A light on the vision and objectives of Esports Team Twente

Research department goals:

• Starting in early March 2021 ETT will host a showcase-event in collaboration with the EsportsLab and the BMS lab. During this event all the new developments in the fields of Esports research will be demonstrated. Hopefully, this will be a recurring event where on a (semi-)yearly basis the UT hosts an Esports research showcase where thousands of students can experience our recent projects.
• We aim to publish our research results twice per year in the scientific Esports journal ‘IJ-Esports’, providing a broader audience to most promising project results of our team.
  In addition to our current research collaborations, we hope that ETT can provide valuable insight to a steadily growing number of organisations. Expanding the reach of our research projects on how gamers of all experience levels can enhance their performance and how gaming can be used as a learning tool.
• Our focus is to create an online interface by September 2021, a tool that can be used by Esports organisations to get an inside overview of their performance in specific games that is based on the combination of our completed data-analysis projects.

Competitions goals
In 2021 ETT is competing in the national Esports Leagues of FIFA, LoL, and Rocket League.

• Our hope and aim for the League of Legends branch is to win the Dutch College League, the highest student competition of the Netherlands.
• For Rocket League we aim to achieve first place in the NSBE college league as well, again beating all other student-cities in the highest student competition for Rocket League.
• In FIFA we aim to further develop our collaboration with FC Twente and obtain a comfortable spot in the Weekend League nearing the level of the Esporters of the Dutch football clubs.
• If we reach 1st place in the RL and LoL competitions we qualify for the European College competitions, representing the Netherlands as the top team of our country. Our aim is to reach the knock-out phases of these competitions.
• When possible, we aim to join the highest commercial (non-student) leagues in the Netherlands for RL and LoL next year when our teams won the college leagues.
• We are also currently expanding with an ETT CSGO team and an ETT sim-racing team, all accompanied by managerial and research staff. Our objective is to represent the UT in all relevant Esports scenes in the upcoming years by continuously expanding our competition branches.

Exposure goals
While winning the student-competitions with 250 – 500 viewers watching the college stream is great for the exposure of our team, we also aim to grow our own Twitch-channel and social platforms.

• We aim to double the ETT followers each year for the upcoming four years. With 125 followers at the end of 2020 growing to 250 in 2021.
• Our team is working on the design of an Esports Lounge in Enschede that will unite all gamers in Twente and provide a practice- and tournament area. Hopefully, next year thousands of gaming students and high schoolers will come by the lounge to view and play games.
• Using the Esports lounge and our performance in the Dutch college league we aim to obtain a fan-base of hundreds of enthusiastic students in Twente who cheer on our teams while wearing our merchandise like our ETT jerseys, beanies, and scarfs.
• When we are eligible to join the Dutch commercial league or the European college leagues, we will experience a much larger audience (ranging from 2.000 in NL to 50.000 viewers in EU).

Long-term vision
When we are looking further ahead, in the upcoming ten years we will see Twente transform into the centre of high-tech Esports research. Our student team will host large showcase-events on the UT, during sports events and on high schools reaching thousands of students and professionals alike. We will host national Esports competitions in our very own UT Esports arena and we will organize large local tournaments with all the students and all the youth in Twente. In short, in ten years when people around the Netherlands think of high-tech Esports, they will think of Twente.