the ball in this area.

More to the point, we've gravitated towards focusing too much on only the Officer tier when it comes to communication and other things. The Officers also have their own Discord server, and this, perhaps more than anything, has helped to contribute to the problem. They're the only ones with any real "access" to the team and who see updates with any regularity at all. The reasons for this are complicated, including a history of bad PR, speculation, leaks, and personal anxieties among the team. Some of us aren't even on the public Discord server because of bad past experiences, usually during THG's "dark" periods.

Meanwhile, our Patrons outside of the Officers get practically nothing, it sometimes seems, nor do they have a very good forum for a sense of community. The public server has only 3 Patron channels, and the server is already bloated. It's daunting, and some of us who are there kind of avoid it. All of this has led to Officers hearing more or less regularly from the team while the rest of you are left out in the cold. That's not right. Even if we want to keep some things to a smaller group, either as rewards or for security and other reasons, there's no reason we can't include all of you to some degree. All of our Patrons should have a place to congregate, discuss, and get more updates.

Another big issue is our rewards, which are not ideal. Looking at them now, they're kind of confusing, not distributed well, and could just use improvement overall. They've been changed a couple of times in the past with things being shifted, added, or removed, and it's led to something of a mess. The rewards need more clarity and better distribution. There also need to be rewards that don't break our bank and aren't difficult or time-consuming to fulfill. The last thing we need are vital team members having to spend tons of time and money fulfilling perks we got in over our heads with.

Finally, we're bad at updates. Wow, shocker. For many of us, writing and making updates here and elsewhere is a Whole Task, and it can be difficult to sit down and put together updates, especially for some on the team who aren't big into writing these things or get too into their work for it. And when there isn't much going on, that makes it more difficult. What's needed is a way to provide our Patrons with a more direct line for knowing what the team is up to.

So with all of that in mind, what will we do?

The Solutions

After some discussion, we've decided to make the following changes:

• We will slightly simplify the tiers. We'll eliminate the $20 and $30 tiers and make a $24 tier in their place. Quartermasters will probably be gone as a tier and $24 will pick up the Engineers name if possible. The old tiers will likely be hidden, and those currently paying those prices will continue to until they cancel, switch, or expire.

• We will reorganize, add, or expand some rewards. For example, the $24 tier will share much with the Officer rewards with the exception of physical rewards and a couple other things. The $12 tier will also be up there with some of that. The rewards should actually make sense and have something to offer for each tier.

• Most importantly: We will make a NEW, EXCLUSIVE Discord server for ALL of our Patrons! Stokers to Officers, you'll all be there along with the team. There will still be tiers of access within that server, but more tiers will have more access to more things, and ideally the team will be more active, able, and willing to post stuff they might otherwise be uncomfortable posting elsewhere; the little updates, quick WIPs, rough and early versions of updates, odd images, personal updates, all that good stuff. The idea is that, regardless of what your tier is, you'll be able to talk to the team and talk to other Patrons more easily.

The server itself will of course be its own reward for all tiers, along with levels of access within it. For example, the $12-$50 tiers would have access to dev channels where we'll be able to post more things that aren't ready for a wider audience. We'll also be able to have server-wide streams for all tiers, making the process of doing such streams a little simpler and easier for more of the team. For the time being, Officers will still have their small server as an extra reward, but it's possible that may become inactive if enough activity moves to the Patron server.

Once we have the new server ready and make the changes to our Patreon, we hope the team will have a much better ability to communicate and share updates, we hope the new rewards structure will be much better, and we hope all of you will have a much more enjoyable and fulfilling time as THG Patrons with the ability to talk to the team and each other.

Notes

Why not just share little updates publicly on the main server or in general? Well, aside from some of the team not being comfortable on the public server, there's also the fact that we feel it's just not the best idea to publicly spout off every little update and WIP item. Especially when it comes to Titanic, every overly rough WIP image invites speculation and criticism that may not be necessary.

And why not simply do more of those tiny updates here but as posts that stay Patron-exclusive? Because it doesn't solve the problem of Patreon not being accessible enough for the wider team to post stuff on their own, and it's still something of a task. On the flipside, it's pretty trivial for anybody on the team to send a message or post some images on Discord at any time. We also know how it looks locking things behind paywalls (especially if it's during a slow period lacking updates) and don't want too much content on the Patreon proper paywalled, especially since we try to maintain this page as the public's primary source for updates.

But there needs to be some benefit for those supporting us every month, and we think this new server (along with the reward changes) is a good way to do it that the whole team can engage in, not just a few of us. And there's nothing unusual about this - most

There will still be usual public updates of course (such as they are) whenever we're ready to post them, and the public server will continue as it is, albeit probably with the automatic Patreon roles shifted to the new server. There is still more than could be done on the public side for updates, and that may be something else to look into. For example, bringing on someone whose sole job is to manage socials/Patreon and pester the team for updates and stuff to post. We tried this once before with a longtime team member, but he was simply too busy and in a very different time zone.

Final Word

Sometime over the next days or week, we will try to get these changes implemented and open the new server to Patrons. We'll probably also make another post detailing what the reworked rewards entail. We're actually pretty excited about this, and we hope you'll enjoy the new server.

As always, thank you all.