Patreon for WeakAuras/me?

[InfusOnWoW]

So, recently the DBM author started a Patreon page for DBM and what suprised me is that how many people are willing to support him

I've been wondering the past few weeks whether a similar amount of people would be interested in supporting me doing WeakAuras full-time. I've done various features, e.g. DBM/BigWigs integration, Stop Motion textures, Circular Progress and tons of bug fixes. For example, if anyone remembers that the WeakAuras options dialog was very slow with hundreds of auras, I fixed that. In the last two years I've been the most active WeakAuras developer.

All of that has been done in my free time, which drastically limits the amount of work that I can do on WeakAuras. As I usually prioritize bug fixes, feature development takes months. And there are lots of new features I would love to work on. E.g. nested groups, trigger templates to make WeakAuras easier to setup, a better model selector, a better options dialog.

I recently quit my job and have a few job offers before me, but for WA I'd be willing to earn significantly less and with probably much higher risk.

A few things you should keep in mind. WeakAuras is a team effort, while I'm certainly the most active developer at the moment, WeakAuras was already a good and mostly complete addon before I started. Thus you shouldn't attribute the full greatness of WeakAuras to me.

[Promethieus]

No reason not to. Go for it - I'm sure you'll get lots of support.

[InfusOnWoW]

No reason not to. Go for it - I'm sure you'll get lots of support.

Well, it's either full-time WA, or full-time "Senior Software developer" with hobby WA development. I'm curious if the former is even a option. The later is obviously the safer and saner way to do it.

[Zogarth]

Well, it's either full-time WA, or full-time "Senior Software developer" with hobby WA development. I'm curious if the former is even a option. The later is obviously the safer and saner way to do it.

Gonna be honest, I would do both. WA is normally quickly updated and got what it needs. At the same time, I do believe that people like you deserve to get payed for it. I see no reason not to make a Patreon, so those that want to support can. Also, if the support is big enough, maybe you could make it your full time job. But honestly seems like a big risk. And who knows how long WoW will even remain popular enough for you to make a living.

[Ealyssa]

I will be honest. While I wouldn't like to play wow without WA. I also wouldn't give a single dollar for an addon.

Their is just too much invaluable addons out there to remunerate every single one of their authors. Should I give 1-2 dollars every months for shadowed unit frame, for bartender, for BigWigs, for Exorsus, for Arkinventory, for Details, for PetBattleTeams, and litteraly a hundred more ?

I just won't spend 50+/mo for wow sub + addons. That would be crazy. And while each of these addons are really nice, if they stop, something else will come.

It surelly takes time to create and maintain them, as do a lot of things "outside the game" when playing a MMO. But I honestly find it a bit sad when people nowadays try to monetize every single thing they do.

But hey, if DBM dev could make a living out of it, why not try. I find WA infinitely more usefull, and I honestly thank you for making it. GL in your adventure.

[InfusOnWoW]

It surelly takes time to create and maintain them, as do a lot of things "outside the game" when playing a MMO. But I honestly find it a bit sad when people nowadays try to monetize every single thing they do.

It's not that I want to monetize my existing efforts, which are around ~4 hours per week. I do that, without any expectation of ever getting any money out of that. It's that I would work full-time on WeakAuras, meaning ~35-40 hours per week.

[HealTree]

I guess that would depend on whats' next for WA.

As you mentioned Infus, nested groups, trigger templates to make WeakAuras easier to setup, a better model selector, a better options dialog are things you want to develop for WA. Lets say that takes 2 Months fulltime, which would sum up 320 hours of work. But whats there after that?

WA certainly is a powerful tool and some ppl creating auras that would fit better as their own addons, so the question would be, how long can WA be in development until there is nothing more to add to it?

[Phunkle]

Is there a way for you to actually go fulltime on WA? And by that I mean not only for a couple of months.

I'm not an expert on this topic so I don't know if an AddOn could fill a normal work week for a long time.

[InfusOnWoW]

Is there a way for you to actually go fulltime on WA? And by that I mean not only for a couple of months.

I'm not an expert on this topic so I don't know if an AddOn could fill a normal work week for a long time.

Imho, yeah there is, I have plenty of ideas that would fill my time. I mentioned nested groups above. Nested groups are hard to do because fundamentally a lot of code just assumes that those don't exist. Fixing that is possible, it just a enourmous task.

But as another example: For legion lots of classes changed in major ways, people will want to create plenty of new auras. Now, while WeakAuras is very powerful and supports every new ability there is, creating tons of auras is a chore. What if, WeakAuras would contain a list of the buffs/abilities of each class? That would make setting up new interfaces a lot quicker and a lot nicer. Yet, creating or maintaining such a list for all 36 specs?

