<Split from the Editor’s Note #15 discussion thread>
They have posted three reward level tiers now. It appears Editor Notes episodes will require you be on the $1 dollar pledge level.
Edit: Per their latest post Editor’s Note will remain public https://www.patreon.com/posts/editors-notes-17385554
Well, that kind of sucks. I was planning on giving them some money anyway, but now it feels a little dirty.
So I can submit a question that is asked on air that I will never hear the answer to? That seems overly scummy.
My guess is Editor’s notes will take a different direction. More details need to be provided for sure.
Just pledged for 20 dollars, though I am wondering if we should make a thread just about the patreon and if so, where should it go?
This is probably as good of place as any, for now. The Patreon is for the podcast, and that's all Lore. 
We'll see how it evolves as we go… 
OK.
Editor's Notes being denied to the second class fan ... I'm not actually enjoying it that much.
I don't feel that great knowing that there will be two groups of followers : Those who love and pay C&A and those who will be forbidden to access 20% of the content.
I totally agree that paying people should get something 'more', but this is just wrong.
I would be totally fine to pay if access to the letter's page and editor's note would be unavailable for 6 days for nonpaying people, so paying people gets it first but in the end everyone could access it ... But that ... No ... That's a low blow. I even went to the Patreon page to check if it was a misread. It wasn't.
So far, I was wondering how much I would pay, the problem is solved. If some people are only allowed to sit at the back of the bus, I'll be one of them.
Honestly, I think that's a pretty strong reaction. The Editor's Notes are nice, but they aren't core updates. Lots of podcasts content-lock some of their things. Lots of podcasts, frankly, content-lock much larger things than that.
If the Editor's Notes were locked behind one of the higher content tiers, I might agree with you, but a dollar a month for people who really like the podcast and want to get that extra bit of material doesn't seem like a bad purchase.
The editor notes aren’t the main piece of content and from what we’ve been told have a lot less listeners. Also, one dollar a month to get that isn’t much in my mind considering it’s helping them to fund the Letters Page. Maybe they might change their minds but I personally don’t think it’s that unreasonable for what is more like bonus content.
Yeah, having them Patreon-lock something that's always been a secondary add-on part of the podcast anyway that already has a lower "diehards only" audience and wasn't even done regularly until recently, seems reasonable. Their only alternative would be to carve yet another day out of the week to record Patreon-exclusive things, which would defeat part of the point of monetizing their current work to be more realistic to continue.
That said, I think Matchstickman also has a reasonable concern. Maybe they could limit the Q&A on Editor's Notes to people who pledge to the Patreon, and then devote a "main" episode very occasionally to followup questions by non-Patreon folks. Or maybe in every main episode, at the end they have a "followup moment" where they answer one or two followup questions from non-Patreon folks for previous topics as needed.
Or, another option maybe is that they have the Patreon-exclusive stuff revolve around written content instead. I would totally be willing to pay for the occasional detailed official writeup about a Sentinels topic or an official Sentinels-themed "Magic Story" type thing.
I may have overreacted ... but for now I still don't think so.
Unless there is a big change, Editor's Notes contain questions raised by previous episodes. They are not a themed episode, but are nonetheless used to tie some loose ends in the previous main episodes.
Funny thing, I wanted to see the pledge level before choosing between 5 and 10. So I would have been granted access to editor's note anyway. But no, I'm sorry for not singing the song of joy with everyone else, but I won't pay to hear editor's note. For me the Notes are parts of the Letters Pages, so making them accessible only to paying people, it's not trying to gain money from work, it's greed.
Again time will tell ... I will see how things evolve during the next weeks.
I suppose C&A will talk about the patreon and the changes that will happens in the Pages. It will be time to see then if I want to give them a few bucks or not.
This makes me curious what you would suggest they use as Patreon-exclusive content that would feel more acceptable.
I just kinda feel like if people are going to make very harsh accusations like "scummy" or "greed" from people I've always felt actually care about their customers, it would help to give a little more of a detailed argument regards alternative suggestions of what they could do that would feel more palatable and less "greedy".
