As you might expect, this month my blog is all about NAF World Cup IV. However, first, let’s get the rest of the news out of the way!
BB2016 has been making waves throughout October. Firstly, the Lizards finally arrived, and cold blooded BB enthusiasts now have Chameleon Skinks and some new star players to enjoy. The Head Coach’s Handbook was released, which summarises most of the core BB2016 rules in one book and is accompanied by a handy roster and star player access free download (which supersedes the lists in the book, which suffered from a few typos). We also found out last week that Ogres are next. How does all of this affect NAF tournaments, I’ve seen some of you ask..? Good question, and one that will be answered on Nov. 1 (tomorrow as this is published!) as we release the results of our 2019 Annual Review. We’re going to advertise that the review has arrived and what the state of play will be in 2020 as loudly as we can, wherever we can, so make sure you check it out when we do. A little bit more on the Annual Review later.
Big tournament wise, we learned this month that non-European teams will be welcome at Eurobowl 2020 in Warsaw, Poland. This is hugely exciting news! Nowhere else in Blood Bowl do you get chance to represent your country and face off in true international competition (complete with caps, shirt-swapping and national pride at stake), so a non-European national eight will be most welcome if you guys fancy popping over and joining us. I probably make that sound easier than it is!
Housekeeping time. As ever, you guys have been pretty busy, as 40 tournaments were played this past month, including one Beach Bowl, a Sevens, a Streetbowl and a Deathbowl. That feels like a smaller number than usual, but there was a big fish to contend with that you were all giving a bit of breathing room. Let’s shift all of our focus to the biggest tournament of this month, year or ice age (so far!), the NAF World Cup IV.
Since it is approaching a month since battle was joined in Dornbirn, we have all heard and read a hundred accounts (or more) of what went down. That said, a tournament of such magnitude is impossible to ignore in a NAF tournament blog, and I think you can all stand one more review. Or not! You can always skip it. 😉 I hope that there is some new stuff below, but apologies if there is some repetition from what you have already seen.
The Preamble
The World Cup, for those of you that have been living under a rock, was a 1431 coach behemoth held in over three days in Dornbirn, Austria. Coaches traveled from all over the world, making the NAFWC the NAF’s truly global, flagship, mega-party. The tournament had been the better part of three years in the making, and heading up the organising team was Torsten / Torjurub, your NAF VP. In May 2017, it was announced that the Dornbirn bid had beaten out the team from the Isle of Wight (UK) in the eyes of our learned selection committee, and the hard work really began in earnest from that point. Approximately 230 six-coach teams would face off while playing nine games, one of which would become World Champion. But of course, the games are secondary to meeting, greeting and drinking with fellow Blood Bowl enthusiasts you would never normally get to spend time with.
From day one of my time on the NAF committee, I was impressed with the level of organisation going on behind the scenes and with Torsten’s dedication to the task. The committee kept a watching brief of progress; but bar a couple of meetings and acting as a sounding board here and there, the onus is really on the organising team to being the WC to life. And that makes sense. For instance, sitting in his kitchen in Virginia, Nate probably doesn’t know how best to organise shuttle buses in an Austrian town he has never previously visited; it’s not something that can be externally micro-managed. The build-up was a professional and impressive as I’ve ever seen; I thought the social media output was a triumph and the hype going into Dornbirn was incredibly real.
Some images of you enjoying yourselves, here. I’ve stolen each and every photo in this blog from Facebook, mostly Torsten’s feed. Because I’m rubbish at photos! If you have tagged Torsten and I’ve stolen your photo, or I’ve somehow otherwise stumbled across it online, thanks! I suspect I’ve pilfered from further and wider than I expect… Check out the Facebook group for far more than I could or should copy / paste.
Tournament Review
Much (much) has already been written about the issues that impacted the tournament on the Thursday and Friday. Rather than rehash them myself, I’ll let Torsten speak, via his post-event Facebook message:
Dear Blood Bowl Community in general, and dear World Cup participants in particular, dear NAF committee and SBBM members,
Let me assure you, I have tried to give you the best possible tournament in history, I tried to think about every small detail to make it great, I had one chance only, and I blew it. I feel extremely bad, up to the point where I just want to leave everything behind me and be somewhere in a dark cave so I don’t have to speak to no-one.
In order to understand what happened, I wrote this for you to see what we went through during these days.
