Welcome to the future of Eastern Europe and Ecodemocracy, a four-part podcast special produced by the Green European Foundation with the support of the Green Institute of Greece and the financial support of the European Parliament to the Green European Foundation. The podcast features extracts from interviews of delegates to the future of Eastern Europe Conference, which took place on the 6th and 7th of June in Riga. The conference brought together young green activists from different parts of Eastern Europe to talk about the future of the region as well as the challenges and opportunities for an ecological and progressive turnaround. In this episode, we hear from Sandy Familiari, from Elektra Energy Cooperative and Greenpeace Greece, Teo Komet, from the European Green Party and the Green European Foundation, Aliexe Kodritski, from the Belarusian Greens and Georgi Ptskeladje, from CDN Corporation and Development Network Eastern Europe. The episode focuses on energy and energy democracy, our reliance on fossil fuels and its geopolitical ramifications and the possibilities for a sustainable, just and democratic transition. Do you think that more energy democracy will automatically lead to faster decarbonisation and improve social quality? For sure. Yeah, if citizens get access to energy democracy, which means renewable sources of energy, then for sure it will be fastened. We've seen examples already happening in Greece, for example, energy communities helped to develop more and more solar infrastructure for starters, and we will see many more in the future, which means that we have automatically some citizens cut off from fossil fuels and it's a very practical method to go forward. Are there any good examples of energy democracy in your country, from your experience? We've seen many collective schemes working on energy, which are very good. We have more than 1,000 energy communities registered at the moment. Of course, I don't know one by one what they're doing, but we have some examples that are pretty impressive. We have energy communities solely from women, with women members. We have others who give away free shares to vulnerable households, and we've seen solidarity taking place. We've seen projects that actually respect the environment and the local communities. The other day I was talking to a person from an energy community in Agriño, and they told me that they were planning to install a wind turbine, and the local society didn't want it, so they changed plans and they actually did a solar park, which is awesome. They take people's thoughts into account and it's really nice to see them collaborating and actually adapting to the circumstances, is not the issue with big companies usually. They do not care about a society or a community and they just want to take the profit away from the people actually. In the light of the current events in Eastern Europe, what do you think is the role of energy development? Very interesting question. I think that the ongoing war in Ukraine has shown us the importance of the combination of state efforts and also citizen organizing. This is something that does not come from anywhere. We have already seen it during COVID, how important the intervention of states was, particularly in the EU, but also globally, in strengthening the economic resilience of society and times of a crisis, but also the tremendous citizen efforts that were undertaken to fight against the pandemic. And now with the war in Ukraine, we see that war is perhaps the clearest state effort, but also we see a lot of autonomous organizing. We see it in the field of self-defense against the Russian aggression. We also see it in different types of humanitarian efforts in Ukraine, but also outside of Ukraine, for example, in how several societies in Europe, perhaps in particular Poland, have organized around citizens to host the refugees coming from freeing Ukraine. And I think that this definitely relates to energy questions. The movement to liberate Europe from dependency on fossil fuels from Russia is led by both institutions and social movements, institutions in terms of several governments pushing for faster action. Of course, there are several challenges on government level in different EU countries, but we also see that the changes, there are concrete changes that are happening, and it was not self-evident that they would have happened after the aggression that started on 24 February. But we also see a lot of citizens taking concrete measures to liberate us from these fossil fuels. We see that Extinction Rebellion, for example, is non-violently blocking imports of Russian fossil fuels in different countries, and this combination of institutions and autonomous organizing is a key feature of the energy transition. During the last session, you mentioned a really interesting quote you heard at the conference the other day. Could you please tell us more about the quote and your perception on it? Yeah, one of the officials of the European Green Party on the conference said that it was better that we will bought fossil fuels from 10 bad guys than instead of one bad guy. And I understand why she told that, but I think that it's a wrong position because we don't need to support bad guys at all. Because in Belarus in 2020, protests were attacked by police, by Czech flashing grenades, and European shockers and so on and so forth. So they got it when Lukashenko was one of 10 bad guys, but not one bad guy. And when it needed, it used it to start an aggression war, or aggressive war, or start a war with his own people. And what can Europe do with steps in European implement in order to ensure a just and smooth transition from the 10 bad guys to one bad guy to no bad guys at all? Are there any things we can do to secure that? Yes, we should do with bad guys only on our special demands, not by oil. Just by oil, just do economic trade, but by oil or fossils and so on and so forth with political demands and economical demands and social demands. You not just do economic things with the dictators who want this economic collaboration. Thank you very much. Do you think that more energy democracy automatically leads to faster decarbonisation in the proofs, the social world being? Energy, as during the session it was mentioned, and I very much agree on that, the energy we consume really defines the lives we are living in. There are many aspects of it. If we are using coal as an energy source for electricity or for heating or whatever, then we are living in a very bad life. We have miners who are working in very bad conditions and then we have polluted air and we have problems with the health and we have a lot of problems. But at the same time, the biggest problem is also this energy dependence and somehow European countries, even after this red flag on which we have been talking about, managed to become dependent on the Russian gas and oil. They managed to do that, which they could have very easily avoided. So on the one hand we have these bad life conditions due to energy we are using and on the other hand we have this energy dependence on a foreign country, which is not just a foreign country, it's an authoritarian country that has a very imperial ambitions that is using energy as a political tool. And we have seen that very clearly in the last month but also in the last decades, it just cut down gas to Georgia in 2006 and several people had died because of that. It cut down gas to two other European nations sometimes and you just should not have done that. So you have the energy dependence and you have this bad life quality if you are dependent on air fossils. Energy is perhaps the single most important issue in one's minds. Rising costs, potential shortages and even power cuts as well as the prospect of millions of households being left to endure a very hard winter, paint a very bleak picture. The issue poses major existential challenges for many countries with repercussions on the economy, security, trade and foreign relations. Although we have seen steps towards a renewable energy transition and these have accelerated, it's also important to note how this transition is being implemented in social and environmental terms. Are we moving towards a more decentralized, sustainable system where citizens play an active role and where energy is considered a common good or is this just another opportunity for corporate power grabbing and greenwashing? How can we avoid being at the mercy of authoritarian governments that use energy as a tool for geopolitical ends? Can we ultimately divest as quickly as possible from fossil fuels and fossil fuel extraction? What measures should be put in place so that this energy transition is truly green? Do you think we're all equal against the energy crisis? Everyone is affected from the energy crisis but of course the most vulnerable ones are the ones that are affected more. Like if you're already an energy poor family then of course it's more difficult for you.  The sad part is that this crisis is going on for so long and we haven't seen any solutions to that. The consumers actually are the ones that are paying for it through their bills, through their subsidies that government is giving away through their products actually because the energy prices rising means that every product gets even more expensive as well. So it's a domino effect kind of. If we switch to collective schemes and energy community system then we will see these situations fading away in a way something like that. What steps should they use according to your opinion implement in order to ensure just energy transition after the embargo of fossil fuels? One important step that needs to be undertaken is that we need to recognize our structural problems in particular the role of the fossil lobby in policymaking on ecological questions on national level, on EU level in the realm of UN climate negotiations we need to talk about how problematic it is that policy makers in Europe have had, some still have their hands in the pockets of the fossil companies that are not advocating for policies in the common good but clearly in favor of the profits of their shareholders and then take the consequences of that how do we isolate such vested interests from decision making for the common interest. Secondly, I think that it's crucial that the EU but also any other public institutions empower citizens, municipalities different types of public institutions businesses, trade unions basically everyone who has an urge to do something when they see that there is a crisis to have the means and the knowledge to be