Blood Bowl 2 Same Team Over and Over Again
How Claret Bowl PC fanatics are taking player-run leagues to the extreme
"Rip 'deir spinkly twiggy legs off."
Blood Bowl was originally a tabletop miniatures game released by that almost holy of British institutions, Games Workshop, back in the '80s. Yet it wasn't until the tertiary edition dropped in 1994 that Claret Basin became recognisable every bit the game it is today. It's set in a version of the Warhammer Fantasy Universe where the many opposing races have decided to lay downwardly their arms and settle their differences by trying to score touchdowns.
Every bit such, it exists equally both a parody of medieval fantasy tropes and equally an irreverent jab at the ridiculousness of modern, organised sport. Your players will sometimes steal funds from the team'south treasury, violent fans will invade the pitch and injure your team at half-fourth dimension, and referees tin can be bribed before each game to ignore fouls and concealed weapons. The reason I'm telling you lot this is considering I desire to impress upon y'all just how silly Claret Bowl is. It's basically a filthy, sporty Discworld and almost of its players are in on the joke.
What's more, Blood Basin is designed to be played over fourth dimension. Individual players will accrue 'star player points' each time they successfully complete passes, make interceptions, crusade casualties and score touchdowns. They eventually level up and gain access to new skills and stat increases, providing a existent sense of progression. Information technology's not uncommon for your Woods Elf lineman or Dwarven blitzer to go from a mewling wuss to an unstoppable juggernaut over the course of a season, only for them to cease upward getting permanently removed from the game when seven or eight Halflings decide to gather round and bound all over their face.
Naturally, this kind of record-keeping and stat-tracking lends itself well to estimator games and in that location have been a few over the years, with the start landing on MS-DOS dorsum in 1995. The most recent, 2015's Blood Basin two, is a pretty faithful conversion of the tabletop ruleset, complete with all of the official races and a adequately robust arrangement for organising and running your own leagues and tournaments. While the communities on both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox I ports continue to wane, with lengthy wait times for matchmaking, the PC version has maintained a stable boilerplate player count since roughly Dec 2015, 3 months after launch.
This is due in no small part to i customs that has taken player-run leagues to the extreme. The ReBBL (Reddit Eternal Claret Bowl League) is Blood Bowl two's largest organised league. With over 700 teams spread over 60-something competitions and divided into three continental federations, ReBBL dwarfs anything on the console ports and is a truly incredible feat of arrangement.
The ReBBL is, quite frankly, a glorious picayune slice of weirdness. It has its own dedicated community of journalists who create weekly 'Match of the Day' fashion videos, reporting on the action across all of its leagues and competitions. Presenters, oft under the guise of alter-egos, discuss what went downward in each game, looking at player improvements and critiquing managerial decisions, earlier giving their predictions about the next week's set of matches. These videos often end upward creating legendary players, who get discussed every week and are then mourned when they inevitably get murked on the pitch.
Naturally, if you lot've got well-known players, yous've as well got well-known coaches. Some of these guys are renowned for their incredible skill with certain races, such as Monty, who somehow manages to win regularly with Halflings (who are widely regarded as a joke team). An insane game in which he scored five touchdowns, despite being outnumbered past a vastly more developed Vampire team, is still ane of the nigh upvoted posts on the subreddit. Monty even created a festive jingle for the league, which begins with the line "on the showtime day of Christmas Nuffle gave to me, a Halfling in a large tree".
Still others, like Freddie Gibbs, a dumb Orc coach who refers to Bretonnians as "people from Britain", volition commit to roleplaying their character in all public situations. This has led to the widely held conventionalities that Freddie really is an Orc. I tried to interview him about this. His response was every bit follows:
"I AM 'Un! Orcs iz da biggest and meanest runts 'round 'dis world, and while some stoopid gits loike 'dem pointy-ear'd panzies ya lot call elves 'fink we'z stupid, we rip 'deir spinkly twiggy legs off so 'dey'z can't run from united states of america beatin' 'em ta bitz!"
The interview only went downhill from there, with the remainder of the conversation being mostly well-nigh how elves apparently "crunch good" and his beloved goblin Skipsey, who I assemble is no longer with united states of america.
The ReBBL also has an active press, who volition picket live games and and then perform post-friction match interviews with the coaches. Topics of discussion range from how ane motorbus utilised rats as scouts to bank check out the opposition's pre-game plan, to one guy roleplaying as his star player, a beastman named Hairspray Queen, in order to shower himself with praise. I of the most active writers, a Frenchman who goes past the name Zee, writes a regular feature titled Aptitude-O. Each issue begins with a clarification of him entering a fume-filled tavern where he meets a cadre of baroque characters. Shady Goblins snorting lines of greenish powder, Bretonnian Yeomen headbanging to heavy metal and miserable werewolves drowning their sorrows in tankards of grog can all be establish in this seedy watering hole. These are, in fact, references to the week'southward matches, and coaches on the league's Discord server will often accept turns trying to estimate exactly which player or omnibus has been spotted downing a beer or 10.
