Hello everyone, and a lovely Valentine's Day to you all <3
I have some plans that I wanted to share with everyone, though not everything is set in stone just yet.
First up, there's a beta for a new game coming up! A lot of the game systems are in place, but there isn't much content yet. It is however at the point where I feel that I will need some feedback to guide me forward. As soon as a very basic set of content is in place, the beta will open.
Second, Discord is set to roll out face scanning/ID checks for all users in March (https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/30326565624343-How-to-Complete-Age-Assurance-on-Discord). They are assuring us that IDs will only be used for age checks and not be stored, and there is some arguing for that their new system is going to be fairly okay privacy-wise. (Though they did leak 70 000 pictures of IDs from their previous system just last year...)
However, I'm of the opinion that ID checks have no place on almost any internet service, and that barely anyone should be trusted with keeping such information about you secure. Especially when that ID can be directly connected to a vast amount of your message history.
For this reason, Discord will no longer be required to get Patreon rewards. Instead, beta access can be acquired by connecting your Blushing Defeat account to Patreon, which will let you see a "Play Beta" button on apps and connect to them as long as you are logged in.
Cheatmode access on the other hand will be retired as a reward and granted to everyone. This is because while I think having cheat mode as a reward makes a lot of sense on its own, it doesn't make sense when the games are moddable, since modders need those same tools to test that their mods are working correctly. And if that wasn't clear I think mods are great :D
This leaves two questions up in the air: what to do about the Blushing Maid ($2) tier being down one of it's rewards, and should the discord stay at all? I think that a chat server (or forum, but more realtime is better) is a very good thing to have so I am considering either setting up a Matrix chat server (similar to discord, but open source, federated and with a lot of security/privacy focus) or implementing a simple forum/chat server directly on Blushing Defeat. Or remaining on Discord.
I don't know yet, so feel free to share your input.
Are you planning to continue using Discord with ID scanning?