Hello, and again, welcome... (Patreon)

This post was mirrored from my Patreon. TL;DR: Blog posts will still be freely available on this blog but I will likely start doing monthly update posts on the Patreon. Only this initial announcement was mirrored.

Housekeeping/TL;DR

Hello again! Earlier this month I sent out a message to all (somehow still) active members that the Patreon had a chance of being reactivated and clearly I've come to a decision, if you're curious why etc, keep on reading, if not; if you are still subscribed to the Patreon and are willing to support me again, you will likely have to reselect a membership tier.

I'm hoping existing members won't get automatically charged again (would be weird after years of inactivity and me removing all old tiers), if you do I apologize and do not blame you for canceling.

With that out of the way, here's something I wrote up about reactivating the Patreon...

Catching up

On August 28 2021 I decided to unpublish my Patreon page. While very thankful for all the support I've gotten, there were various things going on that lead to my mental health being pretty bad and the added feeling of responsibility of having people rely on me or give me money without anything in return wasn't doing that any good.

I also winded down various other projects including wow.tools (as mentioned in previous Patreon posts), had already stepped down from publicly being involved with SteamDB a few months earlier and stopped posting datamining findings (especially anything spoilery) on Twitter.

While winding all that down was a good decision at the time, I've kept working on stuff, but much more in the background than before. WoW has been at the core of my teens as a player and in my adult life as a community tool developer, and while I might not always love the community, I cannot deny my love for working on tools for the community and seeing the things people do with them.

From the original WoW OBJ Exporter, to wow.tools(.local), to contributing to wow.export and more recently Noggit, all these things and more have lead to people making incredible things which gives me a very fulfilling feeling and regardless of the feeling of responsibility it may incur I don't want to give that up.

Hell, I've made some cool things in the past year with these tools and that was pretty fulfilling, check out some of the other blog posts on my blog too.

Why

Since the closing of the Patreon, I've done a lot of reflection (ICYMI these posts from 2022, 2023 and 2024). I have more work to do on myself for sure, especially in the coming months due to the recent passing of mom to a short battle with colon cancer that hasn't quite hit me yet. Part of that work is the continuing effort to spend time doing what I enjoy and trying to relieve any possible stress points.

Money has become one of those stress points. I've been talking about opening the Patreon back up in the last 2 reflection posts as IRL costs have kept going up (as they have for everyone) and the money I was able to spend on this hobby has had to go down. Now, it has reached the point where the money stress pretty much outweighs any of the stress the Patreon ever did in the first place, so the logical conclusion is to bring the Patreon back.

Patreon

I am still not entirely comfortable with the idea of opening the Patreon back up, mostly because of the feeling of thinking people should get something in return. However, with the current situation being what it is the only alternative for me is to spend less time on any (community) projects and more on things that make me money (or going back to my old job for 2 days in the week), so in an indirect way, you do get something in return in the form of me continuing doing what I do.

And to be clear, we're not talking about needing a huge amount of money. A few hundred euro/year would cover the costs these projects altogether still incur. It obviously doesn't cover any time spent on them, but that is not as important as the fulfillment of being able to keep working on these tools. If we were to go over the needed amount of money, I could also start investing that into other things (for example; more disks for the almost full WoW archive on my NAS, or maybe even a webserver to bring back a public archive).

I might still come up with ways that make the Patreon worth it in the future. One Patreon-exclusive thing I want to start doing is monthly posts talking about what I've worked in my spare time (which will very likely be WoW related), I already pretty much do this on BlueSky, but Patreon might be a nicer place to make more in-depth posts about that (but non-update blog posts would still go on my blog). Another thing I might do is bringing back the old Party Tortollans Discord but for tool feedback/help for Patreon members only, but still unsure of that.

Anyways, if you've been here before; welcome back. If you're new here; welcome in.