First Quarter Open Board Meeting
* Recorded Voice Meeting *
Cata’s Parts for some reason were all muted.
Introduction - Taevarth
Hello all and welcome to Evolved first open board meeting of 2021! These meetings are to update every member on what is going on in our community throughout our games, upcoming events, new games, and what the board is working on. This is our way to show you all a little bit of what goes into running the community. Whether you joined today or 2 years ago, we try to make these meetings for everyone. Thanks for coming out tonight and we’ll get started!
Tri / Board ‘Who We Are’ - Grimmie
TRIUMVIRATE: CATACLYSM, ISILAURA, AND STAR
The ultimate authority of the Evolved Gaming Community. They are responsible for the advancement of the Community as a whole and actively oversee the continued growth and success of Evolved in all aspects. They work with the Board of Directors and must unanimously agree upon all decisions. As with all members, the Triumvirate Members adhere to the Charter and work within its bounds when exercising their authority.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
PRESIDENT: TAEVARTH
leads the Board by creating agendas for discussion and keeping those discussions on track as needed, including the recognition of speakers. Meeting agendas must be posted on the forums a minimum 24 hours prior to a scheduled meeting. While any Board Member may propose a motion, only the President may initiate a vote by the Board.
VICE-PRESIDENT: GRIMMIE
takes the role of President if the President is absent. Records the official minutes for all meetings and ensures they are published for members in a timely manner. Acceptable methods of publication include posting on the forums or newsletters.
For some more information please check out our #jedbot-authenticate and type in the dot command and any Tri/board members name
Get Together - Taevarth
Tell everyone we will be canceling the in person meetup. Setup a virtual meetup and see if people are interested in it.
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Change the discord channel for the meetup
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Plan events people might like to do - please add here:
1. Setup streams so people can see one another.
2. Streamer games like charades that are different than video games and has a in person feel.
3. Evolved Movie night? Pick a bad movie, we stream and enjoy? Talking allowed.
4. Drinking card games.- Have people use the meetup channel to post ideas that would be fun for a meetup. Have them PM suggestions to Taevarth as well.
Community Updates - Issy/Star
T-shirts (Swag) - Isilaura
With the overall success of our T-Shirt sales we are now looking at different services that can provide more for us in terms of different ‘Swag’ items. We have heard from around the water cooler that members are looking for Masks, Mugs, Water Bottles, Stickers, Patches among different items as well. If there are any other ‘Swag’ items you are looking for please DM me. We hope to have at least one of these items up within the next few weeks.
Thanks to everyone that supported us by purchasing there t-shirts we really hope you like them. They are still available to purchase and tank tops have been added to the list of merch you can get the design on. We will be making a different design for the coming September Community 3 year anniversary so make sure to be on the look out for that.
Note: All Money from sales goes back into the Community by paying for the Website, Forums, Web and Email hosting, Jedbot, Banking costs, LLC and up and coming Event contests prizes. We’ll get a detailed post about these costs up soon - tracking down receipts between multiple spenders is a task in itself. Just know that all spending goes back into Evolved.
Book Club - Star
The Evolved Book Club is going strong and we just finished up our 7th book. Tomorrow, we will beginning our next book so now is a great time to jump in! Our next book is goin to be Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings. As this is a longer book, we will be splitting it up over 2 months so no one has to feel rushed reading it. If you enjoy reading or talking about books, feel free to join our Goodreads group. And if you can’t participate every month, that is fine! There is no requirements to join other than being part of Evolved; The link will be able to be found in the notes after the meeting: Evolved Goodreads Book Club And you can always message Star anytime for more information.
Evolved Game Night - Star
The next Evolved Game Night is going to be held next month in March! If you haven’t participated in these before, anyone that wants to join can! We will group up together on Discord in a voice channel and play various games. In the past we’ve done some trivia, Cards Against Humanities, Jackboxtv games, and recently Among Us has been pretty popular. Its a great chance to meet people you might not always play games with, and just a great way to relax and have some fun. Also, if you have any suggestions for future games, I am always willing to hear ideas or suggestions!
As we have gotten quite a few new members since I last did a survey to get a feel for what times/days works best for our members, I am going to be putting out another one for us to plan our next game night. It should only take a few minutes but will give you the chance to have a say when the next event will be! The link to the survey will be up after this meeting on the forums as well as in the meeting notes. Evolved Game Night Survey Link!
Community Guides - Star
And lastly, there are quite a few ways you as a member can help a little to keep Evolved growing! The Community Guides is a role that assists the games recruitment officers by bumping forum/reddit posts, keeps an eye out in the jed-bot channel for people needing help and directing them to someone in leadership if they need it, they help welcome new members into our community, as well as help plan fun events like the game night and forum/discord contests. If you are interested in more info, please reach out to Star on Discord There is also a section on the forums that goes over a few other ways you can help Evolved so check it out! Ways to Assist Evolved The more people we have helping us, the more Evolved will grow and keep getting better!
What the board is working on this year. - Cata
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New website - Currently we are working on a new website with a new template. Something that will flow a bit better and something that does not have a lot of coding that our web guru has to recode. We are hoping that this will be something we will have completed by our 3rd year birthday in September. But we also want it to be perfect with lots of nice new features.
