Welcome to the latest instalment of MLE Monthly Insight; an in-depth look behind the scenes at the different areas of MLE. In these articles we will look to give you, the community a peep behind the scenes, to see what’s happening and potentially what’s coming. So let’s get to it…

Community

Since the last insight Stovvadz has been installed as Community Director. The primary reasons behind this was to give Stovvadz more responsibility within MLE and to bolster Community operations. We are placing more than ever a greater focus on the Community, working on improving engagement and interaction. Part of those improvements have seen the Community team discuss potential surveys, which saw the release of a community survey regarding the Discord server. From this survey we have made a few changes such as merging two training channels into one, removing the redundant coaching role and looking to breath new life into the Hall of Fame amongst other things.

A new Community survey is planned to be released within the coming days. This survey will allow the Community to provide feedback on topics such as transparency, staff interactions with the community, and various other important topics. We appreciate any feedback we get and the more people that provide it the better we can act upon it and look to make improvements from it.

The Community team is also hard at work looking at how to improve how suggestions are handled. We were looking into using EMILIO (Riz’s lovechildbot) to create a new suggestion system. This has proved trickier than first thought and would be difficult to implement all the functionality we would require. Instead of implementing a bot system some upgrades have been made to the current suggestions tracker based on feedback & suggestions.

We are delighted with the response and attendance to the Council Q&As. We hope the Community have enjoyed them so far. Going forward we will look to try hold these at least bi-weekly if not more often, with at least a couple of Council members in attendance at each Q&A. Some of you maybe wondering if this signals the death of the Town Hall? Well after reviewing our operations we have decided to focus Town Halls for the off-season, when there is usually a greater influx of new members to MLE, as well as a number of organisational changes (i.e. rules, structure, etc.).

Elsewhere in the Community team, the events team has not had much success with events so far this season, with low sign-up numbers a problem. The team are committed to providing engaging and entertaining events for the community and are looking at ways to make events more attractive.

Admissions has been running smoothly, with a steady flow of new people joining the community. As always we welcome those joining and hope you enjoy being part of MLE.

Play of the Week activity has been slightly disappointing in terms of voting this season, with approximately 20 valid votes each week. We are looking at ways to improve visibility of Play of the Week and make the process more straight forward. Don’t forget You can see all the Plays of the Week winners from this Season and previous ones on YouTube.

LEAGUE OPERATIONS

Now the Season is well under way, the primary “grind” for League Ops has started. The bulk of League Ops daily work is transactions and ranks, ensuring these are dealt with efficiently and processed correctly. The start of the season always provides a few unique challenges. One of the main ones this season is a result of the change of uploading replays instead of result screenshots. There’s been a few struggles acclimating to this change but things have improved over the past few weeks and the process has become almost routine for all involved. This is only possible thanks to the efforts of the statistics team and General Managers, so thank you to all involved for their work & co-operation.

League Ops is always looking at General Managers responsibilities and how they can be simplified/made easier. With this in mind the team implemented new GM support roles including Captains & Public Relations support. These additions appear to be well received and the League Ops team is very pleased with the results fo far.

One issue the team encountered in Week 1 was with regards the server reset rules. The team addressed these by rewriting the “Once Underway” section of the rule book to better explain the process following a reset request. To our knowledge, no issues akin to what happened in Week 1 have occurred since.

Looking forward, League Ops current goals for the coming weeks include upping support for the developers team, in an effort to begin displaying on our website the work stats team has done assembling MLE’s historical data in a readable and usable fashion. This process is likely to take quite some time, but it is a daily effort from the developer team and stats team alike. They are also working on a way to open up the replays we’re collecting for community use. And finally, EMILIO is an ongoing project that League Ops intend to, one day, appoint as Supreme Ruler of League Operations.

BROADCAST

The Broadcast team has had a good start to the Season, and despite a few minor issues, have set a good foundation going forward. Very recently our Broadcast operations received a big boost thanks to Simple_Aob who has developed a system, which essentially automates key parts of our broadcast such as transitions. This system will mean, in theory, we have a greater pool of broadcasters to call upon. It also will help deliver a more consistent quality of broadcasts. So a big “nice one!” goes to Aob for implementing this for us. We have also implemented a new system for updating our scoreboard, which also simplifies the process for Broadcasters. These improvements have given us a strong platform to build upon and we are now looking at ways how we can improve our output.

Viewer numbers for the Season so far have been decent however we would like streams to consistently achieve an average of 100 viewers. We are always looking at ways to increase the attraction of broadcasts and are open to suggestions. We would like to encourage more people, especially franchise accounts, to retweet the official broadcast schedule posted on Twitter each week. This will help provide more exposure, especially in the Rocket League community. The infographic below shows viewing figures for past month and Season 10 as a whole up to now, as well as revenue generated (please note this does not take into account any commission Twitch receives).

The Affiliate program has had a good start to the season as well, with Riyo doing an excellent job leading that side of Broadcast. We currently have a good number of people in the program close to becoming verified, which will mean more Affiliate Broadcasts! We are looking into ways we can improve the exposure of verified broadcasts. Part of the “problem” is Affiliate Broadcasts don’t follow a set schedule as do Official Broadcasts. This means we are not always sure how many Affiliate Broadcasts there will be each week and when they will be. This makes promotion a little less straight forward but not impossible. Two ways we will promote such streams are through announcements, as well as posting Affiliate Broadcasts for that week in the broadcast-schedule channel.

