State of the Org — November 2017

Link to past broadcast of our State of the Org Address

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/202482226

Start of Address

Evan: Hi everybody and welcome to the November 2017 State of the Org, lets get introductions out of the way quick for those who don’t know us. My name’s Evan Hirsh, I am the the president and founder of RIT Esports. With me tonight I have the other admins of RIT Esports, starting with Joe Farrell, the Vice President,

Joe: Hello.

Evan: Ron Dodge, our Production Manager,

Ron: Hi I’m Ron

Evan: And Zach Gannon our treasurer.

Zach: Bepis

Evan: Great. Okay, so let’s get right into this. Basically, first thing’s first, we don’t usually do these towards the middle of the month, we usually do them much later, so just quick reasoning out of the way while we’re doing it in the middle of essentially November. That is because next week’s Thanksgiving, didn’t want to kind of, we didn’t think we’d be able to get a reliable production out, and also the week after that‘s December, and we wanted to get stuff in. So, good news is that unlike most other months, we actually got an insane amount of stuff, cool stuff, happening within the last two to three weeks since we did our last State of the Org. So, we’re gonna talk about it, starting with, actually, crowdfunding.

CROWDFUNDING

Evan: So, for those who don’t know, we are going to be launching a crowdfunding campaign, and to talk about that, we’ve got Zach and Ron.

Ron: Time to roll for initiative.

Evan: Yeah.

Zach: I guess I’ll go first. So basically, we’re launching crowdfunding campaign within the next, I don’t know, week or two? It depends on how quickly RIT’s able to get it done with us. The campaign will last a few weeks, probably until the end of December, and our base goal that’s basically like a giant stretch is 30k. If we get even a portion of this, we will be able to do a lot. All this money will be going towards buying teams things like equipment, jerseys, paying any fees we need, travel expenses, et cetera, et cetera. So if we can get even a portion of this done, that would be fantastic. You can help in one of two ways. You can either help by actually donating money to the crowdfunding service campaign, or you can share it with friends, family, or even strangers through social media. There’s social media integration if I remember with the site, so you can just share it and hope that people you know will also chip in. If you do one of these two, or even both, that would be very appreciated for our funding efforts, as right now we’re pretty much going out of pocket for everything since we do not have funding from the school or support from the school in general.

Evan: Yeah, most of the things have been more or less out of pocket. I’ve been the one paying for the server for the past year for our website, and also CounterStrike’s teamspeak, which we gotta have a discussion about that.

Ron: *Laughs* Oh no, not in here.

Evan: Not in here! Eventually. Either way, this crowdfunding campaign is a pretty big deal to us, We’re really hopeful that we get a lot of funding through here. This can lead to a lot of awesome stuff. This can lead to equipment procurements from us, this can lead to higher quality stuff from production team this can lead to travel expenses [being covered] for our teams that need to travel to tournaments and events. This really kind of will help us tremendously and every little thing that everybody in and out of this org can do helps us in ways you don’t even know. Literally just posting this link to your friends on Facebook might have a resounding effect. Even if you don’t donate yourself, just spreading the link out and helping out just means a lot to what we get in the future and how quickly we can financially build ourselves up.

Ron: If you have an qualms about what that funding is, the way that crowdfunding kind of is easy to do is that even if you only donate a dollar, you know, it’s pocket change that you have, That one dollar, spread amongst yourself, and 300 others, or 1,000 others, or more depending on how far outreach goes means that that one dollar can turn into multiple hundreds or thousands of dollars. It’s really easy to do, it’s very simple, it’s not breaking the bank for everybody. Any bit of love.

Evan: Exactly. So, either way, this is something I’m pretty hopeful and excited about. Production team’s also working on building promotion around this, this has been their big job for the past few weeks, and I’m excited to see what they turn out in regards to this. Next up, we’re gonna talk about jerseys. I’m gonna bring Joe on to talk about this, pretty excited with the progress so far and we’re reaching the final stretch here.

JERSEYS

Joe: Let’s talk about everybody’s favorite “coming soon,” jerseys. So, we’re getting somewhere, I know, it’s insane to think that we might actually have jerseys someday, but it is a real possibility. We’ve sent the final payments to [MetaThreads], at this point we are waiting on them to write up our contract, we payed them a $150 design fee, and we are hoping that we are going to be able to recoup that in the jersey sales, which, the price of the jerseys are currently being negotiated with Meta, between team discounts and online sales we have a couple options that we can go with, and we’re trying to find the best way to both not charge people through the nose, but also be able to recoup our losses from the design fee, which, fairly low, so it shouldn’t be all that hard. Keep an eye out for that, prices should be coming out in the next few weeks, and orders should be right behind that. Once everything’s green on Meta’s end, between them designing the jerseys, or rather applying our own design, and opening the store, we’re looking at about 2 weeks. We’re hoping for early December when jersey orders will be ready.

Ron: It’s a nice Christmas gift

Evan: Yeah.

Joe: Exactly, give them to your entire family

Evan: Yeah, it is a nice gift to force upon your loved ones.

