As promised, after the Patreon debacle, we were going to look at how our financial support processes were handled and tweak things if needed. The goal is to allow you to financially support us, if you want, and allow us to easily manage that.
I always stumbled over the whole “$5 Supporter” list read on the show… it felt awkward for me to do. While there was nothing wrong with the term “Supporters” (in fact, that’s what you all are), I kind of wanted something that sounded more cool. After some brainstorming (there were many, MANY names) with Leeta, we finally settled on “The Iron Elite”. Why Iron when we have more than just the Iron Challenge? The Ironman Challenge is THE reason why we are here today: all challenges are derivatives from Iron (in fact, the Iron challenge accounts for 90% of all characters).
We are also going to be doing away with the $5 read-your-name-on-the-show part. Instead, we’re going to be reading the names of ALL The Iron Elite, regardless of how much you have donated to us.
The “tier” system was driven from options available to us in Patreon but, in hindsight, it didn’t feel good to me. We will be keeping Patreon as some of our Iron Elite prefer it over other methods. We won’t be using Patreon nearly as much as we did before; since we have only “1 tier”, all Iron Elite communication will be happening primarily through #the-iron-elite channel in discord or email. I am personally still cautious over Patreon now and will be keeping an eye on any changes that could adversely affect both you and I.
Current Patreon Users: I deleted the $5+ tier in favour of the single $1+ tier. I mistakenly thought you’d be automatically moved down to the only existing tier, however, that did not happen. You’ll need to log into Patreon and select the $1 tier REWARD and connect your discord account so you get access to the appropriate channels.
The Iron Elite Updated List
I have updated The Iron Elite list to reflect current subscribers through PayPal, Twitch and Patreon. I’ve gone through our discord member list last night and assigned “The Iron Elite” role to all users that I could find from the current list. If you do not have access to The Iron Elite channels (both text and voice) in discord, please reach out to a moderator or Stone and we’ll help you out as soon as we can. Things may not be working 100% yet, please reach out to me if you don’t have the access you should or your name isn’t showing up on The Iron Elite list when it should be.
Donation Avenues
It was important for us to figure out the best way to allow you to financially contribute to the site without having it be a major focus for us. We truly appreciate the support, however, we do want to keep focused on doing what we do best: Community, the Site, and our Podcast. Ignoring $$ values helps greatly as the only thing we really will be tracking are the one-time PayPal donations. I want to let you all know what avenues we have and how the $$ values work out; some are okay, some are not.
PayPal Subscription: I added this method to provide an alternative to Patreon’s changed model. You should not be paying any fees on this and you can choose a set $ value (in Canadian funds) for how much you want to donate each month. I pay the fees for each payment and they are fairly negligible. The payment goes to HockeySim.ca (this is the name of the account I use to handle payments from that site – I’m not creating a second PayPal account). I receive email notifications so addition to The Iron Elite list is dependent on when I have access to my PC.
PayPal One-Time Donations: Again, this shows that it’s going to HockeySim.ca (but that’s okay, it’s me). By default, this is in Canadian funds. Again, you should not be paying any fees. Fees on my side are fairly negligible. For folks donating as a one-time payment, you will be in The Iron Elite for 12 months from the most recent donation date. The minimum donation value is $1 CAD. I receive email notifications so addition to The Iron Elite list is dependent on when I have access to my PC.
Twitch – Subscribers: While we’re trying to use Twitch more and more, the model they use is not so good for us. We get only 50% of your subscription $$, however, we do get 100% of any bits you cheer us with. We do not have an easy method to track bit cheering; so cheering would typically not get you The Iron Elite access on discord. Twitch dollar values are in USD. We do have different emotes set up for each sub tier (you can use these in discord chat as well) but overall, there is no reward difference between $4.99 and $24.99. I do NOT receive subscription email notifications, so generally I will be looking at the list once a week. If you want your name up sooner, please reach out to me with your twitch name, twitter name, discord name, etc.
Patreon: $$ values are in USD. Fees are paid by us and are fairly negligible, however, we’ll continue to monitor what Patreon decides to do with their payment model. We have only one tier now. You can connect your discord account to Patreon in order to automatically gain access to the reward channels. If you were a $5+ tier member, you’ll need to log back in and select the $1 tier so that you have access to the discord reward channels. As a heads up, we are keeping this only because it’s a preferred method for some of our Iron Elite, however, we may shut this avenue down depending on how they handle any future model changes.