General Discussion

@tpyo One of my favorite things about the whole necromancy thing is that the devs like... didn't initially realize they'd set up the potential for necromancy lmao. They mentioned during an Inside a Blaseball stream that they were on a work call sometime early s6 and someone was like "oh hey... couldn't someone theoretically use the Lottery Pick blessing to bring someone back from the dead?" and the other devs were like "...yeah i guess but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, they probably won't figure that out right away" and then like 15 minutes later Cali Lotus got incinerated and kicked off the whole chain of events and they had to spend the week trying to decide what to do if the necromancy worked lol. I think the way that blaseball has a back and forth between players and devs like that is SO COOL - I've described blaseball several times as "a TTRPG for people who like cosmic horror and/or sports" because really the way the whole thing is set up and plays out is closest to a TTRPG in my mind. Obviously the devs have a plan and an overarching storyline (now at least - early Discipline was the wild west lmao) but they also respond to things the players do and try to tailor some overall story beats and mechanics to things they know players like.

I remember the whole desert/gate thing! The whole Garages channel was losing their mind when we realized what was happening. That was SO COOL. AND the Worms hitting the gate led to the Longest Thursday (that day we started unredacting EVERYTHING in the Library and started realizing exactly what had happened with Megan Ito and Parker and the firewalk... Parker Prime my beloved), which is honestly one of my favorite blaseball memories - I could not look away from the Discord all day because it seemed like there was CONSTANTLY something new to talk about. And the fact that the Worms were then also immune to consumer attacks? *chefs kiss* Incredible. God finding out what the investigators did together was SO HYPE.

The Garages actually ended up with a Chorby's Soul ring at some point, but it was a couple seasons later. I believe we had wanted an item out of the Bargain Bin to protect one of our itemless players... but the Bargain Bin pulls the most durable item in the pool, which was of course Chorby's Soul. We had either forgotten this or not realized it was in the pool to begin with (or maybe just not been going for Bargain Bin at all? honestly I can't quite remember, I just know we didn't intend to end up with Chorby's Soul). At the same time, we also got gifted an eDense infusion, which made a bunch of our items more dense, AND one of our renovations made us more Dense as well - neither of these were things we were going for and we were fairly upset. We had also won Gatchapon in the previous election (ALSO not something we were going for, but some people take "expand band" very seriously lol) and had all the extra players in our Shadows weighing us down. After being absolutely torn apart by consumers when we had Chorby, we had been terrified of being heavy, and now this gift round had made us extremely heavy and everyone was pretty stressed... and then shortly after, the Reader flipped the depth chart, and our team was suddenly out of consumer territory. Either someone knew/suspected the flip was coming (I know SIBR has a way to see certain code pushes early and will sometimes have advance notice on things, but I have no idea if the flip was something they knew about) or someone was just trying to mess with us, but either way it very quickly worked out in our favor (and we also did get a bit of Tot Clark, Consumer Puncher, which was very good!).

I remember the Lovers plundering PM, too, and had wondered at the time if it was part of a play to get Knight back! It's cool that they coordinated with y'all and asked if you would be okay with it - obviously it's fair play to use the available game mechanics however you want but I always think it's so nice when teams work together and try not to blindside or screw each other over. I really love the Lovers as a team too - they frequently come hang out in Garages channels (especially while blaseball is in session) and we have some in-jokes about how our teams are holding hands and how the Lovers always have our number (both in blaseball and in general). They're good folks and I always feel so bad about how hard they got hit by the sim during Expansion, especially with Knight. :( Although I do think Knight is only TECHNICALLY dead because the Steaks went to the Hall first and all the Hall teams became legally dead upon entering the Hall (every single active Garages player is marked as "Incinerated" in the Wiki lmao), so maybe the Lovers will be able to get Knight back someday. Provided we even get the same players back next era, I guess. (I sure hope so, I'm real attached to our guys. My dream would be getting a reset to the s23 elections when all the teams went under review, because I want Tot, Mike, and Ollie back SO BAD - we lost 3 s1 players in s24 and that HURT. I've got my theories about how things might play out if they do bring back the current rosters, but I guess we'll see.)