a part of the transition the social and ecological transition to know what to do and to make it very easy for people to find other people to do it together with because this is not a transition that will be only led from the top quite the contrary, it's a transition that in order for it to succeed big parts of our societies need to be an active part of it it's clear that one size doesn't fit all it's complicated to list concrete measures for what could work and what we should avoid and I think that it starts with an honest power analysis of the status quo and then different steps that have as a name to empower people and we should also recognize that we for example in green parties we also don't know right now for example what are the actions we as green parties or citizens should be undertaking in near future what citizens want to do there's a lot of very important conversations to have around this question and it's a commitment from the European Greens to make sure that we create those spaces where citizens can join these conversations and that we can create this transition together I do think that the energy transition is going to be the key also for democratization because well we have this very famous oil curse right and if you check the list of the countries who are that are in rich oil countries in rich oil and gas countries most of them are very autocratic most of them are very authoritarian most of them are very equal like Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Qatar you have a lot of Azerbaijan in Europe this is also a big thing I mean and it's very centralized so and it's very very much around the power so energy transition can really contribute to the democratization itself but at the same time it will be also important to not just replace gas and oil with wind farms which are going to be in the same system but to have this more democratic way of deciding on the energy we talked about the energy cooperatives we talked about local communities that can own the energy it's not a centralized system where one ministry is managing all the power but there is local communities that have their own power one wind farm to every village and the big wind farm near the city so it's much more decentralized infrastructure it needs political win it needs money and in this transition period as you said the social aspect should not be left out because I mean we have seen that when wannabe greens, let's say like that do green stuff in quote marks they don't do that well Macron policy of rising full prices in France ended up with Gilles Lejeune because it was completely ignoring the social aspect of this energy transition so we as the greens we talked about the energy transition per se but we are not keen about the just transition because it's the whole process we have to while we are switching from dirty energy we have to also switch from this dirty politics and this dirty way of living on this planet so while we are transitioning we should make sure that we don't leave anyone behind because of well our values as well because we live in a just society we live in social equality, we live on all this social justice but at the same time we also pragmatically because they are going to have a black lash if because of your policies which are raising prices on fuels and people are still dependent on fuels and then you don't don't intervene as a state and you leave everything for the markets well market aim is to profit and the market will never really be very social unless you have a social state that markets is also not just profiting but also benefitting the society as such so it is very important that we don't leave anyone behind because there will be a black lash if the policy will be designed in a way that will only benefit the few, it's not the many so that is the crucial and that's why we nowadays and it also I think very briefly goes back to the first question we talked about the global landscape nowadays the climate and the energy is something that everybody talks about conservatives talk about it liberals are talking about it even far right is talking about it far left but the difference is that we as the greens to challenge the right we can say that well first of all we really do deliver the green transition but also we deliver in a way that we don't leave anyone behind but to challenge the far left is a very crucial aspect of it but we really deliver the change and we are seeing I mean the green side in government in many countries and we are seeing how it is possible the green transition is possible we just need political will and well the green is in power for that yesterday you held a very interesting workshop about the difficulties one in phase one establishing and communicating the idea of energy communities in your experience what was the biggest difficulty you had to overcome in order to first establish hyperion from natural and then electron, hyperion are different entities Electra is a social enterprise that is working for many years now Hyperion is an energy community which has 35 members at the moment and we will grow up to 140 by the end of this year so hyperion faced a lot of barriers starting we were one of the first communities registered and it was a brand new framework no one knew how to register on an energy community and it was frustrating at the start but I think one of the main barriers was the grid space the low voltage system network is actually full in many regions in Greece which creates a huge problem for energy communities which want to just build a small solar part or a small infrastructure because there is no available space it can be solved by upgrading the system it can also be solved by going for even bigger project so you can move out of the low voltage network but I think this was the most difficult part for us other than that we've heard lots of people struggling with finding the finances to start the community we've heard about the services not working very well like you go to a public service and they tell you oh no this is not our responsibility but it is so we do not even have trained employees to empower and enable these kinds of projects I think it's maturing nowadays and it's going to be even easier in the future we already see lots of differences from like four years ago and now and it's improving so I'm only optimistic you've been listening to part two of the future of Eastern Europe and EcoDemocracy a full part podcast special made possible by the Green European Foundation and the Green Institute of Greece


Hello and welcome to this session in which we would look at a CPA exam simulation that deals with incentive stock option plan. This topic is challenging for students for many reasons. One, it deals with an equity section of the balance sheet, which is a little bit unusual. When we talk about stock, you would think about investments, you will think about assets. Stock options, they're going to be touching the equity section of the balance sheet. That's one. Two, stock options are not something that are intuitive for students in contrast to regular stocks. Regular stocks, we are all familiar, you buy stock, you buy stock at a certain price, you hope to go up, you sell it, this is an investment. And how to account for an investment is challenged as is. So when you include stock options, it makes it a little bit more challenging for students. Now the good news is this, I did work with stock options when I was younger, right after my undergraduate degree. I work with Merrill Lynch and I handled incentive stock option plan for various companies. So I'm familiar with this topic. I was very, very familiar with it actually in the real world, not from an accounting perspective, from a finance perspective, but able to, if I'm able to explain it to you from a finance perspective, then you'll be able to understand it from an accounting perspective. And this is what I'm going to try to do by going over the CPA simulation. Now whether you are an accounting students or a CPA candidate, I strongly suggest you check out my website, farhatlectures.com. I don't replace your CPA review course. I can't do that, you keep that. I am a useful addition to your CPA review course. My resources, my lessons can add 10 to 15 points to your CPA exam score by helping you understand the material better and which you will see in this exercise. My courses are designed to mirror image your CPA review course. So they go hand in hand. I don't intend to replace them. You need your CPA review course. And here's your risk. Your risk to try me is one month of subscription. Your potential gain is passing the exam. Are you willing to take that risk to pass your CPA exam, which you only have to pass once in your lifetime? And if not for anything, take a look at my website to find out how well or not well your university doing on the CPA exam. I do have resources for other accounting courses and CPA section. If you haven't connected with me on LinkedIn, please do so and take a look at my LinkedIn recommendation. Like this recording, share it with other, connect with me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and please follow me on Reddit as I am trying to increase my followers. So let's take a look at this exercise. So we have Adam graphics offers incentive stock option plan to its district manager. On January 1st, options were granted for $56 million, $1 power value, common stock. The exercise price is on the grand date was $9 per share. Now let's stop here and make sure we understand from a business perspective what we are saying. What we are saying is this, Adam graphics, it's a company and what they did to encourage your employees to work hard for the company. They told them, we're going to give you $56 million shares. You can buy those $56 million shares at $9 per share. That's what a stock option is, giving you the option to buy it at $9. The key here is to drive the stock above $9. When the stock price is above $9, if the stock price is $12, guess what? You buy $49, you have the option to buy $49, and you make an automatic profit of $3. So this is the idea. And they granted $56 million shares. Options cannot be exercised prior to January 1st, 2023, but you have to wait. Although we're giving you the options now, you have to work at least two years for the company. And after two years, that option will last. It means you can exercise it. And you have from January 1st, 2023 till December 31st, 2027. Let's take a look at a time frame here. This is 2021. This is 2022. This is, let me put 2023 in a different color. 