FUMBBL, the online Blood Bowl league

It has probably not escaped many of you that the Blackbox system has returned for the competitive division and the 2020 ruleset. The new system is slightly different than what it used to be, as it's running in the competitive division alongside the normal gamefinder system.

When selecting teams, you can choose a "mode" for your team, where the choices control which of the systems you want the team to participate in:

- Open: Restricts teams to the regular gamefinder and even if you activate for the blackbox, these teams will not be entered into the random scheduler
- Strict: These teams are only participating in the Blackbox system, and will not be matched against teams on the regular gamefinder.
- Mixed: These teams participate in both systems.

The scheduling method used tries to match by Current Team Value, with a minimum of 1 000 000 CTV.

While this has been available for a few days now, what is new is that the Blackbox Trophy has also been revived under this new environment with season 6 starting today, and running for the rest of the year. For those of you who have not heard about the blackbox trophy, it's a long meta event where coaches designate a squad of new teams and play a number of games over a longer period of times, scoring points as they go along and fighting for a spot in the top 10.

There are a couple of new things with season 6:

- Teams in squads are forced into strict mode, and will remain so until either the team completes the games for the season or the season ends, whichever happens first
- You can have multiple concurrent squads should you want to.

Beyond that, the settings for this season are:
- 4 teams per squad
- 15 games per team
- Running until the end of the year (December 31st)

Scoring and roster composition details can be found on the trophy page:

Blackbox Trophy

The costs for the rosters are very quickly based on the win rates of open play Competitive division, and it's quite possible that there are some rosters that should be costed differently. We'll see how it turns out!

As always, this is a new feature and is likely to have some issues and bugs. Please feel free to get in touch if you encounter problems (preferrably on the Discord server).

Ulthuan Invitational is now accepting applications

Will You Choose Light Or Dark?

Tournament draw starts
22.00pm server time
Wednesday 3rd August 2022


Any Competitive team of the following races ( Amazon, Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, High Elf, Human, Imperial Nobility, Lizardman, Old World Alliance, Norse and Wood Elf.) can apply here for the Light Qualifier

Any Competitive team of the following races (Black Orcs, Chaos, Chaos Dwarf, Chaos Renegade, Dark Elf, Goblin, Tomb King, Khorne, Necromantic, Orc, Nurgle, Skaven, Snotlings, Undead, Underworld, Vampire and Ogre) can apply here for Dark Qualifier

You may only apply to one of the 2 qualifiers

Prizes

Dynamic gold
Bonus MVP
Record on your profile

For the Ulthuan Invitational XVIII, Vaul will craft the following pieces. Any two chosen by the winning coach. Note that due to ruleset incompatibilities these prizes will take up a skill slot currently and will therefore come with a TV discount to make them special still.

Ulthuan Bracers (Fend)
Ithilmir Armour (Sprint)
Helmet of Fear (Foul Appearance)

At 09:26 this morning, FUMBBL went down unexpectedly due to a failure of the UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply, a device that conditions power to the servers and allows the servers to run for a while if there is a power loss).

It took until roughly 12:15 for me to identify the problem, see if there was an easy solution and bypass the broken device, and we are up and running again.

However, I will need to replace the UPS with a new one at some point soon. I will need to do some research on what device I'm buying. If anyone in the community has experience with UPS:es, I'd happily take suggestions on which model to buy.

I have a couple of constraints on what I'm after:
- I'm looking at a budget of $500 to $1000 or so.
- Reputable brand (I've used APC for a very long time, and am happy with the ability to buy replacement batteries etc)
- Preferrably rack mounted (up to 4U), but will consider standalone devices too.
- The hardware runs typically at 550W or so total, and my other UPS was 1000VA which has been fine. There's not a lot of headroom here though, so I am looking for something along the lines of 1000-1500 VA.
- "Smart" functionality (ie, computer communication) is preferrable, but not required.
- Global availability (more specifically I need to be able to order it from Sweden without having to pay insane shipping costs), and needs to be in stock.

Again, if you have experience with these types of devices, I'd appreciate suggestions.

Either way, I apologize for the inconvenience for those of you whose matches this affected. I hope to have this UPS replaced within a couple of weeks (which will unfortunately cause another maintenance downtime).

Edit: The UPS has now been replaced and things should be back to normal again. Thank you kindly to those of you who donated to offset the cost of the replacement.

After many a long year, FUMBBL's very own magazine is making a comeback.

The GLN team will be releasing issue 18 by the end of August/early September.

The GLN needs you. If you have something to say, tactics to discuss or even something to sell we want to hear from you. Do you have a question for our agony aunt? Are you an artist and want your stuff laughed at and ridiculed? Are you a poet? Send us your poems to be judged by our resident literary expert. The two most impressive will be entered in our Limerick vs Haiku contest.

We want your obituaries, challenges and blood feuds. We may even print some news if there's any room left.

  Please join us and take part in the GLN Discord or post your ideas in the GLN Forum.

Alternatively send a PM to either Halfabrain or Happy Amateur.

Deadline for submissions is July 31st.

After a much longer time than expected, and a seemingly endless series of work from HimalayaP1C7 and myself, Gamefinder 2.0 is at a point which we are happy to call beta.

This means that all the core functionality is in place, and should be usable by people to find and launch games through. There may still be issues and/or usability quirks, which is why I am asking for as many of you as possible to start using it to find games. The new system can be found here:

https://fumbbl.com/p/lfg2

In addition to finding issues and bugs, we are also looking for feedback on the user experience as a whole. It's clearly different from the old gamefinder, so try to remain a bit objective when you provide feedback. The intent of the redesign was to give more information to people, to allow for more flexibility in matchmaking but also to correct some problems with the old system.

Either way, please do take a peek and let us know what you think! There's a forum thread for feedback as it's easier to follow the forum than the comments to a news post.