Since I admit the "let Patreons access it earlier" suggestion I've seen floated as the sole alternative so far doesn't seem like that great a draw since I know there's a lot of fans who often don't get to listen to episodes until a week or two later anyway, thus negating any benefit they could get out of it.
My perception is not that it's adding content for the patreon backers, it's taking away already established content from non-patreons. The Editor's Notes are primarily content derived from the listeners asking questions about the things they have already heard. You want to take away a reason for me to contribute to the podcast? I have no interest in asking a question about things you bring up in the episodes if I wont hear the answer.
As to what could they do instead? Pretty much what has been already suggested, early access. I have no problems with people getting content early, or even getting additional patreon only content that is not stuff we already heard, enjoyed and contributed to*, but not something we already know and love.
As to early acccess not benefitting some people? That purely depends on why they are backing, some people back things just to give money to creators, not for the rewards.
*perhaps make it a different podcast each month where Christopher and Adam do one of those silly podcasts they mention in passing, or have them talk about things that they are enjoying (art tablets, single malts, other games they are playing (RPGS?)), or discussions on the animal 'verse (or other 'verses that don't come into any of the games).
True, but generally if you want to entice people to put in money for something, you have to, well, offer something enticing.
And I know that in Twitch, there's sort of an unofficial "don't actually talk about today's/this week's Letters Page ep that much" thing going on because about 3/4 of the chatters will send up a comment that they haven't listened to the ep yet, and there's a lot of folks who comment they're even a few or more episodes behind.
While I like this idea as a general concept (and it's one of their "total earnings" goals already actually), I do worry if non-Sentinels content would be a sufficient monetary draw for a Sentinels-themed podcast. For every person who likes the C&A banter, I've likewise seen people who complain they want more "meat" out of the podcast.
I feel like I kinda have to go back and highlight the "if you're going to ask for money, you usually have to offer something that is worth the money" bit.
Since while I said in an earlier post I think there's ways they can realistically work around the "people asking questions they can't hear the answer to" aspect that I felt was a reasonable concern of yours, I also feel like people still kind of have to accept as a general thought that any time free content monetizes, that means there's now going to be some desirable content that is no longer free, since that's usually the exact way you entice people to pay.
Suggesting that they offer things that may not be that desirable to most of the audience risks those things not being that effective in actually enticing people to pay.
Since the Editor's Notes are both the only place follow-up questions get answered and the default place for announcements, and they've been included content up until now, it definitely feels bad having that get paywalled.
Time permitting, I think a bonus episode would be the best idea: one that doesn't have any announcements or major reveals, and that only answers questions written by Patreon subscribers, so that non-subscribers don't feel like they're missing anything they used to have. That would be a huge incentive to subscribe, too, since it would create a smaller pool of letters C&A would be choosing from. And I think it would be neat if they also relaxed some of their usual rules about questions and maybe answer more questions about the games themselves, like their history, the creative process, anecdotes from playtesting, etc. and not focus as much on the "comics" and the fictitious world they're published in. I know I'd personally appreciate some "bonus" answers of the "That's a good question, but we're not going to answer it because X" variety. Make us feel like they hear us at least.
Anyone know if Patreon has a way of releasing podcasts with RSS? My RSS player supports feeds that require authentication, and I'd really rather not have to download them manually and play them in a separate app.
All I know is I can't even afford a dollar a month to hear Editor's notes. :( Hopefully there will be a place to see them summarized.
As someone who ends up missing the main episode's cutoff days a lot, and therefore inevitably sending in questions to the Editor's Notes, I'll admit that I'm not particularly happy with this development. I don't have the freedom to make a Patreon and contribute each month. The thought that I'll end up not being able to listen to my own submissions is not a fun one.
I hope this isn't retroactive. I like the Editor's Notes, and I don't want the ones I've been listening to to suddenly be gated off.
I’d much rather see delayed content (1-2 weeks) for non-Patreon listeners than the current total lockout.
I would also be okay, however, with all asked questions being restricted to Patreon subscribers.
While I can understand the frustration with having something "taken away", I find accusations of "greed" to be WAY off base here.