Layna has become so important to the Garages and our dedication to not giving up on bad players and I love her so much. ;-; We love her SO MUCH that back when the Beams were trying to get rid of Brisket, they were doing a scattershot approach where they just filed Wills for every single player within EE range of Brisket (so that they weren't targeting any one team) - this would've included Layna. Our reps got wind of this (we're fairly close with the Beams) and went over to very politely ask that they NOT file any EE Wills for Layna, because we had put so much work into her and were kind of having a rough time and losing Layna for a very heavy cat would've been a big morale blow for us at that point (we were only a couple seasons removed from Chorby and still recovering). Despite Layna being an OG Beam that they would've loved to bring home, they kindly agreed, and had pinned messages in their voting channels asking the Beams to avoid putting in EE votes for Layna. Obviously they can't directly control everyone's votes, but the fact that they overall as a team were willing to leave Layna with us was incredibly sweet and I am still grateful to them for it. <3 (We did wind up getting Brisket anyway, but it was for a player we'd had for I think less than a season and it definitely stung much less than losing Layna would've. We turned Brisket into a lil mascot balloon and it's chilling in our Shadows being adorable now.)

Yeah I feel like Unstable was much less of a threat during Expansion, just due to the relatively reduced frequency of Eclipse weather. During Discipline, when Eclipse was one of like 5 weathers? Terrifying, because the odds you were going to have to play in an Eclipse while Unstable were so high. During Expansion when we had like eighty different suns and salmon and flooding and etc? Generally not much of a concern. (I think Luis and Chorby/Chorby replicas may have actually been the only two players to get got by Unstable + Eclipse in all of Expansion aside from s24 when there was instability and supernova eclipses EVERYWHERE.) (Actually fun fact the first time Chorby got incinerated was in a Mills/Garages game, with Chorby playing for the Mills, and the instability actually chained to Layna - thankfully she was a pitcher at the time and didn't have an Eclipse game coming up so she was safe.) So that Tot game felt particularly terrifying. I remember the Keepers coming in, realizing there was absolutely NO WAY they were going to restore order, and just kind of hanging around to make sure we didn't start like, swearing AT each other or something (all our swearing was directed at the Sim and/or the fictional rogue umps. Afterwards one of the Keepers did ask us to send apologies through Modmail - and then almost immediately had to ask us to stop apologizing because we were apologizing too much lmaooooo.

I loved all our Short Circuit guys, I'm gonna miss em so much! I got especially attached to our SC1 guys and I'm gonna miss them most of all but all of them were great. I like to think they're all still out there in the extended blaseball universe having a great time (what passes for a great time in a universe ruled by capricious gods who make you endlessly play a sport for their own ends anyway).

One thing I think is especially cool about team cultures is like, inter-team relationships and how those develop? I mentioned the Lovers earlier and how we've got a kind of silly teamwide flirtations between our two teams - that initially started because of the whole Kichiro/Allison (RIV Allison Abbott :( ) thing back during Discipline. We consider the Magic our best friends in all of blaseball (parkpark it!); them winning Chorby Short from our Shadows as their first-ever blessing really bonded us and now we would do literally anything for them, I love the Magic so much. (They even wrote us a whole friendship album!) We also became good friends with the Mills after the Chorby Soul resurrection. Chorby was a former Mill and wound up plundered by the Mills the season after we accidentally revived him (and then was incinerated in a game vs. us, as I mentioned) and so we all kinda went through it together and that was a bonding experience (and then during SC3 we were the two teams slated to play ourselves during that midway tournament when the Sim just completely broke lmao, so we had fun bonding over that as well). And we've got old (playful) rivalries with the Beams and the Spies - the Beams because we have vowed to kill all Gods and if the Sun is a God then that includes the Sun, which the Beams are Not Happy about, and the Spies because they were in our division back in early Discipline and so we played them a LOT and developed a bitter, UST-fueled rivalry (because we also think the Spies are very cool and good). It's so cool how like, team cultures develop and those cultures can influence interaction with other team cultures!

