Is Fumbbl Down?

[Thadrin]

Why? because people are scared of them?
There are opponents that will make more of a mess of your roster than dwarfs.

[Captain1821]

It is good to see many of you here! I hope FUMBBL will return soon.
In FranceBloodBowl they use the same Javabbowl we use?

[Anadrael]

from AfterNET

Topper28 set the topic for #fumbbl to "Christer said that his internet connection has been down since Wednesday last week. He doesn't know when it will be back up. He predicted a few days"

[mstrchef13]

As I have read about in forum threads and heard personally in chat, many fumbbl coaches don't want to play against dwarves because dwarf strategy is highly predictable (get the ball, cage, plod down the field two squares at a time), slow, and boring.

Honestly, I'm on fumbbl to (1) become a better coach, and (2) enjoy myself. Winning and losing doesn't matter much to me, because I realize that I'm not as good as most of the people I play. However, if I'm going to give up 2 hours of my life to play a game, I want to enjoy myself. It doesn't matter whether I'm playing elves or chaos, I'm going to be bored to tears against a traditional dwarf coach. Cage, plod, stall, score on turn 8 is incredibly effective as a strategy, and incredibly boring to play against, so many (including me) just won't do it.

OTOH, if I look at your roster and I see a dwarf runner with 9 completions and a blitzer who took catch on a doubles roll, then I'll play you because you're different, and the game will most likely be enjoyable regardless of whether I win or lose.

Fumbbl coaches aren't anti-dwarf (for the most part), they are anti-boring and anti-predictable. A chaos team with three claw/rsc and dps on it is predictable too, so they don't get games much either. But fumbbl isn't anti-chaos. It's an open format, you can choose to play who you wish. I wish to be entertained, to not fear for the survival of my team, and to have a chance to win. If I don't think I have that, I'm not playing, and why should I?

[Hammerhiem]

apsolutely spot on Mstrchef.

Dwarf teams generally are the most boring to play against, if they win the kick off you can expect a very dull game unless you get a favourable kick off.

I have developed cage busting elves purely so i have a reason to play against them, and the games where still dull.

high end Chaos teams with 3 RSC 5 Claw and no block should expect never to get a game, since they are the anti thesis of the way i like to play.

[MattShepherd]

What's interesting here -- to me -- is that FUMBBL also serves as a large-scale acid test for the game itself. The smallest crack in the game becomes a chasm when you are suddenly looking at a playbase of 1000 players as compared to the 10 in your home league.

Case in point: Dwarves. In my (very limited) experience playing BB, Dwarves are usually a pretty successful team. They win a lot of games. In the one league season I completed, I won with C-Dwarves, and the dwarves came in second, followed by ors, followed by Chaos.

It takes a site like FUMBBL to see how in the broad scheme bashy teams are generally more successful than dodgy teams. Not exclusively, and not consistently, but generally. But that's the kind of data you can only gather after observing a bazillion games at all sorts of skill levels.

I don't think BB would be the game it is now without the kind of macro-testing that FUMBBL provides. Rather than trying to get a bunch of people to hook up via phone and play a few games here and there, you can get thousands of people playing (and complaining about, ad nauseum) the game every day.

That's a hell of an evolutionary speed-up.

[Hammerhiem]

agreed dwarves are sucsessful, but sucsessful does not always equate to fun.

i play for fun, that means i limit my playing of dwarf teams to very low TR or teams that have a cage buster.

it's either that or a lose 2-1 with the dwarves scoreing twice on turn 8, usually after standing at the endzone for 2 turns in the half they recieved the ball. . . this i can live without thanks.

[ClayInfinity]

Hey, I started this thread, so I guess I will jump back in now that it's up to 10 pages...

I have played several hundred FUMBBL games since I discovered it in late 2003. To me, it has rekindled a long lost passion as my real life took over many of my gaming hobbies. Now I can play whenever I have the time and I dont need to travel etc etc.

But it has worked the other way in that I recently joined a table top league in Sydney and am loving it! I also met some of the guys in our Aussie Fumbbl league (the SWL) and we have now started a small D&D game! So I guess I have fumbbl to thank for rekindling not just table top BB, but also D&D.

On the negative, it is cherrypicking and the plight of Dwarves that gives fumbbl a bad rap. I think that is warrented. However, I do think that guys who bitch and moan about "rude" or people who are arseholes think they need to get over it. How insulting can one person get over the IRC??? If some one abuses me, I just hit ignore, or better still fire back! Hey, I live in Australia and if some guy in Europe wants a piece of me, well I will oblige and give him back his just deserts!