First of all, despite everybody blaming the Software for all the delays, it probably sounds funny or strange, but the Software worked exactly as expected. But if you feed the software with wrong information it will calculate it wrong. The Software has worked at UKTC without any problems, also at Tilean team Cup and German Team Bowl. Only at Bibali Cup it did not work because the preparation of the file was bad. There were misunderstanding between me and the organizers, which lead to a breakdown in the draws. Nothing we could fix that easily. So 3 out of 4 tries worked without problems, the software works, but we knew we had to be very careful when setting up the file.
The whole mess basically started 3 weeks before the event when I found out that the glue on the iron foil will not stick to the markers as we had planned. The manufacturer tried several things, but nothing really improved the problem. So I thought that it would be ok for people to use superglue to getter better contact, but in order to help people I made the decision that everybody gets them pre-assembled, instead of the players putting them together themselves. This was the worst decision I have EVER made. It took 2 weeks, 4-6 people working on them until 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning, including myself. Instead of taking care or proper data-entry I was putting puzzles together. Instead of entering all the line-ups of each squad and making sure the manual draw was properly entered I was putting ironfoil on the puzzles.
So on Wednesday afternoon we started to put the skill markers into the bags for each coach…. and on Thursday until 4 pm. This is when we make a second bad call, instead of letting the coaches pick their own markers, we sorted them by ourselves… This is what caused the long delays on Thursday…. In the meantime we registered the squads to see who is missing. At that point I knew about 12 coaches missing. Then another mistake happened, which we still don’t know who’s fault that is, but it is pointless to argue. There was an Italian group which had two squads, but they only send one person to the registration for both squads. Either they forgot to tell our staff who the second squad is or our staff forgot the put a check mark on it. It’s pointless to do finger-pointing now, it just happened. So by midnight, shortly before the hall closed, I was given the lists. I put in on inside of my laptop, but when I left it must have slipped out of it. When I was at the hotel the list was missing. Here is when I started panicking the first time, because at this point I also noticed that the squad order was not in the system and Milo had the list on his computer. So I started entering the infos from our web data base manually and gave up at 2 a.m. in the morning after I had only done 10% of all squads.
I went with Milo early to the venue on Friday morning where I found the missing coaches list on the floor. I started organizing the drop-outs in the way we had planned it. We had 18 drop-outs plus one team (so we thought). In the meantime Milo started to write a script to enter the lineups. Under pressure and his sickness it took very long, it felt like ages. As originally planned and announced prior to the event, I had called the single sign up squads to me and told them which team they will be with from now on and we sent them to their new squads. We also had to switch one pairing. Now we are already in two hours delay and I had to to start the opening ceremony, which of course also had a technical problem since the server just broke down shortly before the presentation was about to start. I’m on the stage and was hoping Milo was getting the script done. Usually he is very quick, but with his health condition getting worse his concentration was gone. Every few minutes somebody of our staff came in and asked him how long? how long? And we couldn’t give any good info. By the time the draw was out, we had 2.5 hours delay. We thought we were in calm waters now. Then the one squad came back and told us there was already some other squads playing. This is when we found out that the missing squad was indeed not missing. Usually I would have called the captain of that missing squad to see what happened, but due to the other problems I was overloaded with work and did not ask somebody else to do it. So we came up with the idea of them having to play each other (it was a squad of single sign-ups and they did not know each other), which they liked.
Then the second game came upon us. Apparently some 7-man squads had wildly mixed their team and other people ignored the order we assigned them. This lead to about 10 games to be changed manually, which took time. The next draw was out, but we learned quickly that some pairings had just played in round 1 against each other. So I looked in the Software why this happened. It took a while to locate the error. It was not an error in the code, but a data entry problem. When I did the manual draw during the press conference I have updated the game 1 page with the results of the draw, but I forgot to update the center piece of the main window with the pairings, so it still showed a random dummy draw and by accident it only affected a few squads. I’m actually happy that it happened already in game 2 and not later during the tourney. NAF committee came in to see what the hold up is and I explained it to them. Again, Milo wrote a script to extract the data from game 1 and sorting it so I could fit it in my main page. Again that took time of unknown length. So once the draw was out NAF committee and us agreed on dropping the third game especially after the long Thursday.
