A note on pledgers cheating the Patreon system

Hey guys! You've been totally awesome! Or rather, *most* of you have been awesome and you have our eternal gratitude!

Unfortunately, we looked at how things are faring recently on our end. Sadly, we seem to be getting a lot of people lately who are currently gaming the system by pledging, stealing content, then downgrading or deleting their accounts without paying. This has been an ongoing problem with a lot of content creators we know, and we think this is pretty unfair to a lot of our good pledgers who don't take advantage. 

With this in mind, we are going to implement some new processes for next month: 

1. Pledge rewards will be sent via private messages / email to pledgers who have already paid for the new month. We intend to send these rewards every 5th of the month, as Patreon does not process all payments immediately, but we'll be sending them sooner should Patreon be quick at processing them. 

2. Sharkie will be going over the list and doing the mailing. We'll still be posting public reward announcements here so you know once we've sent them out privately. If you don't receive any but you've paid, please don't hesitate to message us! Sharkie also has a list of the current delinquents and they're on watch. More cheating will result in bans. Please don't do that anymore, you make Sango sad. :(

3. Rewards that will be sent privately will include, but will not be limited to: newest game builds and patches/fixes for them, new monthly passwords for all walkthroughs, some early access artworks, etc.

We are taking steps to protect some of our current work, so feel free to ask us if you have any questions! 

We are very sorry for the inconvenience! We would much rather make sure that our patreons are treated fairly over everything else, and we hope this will help! We really wish we didn't have to make an announcement over this, but the number of people doing this are getting a bit ridiculous on our side. But we are, and always have been, grateful to our patreons who enjoy our games and support us, and we plan to work harder in the coming months for you guys! 

Edit: we're considering charging an upfront system as well, which will pretty much take away the need to do all the stuff we mentioned above since people will be charged as soon as they pledge, but if we do we will delay implementing this until the start of next month to give leeway to people pledging in the middle of the month right now!