Hi there! I hope you’ve been enjoying the past few articles and comics we’ve added to Metrocop in the past couple of months. Today, I have some news regarding the ongoing weekly schedule.

Back when the site relaunched on August 31, I mentioned the following:

During the absurdly long development period of the new website, I prepared a content plan and have continuously been working on new content, to be published (at least at first) on a weekly basis. I’m aiming for at least 3 months of sticking to that schedule, then seeing if that’s sustainable in the long run—Metrocop is, at least for now, still very much a one-man hobby project, so I’m sure you can imagine how much work that is!

November marks the third month of the twice-a-week schedule (new Half-Life-related articles on Mondays, new comics or related articles on Wednesdays). In this period, we’ve already added 14 articles to the website, with over 28.600 words in total, as well as 89 comics to the archive.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, doing 2000+ words and adding dozens of new comics every week has proven to be unsustainable in the long run, to say the least, which is why I’m announcing some changes to the schedule.

What’s changing

  • Effective immediately, Metrocop will not have scheduled Wednesday posts for the month of November. That isn’t to say there will be no posts on Wednesdays (there is still a new episode of Combine Exchange Program to come this month, plus I’m still constantly working on bringing more comics to the archive), but there won’t be an obligatory weekly post anymore. With that said, during November, unless anything changes or forces my hand, there will still be weekly posts on Mondays;
  • After the three-month period is over, i.e. after the end of November, there will no longer be a schedule on Metrocop, for comics or articles. This doesn’t mean there won’t be any new posts in the future, just that releases will be more sporadic, i.e. “when it’s done”. This will have the upside of allowing more time to invest in higher-quality articles, an example of which is hopefully coming this month or the next, and in more features for the website and associated platforms such as the Discord server, including some requested features (which doesn’t mean you won’t get any lists, rankings or other comparatively easier articles, because those are still fun to write).

I hope you will understand and thank you if you’ve been keeping up with the content we’ve been releasing thus far! There will still be more to come—better still once I can catch my breath and work on things more calmly and in-depth—and you can always read the hundreds of comics already available on our website, because I’m sure most people haven’t even reached the depths of that massive archive.

How to keep up with new releases

One advantage of a weekly schedule that motivated me to keep going is that you can always know when things are coming out and have a reason to keep visiting regularly. Without a fixed schedule, it’s harder to keep up and it’s therefore easier to forget about the website.

Right now, there are two good ways of keeping up with new releases:

  • Join our Discord server. We have a channel specifically for announcing new posts, “#new-articles”. If you use Discord, you can always visit the server to find out if there’s anything new on the website;
  • Follow @metrocopnet on Twitter. I am aware that the platform is essentially burning since its recent acquisition by a certain billionaire, but, for the time being, Metrocop will continue to have an active presence on that social network. Depending on how things go in the future, it might expand to Twitter-like replacements as well.

I am contemplating creating an e-mail newsletter in the future so you can be notified by e-mail whenever a new article or comic is published, but, for the time being, those are the two available methods. Nothing’s stopping you from just visiting “https://metrocop.net” directly, either!

One last thing

I’m also preparing a way to crowdfund the website, especially in regards to the hosting costs that are burning a hole in my pocket every month. I know it’s hypocritical to ask for money the moment I say I’m slowing things down relatively speaking, but if you want to help the website stay up and maybe even help finance some crazy ideas for the future, please keep an eye out for that.

I think that’s plenty for now. As mentioned, there will continue to be new weekly posts on Mondays, so make sure to keep coming back for those, and then keep following Metrocop to be updated on when new content is released!