But in the 18mths I have played, I have RARELY experienced that... I think that kind of issue is a very insignificant aspect in Fumbbl.

In fact, I have noticed very little chat in the main #fumbbl channel and I actually think that has taken some of the "community" feel away from fumbbl.

And to all the SWL'ers here who I have seen posting, the SWL Season 9 will start soon after when we are back online

Clay

[Frankie]

I guess the members of the site increased since fumbbl is down. How ironic...

Thanks for the info Valen! Primarily I was looking for this post, but a few comments raised my attention: why are some of you blaming fumbbl because of some nerds? Good coaches should define it rather.

[Snorri_dj]

Three beers for the SWL!

Snorri

[harald]

I would like to see implemented in fumbbl a little distinguishing of teams as bashy, neutral and finesse and in order to play one from the ame category you would have had to play a team from the other categories first ie on a rolling basis.

That would mean less bash vs bash and less finesse vs finesse on fumbbl but it would still weed out the rsc/claws broken-powerteams since they would never get their non-bashy games.

FUMBBL is just great and I have met a whole lot more good coaches than dullwits. Though it is tough to get non-bash games with 7 foul appearances regardless whether you have DP/excess MB/RSC or not. Thus I intend to start a more gentler chaos and emphasize on the pass play just for the hell of it.

Only ways to get 'real' games are in tournaments and leagues which there are plenty of anyways though games are not often enough to suit my crave for bloodbowl. FUMBBL allows me a game of bloodbowl every night despite kids/pets/house etc and is an awesome complement to live bloodbowl that is only played about 8-10 games a year unfortunately.

Go Christer and may that site be up soon enough!

[Taffsadar]

I've played 40-50 games lately and I've only faced 1 guy who really was an flower of an undescript sort and spent 10 turns of the game fouling becuase "he had lost anyway". Another guy was abit whiny about my rolling while playing as a retard. To be honest 2 persons out of 40 should statisticly speaking be assholes wherever you look in the world.

[Azurus]

I think the problem with dwarves is simply one of repetition.

Many dwarf coaches on FUMBBL (not all, of course) can only manage one type of play. One of the reasons for this is that the powergamers lock on to them as a 'safe' team. (One good team + One good strategy = easy wins). I was once convinced (by the league commish) to play them in a short league. Having no prior experience of playing dwarves, I won 3 and drew 2 of my 5 games. As I said, 'safe', I found it surprisingly easy to simply 'not lose' while playing dwarves (I did get bored almost senseless mind, although I had to play Khemri twice, I think - what a depressing matchup). These powergamer types can often be shown up though, since, once they've lost the ball from their cage, they go to pieces.

From the other side of the field, then -

Since most dwarf coaches do play a very similar game, the high number of games a coach can play on FUMMBL can mean they get boring very fast.
In TT I play about a dozen games a year, so odds are I'll play against dwarves once, perhaps twice. Fine, no problem. On FUMBBL, I play around 125 games a year, so I'll play, say, 10 dwarf teams in that year. If they all play the same way, I'll be bored of dwarves by the 5th team, and will probably look for alternatives to playing the other 5. A more versatile team (and of course, versatile coaches help greatly in either instance) will hold my interest for more games.

I think, fumbblers don't have a problem with playing dwarves. They have a problem with playing dwarves REGULARLY. I certainly do, they bore me quite quickly, so I try not to play them too often. Maybe I've just been unlucky with the dwarf coaches i've faced, but I've had no such problem with, say, orcs.

[Mirascael]

Nah, dwarves are clearly broken, not from their own perspective but from the perspective of a low-AV team playing against them. Dwarves get Guard/MB very quickly, and then it's GG THX NO RE AV 7 teams regularly.
It's a fundamental flaw of the game's design rather than a typical fumbbl problem. When playing in a long-term league with a fixed schedule and experienced players, all races but dwarves, chaos dwarves, chaos and orcs can be considered as challenging fun choices (sort of better gobbos/flings). Sad but true, just check fumbbl's major (and minor) leagues, if there is a fixed schedule you'll commonly encounter racial restrictions for these 4 teams (sometimes for khemri, rotters, ogres and undead as well), which are the favourite choices for such leagues. That's not a fumbbl issue, that's a bug coming with the very rules themselves.

[Uber]

I bet most of those brave dwarf coaches don't even play against dwarves themselves. There's just no reward playing a high av thick skull all block stalling team. Until they make some changes to them, I don't see that changing much.