Changes to Patreon (Silver & Gold)

[Kyet]

Hey everyone.

I'm happy to announce some updates to our Patreon system.

1. A new $15/mo tier called the Silver Tier has been added. It grants access to silver, prisoner, and emag ID card skins as loadout options in your character preferences. These skins can be applied to your ID card to turn it that color, but do NOT grant any additional access.

2. The Emoji Tier ($20/mo) is now called the Gold Tier, and grants access to a gold ID card decal, instead of the ability to create an emoji for our Discord. We had to make this change as were running out of emoji slots in our Discord, and we wanted to make it because we wanted our top donors to get an ongoing perk for their kind support.

3. We are moving away from our old system (where every change to any patron's status required manual database updates by one of our staff team). Instead, we have a new, automated system, where linking your forum and patreon accounts (via the patreon button on our forum homepage) and setting your ckey in your profile preferences on our forum, should be enough to get you in-game perks automatically. If you can't get that working, at least set your forum email to the same email as you use on Patreon, so we can link your accounts that way. It will take longer, but it should always work.

4. We now charge patrons up front when they become patrons. Primarily this was done so that someone can't pledge to us on the 2nd, enjoy benefits until the 29th, and then cancel right before they get charged. As a secondary goal, this allows us to give patrons their perks quicker (because our integration software will show them as having paid) sooner than before.