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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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eaglejarl said:
As to the fees, Patreon shifted the cost of the credit card processing from the creators to the donors.
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I don't *think* that's what they actually did. They still batch transactions together. So I gave something like 10 dollars a month split between 5 people. I was getting billed monthly for 10$+3%+$0.35. Under the new system, I'm getting charged ($2+$0.35)*5. This means it's a lot less practical to give a little bit to a number of people. It looks like credit card fees, but I think it's not and they're being sneaky.

But I'll put your feedback in liberapay's issue tracker, at least. It's mostly python, so if those are features they're amenable to I could look into adding them.

There's no reason you can't have an account on both. I wasn't donating for the updates/rewards anyway. Or make a "marked for death" "team" maybe.

Using "they" as a singular gender-neutral pronoun is just easier. I am unlikely to start keeping track of peoples genders at this point in my life.
 
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traverseda said:
I don't *think* that's what they actually did. They still batch transactions together. So I gave something like 10 dollars a month split between 5 people. I was getting billed monthly for 10$+3%+$0.35. Under the new system, I'm getting charged ($2+$0.35)*5. This means it's a lot less practical to give a little bit to a number of people. It looks like credit card fees, but I think it's not and they're being sneaky.

But I'll put your feedback in liberapay's issue tracker, at least. It's mostly python, so if those are features they're amenable to I could look into adding them.

There's no reason you can't have an account on both. I wasn't donating for the updates/rewards anyway. Or make a "marked for death" "team" maybe.
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Here's from the email they sent me a couple days ago, in which they claim that this is what they're doing:

Aside from Patreon's existing 5% fee, you may notice that your income on Patreon varies because of processing fees every month. Your patrons may not even be aware that you actually take home a lower percentage of their intended pledges because of it. Our goal is to make your paycheck as predictable as possible, so we're restructuring how these fees are paid.

A new service fee of 2.9% + $0.35 will be paid by patrons for each individual pledge starting on December 18th. This streamlines fees for both creators and patrons to ensure that you pay no more than 5%.
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I don't see a lot of incentive for them to lie since that could be construed as fraud, but it does seem weird that it was applied before the 18th, though.
 
But that's not how payment processing fees work? It's certainly not how the stripe api worked. As a patron, I was getting billed once (or twice) a month, for the full value of whatever I was putting in. So for me, that was $10+$0.35+3% for all my pledges. That money way being routed internally, and when you took it out you were getting charged $0.35+3% for that transaction. You'd pay that one fee whenever you chose to pay out.

It meant, roughly, that each user was paying a transaction fee a month. Now each pledge is paying a transaction fee. That means that you're paying 0 transaction fees, but I'm paying $0.35 per person I'm pledging to.

Most of those aren't even real transaction fees, money going in or out of the system. They're fees for inter-patreon transactions. It's not fraud, they've just quietly changed the definition of transaction from "money going in or out of the system" to "money transferred inside the system". They've stopped being credit card transaction fees, and started being patreons transaction fee. This increases the total amount of money spent on transaction fees by something like 500%, if my estimates of the average patron are accurate. This means that if I'm giving a small amount to a bunch of people, the actual amount of money patreon takes is closer to 20-40%.

The only situation where this could be cheaper is when one creator has one patron, and that's the only creator that patron supports. A one-to-one creator-patron relationship. In that situation, and that situation alone, patreon would be charging $0.35+3% less. In every other situation patreon is taking a lot more in fees.

They're not lying, there is a way you can interpret their statements to be truthful, but it relies on a flexible definition of "transaction".
 
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Personally, I like liberapay. It's an open-source project, funded entirely by donation, and is a pretty solid project. But you might be interested in kickstarters drip as an alternative. Patreon is an LLC and I think they're gearing up to become publicly traded. There are strong pressures on them to act a certain way. Kickstarter, on the other hand, is a public benefit corporation. That should mean they're less beholden to maximizing shareholder value, or at least that they can't be sued if they chose not to.

