Small update that only affects people who sign up for Patreon in future (ie, does not impact current subscribers) — we’re now on Patreon’s new subscription billing system.
The new system does a charge+access on signup, and then again one month later (like netflix or almost all internet subscription systems — not tied to the first of the month). You can confirm your next bill date by checking your next charge date at checkout (or after sign-up: in your Active Memberships tab). Definitely seems a lot more logical than Patreon’s original model and I’m glad it’s being offered.
The biggest upside is this means no more waiting until the first of the month for new Patreon users! Depending on how fast Patreon API is, it may activate as quickly as instantly, after 30 minutes, or if the API is being slow, may take up to three days. In any case, a lot faster than waiting potentially weeks for a charge if you backed at the wrong time of the month before.
The downside is behind the scenes, Patreon API now doesn’t provide me the same useful information that I used to be able to rely on. I ended up having to rewrite the API integration another two times, now with more error-prone data, but it appears to all be working now. (BMT and most other payment processors provide a lot better data in this regard, but that’s a rant for another time). The takeaway is if you back, and it takes more than three days, please contact me so I can figure out what’s going on. Though as of this writing, everyone’s access appears correctly set, so we should be all good to go.
Also, I went ahead and enabled support for annual memberships, as a few people said they’d like this in the survey — currently though the annual plans are just for convenience (same cost). (In terms of other, potentially more significant changes in future, I’m still carefully considering the results of the survey — thanks to everyone who filled it out! I was surprised to see as many responses as I did, and some of the comments were very uplifting to read, thank you <3)
Content-wise, things are slowly moving forward for the upcoming sewer expansion content DLC chapter. Hey, it’s hard to code quickly when you’re a sluggirl :p One of the more interesting new items implemented since last post is a level limit piercing / ‘Easy’ tattoo, that locks your level to level 1. That’ll be helpful for revisiting the sewers so you’re not overpowered (or if you’re just looking for a hard time~). As a reminder, if you’re watching stuff happen in the WIP build, please do NOT overwrite over your stable version saves. (WIP is usually a hot mess so save/load is likely to get corrupted, only saves from release/non-wip versions are supported.)
Anyway, that should about wrap things up for now. More to come…
TLDR: if you’re an existing patron, there’s no change to your billing date or schedule — the new billing system only impacts new sign-ups, who can now get access more quickly.