Important News (please, at least skim this)

A notice to all my patrons: I have news I need you to read and I will need your assistance.

Trust me, I absolutely understand if you're not all that keen on reading a wall of text, but there's information that requires sharing, so please, lend me your eyeballs and screenreaders for a minute or three.

In the briefest terms:

* Patreon tiers are changing, and perks distribution with them
* I need you to swap tiers accordingly to keep your rewards
* Guild Wars 2 content will be severely scaled down

What a way to start a week, eh?

In slightly less brief terms, several factors (piracy, inflation, Patreon itself, ANet... doing stuff) force me to change my Patreon tiers a bit. Instead of a "pay-what-you-want" kind of model, which is unfortunately not terribly useful on Patreon's current architecture, there will now be 3 different tiers, with different perks to all of them. 2 of the previously available tiers that served as a voting mechanism of sorts will be removed as a result.

And I need your help to make this change. Patreon just does not allow me to throw you around willy-nilly (which is not a bad thing, it just complicates this particular situation), so I will need those of you who were previously slotted in the Stonewarren Patron (Semper Fidelis) or Soldier of the Legions (Guild Wars 2 content) tiers to relocate to either of the 3 new options (Tip Jar being replacement for the basic tier, Backstage Pass containing most of previously available perks and the new Patron of the Arts tier being mostly intended for the handful of people who were already paying me this kind of extra). However, "remaining" in the single buck tier does not necessary mean you will be losing benefits, because...

Here is what the new Patreon tiers look like. (Please note that the prices below are in Czech crowns. You should see regular currency conversion as it applies to you, but this translates to 1, 5 and 15 USD, respectivelly.)

You may notice that most of the currently available perks have now moved to the middle tier, which is five times the original asking price. But those of you who supported me thus far will have a way to keep accessing these materials even if they stick to their original "a buck a month" coin contribution.

I am aware times are not harsh just for me, but also for all of you, and trust me when I say I tried delaying this as long as possible. However, I am very well aware of what your kind support allowed me in these past few years, and I simply won't throw you all under the bus.

Even if you decide to remain in the lowest tier that will now only have early access to finished work, each of you as my existing Patrons (those who have exceeded a certain amount of patronage in general) will be given a special legacy role in the discord, and that role will come with access to a channel where I will share all the materials that will now be locked behind the Backstage Pass. This also includes those of you who meet the overall criteria but had to stop their patronage for any reason, if and when you decide to renew at any point in the future.

If you are not in the Stonewarren Discord, please, consider joining it, as that will be the most comfortable place for the Legacy updates. If you elect not to do so (or are unable for any reason), I will be contacting you separately at a later point to set up an alternate means of delivering the goods.

I cannot be too specific on the details due to NDA, but lets say there have been some managerial changes and due to circumstances of my contract with ArenaNet, I lose the rights over every piece of Guild Wars 2 related content I release. (And I have for the past three years.)

And since I do care about my creative rights, I elected not to create any more "valuable" Guild Wars content – no more comics, no more full illustrations – until these conditions get lifted. My work is my own and I refuse to let anyone trick me out of that.

Please note that I am not abandoning Frostbound (at the very least, but I would like to revisit others as well). I will simply put it on ice until circumstances are safe for me to work on it again. Until then, I will be focusing on my own works and other fanart. Guild Wars will receive its pound of flesh a month to satisfy the terms, but I am not willing to give more than a single sketch. Still, I am also eager to go back to the comic, and I will happily do so once I am able. I simply have no way of knowing whether that is next year, next month or next week.

I have also not burned any bridges, so should the conditions change, I will be more than happy to pick up where I left off.

I do realize that for many of you here, charr comics and artwork are the reason for your support, and I absolutely understand if you choose to no longer give it going forward. Rest assured I will not hold it against you in any way, and I hope I will have a chance to provide this kind of content again in the future, because I had a blast making it.

Well... I have to shake it off, bite through the losses and vague sense of betrayal, and move on. Fortunately, I am in a fairly good mental place these days, so while this whole thing annoyed me, it didn't do much to slow me down (I mean, besides having to write several novellas worth of information posts to places).

I have a lot of my original stuff that I can fall back on. Stuff I have been slowly brewing for a long time now. There is a certain band of adventurers bound to pop up. Some naval-themed attempts at drawing humans. Not to mention, this whole Strange Tag...

Besides the mandatory Guild Wars sketch a month, I'll also use the restructured patreon tiers to share a bit more of my creative process and projects I have been working on during this past year.

And last but not least, an old colaborative project of mine that needed restoring led me to start learning Python programming and mess around with the visual novel format and... I think I found myself a very neat hobby to inflict on you all. :>

If you've read this far down, thank you, you're absolutely wonderful. If you decided to stick along, I am more than happy to have you. If you want to just lurk somewhere in the shadows and wait for the return of charr, I will be happy to see you again in more favorable times.

Best regards,
Changer

P.S.: I will share an unsolicited piece of legal advice for absolutely no particular reason: if your contract ever contains the phrase "artist agrees to waive any and all moral rights", think very hard whether you want to work for a place like that. If you don't know that specific phrase, google it. And if I were to provide you with a single word of advice regarding the signing...