Usually I use my blog posts for updates regarding the client or other site related stuff but this time I wanted to put up something a bit more personal.

As many of you are probably aware FUMBBL has now been online for 20 years and today is the 20 year mark for me as well.

So I felt like recalling the past and how joining FUMBBL affected my life. This ended up being a huge wall of text and some of it a bit braggadocious but maybe some of you will have the patience to put up with it ;-)

Like for many here my first contact with Blood Bowl was during my youth, in my case when the 3rd edition came out. I always liked the game but hardly found anyone to play with and so that stopped for about 10 years. Then in early 2003 a mate at university kinda unprompted told me "I will now play some online Blood Bowl" and I went like "What the...?? Where?" So I signed up got my first game in and was instantly hooked again. Funnily that guy hardly played himself ;-)

But for me, there was no stopping and I spent several hours playing games and hanging out in the old IRC channels. After a few years I even took the lead of most games played with over 6000 games which shows that I was going at an insane rate for quite a while.

Being online this much had other consequences as well. Back in the days there were four admins: Chister (the man himself), Mr-Klipp (US based, helped with early coding of the site) and two English blokes Zy-Nox and Grumbledook. The latter approached me if I wanted to become a team approver. This is something many of the current coaches probably do not know, in the first years of FUMBBL every single team had to be approved manually by an admin (this is why the button still says "Submit for approval"). The amount of teams submitted grew very quickly so the admins just could not keep up and that is why the position of team approver (or approval monkey) got introduced. In the end we were a rather large group trying to cover all languages so wen could make sure no offensive teams were in circulation.

Over the years approvers left the site and I was hard to find replacements and at the same time demand rose so at a certain point the approval system scrubbed and FUMBBL switched to the current way. Also during this period the admin team shrank as well. It has undergone a lot fo changes before and at this point only Christer was left from the inital admin team but he had assembled an effective team consisting of people like Trog, Cusi (R.I.P. you kind giant), peikko and lots of others. In retrospective this was often called the "Golden Era" as we had a lot of very dedicated admins keeping everything running. But as I wrote at the start of this paragraph people left and as an approver I was hanging out in the admin channel anyways trying to help out coaches when no admin was around. So when there was no end of that dryspell in sight Christer bumped me up to admin status, also called gorillas in those days (I always had the feeling he was a bit reluictant about giving that weirdo German more power :-D).

So I now was handling support tickets as well, monitoring the forum and channels and dealing with inappropriate conduct (oh the joy, so I know what site staff has to put up with and they have my deepest sympathies). Apart from that I took over running a few seasons of the XFL and introduced the first version of the selection system for when what race would have their qualifier. I feel that this time did help me with my personal growth as I had to cope with different people in different situations. I know that I was far from perfect in my judgements on more than one occasion and I am sorry to everyone I wronged during that time but I like to believe that I did more good than bad. Due to some unpleasant interactions within the admin team (which I will not go into detail about) mroe and more of the admins stepped down and at some point I also felt not like putting up with the situation considering I was giving up my free time. After this I spent considerable less time on the site for a lengthy period of time.

But of course the seductive mistress of Blood Bowl drew me back so I picked up more games again but never went back to the ludicrous amount of the early years (thankfully). The years passed and I enjoyed the site. I even wrote a few pieces for the GLN (in hindsight far from great) and did co-commentary on two games but the audience obviously was not to thrilled about that ;-). At one point I got the idea in my had that it would be interesting to actually see what dice rolls where made during a game. So I started to reverse engineer the client and mess around with it which a few weeks later led to the first version of the dice stats being launched on a separate website. A day later Christer messaged me and offered to integrate the tool into the website, so we got together and now you have the nice button on your match reports :-) A short time later I also launched another small app for league stats (allowing league commissioners to determine what player in a league scored most td etc.)

It did not take too long and Christer asked me if I would be interested in helping out with client development since the original author vanished and so all the work was Christer's responsibility. I started out with some small changes, minor bugfixes etc. then implemented complete feature sets like the support for the Snotling team when it came out. Since the start of 2021 I am basically the sole maintainer of the FUMBBL client (sorry to everyone who's game I crashed) and implemented the changes for the 2020 rules and following releases like Spikes and Almanac. Also during this time I kicked of a new German speaking league but when the 2020 development hit it's hot phase I passed running this league to another coach after it's 12th season.

Now this sounds like FUMBBL mainly gave me work to do (it did in spades don't get me wrong) but other than that it brought me joy and also a lot of experiences. Shortly after I started on the site I joined a German speaking league and got to know more people that way. As it turned out one of them was also from Munich (the city I live in) and played in a table top league there. So in mid 2004 I started to show up on their Saturday league games and quickly joined their league. After a while I took over the job of league commissioner but as it goes with many such leagues it did die down after a few years. But not before those guys got me going to tournaments. Also a few years later I found another league in Munich in which I still play and now organize boot camps where the more experienced coaches try to help newer coaches improve their game.

My first tournament experience was the Eurobowl 2004 near Frankfurt that I only attended to watch but it was my first contact with Blood Bowl tournament players from all over Europe and I really enjoyed the atmosphere during the games and the socialising in the evening. From that day on it was clear to me that I wanted to be part of this community and so I started joinig my league mates when they went to tournaments. Among my first were the Dutch Open and Spikey Club Open in 2005 and I met a lot of lovely people that I still see every once in a while on tournaments which is always great. This hobby gave me friends and acquaintances from a lot of European countries and even over seas for which I am very grateful. I am still very enthusiastic about tournaments in general and like going to ones I have never been before as much as revisiting the well run ones every year, having attended over a 100 by now including several Eurobowls. The Blood Bowl community is a great one, online and offline and it has enriched my life more than I can say. I am very grateful for having it experienced from the early stages when there were only a few tournaments that most people went to as their were not many options to the thriving scene we have now. On the other hand I like to think that I manage to also give back to the different part of our community and hope I am making the hobby overall at least a tiny bit better.

For all of the things above I have to say thank you to a lot of people, first of all of course Christer for having built this site and keeping it running for two decades, my university mate for bringing it to my attention but also to oh so many people being nice to me, playing the game and encouraging me on FUMBBL, in local leagues and tournaments, drinking beer and playing stupid games with me in pubs in Germany, England, Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and and and... And last but not least my lovely girlfriend who has not only been tolerating the huge amount of time consumed by Blood Bowl but was always supportive and sometimes even encouraged me.

Thank you for having read through all my ramblings, I hope it was not too much of a torture :-)