READ: Refreshing the Patreon, Tiers, etc.

Hey folks!  This one's been a long time coming - I've finally sat down to sort out a lot of the Patreon Tier benefits, since most of it was written back...when I made the Patreon actually, and there were a lot of benefits that we'd tweaked after chats on Discord, things I'd been doing formally but hadn't been formally listed as a benefit, and some that I've just fallen short on.  As you'll see, I always find myself worried about providing a fair "value" to your support amounts, even though I think almost everybody has said before that the support is just meant as support, and the bonuses are just that.  Still, I want to keep trying anyway.

These tweaks are also made with the intent of bringing things level with the YT Channel Memberships feature, which I've not really promoted or used to any significant degree.  Some of these benefits will be offered to tiers there as well, aligned based on the support level and all that - but I needed to tweak a bit so that they could all align.  While not much has changed outside of those clarifications, I do urge you all to check out the tiers to make sure you feel comfortable continuing pledging at that level.  Below are the sparknotes:

• Mainly formatting, to fit phrasing properly with the other tiers!
• That said, I did fix the phrasing of "ad-free videos" to avoid confusion with the early video benefit that Silver Bolts and above receive.  Often I just sent the early video out to everybody anyway, and in some cases I think there are good odds I still do that, but I don't want anybody to feel like the value of their support isn't worth it.

• For the most part, this was also formatting and clarifying; i.e. Silver and above were the ones that'd have full Patreon feed access (Bronze still has Q&A threads and occasional updates, but not proper progress updates and polls and whatnot).  While it was small I just gave it to everybody anyway, but I know if I keep doing that it'll eventually become a problem, so I'm just gonna nip it in the bud now.
• The big one I've been struggling to fulfill for a while: The verbal shoutouts in the video credits have been moved up.  (The text credits will still remain of course!)  I thought about just removing them entirely, and honestly that's inevitable as the Patreon and channel grow, but for now I've decided to try keeping it to see if I can make it work.

Keeping the names in has gotten harder and harder because of how YouTube sees it when people start leaving a video all at once - the endslates were running close to 2 minutes at times when I read off all 40something names, and YT doesn't let you put the little video endslate items up until 20 seconds before the end of the vid.  My hope is that I can still sneak in some shoutouts to new Patrons and Members as they join, along with the Golden tier members - but again, this whole part might just get cut quickly.

• As noted above, Golden tier is now the semi-exclusive home of the "I read your name at the end of videos" thing.  Even then, there's a caveat that I'll likely be splitting the names and reading some in some vids, the rest in others, simply because there are too many.
• The TGB Merch discounts are in effect imminently, and I've added a section about Patron-exclusive merch drops whenever I commission art or something for a project, essentially whenever I can figure out a way to give a cool, cheap, one-run poster or whatever out of it.  I just have to wait for the price adjustments to go into effect (I've sold all my merch at a loss, essentially, because I wanted everybody who wants merch early to get it as cheap as I possibly could, while choosing the best quality of shirt material etc.), so that I can figure out how the coupon system'll work.  You'll get a post about this as soon as I have that sorted.  If anybody wants merch though, now's probably the time, because they're just about the best deal I think you can get on shirts/hats/mugs in general!
• I've also tweaked the Video Suggestions stuff, because I just haven't been good at fulfilling those.  Sometimes it's just hard to make a topic work, others I have to make the shitty call that even if I wanna talk about something, it's the kind of thing that'd do poorly in video form and thus hurt the channel.  I always talk about this stuff in detail when the suggestions come up in the Golden Backer suggestion room on Discord, but I want to find a way to make that more consistent.  It might just be in rambly form on TGB2 sometimes, or I'll force it into a Crubcast somehow.
• Either way, I'm going to aim to be more proactive in sharing my long-term video plans with the Golden tier folks before anybody else, so that I can ask your thoughts, give you the first vote on which topics I cover if I'm stuck between two (though some votes may later be expanded to other tiers if there's not much response or if there's a tie) - just all-around find ways to get you more involved in the process instead of going into a hole for a few weeks and coming out with "hey look video."

None of these changes are significant enough to force me to do like a "these go into effect next month" spiel, but since I'm away at TooManyGames next week and unable to work, that's...well that's already kind of the plan.  I appreciate you understanding and taking the time to read some of the thought process behind these changes, as small as they may be overall - and if there are any Silver folks that are genuinely in it for the verbal shout-out, I completely understand if you wish to end or lower your pledge from here-on.  Most importantly, I thank you for even considering supporting in the first place.  That you put that level of faith in my stupid work here doesn't go unnoticed.  If you have any thoughts, do let me know here or in the Discord; I'm happy to discuss!