I do think you're trolling a little bit here yourself.

Right. So what you're saying is that because someone else treated you in a manner that you just don't like that having patron status (apparently) means that you have special permission to treat any non-patron that you want to poorly to make amends for what happened to you. It doesn't even have to be the same person that wronged you in the first place. Just pick someone and make sure it's not a patron.

Let's not exaggerate. Asking you what you're talking about and pointing out the apparent confusion in your comment is not some kind of mistreatment of you. And the "lol" is a natural expression after seeing yet another argument based on an incorrect assumption.

I, on the other hand, was accused of drinking Kool Aid and boot licking,despite criticising the voting process myself at the start of this thread.

It's okay to criticise GOG, but it should be done for things they are actually guilty of / responsible for, not something made up. Otherwise they will just stop listening altogether and we'll all be worse off for it.

There is no trolling in saying that Discord gets far more information than the forum. That's just the fact. Staff talk there daily. It's happening across the industry. We should consider ourselves lucky that the forum has not been shut down entirely at this point. It's not your fault that GOG keeps you in the dark, but don't get angry at me for pointing it out or for correcting wrong assumptions of forum-only users and / or non-patrons.

This on the other hand is approaching that territory.

I'm not angry at you :) We know GOG doesn't care about the forums or engage with people here, it's patently obvious, despite their empty promises. But continually rubbing it in the face of people here because they don't pay the extra membership fee is a bit much. Not at all, it's the truth. The people who might care how you voted are on Discord, if you want to share how you voted, post there. That's where the Patron stuff happens. Anyone interested in how you voted (specifically you, as opposed to the general vote result which is public) probably has access to the Discord so can see that. The vast majority of people only care about the vote result and thus how it might impact GOG releases/support. Your individual vote is not that meaningful. Just because you paid money for it, doesn't mean you have to justify that spending by sharing that information with us.

It was never the intention to "rub it in", but if an argument goes on for too long, at some point one has to start citing their sources over and over. At this point, I feel like I will soon have to start dumping discord screenshots here.

Either that or force myself to ignore purple dots.

As for patron "benefits", let's be happy that it's merely communication and "rigged voting". These are still relatively easy for most people to ignore. IMO it is not in our best interest to add anything more tangible to this sub, because then it would start feeling mandatory. It's bad enough the sub exists at all.

You need to reread what you said to me when you initiated a dialogue with me. I'll quote you to make it easier -

I called you rude and condescending, nothing more.

You then replied back saying that that you spent "a month arguing and getting insulted by someone (pferreira1983) who clearly knows nothing about the patrons program." That just came off as you saying patron status gives you special permission to be rude to people so long as the person you direct it towards is not a patron.

The rest of your post came off as you trying to educate me that GOG doesn't care about its customers that buy games, only cares about the $5 a month they get from patrons. You can reread it all here -
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/become_a_patron_and_determine_which_genre_should_be_favored_in_the_gog_preservation_program_ea06e/post89

And while I'm sure you meant to persuade me to stop being a lowly peasant that actually buys games and become a patron instead, it only had the opposite effect. My point of view remains the same - GOG patrons are just paying for access to a private members club that comes in the form of a discord channel, nothing more. If your behavior towards me (a non-member) is indicative of what I should expect there, then I don't think I would enjoy GOG's private club. This means that I would get zero for my $5, that would be better spent buying more games.

Also this is where I need to point out that GOG is not Costco. The membership fee I pay to Costco more than pays for itself in the form of cheap gas. The price of goods bought inside Costco are cheaper versus what you would pay elsewhere such that the membership will pay for itself that way if you shop there enough.

There is nothing rude there. It's a correction of an incorrect assumption. Maybe it's ever so slightly condescending at most, but that is less than mild compared to the type of stuff you see on the forum.

This is once again a list of completely incorrect interpretations and assumptions

No, being a patron does not give me permission to be rude and I am not being rude. The non-patrons are the ones being overtly rude and dare I say borderline hateful.
So please, stop the exaggerated moral lecturing and direct it towards you fellow non-patrons. Otherwise this is just tribalism, rather than concern for the etiquette.

Regarding GOG caring, it's less to do about patrons vs non-patrons and more to do with the forum vs discord. They prefer discord to the forum. This applies to many gaming companies these days. Ubisoft have straight up shut down their forum for the sake of Discord. Discord is far less toxic than the forum. And no, it's not an echo chamber either. Many wish the patrons program did not exist, including myself.

And no, I am not trying to sell you the patronage. Read my other messages.
I want the patrons program to remain as "useless" and easily-ignored as possible for the sake of everyone. I merely mentioned that paying said sub, even briefly, would enable you to see far greater communication with GOG as well as make you understand how everything patron-related works, so you would no longer have to assume and then argue based on incorrect assumptions.