I only recently found out about Blaseball after another user here recommended it and it sounds so up my alley! With the hiatus going on, I haven't been able to take part or follow along live yet but I'm definitely keeping my eyes open for when the season starts again.

Things might change but at the moment after reading through the wiki I am very fond of the Houston Spies as a team

@vakarians yes yes YES sometimes i just think about what might've happened with blaseball if some of these moments never happened. like, of course there's chorby and jaylen necromancy, but also other things like. turntables and ratification passing, which ratified turntables instantly? imo that was a FANTASTIC moment of facing the consequences of our actions immediately, and it was great because it was OUR actions!! we could've had the option to remove it if the wrecking ball had passed, but that was US who did that. and i think that made the coin practically rigging the elections with either only having 1 decree (before the reader intervened, of course) or just. having every option be adding a new sun seem EXTREMELY sinister while she kept preaching about democracy and fan's choices. its just... fantastic writing. oh and i really love the comparison to a ttrpg, ive heard a lot of people call blaseball an ARG, but i think it's more similar in spirit at least to an rpg? just in how there's a planned story and world but the players have a direct impact on how things actually work out and can even change how the plot goes, while in my experience ARGs are a lot more like,,, the story is completely determined by the creator, it just involves a bit more effort on an observer's part to uncover the actual story? idk idk i think blaseball technically is an ARG but it definitely has more of the vibe of a ttrpg imo

the longest thursday was SO much fun, just,,, everything happening was SO exciting, it really did feel like we were uncovering secret, forgotten texts. and there was just something genuinely a little scary about that huge "Megan Ito ECHOED Megan Ito ECHOED Megan Ito etc. etc. etc." entry. and the slow realization that team incinerations were a THING that could HAPPEN. i cannot understate how much i love the whole herring unredaction mechanic as a narrative device, and the foreshadowing with 1k upshells leading to a lootcrates tweet?? absolutely amazing. i love looking back on stuff like that and connecting the dots. like this is a little unrelated but i did in fact yell at my non-blaseball irl friends about how PERFECT the foreshadowing of the depth chart being upside down was. the gate surrounded by clouds was down... the desert was up.... even the bottom jaw of the consumer looked a bit like a sun! all the phrasing of the crabs ascending to blaseball2 and then returning because they dug too deep... and then the absolute BEST thing was the realization that when the breach first happened, "THE COIN FLIPS. OVER UNDER. UNDER OVER." was referring to the depth chart!! all the way back in season 12!!! like i don't know if it was planned like that exactly but the fact that it was brought back in the final un-flip was PHENOMENAL. the subtle foreshadowing... chef's kiss

oh right yeah i remember that happening! the bargain bin was... a wild ride, that's for sure. honestly in hindsight i think it's a bit funny that chorby's soul, being an item, was just. normally affected by item mechanics. like we didn't even HAVE our replica's chorby's soul for the entire season since someone with the trader mod stole it. i remember feeling genuinely SO bad about that happening, especially since we were completely immune to consumers and the flowers... were not. and lol the worms had almost the exact opposite problem with weight. we were trying to stay light at first, but we kinda gave up on that during the whole chorby's soul thing. a big thing that worms fans complained about for AGES was that we never got the cleanup renovation, and our filthiness was really weighing us down into consumer level. the tune changed pretty majorly after we got the cluttered mod on scratch deleuze- at the time we had the one of if not the filthiest ballpark in the league, so scratch preformed PHENOMENALLY in home games since the mod is based on filthiness levels. and then, of course, now that we WANT to stay gross? we get the cleanup renovation the same season we're doing the whole chorby thing. the strategy people are WAY more focused on the gift shop for obvious reason, and the cleanup passes because there's still people REALLY wanting to keep the worms light. it, uh. didn't really help much, and now we lost what was practically a home field advantage with cluttered. we at least managed to get the filth back up pretty quickly by getting renos in other seasons specifically to build up filth, but STILL. even when we were the second heaviest team when the depth chart flipped (yall were actually the only team heavier than us at the time, haha) we had FINALLY stopped hovering at the depth line, but of COURSE now that we were lightweight, being lightweight was a BAD thing. luckily we were ultimately fine because of absolute LEDGEND Xandra Pancakes with the trader mod. she would steal another team's steel chair, use it once, and then trade it for another team's steel chair with full durability. She did this MULTIPLE times. Resident dirtbag Xanpan got herself a redemption arc... she was protecting her team.......