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Forums - Working on a system for on the forums and possibly Discord that recognizes and celebrates the longevity someone has had within Evolved
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Evolved GIF Contest! - Grimmie
Now that several of us have our own Evolved swag in form of t-shirts and hoodies, let’s show it off in a form of a GIF that we could use in our Discord! Each person can submit one entry of a GIF that they created showing off their Evolved swag OR utilizing our “E” logo in a creative way in a GIF. GIF Possible Examples: doing a dance in your Evolved hoodie, a beloved pet wearing or cuddling our gear, or the “E” used in a funny way in a meme GIF. Event Likely to happen in April-May allowing for a month long to work on entries. There will be Amazon gift card prizes for 1st nd and 3rd places - to be voted via forums poll. -
JedBot - We are currently working on the coding for the new Jedbot 2.0. Something that will have less typing in the Jedbot-Authentication. Looking at coming towards something that has emojis. So this is going to be a process that might take until September. But Jed surprised us 2 days ago with it working and complete. So if everyone could make there way to the Jedbot-reaction-roles. You can now go add and remove roles with a click of a button. It might take some time if so many people are playing with it. You might have to Click once then find your name and see if it appears or disappears. Big thanks to Jed on getting this complete.
Guild / Chapter News
WoW - A
Hello Hello! We’re doing pretty well on Alliance side. Welcome to all our new members! I hope you are enjoying your time with us.
It’s been a bit of a learning process over on Alliance side - we went from floating 2 balanced raid groups through most of BFA 3 days a week, to a crazy 4 raid groups in Shadowlands. It’s been both a wonderful challenge and crazy-ass struggle.
I really want to commend our officers for working through the difficult times together and our members for being patient with us. We recently achieved AoTC for all 4 raid groups and we’ll continue working on full clears going forward. Last boss is still a bit of a strugglebus boss - but the more we see him, the easier it will get. We’ve also continued our Open Raids on Sundays, so if anyone is looking to get into raiding, be sure to join us.
On the M+ side of things, we have groups running most days. Put a key in gchat, and you’re likely to find a group. We’ve started doing M+ Mingle nights (thanks Seph). We’ve had so many new members join over the past few months, that we wanted to find another way for members to get to know each other outside of raiding, while at the same time providing an opportunity for more members to step their toe into M+ and learn. Our next M+ Mingle Night is this upcoming Weds and we hope to plan them more frequently in the future.
We’ve had a few PvP events in Shadowlands - from RBG learning nights, to pvp arena - which have been a success thanks to Taevarth. In addition, I know that he, Avasti, Jed, and many others have helped people get rating to upgrade their PvP gear. Taevarth has recently stepped down as an officer in WoW-A due to Real LIfe after 4 1/2 years of dedicating his time and knowledge to the guild - so if anyone is interested in stepping up for PvP Officering, let me know.
The lottery (new for us in Shadowlands, inspired by Horde’s success in BFA) has been continuing strongly every week thanks to Avasti. Every week if you buy in, you have a chance of winning the pot and the last week of the month we do a mega-drawing where 3 people have a chance of winning. And it’s 100% not rigged!
We hope to start up achievement runs and mount runs and other events in the future, so be on the look out
WoW - H
Hi Everyone! Things are going very well on the Horde side, all things considered.
This was our first raid tier with multiple raid teams, and going from one raid to three and a waitlist proved to be a unique challenge. Following the recent shakeup, we have condensed the teams down to two, and they both did great this past Thursday! We are extending the lockouts this week, and AOTC is on the horizon. Open Raids continue to be Sunday night fun as well!
M+ has also been super popular. We’ve continued out M+ Mondays from BFA, which have been very busy – sometimes with 8 or 9 groups running. We opened up M+ Tuesdays to help support the interest, but after several weeks we have dropped back to just M+ Monday. It’s a great way to hang out, socialize with people from other raids teams or folks that you may not get to play with much, and it provides an opportunity for our guildies with less M+ experience to dip their toes in with more experienced runners and get some keys done. Always a good time!
Damon has been working on getting PVP rolling on Horde side, and we love to see it! Sucker punch Saturdays are every other weekend, and a great way to get some arenas in, run some BGs, and get those weekly quests done.
We also have had great success with the lottery, which we carried forward from BFA. Three people have a chance to win every Wednesday, so be sure to get your tickets! It has been very helpful in keeping the bank funded for repairs, materials, and for future prizes.
We’ve recently started up Torghast Fridays, or Tipsy Torghast Fridays! We all know that Torghast can be a slog when you’re solo or trying to get it done on more than one toon, so Fridays are a fun and quick way to get your layer 8 chores done with friends.
Lastly, welcome to all of our newer members! There is always something going on, so feel free to jump in on the fun.
Classic - A
With the announcement of ‘TBC’ alot of our community has gotten that Hype bug. With that i thought well maybe its time for me to grab the reins and boot up the classic chapter and see what i can do in terms of recruitment out side of the community. Cleaned up the in game roster and leveled it out at 25 accounts. I started recruitment in game and on forums and we are now at 50 accounts in just a short week since the TBC announcement.
