FUMBBL, the online Blood Bowl league

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.

It's come to my attention that Windows Defender has started to trigger a warning of a malware on the FFB client. The specific malware in question is called "Trojan:Script/Wacatac.B!ml".

Without going into too much detail about what this malware is, and what it does, the warning is very likely a false positive. Basically, the FFB client is a ZIP archive with java code. The malware isn't Java based, and wouldn't execute in the context of a Java application, but would instead (if executed) start a process on your machine called "biddulphia9" (and it would show up in the task manager).

I will see if I can reproduce this warning when I get home, and will do a new build of the FFB client to see if the false positive is supressed.

Steps you can do if you're uncertain:
Check for the process in taskmanager (as explained above)

Download the FFB Client .jar file(s) from:
https://fumbbl.com/FFBClient/live
Rename each .jar file to .zip, and extract the files (all of this is perfectly safe, even if it had contained said malware). You can then look through all the files to see if there are any windows executables, and if you're being particularly nervous use tools to decompile the .class files to java code to see what they do. Obviously, this last step is complicated and takes a fair amount of development skill to do.

Delete detection history as suggested here:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/protect/forum/all/what-to-do-about-trojanwin32wacatacbml-false/d884df80-2dba-46c9-bd8b-4e2f93c9dd3f
Unsure if this works, but could be worth testing.

Google-search for information on this. There could be a bit of a "wave" of false positives with this one going on. If this is the case, there will eventually be a antivirus definition update from Microsoft that will make this go away. Regardless, it never hurts to keep yourself informed about what malware is out there and how they function.

I will update this post once I'm home again and able to take steps to reproduce the problem and see if a rebuild resolves it.

Update 1:
I've reviewed the binary form of the files that trigger this malware warning. It turns out that javaws does a small modification to the archive (it adjusts a small piece of data in the ZIP header). The pre-javaws file does not trigger this issue, but the extra few bytes of header information does. The actual content of the archive (the java bytecode) is unchanged.

This leads me to the conclusion that the Windows Defender definitions have been changed to produce this false positive (which is frustrating to say the least). As a workaround, you can go to Settings->Virus & Threat protection->Protection history. Here you will see one or more "Threat blocked" which will point to the Java "Deployment Cache", and manually allow these to be processed.

Note that you should typically only do this if you are sure that the file in question is safe. Comparing the files from this cache with the files I linked above will allow you to verify my claims that the differences are absolutely minimal and double-check my conclusions. I will still try to build new versions of these files and hope that this removes the warnings.

Update 2:
I've resigned the library files that were causing the issue, and they appear to no longer be flagged as malware. Apologies for the inconvenience.

With the new Spike Journal being released, we now have a new Norse roster on the site. Apart from a couple of new traits and some minor changes, there are a couple of things existing coaches will need to know about this change:

- Throwers and Catchers are no longer available to purchase. Existing players will remain on the team until retired.
- Valkyries replace Catchers. No in-place changes have been made, and Valkyries need to be hired as any other new player. Catchers will use up the available Valkyrie slots though. The total number of Valkyries + Catchers can't exceed 2.
- There are new special rules that have replaced the previously existing set. Now, teams will need to choose between Old World Classic and Favoured of Khorne/Favoured of Chaos Undivided.

The last point is a bit tricky, and will need some work which I hope to address over the weekend. Without any action, existing teams will have no star player availability. To fix this, coaches need to make a selection. This selection is incomplete, and I will be working over the evening to sort it out. Hopefully, by the time most of you read this, things will be solved appropriately.

At the time of writing, the new star players are not in place (they will be added once I have sorted the special rule selection properly).

Other than that, if you have any issues with Norse (or related things), the best place to get in touch is on Discord.

For a couple of months now i have been running a new 'thing' every other Sunday night called 'One World, One Blood Bowl'. And Christer was on the latest one. Episode 5.

He said some interesting things about FUMBBL, you might care to give it a listen, or a watch. Details below the links.....
My Twitch (check highlights to find the OWOBB's)
YouTube of #5 the other episodes are on my channel too.
Podcast Version Spotify and Anchor for now, hoping to expand to other carriers soon.

With the release of Spike! issue 13, we have a new roster in the game: Khorne. You don't have to wait long to try them out on FUMBBL, they're already here!

In detail, they've been added to the Competitive division ruleset, which will take effect in any leagues set up with the BB2020 ruleset, or imported the rosters from it.

In addition to this, Akhorne the Squirrel has been introduced as an available star player (available to all teams), and Grashnak Blackhoof comes back to the pitch with this release.

As always, let me know if you run into trouble with any of these new toys!