also would just like to add that when you guys won gatchapon the worms were overall VERY relieved, mostly because the player you guys took was our newest postseason birth player, which was. Backpatch. I will not lie i (and many others) lowkey hated backpatch's name and were happy to see them go after having them in our shadows for less than a season lol. the next gatchapon was... less great, since we lost ANOTHER new postseason birth, but this time it was crow madrigal. i miss crow madrigal so much... we loved that terrible little player so much that we had shadow infused their defense. crow had more defense stars than all their other stats combined <3

oh MAN that is a relief honestly. i did in fact check the wiki and just chalked up the incineration as another "bad thing happens to worm-related players" thing. There was a... surprisingly large amount of bad things happening to former worms/worm-adjacent players considering we had, like, 2 feedbacks and 3 incinerations the entire expansion era. Luis and Aurora Blotles incinerated after leaving the team, Jacoby Podcast and Kaz Fiasco (BOTH former worms) feedback swapped, PM vaulted, Knight Triumphant feedbacked. like it doesn't seem like TOO much but weather events like that just Do Not Happen to the worms??? like. one of our 3 incinerations was pudge nakamoto who had already proven they could just leave the hall whenever they wanted. but yes the lovers are WONDERFUL! we didn't have much interaction with them due to being in direct opposite subleagues but the few times ive hopped over to lovers channels or they came over to hang out with us were a blast c: but yeah its REALLY great to know that there's a chance they might be able to get knight back eventually! and man yeah getting the s23 elections roster in the reset would be ideal. we still get to keep the prehistory players but just. pretend that s24 didn't happen in terms of roster changes. for me personally its less for the sake of my own team, i just think that the breath mints should get to keep rod.net tbh

that's super cool of the beams to do that! love it when teams cooperate like that. we are all really one league!! glad you guys were able to keep layna c: after hearing about all this, once blaseball comes back ill definitely be going out of my way to peek in at your guy's games when she's pitching. its just very nice to hear about an improvement plan working out and it ending out alright c: and yeah i remember when the beams were campaigning hard to get rid of brisket, and i just remember being a lil sad that we REALLY couldn't afford getting an attractor because of how balancing-on-the-line heavy we were. like, when we ended up attracting tad seeth our immediate decision was to give them the roamin' mod because we just couldn't afford the weight, and the whole alternate removing attractor thing wasn't a known mechanic yet.

oh yeah now that i think about it, the fact that all the different weathers being added meant that eclipses were super rare was a pretty neat effect in hindsight? it made the whole supernova eclipse thing that much more intense. like... the contrast. the drama of it all. but i guess that's partially my opinion because, once again, weather continued to not happen to the worms. we didn't even get supernova eclipse half the time because of our black hole boosts in the ballpark haha. and WOW that must've really been a wild time! and honestly im not that surprised that the keepers just let it run its course. the worms were once allowed a designated swear hour because one of the keepers promised us cuss time one season for our postseason performance. that was a VERY fun hour. ill miss you "g'(curse)"

the ohio worms already kinda have a lore thing where our team has access to other universes and timelines via wormholes in the museum so i like to imagine that the og roster and all our short circuit players can visit each other and hang out <3 and yes that includes the ohio peanuts. they might be a little evil but that's ok we still love them

