Switching to "Charge Up Front" from now on (Patreon)

For a long time, Patreon only had one payment system: when you pledged money to someone on Patreon, you weren't charged any money until the first day of the next month. Since the beginning of Patreon's history, there were people who exploited this system; they pledged money, got the rewards, then cancelled their pledge before the first day of the next month so that they wouldn't have to lose any money.

Creators on Patreon were tired of being ripped off by people who used this strategy to get rewards without spending money, so they asked Patreon for the option to charge people up front, instead of waiting for the first day of the next month. Earlier this year, Patreon finally made this an option.

Ever since I first began using Patreon, way back in 2014, there have been people who figured out a devious way to sabotage me; they pledged large amounts of money to my Patreon to create the impression that I was raking in loads of money, then they canceled their pledges before the first day of the next month, so that I wouldn't get any of their money. Then they immediately re-instated their pledges, creating the illusion that I was financially stable and didn't need any further support.

For a long time, it wasn't really an issue, since only about 10% of the pledges were fraudulent, and I was still meeting my financial goals. However, recently, a much larger percentage of pledges have been fraudulent, creating a very inflated and inaccurate number on my Patreon page. I'm switching to the Charge Up Front option so that nobody can use the "revoke pledge before the first day of the next month" ripoff strategy anymore. This won't affect any of you existing Patrons; it just prevents people from ripping me off from this point forward.

Marked as Adult Content

As long as I'm writing a post, I might as well mention something. In June, Patreon marked my page as "adult content", which makes it impossible to view the page unless you're logged in and have agreed to view adult content. Their reasoning for doing this was because some of my posts contain "graphic violence". I've been using Patreon since August 2014, and the people who operate Patreon never had a problem with my page until June 2018. It's bizarre that Patreon was fine with me all this time, then changed their mind after 46 months...but, oh well. As long as I use Patreon's site, I have to respect whatever decision they make, no matter how arbitrary it feels.

Lack of Recent Posts

I haven't made a post to Patreon or YouTube in over a month, but please don't make the mistake of thinking that this means I haven't been working on the game! I updated the game 6 times over the course of July; I just don't post to Patreon unless I have a new YouTube video to share, and I'm not ready to create a video about my recent progress yet.

You can see everything I've been working on at my blog, https://yanderedev.wordpress.com - I'm hoping to release a big, significant update later this month!

Thank you for following the development of Yandere Simulator!