Might be worth checking it out.
 
traverseda said:
Personally, I like liberapay. It's an open-source project, funded entirely by donation, and is a pretty solid project. But you might be interested in kickstarters drip as an alternative. Patreon is an LLC and I think they're gearing up to become publicly traded. There are strong pressures on them to act a certain way. Kickstarter, on the other hand, is a public benefit corporation. That should mean they're less beholden to maximizing shareholder value, or at least that they can't be sued if they chose not to.

Might be worth checking it out.
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Looks like it's invite-only at this point - know anyone with a link?
 
Oneiros said:
@eaglejarl @Velorien and @OliWhail any word On when we can see the next revision to the rules?
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Cariyaga said:
@eaglejarl @Velorien @OliWhail Is there anything we can do to speed along the Fated to Die rules?
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@Velorien is not available this weekend so we can't actually progress the QM discussion. A lot of it is pretty well tied down, though. Once @OliWhail is around to coordinate with I would like to push out a version later today. It will have some big holes in it but y'all should find it useful.

Noumero said:
[x] Jiraiya and Keiko talk about the Toads' and the Pangolins' ancient history
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This sounds like a lot of work...could I convince you to vote it in for Wednesday instead?

ContextBot said:
[X] Akatsuki's Book
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They have a book?

Heleor said:
There's also Drip which is a non-profit iirc (owned by Kickstarter). They're currently invite-only and I'm not sure how many of your requirements they meet.
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They're currently invite-only and I can't find any information at all about their feature set. I'll keep an eye out, though.

Cariyaga said:
Man, I wish SV supported ranked choice voting :p
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You could always hack it into the CounterBot code: GitHub - dstorrs/sv_counterbot: A tallybot for counting votes in quests run on Sufficient Velocity et al
 
eaglejarl said:
You could always hack it into the CounterBot code: GitHub - dstorrs/sv_counterbot: A tallybot for counting votes in quests run on Sufficient Velocity et al
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Hmm... I wonder how hard that'd be... I'll look into it when I'm more awake.
eaglejarl said:
They have a book?
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Kagome said:
See, back in the days of yore, they were this group operating out of Rain. Bunch of dumb idealists. Only then they briefly got famous because some schmo wrote a book based on them. I read it myself. Cheap trash, but I guess the writer must have had a lot of pull, given how there were copies everywhere from Demon Country to the Kazekage's latrine.
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Yep. Pretty well-spread, too. Could have been propaganda on their part, who knows. Also probably a lot of work. :p
 
Cariyaga said:
Yep. Pretty well-spread, too. Could have been propaganda on their part, who knows. Also probably a lot of work. :p
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*goes back and re-reads the QM docs*

Huh. I can't believe I completely forgot about that plot thread. I've been very focused on the new rules and let stuff fall out of my brain.

Without giving anything away, I will comment that there are a limited number of ways for y'all to get certain key pieces of information which will have a major impact on the direction of the quest, as well as giving you a leg up on many of impending events. If and when you happen to stumble across one of those ways it might be a good idea to pursue it.

Having said that, however, I'm not going to write a Lore Update about the book. If y'all want to know what's in it you'll either need to seek it out in-character or convince @Velorien to write it. ;P
 
eaglejarl said:
*goes back and re-reads the QM docs*

Huh. I can't believe I completely forgot about that plot thread. I've been very focused on the new rules and let stuff fall out of my brain.

Without giving anything away, I will comment that there are a limited number of ways for y'all to get certain key pieces of information which will have a major impact on the direction of the quest, as well as giving you a leg up on many of impending events. If and when you happen to stumble across one of those ways it might be a good idea to pursue it.

Having said that, however, I'm not going to write a Lore Update about the book. If y'all want to know what's in it you'll either need to seek it out in-character or convince @Velorien to write it. ;P
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Ominous. I presume Jiraya, given that he is a competent spy master, has already read it though, so shouldn't be hard to find.
 
Voting is closed.

EDIT: Tally was incorrect (somehow??), so use @faflec's version in next post.
Adhoc vote count started by Noumero on Dec 9, 2017 at 10:04 AM, finished with 2533 posts and 53 votes.
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@eaglejarl pretty sure this is the right vote:
Adhoc vote count started by faflec on Dec 9, 2017 at 10:25 AM, finished with 70 posts and 16 votes.
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