oh i love inter-team relationships SO much its unreal. like, ok, one of the first things that worms experienced as a team was the wild low winning all of the bubble blessings that improved the entire wild low division. it was like... a nice little welcome from our division, and ever since then we've had some pretty strong wild low solidarity! and then of course there's breach team solidarity, (let's go breach teams!!!). but even past that worms have developed some really neat connections to other teams during expansion! and i LOVE friendly rivalries with teams so much. there's the spies, the bane of our very existence (affectionate). that whole thing is very funny because the whole dynamic between the spies and the worms reminds me a lot of something like. idk a doofensmirtz and perry the platypus type of dynamic. the spies (and specifically fitzgerald) are the worms worst enemy and the spies politely humor us and thwart our plans without even really trying. the spies really ARE very cool and good (but don't tell them i said that). every single time we've faced the spies in the postseason they knock us out. INCLUDING in our ohio peanuts arc, which was VERY funny. and then with the mechs? that's also a type of friendship in that we act like rivals but then we give each other millions of coins for the gift shop. its VERY fun. and man, speaking of culture, i just cannot get over the fact that the worms have grown so much as a little community since the early days of expansion. the first few seasons were ROUGH, and they stayed kinda choppy for a while. lots of different ideas on what the worms should be. like, things were getting almost hostile at a few points. reps had to start stepping in because people kept blaming the crabs every time something unfavorable happened in the election (long story), but by the end? it REALLY felt like the worms had found our little community and had figured out what we wanted to do with our silly little team. and that was to drive it into the horizon asap and that's wonderful i think. also we're pals with the crabs now and that's AWESOME, black hole buddies <3 and THEN we really found our vibe after short circuit 2. turns out that the ohio worms love being the center of attention, having power, and being just a little bit evil. idk but i think if the game band ever gives us the chance to become villains again we'd take it without question

(and, just as a final aside; i guess it's good that the worm's god, jim, was already dead when we entered the league. one less for you guys to worry about, haha)

[quote name="Aprycus" date="2022-04-11 15:42:21" ] I only recently found out about Blaseball after another user here recommended it and it sounds so up my alley! With the hiatus going on, I haven't been able to take part or follow along live yet but I'm definitely keeping my eyes open for when the season starts again. Things might change but at the moment after reading through the wiki I am very fond of the Houston Spies as a team [/quote] oooh nice!! Houston Spies are a VERY cool team c: blaseball is def An Experience (as you might've guessed by the fact that me and vakarians have been just going wild with all these paragraphs), its REALLY easy to get sucked in once you get past the initial confusion with the... everything that happens all the time. tbh i think now's a really good time to be introduced to it tho, now that expansion is over, since i'm guessing most of the more wacky and confusing mechanics of expansion won't be returning next era. it should be starting up again this summer i think, so you def have time to get caught up with stuff before things get going again!

..what
what is blaseball someone explain
this sounds interesting and intimidating at the same time and now im curious from reading the mountains of text in here