One element of Broadcast operations that has been discussed in the community recently is that of Broadcast series scheduling/allocation. We understand there’s a desire for teams to get a fair share of screen time and we will endeavour to achieve this were possible. Due to the manner of how series are scheduled it is not straight forward to ensure an equal spread of series amongst teams. Bearing in mind there are only 6 “stream slots” each week, which means a total of 12 teams can be streamed each week. With 10 weekends of broadcast action, which essentially means there are 60 stream slots, so there are 120 opportunities for a team to be selected. There are 112 teams in MLE (split amongst the 32 franchises), which means in theory each team could be streamed once, but for that to happen would there would need to be “perfect scheduling” (i.e. teams scheduling in broadcast times every week). Therefore it’s somewhat an impossible task so we have to strike a balance between fairness as well as ensuring the best matches are shown. The infographic below gives some detail on the broadcast spread so far this season.

MEDIA

Our media team has been mainly focused on cranking out the weekly assets, such as Stars of the Week, Play of the Week, etc. We have also implemented Conference standings graphics for each league, which those who tuned into the Week 3 Broadcasts will have seen (see example below). We are looking to implement more stats/info based graphics as the season progresses.

The team has undergone a small restructure with the addition of Wheezy to the team, whilst Porkchop and TeaBoneJones stepped down. We would like to take this moment to thank them both for their support. Wheezy brings years of expertise and knowledge that we hope will help improve our visual output.

We know everyone is eager to know more logo progress. We currently sit at 16 of the 32 logos complete, halfway there! We are really happy with the quality of the logos produced so far and look forward to seeing the remaining 16 completed. We know progress has perhaps been slower than people hoped/expected and in full honesty we would have liked the progress to be a bit quicker but we didn’t want to compromise on quality & style. With that being said we are looking into speeding up the development, with an eye to ensure all logos are complete by the end of the Season and ready to roll out for Season 11, if not earlier.

MARKETING

The Marketing department has had a somewhat slow start to the season but plans are in place to increase productivity and output. The merch store will see some new designs coming in the near future. We had planned to release them in good time for RLCS, to give anyone who was attending an opportunity to rep MLE and their favourite franchise. Sadly with the cancellation of RLCS has somewhat hampered our plans but we still plan on releasing these designs soon. We are quite happy with the results of the merch store in terms of sales since its “doors opened”.  We would like to thank all those that have support MLE via buying merch, your support has directly been invested into MLE. You can see some interesting merch data in the infographic below as well as upcoming offers. While we are generally happy with the merch store we are exploring the possibility of changing our store front as we recognise some of the limitations our current store has.

In terms of Social Media, we are looking at increasing our output across all forms: Twitter, Instagram & Facebook with a view to becoming active on others. Hellyaman is currently revising the workflow in terms of Social Media output to ensure there is a consistent quality and frequency of content. In a recent meeting, franchise activity on Twitter was discussed. We are generally pleased with the levels of activity shown by franchises on Twitter and hope this continues through the season. We realise that Tweetdeck isn’t the most functional platform to post content on Twitter and are looking at how we can improve this interactivity those tweeting on franchise accounts have.

The Marketing team are also already looking ahead to the off-season and Season 11 with a view to generating more interest in and exposure for MLE, utilising visual media, such as hype videos, where possible.

SPONSORSHIP

There’s not too much happening with Sponsorship team at the moment now the Season has started. Focus is on ensuring the agreements and relationships between MLE and our sponsors are maintained. The team had hoped to acquire another sponsor for this season but ultimately a deal fell through. However we are very happy to continue to work with BAWLS & PowerA.

The community PowerA giveaway seems to be going well, with decent number of entries for both draws. There will be 6 more community draws during the regular season as well as 4 draws during the playoffs, which will be open to those outside the community. Check out some interesting stats behind the 2 giveaways. Just goes to show anyone in the community can win, regardless of how many tickets you acquire.

ANY OTHER BUSINESS

We are currently in process of refreshing our Patreon with a view to offering more incentives and rewards. So far, the majority of revenue generated so far from Patroen, Twitch and merch has gone towards logos. We are now starting to focusing on ways we can invest future revenue and have a number of ideas/plans. We believe Patreon can be a great way to generate such revenue providing the community a level of transparency in terms of goals and rewarding them for their support. The finer details of this “refresh” are being ironed out with an announcement expected to happen in the very near future.

We are continually looking at ways to improve our website and have a few plans in place, such as a Community section. However priority right now is to sort out a few minor issues on the website, most notably the player “team issue” i.e. where players are assigned to the wrong teams.

And lastly back to the franchise logos. Our plan was to announce/show all 32 in a big, exciting event once they were all complete. However we have decided to change our tack and over the course of this season will be showing off a few at time. And what better time than now to show off one of the first logos that was created… the Aviators! We will let the logo do the talking first…

So there you have it; the first revealed franchise logo. This logo incorporates the presentational style we wanted; clean, relatively minimalistic but bold. We feel the presentational style applied to all logos allows for each franchise to emphasise their identity whilst feeling part of the MLE brand as a whole. We hope you like it and are looking forward to seeing more logos down the line. Please note while we will be releasing these logos they won’t be incorporated into MLE (I.e. Twitter pfps, on website, in graphics, etc.) until all 32 have been revealed. Thanks once again for your patience and most importantly your support during the logo creation process. The end is in sight and we can’t wait to see all the new logos in “action”.

So there you have it folks. We hope you enjoyed this insight, we took no board feedback from the last insight as well as analysing areas we could make it more informative and insightful. Till next month, have fun out there!