Sets and the support bar

When I buy item sets does that help move the support bar?

I found out the support bar does not actually move bit-by-bit like a health bar. They update the Support Us bar-level with a bigger jump on rare occasions. I believe the bar is mainly based on subscriptions, Supporter & Mentor , but is also just a general thermometer of the potential. The levels of the support bar are actually defined on that Support Us link, where it says "Current Subscriber Count", you can mouse-over the levels of the thermometer there. Purchases from the Marketplace support Roll20 and the artist-producer of the set! It definitely helps Roll20 to buy Sets.

Okay, because I buy lots of sets, and I probably wouldn't just for the maptiles if I didn't feel like buying the sets also expressed my support for roll20 somehow and helped it get better.

It really does help. The artists are paid the majority, which helps incentivize the artists to make & offer more content on the Marketplace, increasing the variety for everyone. Also a portion of the Marketplace sale goes to Roll20 and supports the site. Based on some info here, <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/home/becomecreator" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/home/becomecreator</a>

It's more a barometer. I think it's currently stuck there in terms of scalability as the cost to maintain everything may have gone up with the extra servers so the 'bare bones' is essentially more expensive. Although there are more supporters/mentors, the lights-running-cost is higher; not to mention there needs to be a buffer-zone so the devs feel they can continue to live off the money they're currently getting since they quit their jobs. Therefore there is no 'net gain'. Either way it's manually set by the devs. It will probably hop if there's suddenly a huge flux in subscribers. But then again, are they long-term or only for a few months? It's hard to tell so until there's stability in terms of their cash flow, they'll err on the side of 'we don't have enough'. That's the safer route compared to the kick-starter "I'll make wild promises if you give me money." Over commitment creates unrealistic expectations, I think they're struggling with the current number of bugs and new features so their mindset could be 'make it stable before we go further' .

Actually, the Marketplace isn't counted with the Supporter Bar metric (mostly because the lion's share of that income goes directly to the creators)... that said, we're further along than the bar is currently showing. An update is needed to the bar on the "state of the service," but we've obviously hired some folks and done some big stuff like native tablet applications. More to come, for sure.