We got a message from Patreon(tier related)
Hey guys, most of this message only applies to our two highest tier patrons($20 and $35) but we figure the rest of you would like to know about this too.
We got a message from Patreon pointing out that some of our higher tier rewards are in conflict with their user agreement. It's the chance aspect which has them squinting their eyes and making disapproving noises. We didn't realize this, but raffles are a nono and we have little choice now but to remove those incentives from our tier rewards.
You might have seen me mention the scene raffle before. Basically I said we enjoy creating a scene for a scene raffle winner, but there were some downsides too.
Winning the chance to shape a scene according to your own preferences is something I'd love to win myself and people who win them are almost always incredibly happy to hear they've won. Seeing happy people makes me happy so that wasn't the problem. Actually, we had one very unique exception where the scene winner told us we could offer his winning ticket to another patron. That had us extremely surprised!
Anyway, the downside to our raffle tickets isn't the person who has won, but all the people who haven't. Especially the patrons participating in the scene raffle whose only extra tier benefit was a chance to see their idea brought to life.
You see, When we started Mity we figured we'd get like.. at most three people for the highest tier. That was our most optimistic guess and with those kind of numbers everyone would sooner or later get their scene... but things got out of hand and we got a lot more patrons in that tier than we ever expected.
Nice right? In theory yeah, but when we see people who've been a $35 tier patron for over 7 months (or longer) and still haven't won yet, it makes us feel very uncomfortable. Uncomfortable enough to actually have done some secret extra raffle draws : ) But we don't have an unlimited amount of energy and time so those secret extra draws didn't mean much more than a drop in the bucket.
Anyway, Patreon doesn't like the chance aspect and wants the raffles gone. I honestly can't disagree with them and I sorta feel happy they forced our hand to come up with something else and shelve the raffles.
There are people who still haven't made use of their winning ticket and to those I can say, don't worry. We'll still fulfill those. But this does mean the highest tier will lose it's added incentive compared to the $20 tier and the $20 tier will lose that little extra incentive of the sketch raffle.
We'll still want do some more patron requested scenes, but those will be non raffle related. In fact we'd like to invite the current $35 tier patrons to just send in their idea for a scene. We'll go over them and see if we can use them somehow sometime. Just think of it as a pool of inspiration for us.
We'll try to come up with some worthwhile extra's for at least the $35 tier, but we don't just want to haphazardly come up with anything right on the spot. We'll need to give this some more thought.
In the meanwhile we'll still need to have at least something for the $35 tier as a reward if only temporarily. We decided to add a sneak peek at a scene I'm working on for a future build. Basically this means I'll show the bare bones of a scene I'm working on. I'll add that in a week or so from now. I really dislike showing stuff before it can be found in the game so I hope we can come up with something different though.
If you got any ideas which you feel would make for a nice extra incentive please pm or let us know in the comments and also change your tier level according to how you feel about these changes!
We're sorry if this update sours your day. We hope we'll have something nicer/more interesting to talk about in a next update!