Patreon Tier Changes
Welcome to another blog post. We would like to inform you of an upcoming change to how Patreon Tiers work, specifically regarding the different concurrent viewer capacities we will be offering. Our aim is to clarify any confusion regarding our pricing. Additionally, we would like to do a bit of a deep dive on our recently shutdown VRChat Bots and how they worked, including some sneak peaks at some of the statistics from their two years of service.
VRCDN has always operated as a “pay what you want” service, with a soft cap of up to 300 concurrent viewers (CCU). However, this approach has caused confusion for event organisers that wanted to go beyond these restrictions. Currently, we create custom quotes for those who go above the limits. Unfortunately, this is a lot of work and creates many questions from event organisers. Beginning on 21st of August 2023, we will be rolling out a hard cap on streams, which will change your allowed CCU based on the specific Patreon Tier you subscribe to.
Below is a list of changes we will be implementing to the tiers:
| Current Tier Name | New Tier Name | New Tier CCU |
|---|---|---|
| Helping Out | VRCDN 40 | 40 concurrent viewers |
| Support VRCDN 5 | VRCDN 100 | 100 concurrent viewers |
| Support VRCDN 10 | VRCDN 200 | 200 concurrent viewers |
| Support VRCDN 15 | VRCDN 300 | 300 concurrent viewers |
| Support VRCDN 20 | VRCDN 400 | 400 concurrent viewers |
| Support VRCDN 25 | VRCDN 500 | 500 concurrent viewers |
| Support VRCDN 30 | VRCDN 600 | 600 concurrent viewers |
| Support VRCDN 35 | VRCDN 700 | 700 concurrent viewers |
| Support VRCDN 40 | VRCDN 800 | 800 concurrent viewers |
| Support VRCDN 45 | VRCDN 900 | 900 concurrent viewers |
| Support VRCDN 50 | VRCDN 1,000 | 1,000 concurrent viewers |
I’m sure many of you will have questions about this change so we will try to address a few of them here and will be happy to answer any other questions you might have via our social media, support system at https://support.vrcdn.live or email addresses found here: https://vrcdn.live/contact.
Firstly, VRCDN remains a crowd-funded platform, relying on the contributions of all users to sustain its operations. This collaborative approach allows us to maintain affordable pricing for everyone while delivering a high-quality service to our community.
Secondly, it’s important to know the distinction between a “soft cap” and “hard cap”. A “soft cap” doesn’t impose specific CCU limit, whereas a “hard cap” does. This means no unexpected bills for you as you cannot go over the limits of your subscribed tier. Additionally, you have the flexibility to switch tiers at any time. This allows you to adjust your maximum CCU without interrupting your ongoing stream, which proves useful in scenarios where your event surpasses initial expectations. We will expand our control panel to display your current viewers and your account CCU limits.
Lastly, we understand that certain events may require more than the standard 1,000 CCU limit. For such cases, please reach out to us using the contact information linked above. We will work with you to make a custom quote that best suits your specific needs.
Farewell VRChat Bots
On June 28th, 2023, we made the announcement regarding the discontinuation of our VRChat bot service. These bots have played a significant role in facilitating event discovery and streamlining the management of multi-instance events. However, now that VRChat Groups has reached a point where its features are on par with what our bots can offer, we felt it was time to shut them down so we can focus 100% of our efforts on the VRCDN core services.
Here is a brief history and some behind-the-scenes information about our bots, as well as interesting statistics and some of the plans we had for them. The concept of bots was initially conceived on July 11th, 2021, following a conversation with a VRChat-based festival that was struggling to manage the large number of instances required to meet their attendees’ demands. During this time Jazzy and Klukule were fully occupied with handling the increasing demand of the VRCDN streaming service. Given this, the idea of a bot capable of managing invites across instances was proposed to 24HourMusic, who at that time was not yet part of VRCDN but was well-known for their expertise in reverse engineering and development.
Within a short span of under 24 hours, 24HourMusic developed a proof-of-concept build of the bot which showed their dedication and creative abilities which led to 24HourMusic being invited to officially join the VRCDN team.
Below are some interesting statistics from the last 7 months during which the bots were active. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide data from before this period as it’s not something we have available due to data retention limits:
- 35,347 friends.
- 58,593 invites requested.
- 40,976 invites sent.
VRCDN-RED was our most popular bot and one of the longest serving bots.
These statistics highlight the impact and value of the bots during their operation. While we bid farewell to their services, we remain grateful for the opportunity to have provided these features to the VRChat community and appreciate the support and feedback received during this time.
We are unable to delve into the extensive specifics due to undisclosed internal applications and services, however we are pleased to share a diagram illustrating internal architecture of the bots’ service during the time we were designing high availability features for them.
Through this architecture, the “bot runner” application was capable of concurrently operating multiple bot accounts. The bot runner applications were located behind a series of manager applications, responsible for distributing incoming requests to the respective bot runners. This architecture enabled seamless migration of the bots between different runners in the event of outages, ensuring uninterrupted operations.
We understand that we could only provide limited details about the bots' architecture, but we hope that this glimpse offers a small peek into their complexity. We appreciate you taking the time to read our blog post, we hope to post more of these in the future so keep an eye on our socials.
Happy streaming!