Hey everyone!

Time for the follow up on the big announcement from a few weeks back. The contract with the IT firm is signed now, so I can tell you how this is actually going to work instead of how I was hoping it would work. There's also a personal update at the end of this one.

I'm aware this is a long one. If people would rather hear this than read it, say so in the comments or message me directly and I'll do a talking head video going over it instead over the coming days.

The Portal (not the FM Portal though)

Starting with the part that affects you directly. You get a download portal that's linked to your Patreon, and that becomes the "front door" from now on. Access is set per tier, which is the bit that makes the whole mix and match idea from last post actually possible. There's version management in there too, meaning older builds stay available instead of vanishing the second a new one drops, so if a new release messes something up in your save you can just grab the previous one. You'll also have your own download history, so you can see what you already pulled and what you haven't. The whole thing is a month or 2/3 out, hopefully ahead of FM27!

Bug reporting

The portal also ships with a bug reporting system, and I want to stress that it launches with the portal, not later. It's part of the same build. Right now a bug reaches me through Discord, or a comment, or a DM that lands while I'm halfway into a shader, and I'll be honest, a chunk of those just evaporate. Not because I don't care, but because there's no system, and with no system the loudest report wins and the quiet ones get lost.

From then on, whatever you submit becomes a ticket, with screenshots attached to it. That ticket goes onto my backend task list, it stays visible until it's actually closed, and I'll set reasonable deadlines on them. You get something you can point at, I get a queue instead of trying to remember eleven things at once, and the screenshot goes in right away so I'm not asking you for a picture three days later.

I'll also be able to reject a ticket, with a reason attached. Because some of what comes in is "put Mia Khalifa in at Tottenham h1h1h1 funni" and that is not going on my task list. What I'm considering is making the accepted, and rejected ones publicly visible along with the reason, so it isn't me quietly binning things in the dark where nobody can check. That last bit is still uncertain, I want to think it through properly first.

Specifications

Ahmad already made a really good suggestion about all this, which is that a report should also tell me about your setup. CPU, GPU, VRAM, your in game graphics settings, and which other BepInEx mods you're running. That stuff matters way more than people think. A pitch that doesn't display right or crowds that show up late can easily be a VRAM issue or another mod stepping on mine, and if I don't know what you're running I'm just guessing while you wait. So that's going in, as optional fields, because I'm not going to make you fill in a spec sheet before you're allowed to tell me something's broken.

I don't want to wait until the portal is live to start on that though, so one of the August surveys is going to be exactly this: what are you actually running the game on. Even a rough picture of the hardware across all of you helps me enormously, because right now I genuinely don't know whether I'm building for people on a GT760, RTX3060, RX400 or an RTX 5080 and those are very different decisions, same goes for the CPUs and DRAM.

Building on that, I also want to make it easier for the people who like digging into numbers. Frame times, fps, stutters, VRAM load, that kind of thing. If you're the type who's willing to actually measure instead of saying "it feels choppy", I want to hand you the tools to do it properly, so a report can come in with real numbers attached. That turns a vague complaint into something I can fix in an evening.

That's the part I'm looking forward to most out of all of this, weirdly. Not the storage or the download speeds. Just the fact that a bug you took the time to write up won't disappear anymore.

The Professionalizing Plan

Polls and Surveys

The thing everyone loves, eh?! But it'll be worth it, I hope!

There'll be polls and surveys going out, several of them, spread over the month. The hardware one I just mentioned is one of them. Others will be about the portal, like how you want the packages split up, what you actually download versus what you never touch, and what a customizable selection should let you pick. Some will be about priorities, so what gets built next and what quietly gets dropped. And some will be about how I communicate, because posting whenever I happen to feel like it isn't really a schedule. Your answers genuinely decide things here, the last survey already changed what I ended up working on, and this one has more to steer because there's an actual platform to shape now instead of just a download link.

The Patreon Tiers

The tiers are also getting a look, and I want to be very clear about what that means before anyone panics.

This is about what you get in each tier, not what you pay.

With the portal handing out access per tier, it finally makes sense to sort out which tier gets which content properly instead of the way I decided it 9 months ago with no scope, business acumen, public relations or anything really. Just an autist who set something up not expecting anyone to support! The promise is therefore;

"No price increases in the Chipping In, Backer, Game Changer, Legendary Star and Club Icon tiers!"

And the moment I break that promise is when I expect everyone to cancel their subscriptions, as I have then failed you!

The GOATs get special treatment

The one exception is GOAT, and I'd rather explain it now than have you find out later.