Joe: Give great aunt Agnes an RIT Esports jersey.

Evan: Forcibly buy it for them. Make them give themselves the gift of an RIT Esports jersey.

Joe: Octogenarians love Esports jerseys.

Evan: Your parents will love esports jerseys. They don’t know what an “esports” is and they wonder why you’re spending so much time playing DOTA, but this validates it, everything. Basically, I’m really excited for this, this is the thing that people have wanted from day one, and it’s been taking a while because we wanted to do it well. We were looking at jersey companies, we were doing this thing since the Summer, since Ron created the initial design, and so we’re finally nearing the tail end and we’ve essentially gotten the ideal partner out of this, right? We’re working with Meta, that in and of itself is pretty awesome. I’m really thrilled to just see that in general. So, anyways, next up is the Magic Center

MAGIC CENTER

Evan: We’ve got some cool stuff to talk about here. Alright so, for those who don’t know there is a new building coming on campus. It is called the Magic Center. It has been planned for development for a bit now, and they started to build the actual building sometime earlier this year. Now, so here are the things with the building. It is a building that previously everyone’s been asking about, and I’ve pretty much only been able to say “Hey, it’s got some stuff and it’s been designed around us.” But now I can get a lot more into specifics with it. And I made sure to try to get as many details as possible so i could bring them all to you tonight and just kinda like,lay it on everyone. So, what is in the building? Well, first off, the building was designed around us, our faculty advisor, Chad, was on the planning committee for this building from day one, and this building is insanely future forward, and is going to change pretty much a lot about how our organization functions and operates. So what is in the building? First off, let’s start with the more familiar stuff. So, there’s going to be two tabs similar to Orange Hall. If you’ve come to an Orange Labs practice, you’ll be pretty familiar with what we’ve got there. You’ve got six person pods, arranged in these sort of interesting formations. That is a six-person thing specifically because we realized six people would be the optimal layout for a team. For an Overwatch team you’ve got six players max, for other teams you could do five and a coach. This is fundamentally the best layout for us to play our stuff. Also, second floor is going to have traditional labs. When I say that I mean the other labs that are currently existing in Orange Hall, you’ve got rows of desks, of computers, then you’ve got a projector in the back. Those are things that are going to be pretty useful for video review. Really looking forward to just having dedicated rooms for that. Now, why would I be looking forward to those rooms? We already have these rooms in Orange. Basically, we’re going to have way more access to these rooms than in Orange. Right now we are being told that we have access to these labs most nights and weekends. We have way more access to this than Orange Hall. In fact, the idea is that we have so much access to these new labs that we basically gain the ability to move our practices and game sessions from online to offline, and have a physical place to play. I’m going to talk about why that’s pretty beneficial to us later on. But, we already have this. This is pretty cool, but this is something we know. So what’s new? So we have two things. We have a 180 person theater. This theater is going to have a stage with power and data, and a 4k projector system. This in and of itself is pretty cool. The idea is that we are going to be able to run events in here, we’re going to be able to do a lot of productions in here that we would really be able to do otherwise. And the other kicker, and this is the cool thing, you might’ve walked by this building and been like “Hey, what’s this giant concrete room that’s in the front left of the building?” And that’s a 7,000 square foot soundstage with dual screens. It has high powered data on each wall, and both those rooms, the soundstage and the theater, are designed with one of the primary use cases being for esports. This building was fundamentally designed kind of around us. Now we have this giant 7,000 square foot soundstage in order to run productions off of, in order to create events off of, in order to have our players play and our production team produce, and a 180 person theater to create watching events for people to watch our teams actually play their games. So this in and of itself is pretty awesome for us. It also has an audio production room, which is going to be excellent moving forward for when we want to do more audio production, when we’re looking to do casting, and also a green room and showers. Showers, pretty big one, we got showers in here. So this is gonna be finished and opened in Fall of 2018. Shower With Dad Simulator. Can’t believe I just said that in a state of the org. So this is going to be finished and open Fall 2018, which means not this spring semester but next fall semester. So, in less than a year this is thing we have access to and the ability to use. So, going on, this building’s going to change the way that we as an organization fundamentally operate. This is something that I talked to managers about yesterday. The idea is now we’re going to have to start to transition more from an online organization to an organization that has the ability to physically operate in an actual space. Now, we’re still planning on what we should do around this new building and how we should best make use of this building and our access to it. So, the idea is that next semester is going to be the last semester as we know it for “lab practices.” The idea is, right now we have a lab practice, and I haven’t really been entirely shy about saying that the lab practice is more for kind of like, a physical event and just making our teams get offline rather than being the most effective practice we can make it, and that’s something I definitely want to phase out. That’s generally because we don’t have access to Orange Hall labs as much as we want. Now we’re looking at these new labs and we just have the ability to transition all practices to physical “lab practices” without having crowded labs or anything like that. Now, why is this beneficial for us? We’ve been playing online forever, right, this is a change for your team, this is a change for a lot of how we operate, so what is even the point? Okay, here’s why. One is that it eliminates equipment issues. Outside of keyboard and mice, equipment is the best it could be for us and is generally better than the rigs most of us have in our rooms. These labs are gaming labs. They’re going to be equipped with better equipment than Orange labs right now. State of the art graphics cards, pretty great monitors, hopefully 144hz monitors, although those are unconfirmed right now, I’m still looking more into those, and this is just some dedicated equipment to work with. Also, we’re going to have faster dedicated RIT connections here. The whole building is wired with [Category 6 cables]. So, no more internet issues in Province preventing games and practices. This is just going to be a consistent experience for us, and it removes a lot of variables from the equation of when we’re playing matches online versus other teams and other schools. We can’t really keep blaming stuff on internet when that goes wrong. It hasn’t really happened that much in the last semester or so, but I’d still like to prevent it from happening more in the future. Next up, physical practice means just better interaction between players and teams, and now we have just more dedicated labs to do video review, so that’s awesome. This is also super beneficial to our support apparatus, because now we have easier stream setup and teardown, or rather the complete elimination of teardown in and of itself. We don’t have to set up new stream setups anymore on location in order to do events and tournaments, like the recent Rocket League open, which was pretty fun to do, but a massive undertaking and also kind of a technological hindrance. We actually had to work off Wi-Fi for that stream. It also will give us consistent quality across the board. It’ll allow us to produce more of our streams and produce more of our teams playing games, because we’ll just have a dedicated place and location to do that from, rather than having to constantly switch assets and internet connections and computers and bitrates. This is just going to be one physical location to do everything from. But yeah, so I’m really excited for this, this is something that I’ve been looking forward to since actually this time last year. It’s been a really, really, really cool thing to have coming up, and I’m thrilled just to have, finally, a physical place for our organization to kind of exist. Alright, so some other things just to kind of close up. We’ve got some last stuff to talk about mainly. First up, let’s talk about intramurals.