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026, and 2027. So first thing is you have to work those two years. You have to work those two years. Then after those two years, this is when you can, what we call, exercise the option. Okay, so the first two years, simply, I'm not going to use the word restricted. I'm not really sure if this is 100% correct. It's not vested, not restricted. The options are not vested. So the first two years, you have to work for the company. Then the years in green, you can exercise the option. So here you can buy the stock for $9, and you're hoping the stock to be $100, whatever. So that's the key. So this is the picture that you are looking at, and you are granted those options today. So the fair value of the $56 million, estimated by an appropriate option, pricing model is $1 per share. Now, they have to tell you. The problem will have to tell you whether you are an intermediate accounting students or a CPA candidate. The problem will tell you what is the cost of the option for the company. What does that mean? It means you have a CFA or a specialist or an investment banker that they will tell you the cost for the company is that much. And the cost for this company, they're telling us $1 per option times $56 million. So the cost. So the first question is, what's the compensation expense? Well, the compensation expense is $56 million for the company. The compensation expense is $56 million. And you want to take a look at this picture because I'm going to delete everything. So this is the compensation expense. So usually the first question should be given to you. It's $56 million. This is the compensation expense. If you are asked that question, now, when do you record this compensation expense? That's the question. When do you record this compensation expense? Well, let's think about it from a logical perspective. When do you record the compensation expense? You record the compensation expense when the employees are working for the company, when they are producing for the company. What's the deal with this stock option? The deal is for year 2021 and 2022. This is where the employee has to work. What does that mean? It means the $56 million has to be divided into two periods, two periods and half of $56 million, which is $28 million, half of it, half of it will be recorded in 2021 and half of it will be recorded in 2022. Although the irony here is this, really, you're not paying the employees anything in 2021 and 2022. However, you have to record the expense. Therefore, December 31st, oh, by the way, what do we record on January 1st, 2021 when we grant the options? No journal entry. So, if you're giving this on the exam day, on the grant date, the grant date is January 1st, 2021, there's no entry. Simply put, it's a contract. You just say, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you those options. When does the company start to record expenses? Well, after a year, this is January 1st, there's no expense yet, but after a year, the employee work for a company, now you have a compensation expense of $28 million, you debit compensation expense. On January 1st, you'll put no entry on the grant date. Now, the credit is what? Usually, when you debit an expense, you either credit cash or you credit a payable. So usually, when you debit an expense, you credit cash or you say, I'm going to pay you later. Guess what? For stock options, you are going to credit an equity account called paid in capital stock options. You're not really paying them anything yet, but you are increasing your expenses. So notice what's going to happen.  Guess what? Then you increase your equity by crediting a new account called paid in capital stock options because you are issuing stocks. You are paying them with stocks. So look, look, the net effect is zero on equity. Equity went down. Equity went down. I'm going to put equity down, although the expense is up. Equity is down because you have an expense. Then you should equity. You should stock option paid in capital. Equity is up. You really, the net is zero on equity because one equity went up, one equity went down, but you have to record the expense. Simply put, what, what gap wants you to do or FASB, they want you to record the expense on the income statement.  Why? Because back in, when we had the dot com back in 2000, 2001, prior to that companies did not have to expense their stock options. They did not have to expense it because there was really no, there was really no expense for the company. You just granted them. When they, when they exercise those options, you sell them the stocks. What gap says, well, companies were granting options and hiding those expenses. So what they want us to do with what they want the companies to do is to show the expense. That's why we record the expense. Although we record the expense and we increase equity, nevertheless, expense would reduce your earnings. Okay. So it's a non cash expense. So what does that mean? Even from a cash perspective, this is a non cash, non cash. Good. I'm glad I remember to tell you this non cash expense. It means non cash expense. It means when you're preparing your cash flow statement, you have to add this expense to the cash. Why? Because you're going from a cruel, you're recorded an expense. Then this expense is non cash. You will add back 28 million. Okay. So just I'm glad I remember to mention this. Okay. So this is for 2021. Then a year later, they're going to work another year. Then you're going to then 2022 a year later, you would debit compensation expense again, credit paid in capital 28 million. At this point, you have recorded the compensation expense. So we did January 1, which is no entry, December 31, 2021, December 31, 2022. Those are done. Those are done. Now starting January 1, 2023, the employees, those district managers, they can exercise their option. What does that mean? It means they can buy it for $9. And look what happened. Assume 75% of the options were exercised on March 1st, on March 15th, and the market price was 10. The market price now is above water. We call it it's above water. It means it's a positive. And the district manager is going to say, you know what, we are going to exercise the option. Okay. So if they exercise the option, let's think about it. What do they have to pay the company? And the only exercised 75% of 56 million. So you have to understand that if we take 70, I'm sorry, we have to take 56 million times 0.75. They are going to buy 42 million shares, 42 million. The first thing they have to pay the company $9. So we're going to take 42 million times $9 per share. They're going to give the company 378 million. The company will debit cash 378 million because they have to pay the company this much. Now, you have to understand every time we issue stocks, every time we issue stocks, we have to credit common stock and you have to know this by heart. Common stock is credited. Here's the formula. Number of shares times the par value. What's the number of shares here? 42 million. What's the par value? Dollar. So we have to credit common stock, 42 million. So this is easy. I'm putting the easy, I'm putting the easy entries first. So this way we can put, we can fill this together. Now, also, also when we did is we have now a paid in capital stock option account. We have paid in capital stock option and we have in there 56 million, you know, this 25 and this 25. Now, as we exercise those, now we're exercising 42 million. We have to reduce it by 42 million. Therefore, we debit paid in capital stock option 42 million. Why? Because we are exercising the option. Then we credit common stock for 42 million. Now we need something for the entry to balance. That's easy. When you are issuing stocks, anything that's left is paid in capital. So this number 378 is a plug, plug, plug. Okay. So this, this number is a plug. So again, we paid $9 per share for 42 million shares. We have to pay 378 million. We have to reduce our paid in capital stock options by 42 million because we did, we did, we did exercise the options. Therefore, we reduce our stock options. We can no longer keep them. Now, it's good to know how many do we still have left. So if we take 56 minus 42, we still have 14 million. We still have a balance of 14 million in paid in capital stock options. Okay, then this is a plug. Well, we are told the remaining vested options expired without being exercised. What does that mean? It means 24, year 24, year 25, year 26, year 27. The stock never really exceeded $9 or if it exceeded, we did not exercise. So what happened is the option expired. Once the option expired, we have to remove the options. If they expired, that's good. We have to remove them. What do we do? How do we remove this? We're going to debit paid in capital stock options of 14 million. What's the credit? Well, think about it. If the, if the options went unexercised, remember, when we thought they're going to be exercised, we debited an expense of 56 million in total. Well, true 42 million occur. The remaining 14 million did not occur. Therefore, we're going to increase equity by another 14 million and the account is paid in capital, expiration and stock options for. So for them not exercising those options, kind of its increase our equity back by 14 million. Why? Because when we initially, when we initially recorded those options, we reduced our equity. Now 14 million of them were not expired. That's excellent. I'm sorry, went expired. They were not exercised. That's excellent for us. It, it gave us, it gave us back 14 million in equity back to 14 million, which is good. So simply put, let me summarize this real quick. One is no journal entry on the grand date. Then the expense has to be spread out over the period where the employees are working. And usually they tell you this, but you have to be careful in case they didn't, they didn't tell you explicitly.  Then you wait until they exercise. When they exercise, they'll pay cash. You would remove paid in capital for the appropriate amount. You credit common stock and the remaining as a plug. And if anything that went unexpired, you remove it, you remove the stock option paid in capital and you credit another paid in capital, which is you increase your equity. At the end of this recording, I'm going to tell you to again, I don't replace your CPA review course. I supplement. I'm a useful addition to your CPA review course. You're going to study for your exam once. Don't short change yourself. Invest the money, invest the time, invest the effort you need to pass once, pass the exam. Good luck, study hard. And as always, stay safe.