So no, other than helping you learn things instead of assuming, I am not trying to convince anyone to sub. Spending that 5$ on an extra game is far better for everybody, because publishers get a cut and GOG is nothing without the publishers.

Okay. So it's 100% rude and hateful for me to having expressed concern that the patrons are not necessarily getting anything of value for the $5 a month? Thanks for informing me that caring is not sharing around here. Compassion towards others is obviously bad, and I suppose that we probably should add that empathy is harmful while we're at it.

If that's case, I'll have to make a very serious effort to not care about anyone around here, so let's try this -

I don't think that the patrons actually get anything of value for their $5 a month, and that was the whole point of my original post. Sure they get membership with a private club on Discord, but I always found hanging out on Discord to just be a distraction from actually playing games. Maybe that's the point though? If the patrons hang out on Discord all day, they're distracted and don't play the games in their library. Can you really say that you enjoyed playing something if you never play it, you just hoard it and spend all your time on some Discord chat channel talking with strangers about games you own but never play because you're too busy wasting time on some chat channel. That's exactly how I see Discord clubs.

Now previously, my opinion was that GOG should be giving their patrons more than some waste of time chat channel club, but I now feel entirely obligated to say that patrons should be happy with a Discord chat channel club and nothing else.

WHAT? What are you even talking about here? I did not call you rude. I gave specific quote of those being rude. Are you pretending to not have seen them?

Multiple people have already been overtly rude to me here, so you will have to excuse me if I came off slightly condescending to you there that one time. Let's just try to drop this matter and move on to the actual argument then, please? I'd much rather engage with the second half of your comment.

Yes, you are right. The value is crap. It's almost-nothing. It's basically a recurring donation. Other than cloning Humble Choice (Handing out a handful of "free" games every month), all other potential subscription perks are terrible:

• More cloud save storage... right after cutting it down to unusable-for-large-RPGs 200MB? That would certainly be the prime example of enshittification.

• What else could they offer? Discounts? What kind? For specific games? For the whole checkout? From who's cut - GOG's own? The ones for specific games would likely be wasted for users of large libraries. The ones for the whole checkout may lead to more money loss than what was gained through the sub. Also it would make the sub seem mandatory, rather than optional.That would, once again, be a sign of enshittification.

• I did suggest that they should let patrons nominate broken games, but after your comment about some patrons making a mockery out of this system, by making malicious nominations...
...I am not sure if that's a good idea either. There are broken games that actually need fixing, but if people vote for "God of War 2018" just for laughs, then what's would even be the point? Maybe it could still work of they added a mandatory text box for explaining the problem, but people could just fill it up with nonsense again. We know GOG has no resources to moderate anything...

So yeah... The patrons program is useless and it should stay useless. Otherwise the subscription would become mandatory, rather than optional, and who would want that?

As for wasting time on discord instead of playing games... fair point, but we're doing this right now on the forum.

I agree, it's not worth it for me. But hey, that's just my opinion. I know others believe it's worth it to support GOG in bringing more games to the platform, and that's cool—it's their cash to spend how they want. I personally spend a lot on collecting retro games for both PC and consoles. Some folks think I'm dumb for spending money on that when you can just download on steam or emulate games. But it's something I genuinely enjoy doing.

What really baffles me is when people go out of their way to criticize how others choose to spend their money on GOG. Not saying you did that, CatventurerCat.. It's just baffling to me.

I imagine there are quite a few Patrons who are game developers, publishers, journalists, youtubers, live streamers, etc.

For them the $5 a month might be a business expense, that the access to a semi-private Discord with active staff alone, would be enough in their eyes to justify the cost.

Sincere questions:

Should people have the right to choose for themselves whether or not the program is currently worth $5/month? Should GOG make that decision for them by shutting the program down?

It's possible many just see it as a generous move to help GOG get old games running on new machines, and don't expect much in return other than that. (As it is currently, I'm not really bothered either way whether the program lives or dies.)

I do still want GOG to publish that report on how the money is being spent.

Is there anything GOG can do or add to make the program worth $5/month in your view?

it feels like tv about games too
🖱😍⃢👾⌨
https://youtu.be/7-8Y-DRM1Hg (for promotional purposes : )

You specifically replied to me saying, "The non-patrons are the ones being overtly rude and dare I say borderline hateful." Since I am blatantly a non-patron and you replied to me specifically saying that, yes you were calling me rude and hateful.

Go See Post #97.

Go see post #97 and #99 yourself. I gave specific examples of those being rude, none of which were you. I don't know why you insist on clipping the statement in half. That being said, it is now clear that you want to argue in bad faith, while ignoring the rest of the discussion I tried to have with you about the usefulness and the perks of the patrons problem.

Sad... I guess it's time to try and move on from this thread.