[quote name="Acetheaxolotl" date="2022-04-12 09:26:44" ] ..what what is blaseball someone explain this sounds interesting and intimidating at the same time and now im curious from reading the mountains of text in here [/quote] oh man ok let's see if i can give it justice so the very, VERY basics; blaseball is an online baseball simulator where you can directly impact the future of the game; it's baseball at your mercy. you make an account on blaseball.com, you pick a favorite team, and you watch them play. for every game you can bet on who you think is going to win. at no point is real money involved; it used to be that you used coins to bet on games to get more coins you'd use to buy votes, but after we destroyed capitalism (long story), you just choose who you think will win and if you get all your guesses right you're given votes. the votes you earn are used in the election, which you can vote on any time during the week. the results are revealed at the end of the week. the elections are where it starts to get both very wacky and very dramatic. blaseball is very VERY big in the whole fans determine the future of the games thing. you get to pick new rules that impact the entire game (like new weathers, new game mechanics, how you can earn money, etc) and get a chance to improve (or hinder, if you want) your chosen team. The thing about blaseball, however, is that things are NEVER simple. At the very first election, fans voted for something called "The Forbidden Book" (it is forbidden). When the Book opened, rouge umpires started to incinerate players. To make a long story very, very short, fans found out that they could use the election to bring one of the dead players back to life. This was not an intended game mechanic, but it was pulled off. Said player, Jaylen Hotdogfingers, came back with a Debt so that they would randomly hit players with a pitch and make them more likely to become incinerated. imo that pretty solidly set the vibe for how blaseball was going to go from that point on. blaseball is a game of the fans facing the consequences of our actions. alongside all that voting shenanigans, there's plot to this funny little sport simulation. In the discipline era, the main villain was a giant, evil peanut god who kept trapping players inside giant peanut shells. In the expansion era, the main villain was a girlboss CEO in the form of a roman coin who was also the embodiment of capitalism. she kept feeding players to sharks it was a problem. So, like, it's a very eldritch version of baseball? there are a LOT of implications. like players are apparently sometimes turned into coffee. sometimes players swap places with versions of themselves from other universes. Fish (salmon, specifically) have control over the flow of time. Players are hatched from a field of eggs. Los Angeles is infinitely recursive, the Mojave Desert has been consumed by a portal into hell. Atlantis is real. There's a lot going on and I could literally write essays, plural, about blaseball's plot. But like, overall? It's a whole lot of fun, it has the vibes of a ttrpg, you don't really need to know anything about baseball to enjoy it. It's very much a fan-driven experience, it's kinda hard to REALLY experience blaseball alone. Coordination is a HUGE part of the experience, since that's how fans are able to pull off election shenanigans like Jaylen Necromancy. Lots of the players have silly names, but the only real "canon" things about them are their stats and a few randomly generated things like a pregame ritual (stuff like "running the bases", "spinning", "blood transfusion," "spaghetti," and "wild hunt") and coffee type. Pretty much anything you'll hear about players otherwise are all fan-created! but yeah, TL;DR, blaseball is an eldritch-themed baseball simulation with plot where you get to impact what happens!

[quote name="tpyo" date="2022-04-12 18:25:55" ] the elections are where it starts to get both very wacky and very dramatic. blaseball is very VERY big in the whole fans determine the future of the games thing. you get to pick new rules that impact the entire game (like new weathers, new game mechanics, how you can earn money, etc) and get a chance to improve (or hinder, if you want) your chosen team. The thing about blaseball, however, is that things are NEVER simple. At the very first election, fans voted for something called "The Forbidden Book" (it is forbidden). When the Book opened, rouge umpires started to incinerate players. To make a long story very, very short, fans found out that they could use the election to bring one of the dead players back to life. This was not an intended game mechanic, but it was pulled off. Said player, Jaylen Hotdogfingers, came back with a Debt so that they would randomly hit players with a pitch and make them more likely to become incinerated. imo that pretty solidly set the vibe for how blaseball was going to go from that point on. blaseball is a game of the fans facing the consequences of our actions. alongside all that voting shenanigans, there's plot to this funny little sport simulation. In the discipline era, the main villain was a giant, evil peanut god who kept trapping players inside giant peanut shells. In the expansion era, the main villain was a girlboss CEO in the form of a roman coin who was also the embodiment of capitalism. she kept feeding players to sharks it was a problem. So, like, it's a very eldritch version of baseball? there are a LOT of implications. like players are apparently sometimes turned into coffee. sometimes players swap places with versions of themselves from other universes. Fish (salmon, specifically) have control over the flow of time. Players are hatched from a field of eggs. Los Angeles is infinitely recursive, the Mojave Desert has been consumed by a portal into hell. Atlantis is real. There's a lot going on and I could literally write essays, plural, about blaseball's plot. [/quote] A universe to rival DC and Marvel... I care little for sports but I must say I am [i][b]intrigued[/b][/i]