Supporter Newsletter - October

Hello to all of our beautiful Supporters! I hope you've all had as much fun throughout September as I did. What an amazing month for Requiem. We hit our biggest milestone so far with 10,000 members in our community. It truly is an amazing accomplishment and I would have never been able to do it without the fantastic people around me. I am just so happy with how this community has become and how great everyone is. Now, with all of that cheese out of the way, let's jump into this month's Supporter Newsletter.

Let's start off with our recent Supporter Survey we put out. If you haven't filled that out yet, please make sure you head over to Discord and check the Supporter Announcements to find the link. Our Moderators and Admins are reading over the anonymous survey and take everything very seriously that you all tell us. We mainly put that out there to get a feel for what your thoughts were on us giving our Officers, Supporter Benefits after they've helped out on the team for a certain amount of time. We'll continue to read over the replies as we make our decision.

After the survey has gone out, it's really made me think about trying to be even more vocal with you all and get your feedback on changes. Most of our changes go through a discussion-based system with a vote. All of our Moderators and Admins talk about a certain topic for any length of time from less than a day to weeks. We open these topics based on suggestions that come in from the community. We talk about the pros and cons of everything suggested and we weigh our options to see what would really be beneficial to everyone. I'd like to change that up a bit and bring some of these discussions/votes to our Ally Tier and above Supporters.

Even though I do these monthly Supporter Newsletters and try my best to inform you of everything that I can, even most things that no one else in the community knows. It never hurts to have more opinions and feedback from everyone. You all represent our community vision and what people want. Our main goal is to bring an enjoyable experience to everyone throughout Requiem. I believe with your help and us pushing more information to you, we could achieve that.

We're currently looking to bring on a new Community Outreach Moderator which would be the one to primarily contact our supporters and stay in touch with you all. I would myself but I am just so spread thin as it is now that I feel like I'm going to be pulled apart at times. (Not a bad thing, I love this place and wouldn't ask for anything else.) However, with a Community Outreach Moderator, their job is to keep our staff connected to the community so while we do our jobs, they bring us the information we need to know, along with all of the suggestions/feedback from everyone. Our Moderator Team is at a strong point right now with some amazing Mods and bringing on others would only make us better. Keep an eye on the Supporter Zone in Discord with some possible upcoming changes.

I'd like to touch a bit on Sea of Thieves and the state of our Sea of Thieves Section within our community. Obviously, Requiem is built primarily on our ability to host 24/7 Alliance Servers. That being said, lately, with school and work starting back up after many people were locked at home with COVID, we're losing a lot of staff members which makes the jobs of our current staff members even harder. All of this creates a difficult circle so that when we bring on new Officers, and once they see the difficulty, rather than helping much, they end up leaving the team too. We're doing our best and I'm confident we'll have the team back to its full strength in no time. No matter how bleak things may look sometimes, I will NEVER stop fighting for Requiem and will always do my very best to help push us further. If you're ever interested in helping out, please check out the applications to apply for an Officer Role, even if it's not on the Sea of Thieves Team, we have positions open everywhere.

I do also need to talk about where the money has gone over the month of September and boy was it a big month for Requiem. As usual, we pay for our VPS, Minecraft Servers and things of that nature. This month we had a HUGE event for our 10K Celebration where we gave away over $750 worth of prizes. Right after that, we did a big charity where Requiem matched $500 worth of donations raised over $1,200 for charity. It's been a crazy month and the expenses have been high but it has definitely been worth it. We've also put a major upgrade into our Minecraft Server so it is a bit more expensive now but our performance has improved.

Another thing we're starting to do more of now is Stream. Given that we did a stream giveaway every day during our week-long 10K Celebration Event, we felt that we should keep that sort of trend going and try to have a stream as much as possible. There's also now the ability to become a subscriber on the Twitch channel. Right now, I and Grimrpr315 are looking at the best way we can duo the stream so that he streams sometimes and I will do the say. This will be a variety of content to you all, across the board. We're even looking for other Content Creators that would be willing to brand their name alongside Requiems and stream on our Official Channel. Head over and follow our Twitch channel to keep up with all of those updates!

We will continue to persevere and push forward through any hard times that we may have here. At times it does seem hard but looking around with such a great team and community around me, things always get better. Our community will only continue to thrive, no matter what, so don't worry. We all deserve a place to call home and game with friends. Requiem is that home for me and many, many others. I wouldn't ask for it any other way. I really hope you all feel the same about our community. Please leave a comment below sharing your thoughts so far on Requiem and if you have any new ideas/suggestions that we could bring into our home.