Willing to pay $1000 USD for alternate endings

[Juku121]

Organize some kind of support system for modders who face financial difficulties and are forced to quit modding and fight for survival.

There are already several such systems: Nexus collects donations for modders, there are quite a few 'donate to a [starving] artist' enterprises like Patreon/Subscribestar/Ko-fi, there are also Kickstarter and alternatives where people beg for money due to all sorts of things, from cancer treatments to criminals shooting them in the head while on vacation.

Any potential money you could get from the OpenXcom community even under the most fortuituous circumstances is going to be tiny, because the userbase just isn't there. Never mind that if we somehow magically did have a system of financial support, there would be a lot of incentive not to pay out to the poorest, but rather to those who contribute the most. Which won't really change much anything for the worst off.

Modding and even game dev in general are not and have never been an answer to financial problems, short of being a lucky founder/executive. Ask all the devs who sunk their life's savings into a pet project that never saw the daylight...

The solution is to use the free time you spend on modding to try to dig yourself out of that hole (learning new skills, looking for a better job, getting a side hustle, even navigating the bureaucracy to eke out a bit more support in more developed countries), not dig yourself further in.

[Juku121]

...in a country where there are wars, no one wants to hire anyone, and if they do, then they either pay less than $100 a month or come soldiers and demand from their superiors to send their workers to the military registration and enlistment office for a medical examination and military service (in simple words, they are taken to war, since there are always not enough soldiers, we are suffering huge losses).

...

Previously, my government at least gave assistance to poor citizens in the amount of $50 a month, now the president and politicians absolutely do not care about their citizens and they refused to help everyone in need, people are so weak that they simply cannot protest, and if they go to protest, then the army will shoot them for betraying their homeland.

In that case your problem is not 'bad finances', it's "relatively meek person in war-damaged country". Historically, there's been no good solution to that. I suggest considering emigration instead of hoping for modding to provide what it doesn't provide to almost anyone, anywhere, even in countries far better off than that.

[Juku121]

Spoiler" Really offtopic now":

Let me just say that my personal experience with Russia, Russians, Ukrainians and Ukrainian refugees does not quite agree with your picture of it.

I agree that war sucks, getting press-ganged into it sucks worse, and Ukraine is a country wrestling with a giant pile of problems, most of them self-inflicted. But at least it's trying. I strongly disagree with your idea that surrender or defeat would make things better, even for Russia.

In any case, if you think life in Ukraine is worse than under Russia and it's too hard to go over the western and northern borders, there is always the option to defect to Russia or its new colonies. There are people who (presumably) make money as propagandist streamers for the reconstruction of Mariupol. That's in all likelihood an order of magnitude or two more income than you'd ever get from modding anything.

[SupSuper]

Guys, this is getting way off-topic. I sympathize with your situation, but this is not the place for it. If you wanna chat further, take it to DMs.

[Solarius Scorch]

Since the thread has been resolved, and then started going in an inappropriate direction, I am locking it.