PokéSins Season 2 Delayed (Patreon)

Helllllo Rivans.

I know the title is a series of words that are never fun to see, but I have good reason for this and it's not to do with episodes being harder to make than expected.

For the last few months I've been having my website renovated off-site, culminating in it swapping in to replace the old one. I did this for a few reasons such as the old site not working properly on some browsers, but also because I spoke to the maker of the video player plugin and he assured me that it was my site's theme that made it run slowly.

I now use a different theme. I don't know if the player is running quicker.

I'm aware of the visual issues since the new site came online, meaning the play button is cut off and the buffer bar doesn't fill. It also stops you from jumping to a point in the video. I'm working on this (and will be taking another good crack at it tonight), as it SHOULD just be settings I can tweak, but I worry that the player itself is still not performing.

I'll be upfront, I am disappointed in the video player plugin. It wasn't free, costing a decent amount to buy a license, and yet from the get-go has had issues of speed, visuals and settings. The maker of the plugin uses a single comment thread for tech support, generally responding with a single sentence which, more often than not, is "Update to the latest version". When I came to him with the list of issues, he flatly told me the theme I use is the issue. Now I have a new theme...

Even if I can fix the visual issues, I REALLY need to hear back from you guys whether the speed has improved or not. One person has commented recently to say it's still slow, but admitted it might he his internet, rather than the site. Please watch some PokéSins episodes on the site and comment here how the speed is.

If the speed hasn't improved, I'm probably looking at getting a new player. This will mean more expense for me, and more delays for you. I'll need to redo all the individual PokéSins episode pages to the new player, so that will be a MASSIVE workload.

So why does this mean I'm delaying the start of Season 2? Because of the State of the Channel 2019. This may not sound like a good reason, but the SotC is going to be the foundation of my channel's official news for the near future (taking pride of place on my website's About page), and I don't want it to contain me saying 'I renovated the website and the player's still not fixed'. That would be disappointing.

I may not engage in a lot of active promotion, but the SotC WILL be the face of my channel for a bit and I want it to be the best face it can be. In the SotC I will talk about PokéSins Season 2 and I want to announce that the player runs a lot quicker. I know a lot of viewers have issues with it and my biggest news video of the year should be the place to announce it's overcome.

Whether you agree that's a good enough reason or not, it's not all bad news. While I will be delaying the PUBLIC start of Season 2, $5+ patrons have already had the first episode as part of an Early Access system that I talked about in a previous post. This will continue. Whatever the state of the SotC is, I'll post Ep2 for the $5+ patrons as normal. While I don't expect it to take much longer than that, this will go on until the issue is resolved.

I don't want the State of the Channel to release as late as February, so if we reach the end of the month and I've still not got it all satisfactory, I'll have to do the video anyway. This speeding train won't stop and, while I can do what I can to keep the First Class passengers (you guys) happy, I'll need to keep laying track ahead.

I hope that all made sense and you understand my reasoning. I wish time would just slow down for a bit so I could get a proper handle on things but, sadly, that's an unlikely occurrence.

I really appreciate your patronage and support, and I hope this gives you an insight into the technical issues I'm facing and trying to fix/avoid.

Thanks for reading.

- Geran