New Patreon Tiers and Goals

Hi everyone!

Eric here. When we originally launched our Patreon, we designed it primarily as a tip jar. Well, after a lot of brainstorming, that is changing today, with new, actual tiers of rewards for you all. We also have some new patron goals, which we'll describe at the end of this post.

Couple of quick things to note:

• None of your current benefits at the $1 tier are going away, there are just newer things for some higher levels!
• If you want access to a new tier you will need to change to it manually (sorry!). We can’t change your tiers in the background so if you’re currently supporting, for example, with $5 through the current "Hoid’s Tip Jar" you will need to change your contribution to be the $5 tier to access the new perks.
  • The current "Hoid’s Tip Jar" is just going to be renamed so you won’t need to change anything if you’re happy to access just the $1 tier!
  • If you already contribute $5 in the old, single tier, and you switch to the new $5 tier, you will not be charged more.

Now without further adieu, let’s get to the exciting stuff, the new tiers!

The $1s Above

This has the same benefits as you have currently, which are:

• Patron designation on the forums and Discord
• Special patron forum and special Discord channel
• Shardcast outtakes and advance video access on some videos
• Ability to vote in art polls and suggest options for future polls

The $5 Scholars

All of the benefits above, as well as:

• Voting on when upcoming Shardcast topics come out. Generally, we have a set of a few topics we will record next in mind. With this reward, we will put out a poll every few months with those topics to determine which order we post these podcasts. This way we can prioritize what we are doing for you. This could also mean we have some podcasts recorded and we want to determine when we should put these out. (Note, all people, patrons or not, can always suggest Shardcast topics, and that won't change. We do have a pretty big list of ideas, though!)
• Monthly informal chat with Shardcast panelists on a Discord voice channel. Streams are great and we want to continue doing them regularly, but interacting with you in chat only goes so far. These informal chats will have several of us in a $5 and above patron-only Discord voice/video channel and we can hang out for a while.
• Quarterly Q&As with questions from you, livestreamed for patrons, with VODs publicly going to YouTube. Different from normal streams, these would be primarily focused on answering your questions, rather than chatting.
• Quarterly livestreamed actual Shardcast episodes. Finally see the boring stuff we cut away in editing! Honestly, many of you have asked for this, so we can definitely do this and show you how it is mostly not very exciting. Not every episode is a good fit for streaming, so we will start by guaranteeing it quarterly, but we may do more. Recordings are basically always on the weekends, around 10am or 11am Pacific.

The $10 Heralds

You're crazy awesome for supporting at this level (and hopefully not crazy from millennia of torture). This has all of the benefits from $1 and $5, as well as:

• Who's That Cosmere Character Priority Queue. Sending in WTCCs is very popular, and that's awesome. Slight problem: there's over 200 things in the queue, and we are very behind on it, which is not really a good experience for you. We will increase the WTCCs we generally play at the end of an episode to three, two from the regular queue, and a third from the new priority queue. We weren't sure exactly which tier ($5 or $10) to put this, and we are putting this in the $10 tier so the priority queue doesn't get too backlogged. After all, if we get a hundred things here, this isn't much of an advantage. Patrons at this tier can submit things via a Google form. You won't be able to submit more than one of these per month.
• Your name immortalized at the end of Shardcasts and videos. Ruin can never change it! When you are in this tier, your name will be included at the end of videos we create around that time period, thanking you for your support, immortalized in that video forever.
• Your name and a short blurb saying you're a kick-ass patron on 17th Shard's About page. For the duration you're in this tier, your name will be displayed in a section on our About page with your Patreon name and, if you submit a Google form, you can include a short blurb which will be displayed there as well.

Have any ideas on other tier rewards we could do? Maybe eventually we could do a $16 or $17 tier. Let us know, and let us know how you like these new tiers!

As always, you are awesome for any support you give. It means a lot.

New Patreon Goals!

Since we hit our $500 goal, we didn't really know what our next plan was for 17S and content. Now we have some ideas for new goals!

$750 / month: Buying more fancy cameras for more Shardcasters!

On Shardcast itself, we don't exactly need super fancy cameras, since it's compressed through the internet and captured on a small part of a screen. But for solo videos, no webcam can match the video quality of a nicer camera. These can range from $500 to $1000 (and, well, much higher as well, but we don't need a $7000 camera). With this goal, we will start buying some nice cameras for more Shardcasters so it is possible they can make nice solo videos.

$1000 / month: Doubling the Coppermind art poll budget!

With this, we will either commission two Coppermind art pieces per month, or one higher budget art piece. For example, this would enable us to sometimes hire more expensive, professional illustrators.

Thanks for reading this! If you wanted to back us, you can find our Patreon below:

Patreon