After game 2, Milo and I went to the hotel and worked until 2 a.m to clean out all remaining mess in the system, except one, but this only affected the two student teams and we were able to enter data manually for them after each draw. We did some tests and we were somewhat confident that it should work now, but we were also confident at game 1 and 2, so we cautioned the NAF committee, that we believe 4 games are feasible, but only if we have more time between games and also reducing the game time back to the original 2.25 hours. The 45 min in between games was enough to download the results (takes about 5-8 min for 1428 coaches), create the ranking (4-6 min) and put the next draw up online (5-8 min). After each step we have reviewed the data thoroughly to make sure there were no errors. This led to a perfect Saturday.
On Sunday morning Milo put the 7-man-squad changes on my computer, which I was supposed to put in during the first game. This morning was crazy, so many people needed information and ask question after question and by the time game 7 came to close I still had to put the changes in the system. That caused about 15 min delay. Then the 3 hour-free-Wifi ran out and in the middle of uploading the data we lost internet connection and it was impossible to get my laptop to do anything. After 15 min we finally were able to get the file on a USB stick and put it on Milo’s computer. This was the moment when I ran onto the stage to make the announcement that there will be a delay. In the meantime we had the data uploaded and Milo was running the last checks to see if there are any mistakes left and indeed, he found one. But that was an easy fix, but the upload would take 6 min. We still double checked the data again and then we announced the draw. The rest is history.
For the award ceremony we wanted to look for the best coaches, but this was only possible on Milo’s database and he missed some tiebreakers in his rankings, which I had in my Excel system. So we cross-checked it while Christian Schwager was writing the award documents. That mismatch between Milo’s ranking an mine also caused the confusion of some coached believing their squads should not play against each other. Actually, that was partially true, because in my system I accidentally mixed the second and third tiebreaker around after game 6. So games 7 and 8 had indeed the wrong pairing, but only to a small amount. Unfortunately it hit Alfea and Masters of Tilea, but at this point of time I did not want to redo the draw and cause more delays. I argued that if you want to become World Champion you need to beat each other at one point, either round 8 or 9.
To make one thing clear: 99% of all the mistakes were done by me and I accept full responsibility.
I know all of you have spend time and money to come to this huge event, but on the other hand, I had to take 2 months off of work, unpaid. And all the time and personal money which was spend during the last 2 years is not even accounted for in any balance. We are totally aware of my short-comings, but keep in mind, we are all volunteers and not a professional event organizing company. Mistakes happen, do we like this: definitely not. Can we change the past: no. Will we get another change to make up for the mistakes: no. Did our and especially my reputation suffer from that: sure as hell, yes.
All the bitching and whining about my incompetence here on Facebook may help the one or the other to vent their frustration. It’s human nature. Some of the comments have been over the top in my opinion. I am thankful for all the posts showing respect to out group running this huge event and I’m glad most of the people enjoyed their time in Dornbirn and enjoyed the World Cup. I’m pretty sure that the next World Cup organizers will be aware of all the mistakes, which have happened, and they will provide a much better event than we did. If they ask me for advice, I will definitely give this to them. A „things well done and lessons learned“ document will be produced and given to the organizers of the next World Cup organizers. Again, overall, there was only ONE REALLY BAD DECISION during the event preparation, but that decision was crucial for the performance.
I will not allow any comments to this post, since all has been said about this and this is my closure to this. If you have comments, good or bad, see me at any future event and tell it to my face, I can handle it.
Cheers,
Torsten.
My heart breaks a little bit, reading that. I’m naturally extremely protective of NAF TOs. As TD, being chief TO cheerleader is part of my job. I think he’s being pretty harsh on himself there, based on some raw and vocal online feedback and a high stress level in the immediate aftermath of the event, and now everything has settled down, he should be more proud of what he and the team achieved than upset over what went wrong. It is incredibly big of him to write such a detailed apology post, and I think we’re all better off for the education.