C&A have spent the last 13 months spending anywhere from 3-6 hours per week prepping for and then recording each episode, plus another ~2 hours for each editors note. (They've said in the past that they spend roughly the length of an episode in prep, and recording time is obviously longer than the episode length). That means, minimum, half of an entire workday, per week, for 2 of the 4 most important people at the company, devoted to a podcast. They then have to PAY Trevor (an outside contractor) money to edit each episode, and they then upload to a website that they have to maintain and, you guessed it, pay for. And they haven't asked us for a dime.
Now, up until now-ish, time spent on The Letters Page has helped C&A to get their stories lined up, which has been useful both for OblivAeon and for RPG prep. (This is, in fact, the very argument that C&A made to OblivAeon backers who complained that they were wasting time on a podcast that should have been spent getting OblivAeon finished.) But we're moving out of that phase and reaching a point where The Letters Page will no longer be directly contributing to C&A's productivity on GTG projects. So time spent on the podcast means time not spent developing/overseeing the development of new games.
Let's not forget that GTG is actually a game publishing company, and that publishing games is what allows them to do silly things like pay salaries to their staff and keep the lights on. You know what doesn't pay for those things? Spending time and money to produce a podcast for free. If C&A were being "greedy", they'd drop Letters Page the second it's not helping them release product faster and focus on more important things. But people seem to enjoy it, so they're willing to keep it going... but it has to at least be marginally worth it. (If I were to look at this strictly from a revenue generated perspective, I would probably conclude that the podcast is a waste, because I'd be surprised if whatever piddly amount the Patreon brings in is truly worth the opportunity cost of C&A's time.)
So C&A took something that gets a lot less listeners, and hid it behind the lowest paywall on their patreon. If C&A were being "greedy" they would've made Editors Notes cost more. They could've easily made it exclusive to the $5+ groups, but instead they're only asking for a dollar. That is less than a cup of coffee. Before taxes. At Tim Hortons.
Now, there probably are some listeners who truly can't come up with a dollar extra per month. And it honestly is sad that they'll be missing out on ~1 hour of content per month that they used to get for free. But they'll still be getting ~1.5-2 hours of free content, per week. Commercial free (so far as we know) as opposed to many other podcasts. That's a pretty good deal.
For everyone else, please take your moral outrage elsewhere. C&A are asking you to pay a very small amount for something that costs them time and money to produce. It's simple, really: decide whether or not the Editors Notes are worth $1 to you, and then either pay or don't pay that $1 accordingly. That's how capitalism works.
(Note: If you want to whinge about capitalism, I believe the most apropriate thread would be the one for the Vengeful Five episode, in which Proletariat was discussed, and which is found here).
OK, I'm glad dprcooke made their post, because it echoes a lot of how I feel but I was terrified of everyone jumping down my throat yet again if I said any of it, so I tried to kinda sugarcoat it a little. :>
My stance on life in general is that nobody is ever obligated to do anything without compensation, and the USA being the capitalist country that it is, "compensation" in this country often involves money.
This particularly applies to companies, who exist entirely to make products in return for getting compensation of money for them.
Any time a company makes free content for you, it's them taking time away from doing stuff that makes them money. That's a very nice gesture of them, and TBH generally is often done to still compensate the company in some way. In this case it compensated C&A with getting to talk about their babies and it serves as a marketing device/secondary source for the RPG, so it made sense to do it entirely for free so long as they were talking about info directly related to the RPG... which is exactly what they did.
And yet even with that consideration, I feel they're still being super-nice having the Letters Page itself be free because many companies would charge for even the material in the main podcast itself. I have a hobby of reading RPG sourcebooks for fun, and the material in the Letters Page is material that many companies would wrap into a sourcebook and charge money for (Stuff like 10 JackPointers for Shadowrun comes to mind).
Especially since those sourcebooks wouldn't even contain Q&A sessions or anything. Having creators actually show up and regularly solicit and answer questions is incredibly uncommon. I think the last time I saw it done was Chris Avellone and the Fallout Bible, and bear in mind that Avellone did that as an entirely personal project while working at a dying company because he thought Fallout itself might die out and so wanted to do a last hurrah.