In this presentation, we will discuss the audit process related to intangible assets. First question, of course, is what are intangible assets? We will define intangible assets. In other words, intangible assets are assets that do not have physical substance that provide economic benefit for more than a year. So we're thinking about types of assets, but things that you can't touch, you can't kick, you can't feel. However, they do have value and they're going to be providing value for more than a year. And therefore they're going to be assets, things that we would expect to see or would like to have on the financial statements, even though they don't have that physical substance. And you can imagine as an auditor, considering things, the fact that they're not physical, they're not tangible, can provide some problems for us in order to test for their existence. So types of categories of intangible assets will be things like artistic things, anything that's got a copyright to it basically could be some form of intangible asset. Note that the copyright itself is kind of


All right, I think we're gonna go ahead and get started now that we've had time for people to jump in and join. So welcome again, my name is Tim Lennon. I am the CTO here at the Drupal Association. And today I'm gonna give a preview of the attendee experience here at DrupalCon for the first virtual DrupalCon that we've ever run as an organization. So I'll be talking a little bit about how that impacts what you're used to with DrupalCon if you're a returning attendee and if you're completely new to DrupalCon, I hope I'll be able to give you an overview of what that experience is like and why it's something that we as a community dearly love so much. Quick reminders again, because a couple of folks may have joined. Anybody who has questions can use the Q&A feature. We'll have a Q&A section at the end and you can certainly use the Zoom chat feature. All right, we're gonna roll right in and get started. So firstly, I'd like to acknowledge that we wish we could have joined everyone in person in Minneapolis this past May as was originally planned before the COVID pandemic broke out. It would have been wonderful. We wanna thank the original organizers in the local community in Minneapolis for everything they had done to try and help make that event successful. And indeed a lot of their work has then gone into the process of making DrupalCon global successful. And while it's unfortunate that we couldn't be there in person, this is also in some ways a really exciting opportunity. We've never tried a fully virtual conference before and the ability to open it up to an audience from anywhere in the world is a really great opportunity and really exciting. I imagine we're gonna have people who never before had the opportunity to join us at DrupalCon. And so it's gonna be just an invigorating time for the community and a really great time to bring in new voices and new people into the whole experience. On that note, what it's also allowed us to do is partner with a lot of organizations to just incredibly expand our scholarship program. So these are a number of the organizations that we've partnered with including the local association leads of all the local Drupal associations throughout the world. Organizations like FOSS Asia, Shikot Africa, Programeria, all of these others that you see here. These organizations do great work to try and lift people in underrepresented groups into spaces in tech that they might not have been able to reach on their own. And we're really happy to be partnering with them and helping to bring more people to DrupalCon. To give you an idea of the scale of the expansion we're able to do at a typical DrupalCon because of the travel costs and the hotel costs and the ticket prices and everything else. We can usually do somewhere in the region of 20, maybe 30 scholarships on the outside. We have given out more than 140 scholarships through these partner organizations and we're thrilled to be able to do that with this virtual event format and welcome so many new faces. So if some of you who are joining today are part of the scholarship program, welcome. And I hope this will give you a great introduction to what you're going to be able to see and participate in in just a couple weeks here when we get started with the conference. What's also exciting about this is when we call this DrupalCon global, it really is going to be a global event. I think as attendees, we should all be prepared to welcome folks from all over the world. This is some of the representation of people from that scholarship program. We have people from Burkina Faso, from Nigeria, from India, from the Czech Republic, from Malawi, Vietnam, all over the world. And it's really exciting to have so many folks, new faces joining us for the event. So thank you again for, as a community, supporting this effort and this work to allow us to transform the event into a virtual one and to reach out to all these new people. And I'd also like to address this concept of how do we hold a global event for an audience all over the world and yet still create live engagement and interactivity? So something that's been important to us is that we're working on a 12-hour program schedule. If you've peaked at the schedule so far, you'll see that. And we have overlapping content across the major time zones from areas of representation of the attendees that we're gonna have in the program. So you'll see that regardless of what time zone you're in, there's featured content, main stage speakers, sessions, BOFs, exhibit hall time, all of that's available, as well as an on-demand content library that's available 24-7. And we're even doing extra things like running reruns of certain main stage content. So there'll be a time to watch the Drees Note early in the day and then a rerun appearance of the Drees Note later in the day as a way to make sure that people in different regions of the world get to have that experience and share together. In addition to that, we have been encouraging people from various local associations that if they want to set up, let's say the Indian community wants to set up a kind of pregame before the official programming kicks off, they can get together and gather as a community to start DrupalCon early. And then perhaps our Australian community can do the kind of closing out and after-party in the evening for that 12-hour schedule. So we're really excited about this and very happy to be able to try this global reach. So what's in a DrupalCon? If you are a repeat attendee, this will seem fairly familiar to you, but I'll be getting into the details of how we're executing this differently using the virtual event platform. So bear with me if you've been to a bunch of DrupalCons before, but particularly for those who are new, I wanna just make sure we go through this. So some of the key components, of course, are our plenary sessions or keynote sessions. So of course we'll have Drees joining us for the Drees note as we all come to enjoy and expect at every DrupalCon. Mitchell Baker, the CEO and chair of the Mozilla Foundation is gonna come and talk about the open web and the impact of open source in the current age. I think that's gonna be a really exciting talk. Our own executive director, Heather Rocker, will be doing the introduction to the Drees note and remarks from the Drupal Association public board meeting. And then we'll have a Drupal initiatives plenary that includes all of the kind of leads of different major Drupal initiatives that are going on now, either report outs on what's just been finished up as part of the great push to the release of DrupalMind or the upcoming changes that are coming in the next generation of these individual initiatives. So those are just a few content highlights not to miss. We also have featured sessions from a number of people, Grace Francisco of MongoDB, Stu Karoff from the Asian Penguins organization, which is a Minneapolis organization that works with the mom community and high school students to help work on introducing kids to Linux. Leslie Mack, the founder of the Ferguson network, Lev Kay of CredSpark and actually a couple other featured speakers that are just coming in as well. So it's gonna be exciting from that point. And of course, there's the approximately 100 sessions from the community that are gonna be available throughout the event that you'll be able to join. So again, I'll go into the details of how you'll manage that schedule as we look at the virtual platform that we're gonna be using. In addition, there are summits. The summit content, if you've been to a DrupalCon before, summits are effectively a place for to network and learn with peers from a particular field. Often these are industry related summits. So as you can see, there's a summit for people in the nonprofit space, in the government space, libraries, healthcare, places that tend to be really strong holds for the Drupal project and where people have a lot of perhaps common challenges that they like to share with each other. So typically these in the past at the in-person events, these have been separate tickets and they've had limited space and they often sell out. And this time they are completely included in the regular ticket. They're sort of a mini summit version and we can have additional participation. Just noticing a quick question in the chat. Yes, this presentation will be available as a recording after the event. So you need to share this with any of your coworkers or other folks in your networks. You will be able to do so. So we'll promote that on social as soon as we get the recording processed. So finally, I do want to mention two more elements. The first being the birds and a feather sessions. If you're not familiar with these, these are sort of unconference style self-organized conversations. So you can go onto the DrupalCon website and you can actually snag your own slot to create a bof of birds and a feather session. And these are not presentations. These are actually opportunities to have a discussion. So as you can see here, we have one session submitted that's for a discussion with the Drupal initiative leads. So this would be a great chance to go in and talk about what does it mean that the Olivero theme is coming together as a new default theme for Drupal and different things like that. It's a great way to engage there. Let's see. Finally, there is an on-demand content library available. So the on-demand content library has video content from our speakers that's being uploaded so that it can be watched at any time. You don't have to wait for the specific time slot. Again, this is in deference to the fact that it's a global event and it's gonna be tricky to follow a complete 12-hour schedule every day. So we're gonna have a variety of this content available and then recordings included in it as well. And then at the end of August, all of this becomes part of the public DrupalCon archive. So that will be available as well. And we don't want to forget social events. So there will still be trivia at DrupalCon global. We'll be doing it digitally. And you can certainly submit your own social events. So if you wanna do that virtual dance party or board games online or whatever else it might be, you can kind of submit those items and participate in some of the fun social side of DrupalCon, which is always important. For me, it's not just the scheduled content. It's that social and interactive element that makes DrupalCon such a special event. So now I'll talk a little bit about details of managing your schedule and how you work through that. And again, bear with me, if you're a DrupalCon veteran, we will get to the virtual platform part soon. So this is just a little animation of how this works. If you go to the program menu on the DrupalCon global website and click on schedule, you'll be able to filter the schedule by the event type, by what track the content is in. And