Hi gang,

In the promotional round for the last NAF Live tournament, I wrote that I’d talk about the future of the concept this week. So, here that talk is!

Firstly, we almost have our ruleset sorted for the weekend of 30/31 May. On those dates, we’ll be putting on a 6 game weekend tournament (three games on each day), and each timezone will feature one ‘all in together’ group. Whether there are 8, 80 or 800 participants, you’ll all be fighting it out for one top spot. Expect news on the ruleset to be posted this weekend.

What happens thereafter is not yet entirely set in stone. When we began to put on these Live tournaments, we thought they would have a limited shelf-life. We have tried the concept before (long before Covid-19 and a near-global lockdown), and it was not at all popular. We found that coaches (and admins!) didn’t want to work all week and then sit at their computer all weekend, which isn’t unreasonable. Our thinking here was that, while life was very different, we’d try again and offer some escapism while there was no tabletop BB available; mothballing the concept when life returned to normal.

The tournaments have been more successful than I imagined they would be. We had > 250 of you join us for the NAF Live Championship, which is amazing. The overall feedback has been extremely warm, and we’ve built an excellent team of admins that have pitched in and made the tournaments happen. You will have noted the efforts of Foad, Stingray, neilwat and Stimme over this past weekend, but we also have Strider84, sann0638, Leipziger and D_Aquebus helping with various tasks behind the scenes. With the level of positivity around the tournaments and the admin team infrastructure we’ve built up, we have decided to continue NAF Live tournaments on an ongoing basis.

That said, we won’t be continuing with a frequency of one tournament every two weeks for much longer. Participation this past weekend was reduced (although I appreciate that the slight difference in format was probably a contributing factor), and FUMBBL play more generally seems to be slowly reducing. While it is unwise to make sweeping statements about ‘lockdown’ as if it’s the same for all of us, and predicting the future in general is plain foolish, it is logical that as the precautions governments are enforcing are relaxed and summer arrives, demand for these tournaments will reduce. It will become much more sensible to hold an event (say) monthly than fortnightly to maintain a critical mass. We should also ensure our staff don’t burn out. While they’re keen, they’re slowly drifting back to ‘normality’ themselves, and it makes it harder and harder to lose a weekend to overseeing an online Blood Bowl tournament.

There will be as many opinions on this news as there are people interested in the concept. I’m sure some of you would be happy to play a NAF Live event every weekend, and there are others that would love to participate just once, if only real life would allow. And everything between. At the moment, my feeling is that the upcoming tournament on 30/31 May is going to be our penultimate or final fortnightly NAF Live tournament and we’ll move to monthly thereafter over the summer months. Of course, this is a fluid situation. Should everyone around the world be back to normal in July, we may have no demand at all and the tournaments could die. Should we get a second spike of the virus, we may well increase the frequency once again as the world is locked indoors.

Anyway, I hope that gives you all some insight. NAF Live was supposed to be a fun escape from reality and some more online NAF sanctioned Blood Bowl for our awesome membership while they want it. I’m delighted it’s been so popular that we’re going to continue putting the events on, we are just going to slow up a touch to manage an anticipated reduction in demand.

Cheers!

Phil / Goo.