INTRAMURALS

Joe: This is pretty simple, basically intramurals are on everyone’s mind, we are going to be changing the game as we always do, so if you’re interested in playing in intramurals, and you want to have some sort of input on what game it is that we do go with next semester, there is a survey in announcements. That survey’s been out for a couple days by now. If you haven’t already filled it out, go ahead and fill it out, and we’ll have a better idea. The games are League, DOTA, Rocket League and Heroes of the Storm. We won’t be doing Overwatch again, we want to change the game every semester.

STICKY LIPS RECAP

Evan: Thank you for people who came out to the Sticky Lips fundraiser. That was fun. How much money did we make off that, Zach?

Zach: Still have yet to receive the check from them

Evan. Okay, so we’ll figure that out when we get it, but that’s some money in our account that we will use for solid things in the future, like maybe more design stuff from Meta, because we might be designing more merch with them.

Future Merch

Evan: In the future we’re looking to Meta as the company to do our merchandising. They very likely are the company to be doing our merchandising, I’m not really going to confirm anything on that yet, but it’s just probably easier to continue to work with them, and also it’s a really cool company to work with.

Q&A

Q: are jerseys <$60 now?

A: We’re trying to negotiate price.

Q: what are your thoughts on blake shelton being the sexiest man for 2017

A: That’s objectively wrong.

Q: do our accounts keep our game settings on the new lab computers?

A: Probably not. Unless confirmed otherwise, labs will function identically to ones in Orange Hall, except we get more access.

Q: where is penguin

A: I don’t know, I miss him.

Q: Why doesnt ritesports run tournaments?

A: We’ve run them once or twice kind of, but we generally prefer not to. We as an org was generally conceived as the collegiate equivalent of an esports team. Not a priority, done sometimes. Don’t have the resources for EGS style tournaments. At the end of the day, tournaments aren’t really our jobs. (Says the gold Mercy main.) Fine with physical events if they are related to our teams however. Planning to have viewing events when teams are in playoffs or something else.

Q: What do we see ourselves using the soundstage for?

A: A lot of team production stuff. We’ve been conceptualizing what we’re going to use this for for a while now. Place we can put teams for tournaments, more than enough room for this. Can run base production off this.

END

Evan: Thank you everybody for watching this month’s State of the Org, we’re probably going to do another one… When should we do it? I think after finals I would imagine would be the best time.

Joe: Yeah, probably the week after finals.

Evan: Yeah, so I would expect us to do another State of the Org the week after finals once break has started. If you have any questions in the meantime, you wanna talk to us about anything, feel free to join our Discord if you haven’t already to talk to us there, or just ping us. We’re all free whenever to just chat about the organization and what we’re doing. Most of the stuff outside of the building stuff has been pretty openly discussed in our Discord until now, and generally all future developments are pretty much openly discussed in our Discord at any given point, so just feel free to talk to us there. So yeah, thanks everybody for watching and coming by, we will see you all in December, where hopefully we have some new developments for you regarding our Twitch channel and our affiliateship, as well as a report on how the jersey process went.