FUMBBL, the online Blood Bowl league

As hinted by my previous post, the season system recently reached a point where I feel it is "ready". With very few actual issues cropping up so far, I am going to just go ahead and press the big button this upcoming Saturday (January 25th) and enable Seasons in the C division ruleset (id 4).

My intent for how this will work is that the ruleset will be switched over, followed by a process for every currently active C division team as follows:

- Any team with less than 15 games played will be left alone. No change.
- Teams in waiting for tournament state (BBT teams that never left that state, 15 games played by definition) will be pushed into re-draft state
- Any team with 15 or more games played that is not currently involved in a match (either mid-game, or scheduled in a tournament / blackbox match) will be pushed into end-of-season state. If they played 16 or more, they will instead be forced into re-drafting.
- Teams on post-match will automatically be processed as expected; with 15 or more games played, the team will go into end-season and simply ready-to-play if they have less than 15 games.

This has implications for custom leagues too. Any league that is configured to use the C division ruleset (id 4) will also get seasons enabled at the same time. Since this is very likely not what is intended, I have taken the opportunity to switch all of these leagues to use a non-season variant ruleset (id=5, also used for 2020 rules Open-play League division teams). Going forward, my intent is to maintain both ruleset 4 and 5 to follow each-other with the only difference being seasons being disabled for the latter.

I am not committing to a specific time of day when this will happen (simply because I am not sure if I want to do something outside of the apartment or not :) ). I will be providing more details on timing on the Discord server on Saturday.

In 4rd Episode of the 7th season:

-Group A is fast
-Witch elves are out!
-Snotlings launch into orbit
-who is the best defender?


(click image for the video)

Sooo....

We all knew it would happen one day, but I still was kind of hoping that it would never.
But here we are now.

With the Seasons now implemented in [C], I am looking for a new environment to build and play my teams, where I am not forced to fire almost all of my players each 15 games or so.

Therefore; which leagues are there around, where I can do so?

For now I only found the OLC.
The group page says: "O[L]C runs BB2020 with NO SEASONS and BB2016 skill progression!".
So, this means 2020 rules but old skill progression? Interesting; I will give it a try, I guess.

I also found "O[L]C 2016". There I can play with old rules and also old progression, right?
And, I also could clone old ranked teams to play there? I was waiting for the opportunity to migrate them to [C], but now with seasons I can't do that to them any more. So, this would be a great option.

Or, are there any other leagues of that kind? Maybe one that would allow a migration from [R]anked but then following the new rule set?

I would appreciate any suggestions here.

Cheers, and see you on the pitch.

Well dis iz it, der end of der road. Der fun police av wun an now itz uniform optimal builds or nuffin. Der joy of koachin a teem of kretinous gitz woz dat wun day a speshul player would rise to der top and mebbe, just mebbe, live long enuff to bekome a legend. No moar. I love me ladz, an I ent got der heart ter fire em so I iz leeving until seasons iz gon an yew kan build yer krazy teemz ow yew want to. I ent gonna rant or sulk but I does av wun kweshtun, why kouldn't we av ad too C divisions, wun wiv seasons an wun wivout?

I ope our adventures made yew smile an I lookz bak on me blogs wiv a lot o pride an appy memories.

Ta raa a bit den,

Der Great Gobbo.

That's just a personal note, so please consider as it is.
I really didnt get too much into that Redraft mode, but I understood that, basically, higt TV teams are gone forever (or, at least, until a new ruleset).
It was already hard to play Competitive with a bulky team with actual rules, with Redraft there will be no more this problem it seems :D
I'm an old-fashioned Fumbbler, born with old old rules with big big teams, please have mercy ;)

Most Blood Bowl coaches love their Blood Bowl. I know some hate it, some loudly, but most of us love it, love the game and love to play.
Could anything be better than spending your life travelling around playing table top Blood Bowl? Every week end? If you had the money, the time, wouldn't you? Or would it break you? In 2023 German/Ladonia coach Volkajo, long term ally and friend of OWOBB played 176 games of Blood Bowl that attracted a NAF ranking. That seems a lot to me, and indeed he claims 2025's Waterbowl will be his last ever Blood Bowl Tournament. Which makes me incredibly sad. Its a huge number, dwarfed by a load of online coaches i know, playing far more than that. But TT games happen at 3-4 a day, 176 is a LOT of days playing Blood Bowl.
In 2023 this huge number, this remarkable feat beat the three previous highs of 2019 PeterD with 166, Lycos in 2011 with 162 and MaD in 2017 with 141. But then came 2024.
Last year saw Torquemada play 183 NAF games. Which is more than 176 because that's how maths works. The nest closest was his freind GreenSkinPhil with a frankly lazy 149 games. In total 18 coaches played over 100 Table Top NAF Blood bowl games, including such well known names as Volkajo (again, but only 124) PeterD (119, he's not as young as he was) AndyDavo and BB_Jock (tied on 105) Gr4n0t4 (102, all while smiling constantly) and my Europen team mate Grave (113 herbally assisted games). all numbers courtesy of Mike Davies legendary Tableau's.
That's a lot of Blood Bowl, so does it change you? change your Blood Bowl? Break you or make you? I plan to ask.

So Sunday night, 26th January year of our Trump 2025 One World, One Blood Bowl will go live at 9pm on https://www.twitch.tv/purplechest and be available soon afterwards as twitch highlight, YouTube and podcast.
The Panel:
PurpleChest: 30 games in 2024.
torquemada: 183 games in 2024
greenskinphil: 149 games in 2024
Grave: 113 games in 2024

So if you went to a Tournament ion 2024, you probably met one of them, or all of them. If you have any points or questions you'd like to happen in the show leave them here, or come join us live, and it will happen.
If they turn up, and havn't found a Blood Bowl Tournament to be at instead.

In addition to seasons being introduced on January 25th, I'm planning to add an additional meta-competition system to the site. My intent is for this to be added at the same time.

For a long time now, I've wanted to find a competitive format for people who for various reasons aren't interested in the squad-based BBT, and would rather focus on a single team. After talking with some people, I want to think that we've found something that sounds like fun.

As I typically do, here's a bullet point description of the system:
Eligibility
- Seasonal competition, in lockstep with the BBT seasons
- Open to Competitive division teams, who play using the blackbox scheduler
- Teams that play their first game during the season get auto-enrolled (ie, no explicit join process)
- Coaches can run multiple teams for the same roster should they want to (as opposed to BBT, where it's one team per roster and season).

Scoring
- Teams are given a "state", either Active or Frozen. Initially, all teams are Active
- Playing a game outside the blackbox scheduler will freeze the team (pending an adjustment to allow official tournament games as well)
- When a team gets to 3 losses or more (counting ties as half a loss), the team is frozen
- Once a team is frozen, they remain so for the rest of the season
- The team score is simply the number of wins, achieved while the team is active (during the season)
- If the number of wins is equal, ties are used as tie-breakers. After that, teams share the spot on the leaderboard

Rewards
- The team with the highest score will award the winning coach a "major tournament" win on their coach page
- Each team with the highest score for their roster will award the coach a "minor tournament" win on their coach page
- Reaching 10 wins with a team before it being frozen will unlock an achievement. This persists across seasons

Naturally, a frozen team will be able to continue playing, additional wins simply won't count towards the score.

As I mentioned, this will be pushed live at the same time as seasons, but as you may have noticed I haven't said what this competition will be called. I have a placeholder name, but would appreciate suggestions.

While there isn't too much time remaining before I plan to push this live, I am still open for improvements.