you can certainly then add individual sessions to your personal schedule. Note also that if you're viewing the site just as an anonymous user, or if you haven't set time zone on your Drupal.org profile, all these times are in UTC. But if you do set a time zone on your Drupal.org profile, it'll be converted for you into your local time. So that might make it easier for you to manage your personal schedule. Similarly, the personal schedule itself, once you've created your personal schedule, you can subscribe to that. You get an iCal file, you can subscribe on Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, whatever calendar program you use as a way to just sync the schedule that you have with your actual calendar, which can certainly be easier to manage to some folks. I'm gonna keep on rolling here. Okay, so this is now a basic overview of what the tool we're using itself will be the actual virtual conference tool. So this is an application, browser-based application called Hopin that is being used by a number of different conferences, including an upcoming UN General Congress and all sorts of things. So it's a cool platform that's been rapidly added in features, and we've been working with them pretty closely. Among other things, we've been working with them on some accessibility improvements to their tools and things like that. But this is the main area that you will join when you join the conference, the reception area. And the reception area has a few different components to it. So on the right-hand side of the screen, you can see a global event chat. So this chat stream will have any kind of conversation that might be going on among attendees. This is one element of the virtual hallway track, but I'll talk about that in more detail as we go. We'll also, as organizers, be posting any important announcements that you might need to know about. So maybe we'll be letting you know when the Dries note is starting or whatever else the case may be. We'll drop that in there, as well as reminders about the DrupalCon code of conduct and anything else that might be important. You also may see the speakers of the event popping in here to promote their sessions and invite you to join. And in addition, if we decide that we'd like to, we may promote some global polls to the audience and there is a link to the people who happen to be in the room. And I'll talk about that more in a minute. You'll also see that there's sort of a summary schedule that gets you some basic information about what's going on, probably using the actual DrupalCon website will get you a more detailed schedule just because there's so much content that scrolling through other schedule stuff might be a little tricky. But you can also just drop in based on the things that you see in here. And then over on the left-hand side, you'll see the kind of five main areas of the virtual conference center, as it were. So, one of these areas is the actual main stage for the event. So the main stage is where we'll be having the plenary sessions and the featured sessions. So this is where you'll go to see the Drees Note, to see Mitchell Baker from Mozilla Speak and any of the other featured sessions that I talked about before. This is essentially an in-browser video sharing experience. It does have its own dedicated chat stream, so you can talk with just the other people who are attending that particular main stage session. And we'll also have little pieces of intermission content so that in between programming, you can get some more information about other events happening later in the conference or just other things you can do like networking opportunities, chances to chat with people. So that is always gonna be under this main stage link here in the sidebar. The next area, there's gonna be a sessions view. This is just an alternate way to see all of the scheduled content. Again, generally speaking, I would probably suggest using your DrupalCon website schedule, but you can also browse through the sessions view and find all the sessions there. And if you just happen to want to hop into something, you can do that. No pun intended, that is the platform name. And then finally, there's some interesting tools that are for just meeting new people. So there's this networking tool, which is totally optional and requires the opt-in of both parties, but basically it matches you randomly with another attendee who's opted in to do this for just a five minute chat. So it's just a way to say, hey, I wanna meet some new folks. And you can just have a quick conversation if you want to, you can exchange contact details. And it's a nice way to meet some new people at DrupalCon. In addition to that, there may be some other folks from the Drupal community who pop in there. People like myself or other DA staff, maybe some of the initiative leads, maybe some speakers. So it might be a fun way to meet different folks in the community. What that looks like when you actually join, by the way, is just a one-on-one video chat effectively with the option to then do contact exchange. Finally, the last button on the sidebar here is for the exhibit hall. So the virtual exhibit hall is actually reasonably cool at this event. And there are a number of different choices and options that you have for how you engage with our sponsors. So you can visit the sponsors in the exhibit hall anytime Tuesday through Thursday. And then there's also a dedicated live exhibit hall hour each day. So when you go into the sponsor booths, you'll get an on-demand experience with some prerecorded videos or you'll get a live experience with live video from the sponsor in the booth. And as you know from DrupalCon in the past, if you've gone before, there's often some great demos from some of the same people who are speakers at the event and some really good content. So it can be really great to visit that. So when you join the live booth, you'll see them on camera and don't worry, it's not gonna turn your camera on automatically, but you can chat. Or if you want, you can request an individual video chat and things like that as well. We're also gonna be running a sort of exhibitor passport game. It's kind of a bingo game where you can visit the booths and get entered to win some prizes.  So please help us thank our sponsors. This transition from an in-person event to a virtual event happened unexpectedly and on a very short timeline. And these sponsors made it possible for us to continue to do this and make this event happen. So we'd really appreciate it if you come in and take a look at the wonderful things that they have to offer. So let me talk about the hallway track itself. So again, for our new attendees who may not be familiar with this term, the hallway track is just what we call that kind of undefinable part of Drupalcom that is sitting next to someone new in a session and then striking up a conversation in the hallway as you're walking to lunch or walking to your next session or meeting someone in the contribution areas and then striking up a friendship. And this is a way that a lot of both personal and professional relationships in the Drupal community have been established. I think it's a really important part of the event and it's just a great way to meet people. It's the difference between just watching sessions and actually interacting and engaging with the community. So again, there's several tools that we can use to do this. So one of the tools that I already talked about is the one-to-one networking tool. And there is a comment from, yeah, there's a comment from Ruby here about how can I screen people if I don't want to participate in just speaking with any random person. So you do have a few choices on that front Ruby. So you can, among other things, you can use the people tab that I showed earlier. I think I have an example here as well. Yeah, so if you see this people tab in the sidebar of the site, shows a list of people who happen to be in either the session you're in or the main attendee room. And you can actually mute any other attendee in there if you'd like. So you can mute certain people if you have any concerns about that. And also if you wanna forego the random matching, you have the option to identify someone in a session who may be made a comment that you thought was particularly insightful or someone in the general chat who was talking about something you're interested in or maybe someone in a boss who was having a conversation and you wanna just keep following up. For any of the people in the attendee list, you can send a chat message if you'd like to do that or you can invite to a one-on-one video call. And in fact, I believe you can even invite more than one attendee. So you have multiple options for just having these impromptu conversations with people you meet in the course of viewing a session at a social event, chatting on the main stage, things like that. And again, you can choose to mute anyone that you don't want to interact with. You have to opt in before any video or audio sharing happens or any of that kind of stuff. So you can help control your experience in that way. Let's see. So that's kind of the basics of how that sort of general hallway track idea works in a virtual context. And I really encourage you to give it a shot to pay attention to the other people in a session chat room who are talking about things and do the same thing you might do in person. Ask them a question about that insightful comment they made and strike up a conversation that may lead to a great new relationship in the Drupal community. So of course, you can also continue that conversation in more formal ways. The birds of the feather sessions that we talked about before, if there's some sidebar happening as part of a main session that you just want to have a big discussion about, you'll be able to request another BOF session even after the event has started. You'll just need to provide the request form asks for two hours notice before it winds up on the schedule, but then you can organize a larger conversation. And certainly you can also continue the conversation in external channels. You can tweet about it. You can go onto the Drupal Slack itself and start a conversation there or on the rocket chat and do all those sorts of things. So also as an attendee, particularly for new folks, there's always some session evaluation options. So you'll get surveys sent to you and things like that. So please try and respond to those. It's really helpful for both the program selection team and for the speakers themselves to understand what people liked about their content. And that's a way to be an attendee who kind of gives back to the speakers who are giving their wonderful content to you. And then I'll talk a little bit about the contribution space and then I'll get into more of these questions because I wanna make sure that we have a good amount of time for that. So the contribution site is live. It is a separate sort of sub-site and with the support of the open social team, a Drupal distribution, it's been built to provide contribution space like virtual contribution tables just like you might be used to in the contribution rooms at a normal Drupal con. So here's a quick preview of what that looks like. On the main contribution website, you have a demonstration of just what the contribution space is about and then there's this table of contents here that has some helpful information to get you oriented. I'll walk through some of these ideas. If you go to explore the event, you can actually see a stream of the different kinds of activity that's going on in the contribution spaces. So you can see here, my cursor started posting some resources in the Olivero contribution table. Jennifer Hodgden started a contribution area for the new contributor guide on Drupal.org and there's a number of different groups that are already organizing on this site to begin contributions. And this contribution space is available throughout the