Or the model browser I mentioned. Currently you can only see one model at the time. It would be far better, if it showed a grid with e.g. 16 models at a time.

Or the options view, reordering auras via those small up and down arrows is rather cumbersome, can we support drag and drop there? I think it might be possible.

Legion adds a new health/mana display below your character. That display moves depending on your zoom level. It would be nice to have WA be able to position auras next to it. (Which then move in the same way when you zoom.)

Legion adds a "cost overlay" to the focus and mana bars. That is, if you start casting, the cost of that spell is shown on your ressource bar. We should support the same with WA.

Our icons displays don't show as much information as a similar bartender button. It would be nice, to e.g. support range-checking or out of mana, and similarly for the Cooldown triggers, I added a "always show" option some time ago. How about a option to desaturate the button while it is on cooldown? I have a idea how to implement that in a generic and flexibel way.

Then there's triaging and fixing bugs. The truth is, while I try to prioritize bug reports, if a bug report would require massive investment to fix, it just isn't happening at the moment.

And those are just my ideas, doing it full-time would allow me to take on more feature suggestions.

So, plenty of ideas, but frankly, with the time I can invest at the moment, I won't have ever enough time to work on most of those.

Obviously with Patreon, I'd do a ~daily report on what I worked on. As in, I would treat that as a professional.

[Phunkle]

Well, that's certainly a whole bunch of possible ideas and I like every one of them.

[Hekili]

Imho, yeah there is, I have plenty of ideas that would fill my time. I mentioned nested groups above. Nested groups are hard to do because fundamentally a lot of code just assumes that those don't exist. Fixing that is possible, it just a enourmous task.

But as another example: For legion lots of classes changed in major ways, people will want to create plenty of new auras. Now, while WeakAuras is very powerful and supports every new ability there is, creating tons of auras is a chore. What if, WeakAuras would contain a list of the buffs/abilities of each class? That would make setting up new interfaces a lot quicker and a lot nicer. Yet, creating or maintaining such a list for all 36 specs?

Developing a tool to scrape wowhead/wowdb and dump it in Lua format would be easier (some addons already do this, such as LibItemBuffs). For my own purposes, I filter SimulationCraft output for ability lists and whatnot, but that puts me at the mercy of SimC's development schedule.

In any case, there are lots of tweaks and updates you could certainly be doing on a regular basis if you did full-time WA development. Several items on your list are short term projects you could complete, but few of them indicate a need for ongoing maintenance. On Blizzard's release schedule, major updates are roughly every 6 months and minor updates are monthly.

Your work is invaluable, but I don't know that you can anticipate a living wage from Patreon. Maybe one day out of your week, but a full work week is quite a chunk of time.

[shanthi]

You probably shouldn't put off picking up a job while you evaluate whether you can live off just Patreon donations. Most likely, even if you can eventually, you won't be able to immediately...it could take months or even years for it to ramp up to peak support. Beyond that, there's the risk that if WoW's playerbase continues to shrink, it won't be a stable thing long-term.

It might be wise to both take one of those job offers and start the Patreon account. If the WeakAuras donations take off to an unexpected extent, you can always reevaluate whether you want to keep your full-time job later. In the meantime, though, you'll have a stable source of income. You can ramp up your work on WeakAuras commensurate with how much you're drawing in donations.

One last thing--a full-time job's worth of time is actually enormous over a year or more. You have projects that might take some time in your mind right now, but do you really anticipate having enough to do given months and months of ~40 hours per week? Unless you're planning to turn this into a suite of products, you may find yourself running out of things in a few months or a year.

[ComputerNerd]

While on the discussion of new ideas, where would be the best place to suggest any ideas for WeakAuras.

[InfusOnWoW]

http://www.wowace.com/addons/weakauras-2/tickets/ is the one place where a idea doesn't get lost, so that's the one I prefer. Though if you mention it either here or on reddit, I probably have read it. Also if you want to start a discussion, a forum is a better place, you can create the ticket afterwards. So shoot.

[l33t]

Just to be completely honest: you can try, sure. But I, for example, won't give you a single coin. I always felt addons for WoW are something optional, and if it takes you a lot of time to develop them, I'd better you just stop doing it instead of blackmailing people into paying you for your efforts, like DBM author basically did. It is simply unrealistic demanding us to pay 1$+/month for every addon we use.

By the way, our whole raiding guild just stops using DBM and switches to BigWigs for Legion.