Speaking to Zee, he explains he'due south trying to evoke the atmosphere of his favourite movies, such as the infamous 'tea room scene' in John Woo'southward Hard Boiled. For him, this is a labour of dear and a smashing mode to practice his English while contributing to the hobby. "I wanted to bring something to the community," he explains. "You see admins, Twitch casters and YouTubers doing a lot of work then nosotros can all share some Blood Basin moments together. Writing has always been more than of a personal calling so I thought I'd offering my services that way."
I find this hilarious. A Hong Kong cop thriller is about as thematically far away from the Warhammer Fantasy Universe as you can get, but this is typical of the zany nonsense y'all see in the ReBBL every twenty-four hour period.
The league's subreddit, which is where the bulk of the discussion takes place, is often full of banter between teams, taking trivial jabs at i some other or announcing their intention to snatch victory at all costs. 1 example of this, a at present legendary event known equally The Chorfening, involved a player posting a video of him opening the game by ruthlessly murdering the opponent's expensive minotaur with a chainsaw. The poor guy'southward bare stare of disbelief (in that location was an admittedly miniscule chance of him pulling that off) is a thing of true beauty.
Even more than awesome, even so, are the moments of heartwarming kindness, such equally when a much-loved jitney appear he was taking a break due to personal strife, eliciting an outpouring of understanding and support from the community. What's so cool almost this is despite the fact Blood Bowl is an innately competitive game, despite the fact unsportsmanlike behaviour and violent conflict is quite literally hard-baked into the rules, and despite the fact and then many competitive gaming scenes devolve into toxic cesspits of human being nastiness, the ReBBL has always been a pleasant and fun place to play.
Speaking to head admin Stephen 'FullMetal' Peers, he feels the reason behind this is elementary. "People notice it easy to disconnect when they go online," he explains. "Anonymity is a powerful influence in people'southward behaviour." However, Peers' instinct is to mitigate this disconnect by making every coach feel like a somebody in an otherwise enormous customs. "Between the regular streams and the weekly recaps, coaches are not just a proper noun in the oversupply, they are people with histories; some are villains, others heroes, but they're all participating in their own story."
The structure of the divisions, being fairly small and intimate (usually no more than than 14 teams), plays a large part in this as well. "You're in that division with them for thirteen weeks," Peers adds. "It builds a sense of camaraderie, and indeed rivalry, which is often pushed through by the sports reporters. It'due south much more than difficult to exist toxic in that scenario."
This focus on customs is at the heart of everything the ReBBL is about. Peers even jokes, "for a lot of the coaches the league is actually secondary to the customs", citing the fact every team in the entire league has been featured on multiple weekly recaps, as well equally possible live-streamed games and written interviews. The impression I get from Peers is this is very much a labour of love and i he's immensely proud of. He even requested I give a shout out to his 40-stiff admin squad, and who am I to refuse such a request? Well done guys!
One of those aforementioned Friction match of the Day-manner recaps is The Punchmans Report, a hip-hop drenched look at the week'due south events, hosted by Jimmy and Rusty. Speaking to the latter of the two, I showtime to get an idea of what Peers is talking about when he mentioned coaches feeling like they're part of a story. Rusty talks a lot about how their reports are driven by narrative. "Are these guys rivals? Have they played each other often? Is this a David & Goliath competition?" he wonders. For him, the league is less about statistics and more than well-nigh the time Orabbi's Anarchy Dwarf squad had the near violent season in the history of the league, or when a human blitzer named Turley made non-cease big plays, game later game. Hearing all this stuff, you could most exist forgiven for bold he's describing a deep, story-driven RPG of some kind. Later on all, equally Rusty points out, "really, at the end of the day, we just want to tell stories".
When Blood Bowl 2 initially launched on PC, the reviews were mostly lukewarm. A number of reasons were cited, from the complexity of the game'southward rules to its unfair dice rolls. However, what they pretty much all commented on was the fact most of the races were not in the game. Mechanically, Blood Bowl practically is its various races and understanding how to utilise the strengths of each of them makes up the vast majority of any successful coach'due south strategy. Skaven, for example, are fast but squishy. Dwarves are extremely ho-hum but difficult to remove from the field. Naturally, humans are the classic jack-of-all trades. Now, three years down the line, not only is every race represented in-game (when you go the Legendary Edition), just information technology'southward as well constantly on auction.
Claret Bowl is past no means a perfect game. The dice rolls (just similar all dice rolls) are inherently unfair. The races are not even slightly counterbalanced. The rules are complicated and difficult to wrap your caput around. Merely that'south what a existent world sport is similar and Blood Bowl takes that thought and turns it into a hilarious, blood-soaked carnival.
Yet it'south the ReBBL that keeps me coming back to Blood Bowl 2 every calendar week. From the real-life greenbacks bounties placed on the heads of despised star players, to the time someone sent Peers a statue of an Ogre as a hymeneals souvenir, I've barely even scratched the surface with my descriptions of the madness that goes on in this quirky little customs. They even have a rookie league for beginners. Who knows, perhaps you'll find yourself standing reverse my team i day, staring at my two Treemen and 14 Halflings, praying to god I don't pick one of them up and throw him at you. Simply you shouldn't be worried, because I'm rubbish and then are my Halflings.
Source: https://www.eurogamer.net/the-blood-bowl-fanatics-keeping-a-three-year-old-pc-game-alive
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