event. So when you have downtime in your schedule or you just want to go contribute for a little while rather than doing session content, you can go join these. But in particular on the Friday, following the primary content, that's our dedicated contribution day where we really encourage everyone to join and there'll be mentorship opportunities for new folks to be there. So here are some of the kinds of groups that you might see there. So again, different initiatives in Drupal might organize a contribution group. There might be documentation contribution. There might be a promotional material for Drupal as a contribution area. And of course, there will be code contribution opportunities as well. And when you click on one of these groups, you'll see something like this. So this is the Olivero contribution table and it includes some resources like a demo URL to get caught up, a link to the issue queue for the project and a Slack channel where people are collaborating on that particular initiative. Similarly, here's the Drupal Mind contributed project reporting group. So this is the effort to help get more modules ready for Drupal Mind. There's already quite a bit there, but there's even more to go. And this just explains how this group is organizing and contributing on this effort during the event. So you could also help us get the word out. And I want to reiterate something here that was posted in the chat earlier. So if you are one of the repeat DrupalCon attendees, someone who's gone to a couple of events and it's all old hat for you, it would be lovely if you would sign up for the scholarship program to be a mentor or ambassador for the new people being brought in using the scholarships or others to just help them get oriented to their first event, particularly because it will be a virtual event. And it's great to have that one-on-one mentorship and buddy system to get people set up to enjoy their first part. So I hope you'll help participate in that way if you're able to. It's a really great way to do that. Let's see. So let's... You also can help us get the word out, of course, in smaller ways. You can just post on your social media channels or in your networks about content you're excited about. So you can signal boosts our scholarship program or you can talk about, find a tweet from one of the speakers about the session that they're doing and you can retweet that and just help get the word out to other friends in your network and bring in more attendees to the program. I think that would be great. So with that, we'll go into the question and answer portion. And I do see some in the chat and some in the Q&A. So I'm gonna skim through the chat space first just to make sure I've got those captured here. So again, I mentioned this earlier, but yes, the presentation is going to be available as a recording after the fact. So this can be shared around for anybody who missed it. And let's see. Yes, John shared in the chat, if you go to events.drupal.org slash global 2020 slash scholarships, there's information about signing up for that mentorship program that I referenced earlier. So I hope that folks will do that. And yes, Ruby, I totally agree. One of the best things about the hallway track idea is in fact, running into people that you haven't connected with in a while. Maybe the last time you saw them was a previous DrupalCon or maybe you know them online and would like to actually interact with them somewhere other than text, actually do some video chat stuff. And it's not like we can't do those things but it is one of those things that DrupalCon gives you that opportunity to make it a priority, which is great. Paul asks, this is cool, but it could be a little bit overwhelming. We put up a video or similar to help people make the most of it. Certainly we're going to be putting up this recording, Paul, and I'd love to hear other ideas. We've been thinking about slicing out some individual clips for different sections of this presentation and making those available just in smaller digestible chunks. Okay, so that's, I think, the questions from the chat. Moving over to the Q&A feature, John asks, can we hop between summits or are we limited to choosing one? From a technical point of view, you're totally able to hop between summits. So if that's something that you'd like to do, perhaps you work for a nonprofit that does something in the government space so you'd want to see content from both the nonprofit and the government summit. You do have that ability to hop. I will let you know they're not, you may find that there's some breakout sessions going on or that there's some kind of engaging activity going on that you might want to make sure you can fully participate in. But as long as you find an easy way to make that transition, there's nothing that's stopping you from doing that if that's important to you. Let's see. Oh, yes. So Jeff noted that this was already answered, but Jeff had asked, it's worth reiterating, is it possible to use networking to set up a chat with a specific person rather than with a random person? And again, yes. You can absolutely use the people tab to see who was maybe someone who, again, you met in a session because they had an insightful comment or something else. You can go to that people tab, find a specific person and send them either a message in text or request a video conversation. So let's see. Another person asks, how do we actually submit buffs on the day of? Because those could come out of this hallway track. Absolutely. So if you want to submit those birds of a feather sessions on the actual day of the event, you'll do it in basically the same place that you do right now if you're submitting them in advance. So it's on the events.drupal.org slash global 2020 website under the program menu. You can find the buffs submission page and the buffs schedule. And you'll be on either that same page will just be swapped out to the form that holds it in moderation for two hours. So we have time to actually make sure it fits in the schedule or we'll do something else. But that'll definitely be the place where you do it when you want to set up those hallway track sessions. Jeff, Jeff Porton asks, I'm still a little skeptical about the hallway track. How about some sort of opt-in directory where we can post bios and info that makes it easy to find people who are interesting to talk to? Yeah, that's a good question. And there's a few tools for that. You have to understand partly we're limited by what's available in the hop-in platform. We have actually been able to ask them for certain customizations. But as you can see here, if I'm looking at Bethany's profile, first of all, if I look in the people tab over here, I do get at least their title and organization information as a first clue. And if I click through, I can get, whoops, pardon me. If I click through, I can see the custom description that they're able to enter. And then a link probably to their Drupal.org profile or a LinkedIn profile. It's not a super detailed directory, but you can post a bio into that space as a way to explain a little bit more about who you are and what you do within Drupal. So hopefully that will help a little bit and between that and seeing the conversations that happen. I'm hopeful that'll help. But certainly we can also encourage other folks within a chat session, whether it's the end of a session in progress or just in the main chat area to kind of introduce themselves. We'll be having deliberate moments during intermissions where we say, hey, now would be a great time to have some networking. Maybe introduce yourself in the chat and see if anybody wants to invite you to a call or set up a bot or something like that. So we'll be doing our best to encourage that from a moderation point of view in addition to these tools that are available. Thanks, Jeff. So we do have a little bit more time if there are some additional questions. So I'll give it a moment here. Okay, so here's a good question. So what can people searching for jobs do if they are here at Drupalcon to kind of network and look for possible employment opportunities? So I'll have to regroup with our sponsor management team, but I think part of the sponsor booths in particular in the virtual exhibit hall will have space where if those folks are hiring, they can certainly promote positions that they have available and things like that. And I think perhaps maybe we can, I'll note this for the team, but I think we could probably use some of our intermission time to create a deliberate sort of, hey, for the next 30 minutes, why don't you share opportunities that you have, things like that? And maybe do that a couple of times throughout the event. That's a great idea. In addition, of course, there's the standard resources like jobs.drupal.org, but I assume you're asking within the context of the event itself. So yeah, I'll just say a few more words in case a last question comes in and then we'll wrap up here. But again, just thank you for attending. Thank you for your faith in us in the quick turnaround from an in-person event to a completely first time virtual event on a new platform. There may be little bumps in the road, but truthfully I'm really excited about all the things that this has unlocked and made possible in terms of engaging with a more global audience and getting people here who we've never had here before. And indeed another question did come in. So are there bandwidth requirements? So there are, there's some bandwidth requirements, certainly. I mean, if your bandwidth is sufficient to participate in this webinar, it's probably gonna be sufficient for the event itself. It's, we've said for speakers that at a bare minimum if you can have at least a 10 megabit up kind of connection, we do have a page with some technical requirements on the site where I can get more details. The short answer is if you can, if you can stream from YouTube and even that the 480p kind of quality of 360, you'll probably be able to do okay. The video features do scale to people's bandwidth, but that, you know, you might experience some artifacting if you're on the lower side. I'll see if I can follow up later with more information from the website. Another question, will future Drupalcons be both virtual and in-person? We don't have all of the details of exactly what will happen next, but we're definitely thinking about this. It does seem fairly clear that there's been a shift in what it means to do technology conferences, both because of the pandemic, but also because of just what having to make that change once has made us realize about the way that maybe events should work. So certainly we're considering that as options as either having hybrid events that both they have virtual and in-person components or having separate virtual and in-person events at different times, all depending. It's definitely something we've talked about internally. I don't know that we have any final exact decisions about specific upcoming events, but yeah, it's something we're talking about. Next question, will contributions happen all week or only on Friday? They are available throughout the conference the whole time and in some ways, I think you could probably even get started a little early and continue going after the conference because that website is up and running already. So Friday is when that sort of dedicated day that we'll have some more mentorship opportunities and things like that available, but the contribution areas will be available the whole time. I think with that, we'll probably wrap it up. We kept it to a nice and tight 40 minutes. So I'd love to give all you busy Drupal people some time back, but thank you again for attending. It's really awesome to have you all here. I'm excited and looking forward to joining you all for the event in just a couple of weeks now and we'll certainly be in touch. This recording will be made available soon and we will see you then. Thanks a lot everyone.


