New Subscription Options at GMPuzzles
Dear fans of GMPuzzles,
We’ve completed setting up 2018 subscription options for our supporters. You can find full details on this web page including quarterly and annual payment options at three levels. Payments will be through PayPal (no account needed if doing credit card processing).
The Expert level gives you early access to all of our puzzles as well as printed solutions and some solving videos to help you get better at our various styles.
The Master level includes the Expert rewards and adds in two extra puzzles for every posted week of puzzles and gives you your choice of one e-book published each quarter.
The Grandmaster level is the easiest way to get every single puzzle we publish in a year. It includes every e-book we publish (which you’ll receive before anyone else), two giant puzzle rewards, and everything in the other levels.
If you want to support our website in 2018, please consider becoming a subscriber to GMPuzzles.
Cheers,
Thomas
Hi Thomas,
I am a little disappointed to see the frequency of walkthroughs get reduced under the new model. They were nice to have, especially on the tougher puzzles where I had trouble getting footholds. Maybe incorporating more text walkthroughs could help?
My major qualm with signing up is a concern about if you can meet the stated delivery goals for each quarter, especially regarding the books and giant puzzles. I was fine with the per pack model on Patreon, since we were charged only when packs were released. However, the upfront cost plus the higher price point of the Grandmaster level makes me a bit hesitant to subscribe though.
Forgive me if this sounds entitled. I have enjoyed the site and all the puzzles over the years, and I do plan to continue my support in some way. Thank you, and have a nice day.
Hi Giovanni,
Thanks for your feedback. It is never an easy decision to make changes to the site, but we are always trying to experiment and if it turns out we can find ways to continue “weekly” videos we may return to this mode.
Right now, the walkthroughs take several hours to prepare and are only watched by about 25% of the supporters who receive them. Even the written walkthroughs we’ve done take 4-5 hours to prepare which is a lot of time considering that is also as much time as it takes to edit and post a full week of puzzles. In order to promise targets of 9 weeks per quarter AND 3 e-books per quarter, we had to make some compromises. We’ll revisit in several months, including seeing if we can get back to weekly posting first while maintaining a more ambitious e-book schedule.
In starting this new subscription system, we are committed to meeting our publication goals above. We’ll check in here every three months and update this page with the # of posted weeks and titles of e-books we’ve released so that solvers can evaluate the value of joining the highest reward level. Some may find they don’t need every book we publish, and the Master level may offer the better amount of flexibility in addition to getting all of the web+bonus puzzles.
Cheers,
Thomas
Could you make it possible to FAVE puzzles when subscribers receive them? I find that since subscribing I virtually never actually visit the website and no longer give any feedback, even on particularly great puzzles, due to the fact that I would often have to make a conscious effort to return to the site X days later when the puzzle goes up.
I imagine the same is true for many other people, which greatly limits feedback.
This is a great suggestion, but I’m not sure I know how to implement it. We’ll think about this more.
Besides the FAVE button, I expect a lot of solvers may want to add comments to the blog at the time they solve the puzzles. Since going to a weekly PDF email option, we do get less discussion. There are some wordpress options to give out user accounts but not an easy way that I know of to release posts twice, to users and then to everyone, at different times without manual steps.
I agree that the commenting is harder, but for the FAVES I was thinking you could just make a page that has the FAVE/answer checker bar for each of the current week’s puzzles. Though maybe this is harder than it initially seems.
For the commenting yeah, it’d be nice if WordPress could add a feature to automatically update post settings at a future time. I suppose it’s a pretty niche desired feature though, so I doubt they’ll add it any time soon even though it would probably be pretty easy on their end.
The way the solving widget currently works is to be associated to a specific post. I can’t give multiple buttons on a single page, and if I did add different buttons on another page they wouldn’t by default aggregate clicks with the widget on the post that came later. So, as I said, we are in a slight technical corner right now without some new code. But I am thinking about how to solve both the commenting and FAVE’ing issue at the same time as I’d like to improve each of these experiences and there could be something to pull from wordpress plugins if we are creative.