Week 27, 2019

Dear Patrons,

it's time to inform you about what's going on in JMR and holy marble do I have some exciting news for you! Let's dive right into it!

The ESPN Collaboration

At this very moment, Jelle and our editor Henri are working on creating a MarbleLympics 2019 Highlights Show that will air on ESPN during a special programme soon. It's an exciting challenge for us, because we have to follow all the standards there are at the all mighty Mouse Company! More details very soon.

New Logos and Team Merch

It's no secret and we won't deny it for sure: We had our problems with the team logos. A lot of disagreement with the first designer and poor fan reactions for Pim's logos. The latter and the fact, that there is simply no time for Pim to create the rest of the team logos required us to find a solution. And we are very fortunate to have one and I am excited to announce to you, that with the showdown, we are going to introduce new logos for all 28 MarbleLympics teams! We hope to have these logos with us for a long time and might adjust them to perfection in the future, but it is our desperate wish to finally have some consistent team logos. We will share the new logos with the public later this day, as we are awaiting confirmation from the new designer.

Along with that, we will bring out team merch as soon as possible. The new logos are less complex than Pim's designs and will be cheaper to print, meaning that we might be able to offer them using the DFTBA store. Should that not be possible, from a financial point of view, we will move the team merch part to gearbubble, where we offered our very first series of merch. Gearbubble let's us produce on demand and doesn't require us to pre-order and pre-produce a bunch of around 100 items. We hope to find a solution for this using the DFTBA store though, to have everything in one place, but just know that there is a plan b.

ML Showdown

Preparations for the ML Showdown will start as soon as the production of the highlights show for ESPN is completed. This will include a change of the team fan sections in the stands (which takes a lot of time!) and printing and placement of new signs for these teams. 

The Showdown will happen in the Seven Seas Stadium and is a smaller tournament for the 8 unqualified teams of the ML19 main tournament, and fours additional teams: The Turtle Sliders, Hornets, Minty Maniacs and Bumblebees. The goal of this tournament is to qualify for the ML20 qualifiers, as only the top 8 teams at the end of the showdown will be granted participation. The other four teams will compete in the next showdown in 2020, together with the 8 unqualified teams of the ML20 qualifiers. This is an pretty exciting relegation system and we can't wait to see how its dynamics will affect the excitement of the MarbleLympics.

Discord Integration

We integrated our official Discord Server as part of the rewards. If you have your Patreon account connected to your Discord account, you will be automatically invited to join our server and will be granted access to the Patreon exclusive lounge, where you can communicate with our other Patrons and our staff! There will be no consequences for you, if you do not want to be part of that community, of course. But feel free to join our nice and pleasant talks and discussions on Discord!

That's basically it! Except the new logos later today and the Quarcetti Marblerun preview very soon - We received additional footage for it and we would like to include it to the preview. All the best and thank you so much for your loyal support!