Um, so it's no secret that NBA 2k20 is, uh, what's the word? Not fun. I don't know man. It's just missing something. Did we forget what video games are about man? I feel like we did that. Okay, so, um, I don't know when they're gonna implement these things But please send this out to the 2k developers because I came up with a brilliant list of ideas I was surprised my guys So I want you guys send this video to as many 2k developers as you guys can on Twitter on any platform because I Genuinely think if they even implement some of the ideas I'm gonna mention here in this video The next game is gonna be a banger cuz I think we forgot what games are about Guys it is so frustrating that every time there's a patch It's not addressing the things that matter to me most or probably to you most because everybody's gonna be different But I think some of this stuff we're gonna agree on so let's get into it. Hey before we do what? I'm representing all the 60 overalls out there today make sure check the link in the description grab some Merch or don't doesn't matter. Hey also dropping a new podcast today link in the description of that be the first one there I'm kidding. I need to stop telling you guys that you have no option, but to do those things So I'm not gonna repeat the other things I've been saying for the past few years because we all know what those are because they haven't done them the last 50 times I mentioned him What's going on with the my court guys the whole point of the my court? It's supposed to be a place where you can practice you want to play with your friends sure You want to try a new jump shot animation or a dribble move sure, but because it's such How do I put this a useless mode? Nobody uses it for those things. There was a time where you could unlock different my courts There was a time where I would invite people to a my court to play some games now It's like a last resort wait. There's no other options I let's try the my court and hope people can make it into my my court because it rarely ever works So let me break down what you could improve dare real quick one the one be one in the 2v2 Aren't as bad, but the 3v3 camera is stuffed up against the wall like this and you can't even see what you're doing It's an abomination So what we can do to improve that and that also is the case for 3v3 program is push the walls back What is that agent? You thought of a brilliant idea right there to solve the solution.  That is frustrating stuff, man I know we all been there where the camera just keeps flipping like this You want to whip your controller against the wall simple things all this could be done in one day by one developer except the latency thing That's just me imagining things. They're never gonna do that But just for some reference if you guys want look at fighter games Street Fighter 2nd They go OD with the practice modes. They provide you with so many features It's scary because they want you to be able to practice offline and then boom you could take all those talents and transfer them online when you Want to that's all I'm saying the next one is probably my favorite proximity chat guys proximity chat is the greatest thing That's happened to gaming is it very toxic? Yes, which is why you should also definitely have an option to mute because I know I'm gonna get sick of it every once in a while For those of you who don't know what that is basically like if I'm standing here and Joe is standing here I could talk to Joe just because we're in the same proximity you get I'm going with this And so it actually feels like a neighborhood where you can communicate with the people around you and then as you get further from him Your voice lowers lowers lowers until it finally disappears. It's like real life guys from talking to guy beside me He could hear me. Well, then definitely people are gonna try and be toxic right because it's video games It's gonna happen then just give an option to click triangle and mute it simple various. I'm tired of proximity chat today I don't want to deal with people. Well, then boom. There's an option, but yo, I'm telling you right now That's gonna add so much to the game. It's ridiculous. It's gonna make it more toxic for sure But it's also gonna make it infinitely more fun, and I'm all about fun. Hey 2k I don't know what the deal is with the servers and I'm genuinely asking why is it that if I'm in a park for two hours It's dead is it like why can't there just be an influx of people as people leave and I'm asking because I don't really Understand the situation with the servers. Is that the optimal way to reduce latency and server errors? Maybe I actually genuinely do not know but when you go back to games like even 2k 18 the game We all hate it you you hop in the parking you be thinking Oh, this is lit in 2k 18 because there's people playing on every court You hop in 2k 20 and it's like one or two courts being played and everybody else is to be sprinting in the other direction Because they don't want to lose I'm gonna mention it even though I sign and try not to mention stuff I say in every video, but just real quick guys the servers, right? Just wanted to mention it because it's definitely important and one of the worst parts of the game Hey, I want to say this 2k if there is an overpowered move now I can't get if it's glitchy or ruining the game how you might want to nerf it But what I think is a better solution and pay very very close attention guys is to create other good moves Instead of removing all the good moves.  Well, let's patch it behind the back two is nice All right, let's patch it and then over there is you just created this boring and still version of was Otherwise an unbalanced and fun game. So it is a teeter totter here balance on one side and fun on the other side You don't want no balance or you're gonna get 2k 19 where everybody's making seven foot stretch big shooting over top people But you don't want balance all the way. You can get 2k 20. There's no interesting moves, man Everybody's using the same generic I could zig zag with the same effectiveness as a playmaker Maybe not but like almost though and that's scary This is an impossible one because everybody think is the balance is somewhere and no game really really gets it right There's always problems with it. No game has it perfect But it's like yo work towards it and i'm telling you right now The answer is not to patch and nerf every good move. I'm telling you that there was a time in 17 Where there was six two speed boosting sharpshooters, which was wild now if the sharpshooters even have a single move That could break an opponent this direction.  Hey, uh, here's a fun idea And I hope you guys like it as much as I do just same way we talk to the other team in the park I'd love to talk to the other team and pro and it'd be a nice option Where like, you know how when you're in like see us go you can like chat to your team or chat to all Same thing that's all I'm asking for I want to talk smack on prime the way I talk smack on park because I swear sometimes It'd be way more toxic on prime than it ever be on the park I asked a couple people about that idea and they were like yeah agent That's a terrible idea But what what I say to you people is why are you so against change because I think you're gonna be the same guy Complaining the game is the same every single year because nothing is changing But then when something changes you don't like it even when it's a good change Or it could potentially be a good change the way I see it You know just like 2k 20 with the badge system I was like, I don't know this could be horrible I'ma wait it out and see and I actually don't mind the badge system this year a couple problems with it But it's definitely better than your the way we've had it in years past. That's for sure Um, the next one is fairly simple, but I feel like 2k never does it. Hey, can we control the meta? Are you guys even like guys look look you can see the moves everybody's doing right? So then how did we go all of 2k 19? And then the most blaring issue with the game wasn't even addressed You guys didn't even like communicate that you you understood that there was a problem with the meta of that game Hey, my pc guys, you can feel me on this one. It's not a difficult concept But for some reason it's rare on console Why can't we change the graphical settings of the game to improve the performance if I'm playing the game on 4k and I'm getting 50 frames per second on pc I could just decide to lower it to 1080p and get 140 frames per second So let's do the same There's problems with the performance on the ps4 and the xbox one then I let me reduce the draw distance So I don't have to load everything in the background Then that way there's going to be less frame drops and skips and lag the latency is going to be better The ps4 won't have to work so hard That feels like an easy solution and the only reason I feel like they haven't done nothing with the draw distance Is because people pay to be on the billboards around the neighborhood So like you can't then allow people to be able to blur that out So it's like all right, but then what if the performance of the game is bad? But I have to see the ads you're forcing me to see the ads It was like remember in like 2008 where everyone had like bad internet anytime you went on a website that had banner ads Yo, it took a century to load. That's how I feel with 2k right now 2k right now You have the potential to make everybody happy And if you don't want to do the draw distance thing at least give us an option to like lower the graphical settings Come on. It's not hard. Uh, this is something that about damn near everybody in the community You've been talking about I want you guys to do some homework real quick.  