Patreon Changes Done, New Server Open, and a Mistake

Hi all,

As discussed a few days ago, we have opened up the new Patron-exclusive Discord server to those subscribed to all of our tiers. The automatic process -should- have brought all of you in already. If you're not on the server, you may need to disconnect and reconnect your Discord via your Patreon account, or add it if you haven't already. If you don't have Discord, we would definitely encourage you to make one for this.

We have also applied tier and reward changes, but there were a couple of hiccups and things done differently from what was outlined in the previous post...

The Quartermasters tier is now hidden, but the Engineers tier was simply lowered to $24. However, pricing changes were also applied to Stokers - raised to $3 from $2 - and Officers - lowered to $48 from $50. These pricing changes were applied in error due to a miscommunication about what changes needed to be applied. These pricing changes were discussed and more or less decided, but were not meant to be announced and applied until potentially months from now, depending on several factors.

We are not able to change prices again for 31 days. We imagine Officers won't object to an unexpected price decrease, but this probably comes as an unpleasant surprise for Stokers. So there are two ways we can proceed: Either it remains this way, just applied early (and the server, reworked rewards, more communication/updates, etc. make it worth it), or in a month we change it back to $2 if most of you strongly feel this isn't the right time for such a change.

We apologize for this. The change wasn't announced, it wasn't supposed to happen now. Likely in the future, but not now. If the price increase does remain, we'll definitely try to make it worthwhile. If in any case you would rather cancel, we perfectly understand.

One other thing: There's a chance the Officers-only server will end up getting shuttered and its functions and channels wrapped into the new server, mainly to make things easier (roles have to be manually managed for it) and decrease the chances of the team focusing too much on that server as before. As such, it will not be listed as a reward for Officers.

Other than that, the rest of the changes should be finished, new rewards listed and all that. We encourage you to check out the new server. We'll also be encouraging our whole team - from researchers and volunteers to general and core team - to be as active as possible there. For example, the idea is for volunteers and others to be able to post their own little updates to the server whenever they want, without it having to wait and be filtered through a larger update on here.

Please let us know if there are any issues, or if anything needs to be clarified.

Thank you!