A fully custom stadium currently works out at roughly 80 cents an hour for me. That's not a complaint about the price, it's a problem with the model, because a tier 8 ground in England is a completely different amount of work than Manchester United's new home ground and right now both cost the same. So for GOAT I'm looking into whether I can do a rate that's decided per ground instead of one flat number. I don't know yet if Patreon even supports that, so it might end up being handled another way. Either way, current GOAT members hear it from me before anything changes, and as always, the conversation should be held, and if there are any suggestions, concerns or others, let me know and we'll sort it out. I will also mention that this does NOT affect any persons currently on that tier or former who have made a commission, that price was agreed then, and it will remain that way.

A roadmap!

Later in the month there's also going to be a roadmap and a release schedule, which is its own part of professionalizing. Right now things drop when they're finished, which sounds fine until you realise nobody outside my own head knows what's coming or when, nor do I most of the time.

I'll be straight with you though, I have genuinely never made one of these before for this sector, only the woolen bearded education ones, and I have no idea yet what format works. So the first version is probably going to be a bit rough and we'll adjust it as we learn what's actually useful to you. A public roadmap also means public slippage, which is fucking scary, but that's sort of the whole point of doing this properly.

Timing matters

The reason I want all of this done in August specifically is timing. FM26 still has plenty of months left in it, FM27 is on the horizon, and I'd much rather go into that with a proper distribution setup, a bug system that remembers things and a clear picture of what you guys want, than try to slap it all together three days before a release. The secondary reason is that now a lot of people simply are on vacation, or are returning during the month, so the pressure on me is not as high as other months. And the final reason is that this is months overdue, and I've been so caught up in everything that I neglected this bit.

The boring, but important bits

Right, that's everything that touches you directly. The rest of this is what sits underneath it, so if you don't care how the sausage gets made, skip down to the personal bit at the bottom, and if you don't care about that either, then I wish you a wonderful evening or day!

The agreement runs for a full year and then continues per month after that. I wanted you guys to know that because it means the portal isn't a thing that quietly dies the moment I get busy or lose interest. There's a contract on it and there's someone on the other end who's paid to keep it running, which is a very different situation from me hosting files somewhere and hoping for the best.

Then the boring but honestly important part, which is what happens when something breaks. Everything lives in more than one place now. There's redundancy on the storage on my end, there's an automatic backup of that storage going to the cloud on top of it, and on the download side there's file versioning, so a file that gets deleted or overwritten can be pulled back instead of just being gone forever. Uptime and disk health get monitored and the backups get actually checked rather than assumed. All of that is part of the monthly package, it's not something I have to remember to do on a Sunday. And if the hosting underneath it turns out to be rubbish long term, moving it all to a different provider is on them and not on me, and my monthly price doesn't change. Which means it doesn't change for you either.

The other thing I'm happy about is the ownership side. I own all the data, I can export it whenever I want, and once the build is paid off (meaning the year) the custom code is mine as well, so I can take the whole thing to another developer or another host if I ever have to. So your downloads don't end up locked inside some company I can't walk away from. That was the part I read three times before signing.

One limit I want to be upfront about: the monthly deal covers keeping it running, it doesn't cover new development. Anything outside the original plan is its own job with its own price. So portal feature requests are real requests that cost real money, which means they get properly weighed instead of built on a whim. Please still send them though, I'd much rather have the list than not have it. Privacy wise, GDPR is in the agreement, and honestly the only thing the portal needs to know about you is whether your Patreon is active.

What about me then?

Then the personal bit, which I said I'd get to.

I mentioned this in a previous post already, but I know not everyone reads everything, so: I got laid off from my job. From the next school year I've got 4 hours of Norwegian a week to teach and that's it. Doing so because I cannot let the students who took it on fall like that. On top of that I've now decided to stop my bachelor as well, because the internship situation messed with a whole lot and it went sideways in a way I'm not willing to keep paying for. I won't get into the details publicly, but it wasn't a decision I made lightly.

What I am doing instead is Coursera courses, on video editing, programming, Blender and Unity among others. If I've got the time now, I'd rather spend it getting properly good at the things I'm already doing every day than sit in a program that's wasting it. Selfishly that's also good news for you guys, because the quality of what I put out is downstream of how much I actually know.

The other side of having more time is that I need to be smarter with it than I've been. I'm going to take either a full day off every week or two half days, I haven't decided which yet. I know myself well enough to know I'll otherwise just work until something breaks, and that something is me. So hey, gonna take better care of myself. Who'd have thunk it?!

More details per survey as they go live. Thanks for making all of this possible, none of it exists without you guys.

Much love, appreciation and warm regards,

Bassy