In fact, don't even bother. I got you with a screenshot. Boom How is it possible that this park right here looks so glorious and vibrant and I say this We have definitely been making some improvements since dry depressing 2k 18, but add the colors back man Make it pop. I want to be there and I want to be excited to see the colors in the life I like that there's like a day and a night cycle. Yo, I really put that idea whichever developer thought of that Give him a raise or her but I need more colors up the saturation man Up it and that's for the neighborhood. I have a brilliant idea. Hey, so let's say I want to play 3v3 program Huh, that's a noble thing to do agent. You'll play some program. Everybody loves program Yo, I'm telling you right now if we had an option to load into different parks on program Right the neighborhood is like a community of people And you can walk into any got next like this and play a game with your friends But the private program is matchmaking where you can load into venice beach rucker park roof top filly You can play a game in shanghai. So you you might be thinking agent. These are crazy ideas It would take so long to do them But hey, I have two things to tell you one 2k has already done them over a decade and a half ago in their early games Just go to 2k 6 2k 7 you mean to tell me they can't do it in 2k 20 I don't believe you and number two they develop dozens of levels for my career And we only ever play at once so we can get to the neighborhood and play with our friends So don't tell me that they can't develop those for multiplayer. I have a brilliant idea for program. Hey guys, let me show for a sec program guys Hey prime guys, let me know how you guys feel about this now Let's say you can load into a 5v5 program game With two players.  Let's say your glass lock is not cutting it You can call a timeout and substitute in your other player That would change the entire dynamic of program and you're using players that you already have available to yourself Am I bugging or is that not a brilliant idea? Now, I genuinely believe this next one You guys can let me know if you feel the same way I like games that reward players based off of skill not time played I could play rainbow six for 20 hours and be a diamond if i'm really good Or I could play it for 200 hours and be a gold if i'm just average. That's fine. That's fine And i'm sure there's like the best players know how to wrap up the fastest and throw lobs to each other Oh, they love to throw lobs guys. We all know those lob throwers But I feel like a rep race especially in the beginning like the first four five months of a 2k would be so much more entertaining If the way you got scored was heavily based off skill And so most ranked games will decide that based off of wins But the problem with 2k is there's no reporting system so people can boost and abuse the system But yeah, most ranked systems in most every f***ing game I play heavily value Winning but like kills matter or in this instance your field goal percentage your shots made, etc Your assists. I don't know man. I just feel like the person who plays the most shouldn't be the highest rank You know what I mean? And in this case, I'm not really talking about rep I'm more talking about like your overall Anybody could be it's the easiest thing ever to be a 99. That should be something challenging to attain But I will say this. I love the fact that you can drop from a 99 if you're not playing well Yeah, I know there's a lot of criticisms on that system and how sometimes you'll have a great game But you'll still go down overall That's something they can fine tune in perfect But for something like that to happen, there definitely has to be a good reporting system because there is people cheating all the time You know how I know because you guys tweet me every single time and I don't know what to do What you meant to do man? I'm not 2k support, but every day I get screenshots like hey check this player He's boosting. He played against the same brown shirt five different times. He's winning 21. Oh, and it's like yeah, I know I know guys man. It's like yo, there's a four times rep event going on I can guarantee you at least 25 percent of people playing are boosting and of those people boosting only a handful ever get caught And the people that do get caught are the ones that upload themselves doing it that kind of just snitched on themselves There's plenty of people that get away with it all the time There should be a decent reporting system a system where you can report someone who's doing that and a system that can determine Whether that report is valid and ban or suspend that person That's not like a difficult thing to do Actually, it is a difficult thing to do, but it's not a difficult thing to attempt You're not a tenth. There's no attempt insight right now. May I so uh cross play used to be a crazy thing Like in my mind I was like, ah, that's so far in the future five six years away But turns out man, there's a lot of games introduced in cross play and 2k introduced an idea That closely resembled cross play last year They had this like celebrity game on 2k where there was a match and everybody that was online the park on xbox nps4 Can see that match being played in the middle at the same exact time it was being played There was a plenty of bugs and glitches But because they were able to do that I came to the conclusion that they're not far away from implementing something Like cross play 2k is a big enough game. They have enough resources. They could definitely make it happen Imagine how convenient it'd be if you could play with your friends regardless of whether or not they were on xbox or ps4 Or sorry guys or pc. Oh, oh, sorry guys or the nintendo switch Okay, all right guys. I'm getting creative. I'm getting real creative with it Hey, uh, you know how when you play mba live 10 the first thing you do when you load up into the game Is you can drill around with lebron on the court That's so much more fun and intuitive than just loading into a menu screen where you click up and down Right you load up mba 2k 21 And then you get into the game and you could just play with your my player in your mycorp You could set it as like the default game mode that you want to load into So you don't have to go through all the shenanigans to get to where you really want to go to I feel like that's not a hard feature to implement could be but I don't think it is because if every time you boot up the game You're hopping right into the park. Why can't right when you load up the game It sends you right to the park or it sends you right to your mycorp or really wherever you desire I don't know about you but That's a brilliant idea to me and the game shouldn't drop broken man in the last like two to three years There's been serious issues with pro and matchmaking for the first two to three months To the degree where like if i'm on the east coast and a buddy of mine is on the west coast We actually can't play together for the first couple months of the game's launch till there's a patch that addresses it And even though sometimes there are packs that address it and they might fix it but break something else guys I know it's hard because there's only one dev team and they're releasing games every single year I know there's a lot of pressure on them and the ideally we all know the best solution is to Hire more devs. I get they're under a lot of pressure But there has to be a way where you release the game finished polished So we're not all game testers.  They got play now online and all start team up There's a lot you can do in the game I know and it could be challenging to introduce a lot of new things to keep all those game modes interesting I'm very well aware of that But the game is incredibly profitable and year after year you hear a lot of people saying the same thing It's like wow, they just didn't do enough this year. They should have changed this Why wasn't this address we've been talking about it for three like people have been asking for new haircuts since like 2k 14 Man, they haven't gotten none of them. So then if there is something we could do to address it Why haven't we done it man? I hope something does change drastically I don't want 2k to just coast and then just drop the same neighborhood and the same animations the same gameplay and the same It'd be nice if we just whoa, what the hell 2k did all of that Then I've been asking for my court changes since 2k 16 I get it. Like ideas are really easy, but the implementation is hard. I heard one of those developers said that to me one time Man, the idea is that's the easy part implementing them. That's the hard part All right, man, but I'm telling you right now There's no better feeling than when you play a game and then you just like what the hell you just whoa All of that is in the game and then so it's like all right 2k, right? You guys are under the tag to umbrella which gta 5 and red dead redemption all those those are games that blow people away Right, you're under the same umbrella as them. Don't try and pretend like you're not capable of doing that I get that those games launch every six years and you launch every single year cool There's solutions to that too guys Like I don't know what to tell you you can make two different dev teams or three different dev teams and run them in cycles Like call of duty or ubisoft does what assassin's creed or you don't want to do that neither They're like there's solutions to every single problem that exists for 2k. Did you guys know that? That a solution exists for all of it It's not like we haven't reached the point where like we don't have the technological advances to actually make that happen agent All of the stuff is stuff. I've seen in other games that I play So if if other smaller teams, you know, they get way less funding or they're Indie like indie developers have dropped some of these features Yo, and so I don't want to hear that this is not possible. I'm tired of hearing that It is possible and I get a year is a tough timeline to make it happen But again, there's a solution for that too. Like I don't know what to tell you guys man There's a reason I don't do many of these videos anymore It's because I did a lot of them back in 17 and I was like, man Am I just repeating myself over and over again? It's the same. Isn't that crazy? Yo, it's the same man Hey, um, I am excited for 2k 21 because I remember how excited I was heading into 2k 14 Because that was the first game that dropped on the ps4 Now, I don't know what the capability is the next generation of consoles gonna have I don't have that information But what I do know is I fully expect to be blown away this year And honestly, I'm talking like 2k 20 is done But it's it's yo February drop some content for 2k 20.  I'm gonna catch you guys in the next episode of Agent zero uploading videos every five days I'm gonna get better with that guys. Trust me