So... TBH I think C&A would have been well within their rights to make the entire podcast from now on be behind a Patreon paywall. It would certainly bum me out on a certain level, but it would be no different from the card games or Tactics or the RPG being products you have to pay for. The fact that they're making only the Editor's Notes (something that they've said download numbers show is already something only "diehards" tend to listen to) be behind the paywall is really gracious of them.
I've outlined ways I think they can get around the "paywalling questions of non-Patreon fans" problem, but people really need to accept that in order for this to work, something you find valuable is going to have to be "gated" or "taken away" because that's how you entice people to pay money. Like, I hate to repeat myself again, but the fact that people keep frequently suggesting minor perks nobody would actually care much about makes it feel to me like that fact isn't really sinking in for folks. (And PlatinumWarlock's suggestion of having all asking restricted to Patreon folks ironically seems even worse to me in terms of PR than paywalling the Editor's Notes considering how people already complain that it feels like only a tiny group of regulars get to ask questions on air.)
P.S. I do think they also should be more up front with cutoff dates for asking questions to try to avoid problems like Girl With No Name has (and which I think I've run into a few times too). There are some reasonable concerns mixed in here, but unfortunately "keep making everything for free" isn't the most realistic solution for them.
Most of the cutoff issue I have is because I'm in another timezone, honestly. For instance, while the show drops on Tuesday for most, that's 2 or 3am on Wednesday for me. When C&A do give a cutoff (which seems to be a little rarer nowadays), I inevitably get confused about the actual date I can submit it, and end up missing the deadline. It's not something anyone intelligent can miss, but I'm not anyone intelligent, ha ha.
Honestly, if they just made cutoff times more obvious to check, it would solve 90% of my issue with this change. As is, without being able to do Patreon things (not for monetary reasons, but security ones... I'd rather not say), I'm stuck wondering not just if my letter will be picked, but if I actually get the opportunity to hear the answer.
The main legitimate problem I am seeing people having is that they might ask a question and have it answered in an editor's notes they won't see, but I personally thought it was a pretty safe assumption that editors notes will become a patreon only question kind of thing.
I also really don't think a dollar for the extra episode at the end of each month is asking that much, and I really don't think it was born out of greed. You don't get into this buisness for greed, its a terrible way to make large sums of money. If there are non-monetary concerns around using patreon though I can see how that would be frustrating.
I do feel like "assume good faith" is something people could kinda stand to adopt as a stance as of late. There's a few too many cases as of late where what I sometimes agree are reasonable concerns are buried under the hostility of assuming the issues in question came about as a result of the GTG folks deliberately trying to cause harm, when I've never seen the GTG folks do anything to make that feel like a justified stance.
I do think the GTG folks are sometimes guilty of Didn't Think This Through (which is likely what happened here), but that's still not deserving of the accusations of deliberate malfeasance thrown out there versus just civilly pointing out the issue and some suggestions on how to deal with it.
This is great discussion, folks – please continue! Thought we'd go ahead and pull this out of the thread, since it has taken on a life of its own. 
Thanks, folk!
It's one of those situations where if the Ed Notes had always been paid content, it'd be totally fine, but they first needed to do this for a year to judge listener investment, so catch-22. D:
Agreeing with upthread that I'd also be fine with a however-long delay.
I don’t think an early release incentivizes anyone to pledge a dollar though. Especially since discussion doesn’t really occur until a day or more after an episode. The only suggestion I can think of as an alternative for just a dollar is just a voting setup for what upcoming episodes would be about.
I can only repeat that the only way I could see a early release being a desirable enough perk is if there was more along the lines of a month-long or more delay for non-Patreons, not just merely a week or two, since many people already don't get around to listening to episodes until a week or two later anyway.
And it kinda feels increasingly weird that everyone's getting this het up over something that before now almost nobody but extremely diehard people (i.e. the people mostly likely to drop money) actually cared about anyway. A conclusion I reach not just from C&A's own proclamations about the much lower download figures for Interludes/Editor's Notes, but from how many of the Editor's Notes threads tend to end up being about the announced upcoming schedule rather than about the actual Editor's Note content. Like, it feels weird that people are suddenly complaining about having to pay a small amount to listen to something they already mostly weren't listening to anyway.