I’ve been going to big, end of year BB events since the 2010 Eurobowl, so ten in a row, now. I don’t think that any of them have been perfect; they have all done things that have turned out well as well as featured areas that were challenging. I have eaten things that barely qualify as food. I’ve waited for hours for errant software to be fixed (not just in Dornbirn). I’ve chased people months after events to get trophies correctly distributed. I’ve not heard announcements or had hard rock pumped at me at ear-splitting levels via dodgy PA systems. Most, if not all, supplied custom dice have been almost totally illegible (perhaps I’m blind). None of these drawbacks (and there are more) have ever impacted my enjoyment or appreciation of any of these events; I remember them all fondly and these are footnotes I instantly forget unless prompted later. Not everything is going to be to my taste all of the time, that is just life. And it isn’t just NAF tournaments that suffer issues; I’ve been to ‘professionally’ run, multi-system events that were more expensive and far more disastrous than the World Cup. Issues happen, but they don’t detract from the parts of events that I remember, namely the people, the socalising and the games.
That isn’t to say that the two more major issues at the World Cup were not annoying or didn’t deserve constructive or negative feedback from attendees that had invested time and money to join us. The skill ring queue on the Thursday night unarguably derailed the hype train for most of those that spent their first World Cup moments in it. The pause on the Friday was frustrating for all involved (much more so the organising crew than those of you booing in the hall, let me assure you). These things were absolutely not good and your feedback has all been heard loud and clear, but I thought the recovery the team made on Saturday and Sunday was extraordinary, and that the tournament ended up solidly in credit, in the end.
I notice while reading reviews that little has been made of all the things that went well, as I suppose is natural when there are big, obvious negatives. The shuttles from the airport to the venue were fantastic. The space in which we played was perfect. Those tables and chairs were spot on, as was the space around the playing area. The booklet each coach was given was great and made navigating the venue trivial. Result submission was seamless. The lunch time food rattled along at some pace (once the team had stopped us serving ourselves!), and was some of he best mass-nerd grub I’ve experienced. The PA system and projection were top notch. I enjoyed the opening / closing ceremonies and the razz-matazz. We got a bunch of free stuff – yes, the block dice were illegible, but most of them (including most of the BB2016 ones people buy for exorbitant money on eBay!) are. The little touches like the beer labels were pretty immersive, and for a venue like that, the cost of booze was not in the least outrageous. Anyway, I thought a lot of these little, logistical things that we take for granted when they go well (and absolutely don’t happen by accident, these are all decisions that have been well made) were excellent. I appreciate not everyone thought everything on that list was as good as I did, but you are never going to please everyone with everything, especially when base-level frustration is peaking.
Generally, then, while I appreciate the two major issues with the weekend were very frustrating, I think my feeling about the tournament will always be a positive one. I got everything I wanted out of it in terms of meeting so many of you; catching up with NAF staff, shooting the breeze with Blood Bowlers I never otherwise see and spending time with good friends. Yes, a wheel or two fell off the otherwise well-oiled machine, but I think when they were re-attached, life was pretty good.
Torsten looked like he had run a marathon while being chased by a pack of wolves on the Sunday night, and I suspect he’s not quite recovered even now! Even volunteering to take on an event of this magnitude in your spare time is impressive (or crazy, or both), but delivering it is something we as a community should be eternally grateful for. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to thank Torsten and team enough, even if he will forever be mad a couple of things went wrong.
The Blood Bowl
Away from the issues, some Blood Bowl was also played. I know, right?! Some Blood Bowl happened among all of memes.
Anyway, going into the tournament, if you had asked me who my top opponents to watch were, eventual winners Amicable du Push Push would have been the first name I mentioned. For those that have followed the top end of high quality European team tournaments over the last five years, you will know each of these coaches, how strong they are and you would have expected them to be at the business end come the big games. Captain Matt_le_Fou was good enough to put this reaction together for me shortly after his glorious victory, so I’ll let him speak:
I’m very glad of this victory. I love this game for 27 years, I love the competition so it’s an old dream that became true and I just begin to realize that it is for real.
At first I want to thank my teammates : Bibi, Elyoukey, GrosNain, Harti, Justicium and Karaak. We are friends that created this team three years ago, with the ambitious goal to win the World Cup, and we were successful and lucky enough to accomplish our objectives! Sadly, Harti, a happy new father, couldn’t make it to Dornbirn, and we missed him a lot… Anyway, he is a core member of the Amicale du Push Push and a part of our victory. I thank my teammates for their skill, for their fighting spirit, for the trust in each other that make our strength as a team.
I want to thank the organizers of the World Cup. Torsten and his staff did a wonderful job. Even with a difficult beginning, they managed to get everything back on tracks and give us a Saturday and a Sunday that went smoothly. A great performance, they ran the biggest feast of Blood Bowl that ever was!
