Secrets, secrets! (no more)

UPDATE: This post was published to patrons on February 18th, and since the official announcement by foundryvtt on March 12th, I'm making it public. Things have changed quite a bit since, so a lot of things are outdated, but the post is now made public.

Hello patrons!

Last August, I started working on a new project of mine, which I then had to delay to work on Arcane Viewing and the Audio/Video Conferencing feature for FVTT. In November, I posted a poll to ask you—my patrons—on what to do next and I mentioned a "cool new project that I hope everyone will love", but in the poll, Beyond20 won with R20Converter close behind, then Furnace and other FVTT modules, so I concentrated most of my efforts on those 3 things.

It's time now to finish my project and I need your help. 

You're still wondering what it is? So, without further ado, let me introduce you to The Forge, your one stop for all your Foundry Virtual Table Top games. Yeay!

The Forge is a new FVTT Hosting Service that I've been brainstorming and building for the past seven months. I have a ton of plans and ideas to build something really incredible with an amazing user experience centered around Foundry VTT, and I really hope it gets everyone as excited as I am.

 I will need you, as beta testers, for a few things : 

• Tell me if anything doesn't work, test the various features of the website, etc.. 
• Give ideas, feature suggestions, thought on what you would like to see.
• Give me feedback on the user interface, how to make it less ugly. Please, I need it :)
• Also probably on the wordings of the various pages so it's easier to read and easier for the users to find the information that is most pertaining to them (help me spare them one of my walls of texts). Are the various subscription plans too confusing or too expensive or don't provide enough value-add, etc..?

I can see how far down this post goes, and you write too much dude, can you just cut to the chase?

TL;DR: Yep. Sorry, I can't help myself! You can access The Forge from https://forgevtt.com and once you create your account, you will need to link it with Patreon via the convenient "Link with Patreon" button (you can also sign up directly that way). If you are both a patron of KaKaRoTo (that's me) and FoundryVTT, at the 5$ tier minimum for each, then you will be able to instantly launch your FVTT instance. Just click on "My Games" then select your game/table and you're good to go.

The service is far from done, and it's not ready for launch yet, but I think it's ready for beta testing by my favorite beta testers (that's you) and I'm eagerly waiting for your feedback. I will need early feedback so I can move forward with the website design without making things harder to change later.

For more details on which subscriptions tiers will be available (and give feedback on those) and some of the features I have planned, check out the Plans page.

Finally, let's keep this project just between us while it's still in the testing phase, once I officially announce it, you'll be able to shout it over the rooftops. :)

Why a hosting service?

I'm glad you asked! Some might think it's obvious  (if you do, just skip this whole section) , but others may not. Yes, one of FVTT's strengths is the ability to self host it and own your data without having to pay for a monthly subscription, so while some might think a hosting service isn't necessary, I think it's going to be vital in making FVTT a successful table top application because for some people, self hosting is simply not doable. For example, think of all the people we've seen on the FVTT discord with crappy routers that refuse to port forward even when their settings are correct, or the IPv6 users behind an ISP-provided IPv4 bridge which prevents port forwarding entirely, or those with a router that doesn't support or doesn't have UPnP enabled and who simply are too lost to figure out how to port forward no matter how much we try to guide them through it.

For those people who are forced to host elsewhere, and for those who just want to have their games available 24/7, or for whatever other reason, the only solution is to host it on services such as AWS, Digital Ocean and others. I've gone through that process myself for the Arcane Viewing signalling server, and while I am fairly tech savvy, it still took me a long time to get the AWS server up and running, and I felt it had a pretty steep learning curve. There are also those who simply don't want to bother with the self hosting, they just want to sign up, pay their monthly subscription and have it all working for them and all their players with a few clicks and no hassle.

I know a lot of people who are just as put off by the 'self hosting' part of FVTT than those who are excited about it. Of course, we could all setup our own mail server at home or on a VPS, but we don't, we still go to services like gmail for that, and it's all about convenience, and convenience is what I provide.

So instead of asking "Why do a hosting service?" instead ask yourselves : Why would someone pay 5$ to Amazon for their AWS hosting when they can give that same amount to me instead and get a one click, hassle free setup and be up and running within seconds? Besides, with my service, you'd get a fully integrated interface and some advanced features (more on those later)!

How does it work ? 

The business model is currently very simple and straightforward, though it may seem more complicated than most newcomers would expect. I am providing only hosting services for your own legally obtained copy of the Foundry VTT software. This means that you need to have a license to use FVTT, in other words, you need—currently—to be a patron of foundryvtt at the Beta tier or higher.

Once Foundry VTT is released, you will need to provide your license key which will be verified with the official servers. You will then also be able to assign multiple licenses to your account if you wish to launch more than one table simultaneously, and depending on what Atropos has planned for his patrons, I might keep the patreon link between the two accounts and provide extras as well (for example Council Tier patrons may be able to configure their instance to run on the latest council version). We'll see when we get there.

I tried to explain most of it in the Plans page, but I'm hoping someone is able to suggest some text that provides the same information to the user with 10 times less words and making it even clearer to understand.

What to expect at this point ?

Since I'm still improving the website and infrastructure, I may stop/restart the server from time to time, while it should only last a second or two and should barely be noticeable, for now, please don't use it for running your actual games.

If you're over quota, your FVTT instance will stop working, I just filed an issue about that, but eventually to avoid the FVTT game failing to launch or corrupting the database, I'll prevent games from being launched if you're over quota. This isn't implemented yet.

With FVTT launching soon (we hope), I am making this project my priority as I believe very strongly that a hosting service must be available on launch day for FVTT to have the success it deserves. I need testers and your input so it's not an embarrassment when The Forge launches. I may be good for writing code and logic, but when it comes to html/css, I'm clueless.

For now, what I have implemented is the hosting of a standard FVTT instance (Game Master Tier), but eventually (for Story Teller Tier), I expect to have a fully integrated interface that is more similar to the Roll20 experience (with regards to launching games, players management, invite links, etc... nothing else from the Roll20 experience, lol).

I think I've written enough for today, if you have any questions, or feedback, contact me on Discord, I can't wait to hear your feedback.

Thanks, and I hope this is getting a few of you excited! :D