That’s why I think they are putting the Editor’s Notes behind the dollar pledge because it has significantly less listeners than other episodes. I’m skeptical if they’ll keep it that way but I certainly understand why they chose this initially.
checks Patreon page for first time
Wait a second, the thing people are complaining that it costs money now costs $12 per year, for an individual cost of approximately $1 per episode?
Yes.
In all fairness, there are some people who can't afford another dollar/month out of their budget. I have some friends whose Patreon subs yoyo with their unexpected costs, for example.
As usual I'm feeling multiple side of the issue.
I think the quote from Matchstickman explains why it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If Editor's Notes were new and behind the paywall, no problem. If they had always costed, no problem. But since they were free and now they are not, it feels wrong. It also sounds really entitled to say "because I got this for free before I deserve to get it free forever."
There are really two ways to fund a podcast these days, listener support or ads. I feel the listener support is by far the better way.
Its only 12 bucks, that's skipping eating out 1 time a year basically, for me. However I don't like things withdrawing automatically from my account, why can't I pay 12 dollars now and be good for the year? That would sit much better with me. Is that an option Patreon veteran?
Personally I've decided to not particiate in the Patreon, deciding the "cost" was not worth the "goods" provided. I will sorely miss the Editor's Notes but I realize that is a consequence of my own personal choice (one that I can choose to change). I will continue enjoying the free content for as long as it exists and continue buying many things Sentinels.
Finally the setting up of the Patreon and the reflection of it was worth it to me to donate has led me to the conclusion that I would prefer the Letter's Page to come to end than pay monthly for it. Sad and as I noted above perhaps entitled.
My biggest complaint re the Editor's notes going Patreon only (and I backed before the tiers were announced) is that I don't know if the podbean app has a provision for this.
Right now, everything's easy to find and listen to, and all in one place.
Blackfang108 hit my only concern. (That's not to say anyone else's is not valid, just that this is mine. 
)
When I've supported podcasts via Patreon in the past and they had eps (or other things) that were only available to backers, I rarely if ever knew about it. I don't pay attention to what comes up on Patreon – I get the podcast through my catcher and that's it. 
Now, because it's The Letters Page, I'll make an exception, but I'll have to put a reminder in my calendar or something…
Editor’s Notes will remain public https://www.patreon.com/posts/editors-notes-17385554
Based on the image used and under the assumption it was done by Maggie I have a feeling she may be their Miss Information.
To be honest, that gif makes me feel like a winner already. :D
I actually feel a little guilty about how things turned out. Since the soultion C & A came up with was doing even more work when they are already crazy busy, over 12 dollars a year.
On the other hand, this directly benefits me because i get more content.
Yeah, I mean, I called it in one of my earlier posts: "Their only alternative would be to carve yet another day out of the week to record Patreon-exclusive things, which would defeat part of the point of monetizing their current work to be more realistic to continue."
Hopefully it works out in the end for them. X3
Oh god! the Cult of Gloom feels a little guilty? isn't that like... a sign of the apocolypse, i hope some giant unforseen big blue/purpleish dude doesn't show up in the multiverse trying to ................... wait a second ...
Well, I backed at the Collector level. I'm glad the Editor's Notes are remaining free, but I definitely saw both sides of that argument. Now imagine if they decided to make the Tempest and Voss episodes Patreon exclusives ;)
My only problem with the whole situation continues to be with, as I said, Patreon itself.
I guess I'll eventually bite the bullet, but it will have to be in the later half of next month.
What's the problem with Patreon? I've never used it before.
I just don't trust most things that automatically take money out of your account every month/week/what-have-you. I always pay my bills in cash when I can, and I do my best to never 'save' my card info on any website.
Long story short: I'm paranoid.
Ah, ok. I'm actually not a fan of things that don't get paid automatically, because then I'm worried I'll forget to pay them haha.
I love it so much.