Our goal during classic while we wait is to get a toon or 2 or 3 up to level 60 with maxed out professions maxed and ready to go. Trying to farm up different Mats, items and Gold so we have a good amount going into TBC.
Our goal in TBC is to get our members to level 70 by finding new and different information on how to level so we don’t get bottle necked with a crazy amount of people all going for the same Boar in Hellfire, gearing members up to do Heroic dungeons and then moving onto raiding. We will be looking to do 25 man raiding (Maybe 2 - 10 man kara groups) providing we have enough to do so. We will also be looking at doing the Arenas and Battle Grounds as well and see what we can do in some PvP battles.
Keeping up on all this information please visit The Burning Crusade Classic.
FFXIV
The FFXIV Chapter has been slowly growing the past few weeks. We’ve been ramping up our schedule and have recently started in on some more event nights such as mount farms and treasure map runs, and hopefully will see a more regular schedule get formed for these events. This April will be the Fan Festival where we will get more news regarding the new expansion, Endwalker, coming this fall. That same time the next major patch, 5.5 will release and we’ll get some new content to look forward to.
Community Gaming News - Cata/Tae
Here in Evolved we are always looking to expand our games within our community. There is lots of different games that are coming out this year in 2021 from MMO’s to Shooters. So if you are interested in creating a game within our community please get in contact with Cataclysm and Taevarth. Also take the time to check out and read the Evolved Casual Gaming and Chapter Creation Overview .
MMO News
Ashes of Creation
From ashes to empires.
Your journey will shape the world.
Experience an MMORPG where everything is permanently impacted
by your actions – explore, trade, build, and let the world take form. From your imagination through your will and into everyone’s reality, what you create will be the cornerstone of the next explorer’s ambition. For more information check out Ashes of Creation
Magic Legends
Choose your path through the Magic Multiverse. Collect unique spells. Control the Chaos. The strategy card game that started it all comes to life in Magic : Legends . Party up with players. Expansive Multiverse. New online Action RPG. Fast-paced combat. Free to Play
Open beta starting on March 23. The duration of the open beta is left unconfirmed, as no end date has yet been revealed. With the full game coming out in 2021. For more info check out Magic: Legends
New World
We’ve been hard at work on compelling end-game features we believe are important to include at launch. These features won’t be ready for the Spring timeframe that we had communicated. With that in mind, we will release New World on August 31, 2021. With this extra time we’ll be able to add these substantial improvements while polishing and fine tuning the whole game before we open Aeternum’s shores to the world.
We’ll continue our Alpha in the months to come and expand testing by standing up EU servers on March 30, 2021. Our Closed Beta will begin on July 20, 2021. If you’ve pre-ordered New World, you’ll have access to the Closed Beta Test.
Shooting game news
Outriders
is a story driven RPG-Shooter that will put the player in the shoes of an Outrider, the last hope of the human race trapped on Enoch, a dangerous and untamed planet. The campaign can be played entirely in single player, or in co-op with up to three players. April 2021 – 4 classes but co-op 3 people - Yes. Outriders will Fully support cross-play, meaning you will be able to explore Enoch with any of your friends on any other platform. You can play Outriders from start to finish with your friends regardless of what system they own.
For more information check out - OUTRIDERS | SQUARE ENIX
PS5 - Taevarth
Seems like Sony wants to push for some games to stick to their 2021 release schedule, while pushing others back (Harry Potter game!). Problem with the community playing together on the PS5 and any counsel really is that they do not support discord, and that has been a challenge for people to connect with one another. Some have played from their desk or discord on their phone. That being said, we will still push info for any big game and try to help connect you all together. As always, if you want to see what/if people play the same thing as you, post in Gaming Chat or console chat in discord! For example, I just found out 5-6 people are also playing Outriders demo and will hook up with them to do the co-op.
A few games to keep your eye out for are:
FF7: Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Intergrade will arrive on PS5 on June 10, 2021. Not only will the PS5 version be a free upgrade for those who own the PS4 version, there will also be a new story episode players can purchase that will feature Yuffie.
Deathloop, the ambitious time-based first-person adventure from Dishonored developer Arkane Studios, will seemingly launch on 21st May
Kena: Bridge of Spirits, the third-person action-adventure game that debuted at last year’s PS5 June showcase, now has a release date for later this year. August 24th
Switch - Taevarth
Zelda: Skyward Sword - July 16th release date. Experience the earliest story in the Lgend of Zelda series. This game will use intuitive motion controls to swing your sword to break through oppenents.
Pokemon Diamond and Pearl remakes on the way to Switch
Switch Pro-release date soon? Be on the lookout for this as news is picking up heavily on it.
Outro - Taevarth
Again, thank you all so much for coming out. Before we close this meeting, we will now have a Q&A for you to ask the Tri/board anything? Want to know what Cata’s favorite pickle is? Now’s the time to ask! You can use voice or the open board chat channel. As always, anyone can come to us any time with questions concerns, whispers of sweet-nothings. And now I hand it over to Cata and Issy for your questions!