Supporter Newsletter - February

Hello to all of our beautiful Supporters! We’re a month into the new year and there have already been some hectic happenings around the world. That being said, we can still make this year much better than the last. 2020 was quite horrible for so many people and I can’t imagine that 2021 will be any worse. As long as we all push forward and are kind to one another I’m sure that we’ll be just fine.

January brought in some fun new content to Sea of Thieves though. We now have access to the Plunder Pass and a new challenge event that will be happening during Season One. With the launch of Season One, we also got a new Merchant Alliance Voyage (my favorite trading company) which brings even more options when you want to decide what to do. Sea of Thieves will only continue to grow in what is said to be its biggest year yet.

Along with all of the fun content to Sea of Thieves, we have also pushed out some cool new changes to our custom Discord Bot as well. Along with a lot of bug fixes that just make our Staff lives easier we have also introduced our new “Alliance Reconnect” voice channel. This channel does just as it’s name intends and will reconnect you to your ship if you’ve been disconnected your leave accidentally. This is just one thing in a long list of changes that we plan to bring to our Discord Bot that will be pretty awesome.

Speaking of all of the changes to the Discord Bot, I want to give you all an update on Custom Profile Pictures and when you’ll be able to get them. Currently we’re working on making the system of getting your custom pfp completely automated so that anyone in the correct Supporter Tier can simply use a command and get their pfp. Unfortunately, we’ve hit an odd snag that we’re trying to fix with it. While the command does work, seemingly after the Discord API update recently, it lost functionality on our live environment but works in testing. We want to get this out to all of you as soon as possible and if I have anymore updates before we release it, I’ll let you know.

I do want to mention some other cool features our development team has been hard at work on. Not everything is entirely for our custom Discord bot but some of the stuff is even outside of Discord. A couple of bigger features that will be coming is our new revamped invite system and our new revamped support system. In short the new invite system will grant you exp for each uniquely invited person you bring in and will grant you rewards based on how many people you’ve invited which will include gift cards, titles, giveaways, etc. The new support system is very simple in that we just want a new way to allow people to get support easier and appeal their bans outside of Discord. We don’t have any ETA on these features just yet but they will be coming as soon as they’re ready.

It's time to talk a bit about our new FiveM RP Server we’ve recently got. As I said in our general monthly newsletter that we will no longer be hosting our normal pve GTA V servers but instead will have all of our focus be on the FiveM RP Server. As I said last month, this new server comes in with a merger and it’s own small community to back it up as well as a great new staff team to run things. The server is in early stages currently with Requiem and we’re planning a 2.0 update that will bring in some awesome new features including a new framework that will really push the fun and roleplay even further. You can expect to see our 2.0 update coming in early March. If you haven’t tried out the new server already, you should definitely check it out!

Minecraft. Oh, how we all love Minecraft. I’ve been playing the game since its early alpha and have constantly come back to the game to continue playing every now and then. There isn’t a lot of news on our Minecraft Section yet but I did want to mention that we’ll be working on revamping it completely over the month of February with the goal of having a complete re-grand opening for our new Minecraft Server that we’ll have set up. We want our Minecraft Section to do well so hopefully with the help of the community we can get it to where we’d like.

Now, before I get to the end of our newsletter here, I do want to fill you all in on what expenses your money went towards in the month of January. Over the month we even did some budgeting so that we put the right amount of money towards different things. The largest amount of our money goes towards Staff Benefits (53%) which is Staff Payments, Team Giveaways, Officer of the Month, etc. Then we have our monthly savings (30%) for taxes and quarterly charity events. We have Server Hosting/Maintenance (8%) which covers our VPS, Server Hosting, Premium Bots, etc. A new one we have is Social Media/Marketing (5%) which goes towards Social Media giveaways, ads, etc. Lastly, we have our Giveaways (4%) which is exactly what you’d think. I do want to note that none of this includes any additional revenue that Requiem may get each month and is based off of our lowest average amount that we receive. Extra Money is put into our savings for when it is needed for things like bigger giveaways, hosting purchases, branding, and so on. I hope this went into better and further depth on where your money goes in Requiem. A last thing to state is that all of these funds are constantly changing and where we’re putting the money so we’ll be displaying that each month in this newsletter.

This has been one of our longer Supporter Newsletters but I hope you all enjoyed the information inside. I try to fill you all in with as much as I can each month so you’re not stuck wondering. During January we had some of our members upset with us because they did not feel we were open enough about where our money is being used which is why I went into much further detail this month so all of you can know what we’re using it on behind the scenes. I’m sure many of you don’t really mind but we like to be very transparent on everything that we can be. There are times that I don’t know if some of the community really understands how much Requiem means to me (Lukian) personally. Requiem is my home and quite literally is part of me so there will never be anything I would do to harm its reputation. Money obviously makes things difficult but we spend a well majority of giving back to the community in some shape or form. I hope you all understand how much I love you and this community because I would probably still be in a dark place if it wasn’t for Requiem. Thank you so much for what you’ve helped us to create here.