[InfusOnWoW]

Just to be completely honest: you can try, sure. But I, for example, won't give you a single coin. I always felt addons for WoW are something optional, and if it takes you a lot of time to develop them, I'd better you just stop doing it instead of blackmailing people into paying you for your efforts, like DBM author basically did. It is simply unrealistic demanding us to pay 1$+/month for every addon we use.

By the way, our whole raiding guild just stops using DBM and switches to BigWigs for Legion.

No one, absolutely no one has forced anyone to donate to the DBM author. And I don't know how my posts can be interpreted as blackmail.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

Job security with reliable income is priority number one for anyone, going 100% into WA building and hoping to be funded by Patreon supports or other donations is not reliable in the slightest and I wouldn't recommend doing the leap.

Like others are saying you could "feel the waters" for a while and see how much "fish" you can get, do so for at least 6 months and see how much you can get on average and split that on the amount of work you do. Say if you manage to work 20% of a regular schedule (8hrs per week) for those 6 months, count your money then and multiply by 5 and see if that amount is something you'd be able to live with.

Then there's the simple matter of what goes on your Resume, WoW isn't going to stay around forever and if you decide to do this then you should put it on your Resume. How would that look? Would it carry any weight in any future jobs you might apply for?

few quick questions.
- Is Patreon taxed? if so how much? (and have you calculated that in your potential income?)
- Insurance and/or other benefits?
- How long can realistically maintain this with the swings of popularity and need for WA scripts comes and go as the Raid Tiers come with wow?
- Competition, have you thought about how much potential competition you'll get and how easily something is spread without you gaining anything from it?


I think it's a huge gamble, one I would never ever risk going full time on without any sort of safety web beneath me- like a huge savings account I can live off for a while if things don't go as planned.

[l33t]

No one, absolutely no one has forced anyone to donate to the DBM author. And I don't know how my posts can be interpreted as blackmail.

Well, of course not! But have you read his message? It was directly stating that "unless you support me, I won't have enough time to get DBM ready for Legion content in time". If that is not blackmailing, I can't even what is. And your messages have nothing to do with blackmailing, that's all about DBM's author only, sorry for misunderstanding.

Anyways, I am quite sure that you getting full-time job is a way better thing for you than trying to live off patreon unreliable donations.

[Varitok]

Just to be completely honest: you can try, sure. But I, for example, won't give you a single coin. I always felt addons for WoW are something optional, and if it takes you a lot of time to develop them, I'd better you just stop doing it instead of blackmailing people into paying you for your efforts, like DBM author basically did. It is simply unrealistic demanding us to pay 1$+/month for every addon we use.

By the way, our whole raiding guild just stops using DBM and switches to BigWigs for Legion.

What the hell are you talking about blackmailing? It's an optional thing for people willing to support. He didn't say "Give me money or ill stop updating the mod".

- - - Updated - - -

Well, of course not! But have you read his message? It was directly stating that "unless you support me, I won't have enough time to get DBM ready for Legion content in time". If that is not blackmailing, I can't even what is. And your messages have nothing to do with blackmailing, that's all about DBM's author only, sorry for misunderstanding.

Anyways, I am quite sure that you getting full-time job is a way better thing for you than trying to live off patreon unreliable donations.

It isn't blackmailing so you obviously don't know what it is.

[InfusOnWoW]

Like others are saying you could "feel the waters" for a while and see how much "fish" you can get, do so for at least 6 months and see how much you can get on average and split that on the amount of work you do. Say if you manage to work 20% of a regular schedule (8hrs per week) for those 6 months, count your money then and multiply by 5 and see if that amount is something you'd be able to live with.

Well, the jobs I typically take, don't allow for any other paid work, nor for a reduced work week. It's either full-time or as with roughly the amount I currently invest. And asking for money, without promising something extra doesn't feel right to me. Also doing that for just one member of the team, would also feel wrong. If I work full-time, it's reasonable, but not if all of us do it as a hobby.

Then there's the simple matter of what goes on your Resume, WoW isn't going to stay around forever and if you decide to do this then you should put it on your Resume. How would that look? Would it carry any weight in any future jobs you might apply for?

A product used by 200 thousand people (or whatever the number is) doesn't look to bad on the resume. OTH, Lua is not exactly a popular language.

- Is Patreon taxed? if so how much? (and have you calculated that in your potential income?)
- Insurance and/or other benefits?
- How long can realistically maintain this with the swings of popularity and need for WA scripts comes and go as the Raid Tiers come with wow?
- Competition, have you thought about how much potential competition you'll get and how easily something is spread without you gaining anything from it?

The usual taxes and insurances you'd also have working as a freelance. I do have enough saved money to take such a risk. It needs to cover my costs eventually, but if it takes half a year, that's okay.