I want to thank the Blood Bowl community, that make this event a giant feast of Blood Bowl. We had nine very tough games, but with a very friendly atmosphere: everybody was happy and joyful to be here. We even share the pregame war-cry of the Swedish Blood Bowl Alliance before our game together in round 7. That was such a rousing and lucky ritual that we did it again with the Swedish team before the final round!
Finally, I want to give a special thank to the French community. They supported us all along the tournament, and gave us an emotional climax with the huge riot at the half-time of the final round. In such disputes games, the mental is a crucial factor, and they gave us a lot of strength!
This World Cup gave us wonderful memories for your entire life. But I can’t wait to meet and play and discuss and drink beers again with our English, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Italian (sorry for those that I forget) friends!
Matt.
Super. My favourite bit of the weekend was the half-time riot Matt refers to above as Push Push battled Alfea for the big prize. I love that camaraderie! Going forward, I wonder if this is a golden patch for the French and they will start fulfilling their potential at Eurobowl? Time will tell. Congratulations to Matt, Bibi, Elyoukey, GrosNain, Justi and Karaak (and Harti). Worthy winners, great players and fun guys to be around. Enjoy it!
(L-R) Your winners, and NEW World Champions, Karaak, GrosNain, Bibi, Justi, Elyoukey and Matt.
And check out the singing here.
The Aftermath
So, the results are in (full placings can be found here), the dust is settling and we have new World Champions. What next?
- A rest. Torsten, as well as every other volunteer, deserves a well-earned rest. Whatever you think about the tournament and how it ended up, these guys put in a ridiculous amount of volunteer hours so that we could all enjoy ourselves. Any TO, be their tournament an 8 man gathering in a pub or a 1500 coach behemoth, deserves our support and thanks. Because without them, there is no NAF.
- Learning. The NAF committee are going to start putting together some learnings from this event, driven by Torsten and team, such that whoever comes next has the weight of this experience to fall back on. Yes, shit happens, but we can only do our best to mitigate it next time if we have absorbed all we can from the first four World Cups. The strange nature of these big tournaments is that no-one ever runs them twice, so retaining experience to improve matters is not the easiest thing to do, especially when the venue and the ‘unknown unknown’ goalposts move every time. But we’ll try!
- 2023. We will announce the schedule and details concerning the 2023 bidding process as soon as we have them. Expect something broadly similar to what we have done before. A bidding process will be evaluated by a committee of respected, experienced, worldwide TOs, and then we’ll support the winners as best we can until they deliver the next big dance. There isn’t a lot of down time in a four year cycle; expect all of this to begin soon.
A line is drawn under Dornbirn. I know I’ll always smile when I see that spiked pear! Has there ever been a better Blood Bowl tournament logo?
TD Notes
To round off this month, some TD rambling. We’ve been busy approving your events; October saw us tick off 79 tournaments, including 1 Draft, 3 Sevens, 2 Specialist and 1 Streetbowl. The surge of tournaments hitting the database following the World Cup was pretty impressive, I can tell you!
Most of the TD work has been focussed on the delivery aspect of the Annual Review. This year, you will notice a slight change in our presentation, but hopefully when the announcement drops, our 2020 ruleset will be very clear. Keep watching this website, and on Nov. 1 (tomorrow!), all will be revealed. Many thanks to the .pdf team (Oli, Rui and JC) for their help in turning around our documentation in double quick time, they have been marvels.
A note on the review: I still see a lot of rulespacks that state: We will be using CRP / LRB6 along with the NAF rules revisions [dated 2017 / listed out]. This has basically not been true for a little while now, and I think many TOs are copy / pasting rulespacks without revising them to reflect BB2016 changes and the NAF reaction to them. Expect me to be deleting these old docs from theNAF.net over the next few weeks; TOs, please update your rulespacks and link our most recent rules! We have made a really keen effort to make the standard rules and where to find them very clear this year, and we hope this makes the whole thing quicker, simpler and easier to understand for your attendees than listing each and every change from CRP every time you run a tournament. If we haven’t given you everything you need to shorten your rulespacks and forum posts with easy links, please, tell us.
Next time
Back to normal! In my last blog of the year (because: Christmas), expect all of the news, reviews and reaction from a fine November of Blood Bowling. See you then!