Rolling Thunder Forums

It probably hasn't escaped anyone's attention that in the game between Gandalf and Daigoro the game bugged out and Gandalf feels aggrieved by the actions taken by Daigoro.

I initially took the issue to PM to try and defuse potential drama but Gandalf has requested that I take the issue public to gauge what people's feelings are, hence this thread.

My overall feeling is that both players should try to mitigate bugs where it is reasonably practicable to do so. If you're not sure what that means I'm essentially saying that we should try to balance out bugs so far as we can within the rules of the game and without disrupting gameplay.

The game has bugs and it's a blasted nuisance when they occur. Unfortunately it's rare that there is a clear cut resolution to these issues that doesn't prejudice the game against either player. It is virtually impossible to balance things out by trying to play as if the bug hadn't occurred due to the large number of permutations in Blood Bowl.

I would like to explain what I mean there based on the bugs that came up in the game that sparked this debate. As I was spectating this game I feel that I am well placed to do so. Gandalf in particular may feel that I am misrepresenting things and I will leave it to him to present his side in due course.

Issue 1 - The Treeman

At the kick-off to the second half Diagoro was kicking so set up first. Gandalf was then due to set up but his Treeman had vanished and Gandalf was not able to place it on the line of scrimmage. The treeman appeared in Gandalf's backfield when the When a Blitz was rolled, Digoro's unmarked Troll was able to move into Gandalf's backfield and defend the landing ball.

I feel that there was nothing reasonable practicable that Daigoro could do to mitigate against this bug. It would, in my opinion, be unreasonable to pretend that the Treeman was front and centre because the resulting play could have gone any number of different ways.

- The Treeman could have been blocked down, allowing the play to continue as it did with possibly 1 or 2 less players getting through. The block down could lead to an injury to the treeman or leave him prone and at risk of a foul.

- The Treeman may have stayed put in which case nobody could get through and the three players adjacent to him would need to dodge away if they wanted to move.

- The Orcs may have blocked the Treeman and rolled double skulls thus ending the blitz event and leaving the Treeman standing.

- The Orcs may have dodged through regardless (unlikely but possible).

Each of those options goes on to multiple branching possibility trees for each subsequent event as players would be in different positions and at different states of standing, prone or injury.

There is, in my opinion, no right answer to what should have been assumed to have happened. We could play what if all day but that's for post game threads, not during the game and certainly not with a 2 minute time limit bearing down on you. Even if you try to assume that the Treeman was in the correct location, how long should Daigoro have had to wait before assuming that his players could move? 1 turn? 2 turns? as long as it took to get the Treeman into position? The number of turns is limited and wasting time would significantly disadvantage a slow team against a fast team.

In my opinion the only reasonable course of action was to play the game as it was presented and curse the bad luck / code.

Issue 2 - The Unthrown Pass

Later in the half Gandalf had the ball and was running down pitch. He had a receiver who was out of range of the orcs but found that the ballcarrier would not throw the ball. The ballcarrier was left in range of an orc blitz when ideally the ball would be out of reach.

As I see it there were three options.

- Carry on and play the pieces as they were. Disadvantage Gandalf.

- Base the ball carrier, making the pass harder but still allowing the elves the chance to carry on. Disadvantage Gandalf.

- Do nothing and hit the turn end allowing the elves to play on and presumably score The clock would roll on. Thus making the orcs chance to score back harder as less available time to play would make a second TD much harder for a slow team like Orcs. Disadvantage Daigoro.

Again, there would be very limited time to take any decision and I feel that the only appropriate way forward is to play the game as it is presented. Once again the multiple permutations of what might have happened come into play. It is simply not possible to say what might have happened if a certain event was different.

Obviously I am not advocating exploiting bugs. If there is a known bug that can be influenced by a coach (I believe that the 12 man bug works like this but I don't know the details) then that should not be exploited. There should be no breaking of the published rules of Blood Bowl unless forced to by poor coding. But when a bug happens and there is no clear way to mitigate it's effects I believe that the only thing to do is to play on.

I welcome and encourage everyone to comment on this. If the consensus is against my view I am happy to try and put something in place that codifies things. If the consensus is with me then I hope everyone will be able to accept that and move on with no hard feelings.

Just going to reply with a factual inaccuracy for now.

Raveen wrote:Issue 1 - The Treeman

At the kick-off to the second half Diagoro was kicking so set up first. Gandalf was then due to set up but his Treeman had vanished and Gandalf was not able to place it on the line of scrimmage. The treeman appeared in Gandalf's backfield when the When a Blitz was rolled, Digoro's unmarked Troll was able to move into Gandalf's backfield and defend the landing ball.

I feel that there was nothing reasonable practicable that Daigoro could do to mitigate against this bug. It would, in my opinion, be unreasonable to pretend that the Treeman was front and centre because the resulting play could have gone any number of different ways.

- The Treeman could have been blocked down, allowing the play to continue as it did with possibly 1 or 2 less players getting through. The block down could lead to an injury to the treeman or leave him prone and at risk of a foul.

- The Treeman may have stayed put in which case nobody could get through and the three players adjacent to him would need to dodge away if they wanted to move.

- The Orcs may have blocked the Treeman and rolled double skulls thus ending the blitz event and leaving the Treeman standing.

- The Orcs may have dodged through regardless (unlikely but possible).

To clarify - what happened was a blitz roll on the kickoff table. This is the definition from the rulebook.

Blitz! The defence start their drive a fraction before
the offence is ready, catching the receiving team
flat-footed. The kicking team receives a free ‘bonus’
turn: however, players that are in an enemy tackle
zone at the beginning of this free turn may not
perform an Action. The kicking team may use team
re-rolls during a Blitz. If any player suffers a
turnover then the bonus turn ends immediately.

Note especially that players that are in an enemy tackle zone cannot do anything. This renders none of the 4 possibilities Rav listed as possible, if I had set my players up as I normally do - treeman & 2 elves to line up against the troll & 2 black orcs that diagro put there. Instead I left a gap because I didn't want to get hurt & die horribly (treeman has guard so improves the survivability of the front line markedly).

Fair point and I didn't check so that's bad for me. It doesn't change the point I was making though that you can assume all sorts of possibilities in a situation like this and it rapidly becomes impossible to select what may have happened.

Rav - I agree with the premise of 'playing the game that is put in front of you' like you have suggested here Rav.

This is common sense, and stops a game turning into a complicated mess of niceties - the disappearing player bug has happened to everyone, and I believe that the 'playing the game that is in front of you' premise has worked before.

Gandalf - this whole 'GlitzGate' would not have become an issue if you had not made a tacatical error in your setup.

Yes, the game glitched and gave you the unfortunate circumstance of missing a player - it's happened to all of us. However, you then made a tactical error of not setting your team up to compensate for this, and it is very unreasonable for you to assume your opponent would do this for you. You did not cover the tackle zones of my team, the basic rules of the game state that you have to have 3 player on the LoS, and you did not move any other player to fill the gap left by the missing player.

a Blitz! is a random kick off result, it is not a fault of the glitch that there was a massive hole on your LoS, you had more than enough time to cover for this, and you didn't.

IF the glitch had happened AFTER you had set up your team (Ie, you'd set up with the treeman standing in front of the troll) but then when we kicked off he disappeared, then I would totally understand your grievance, and I most likely would not have moved the troll as that would have been making a direct gain from a glitch. However, you had a full 2 minutes to compensate!

For the record, my actions took advantage of your MISTAKE and not glitch.

I am not even going to begin addressing the rest of your actions or your conduct here because it is unfair on everyone else.

Daigoro, please can we keep this to a discussion of the possible ways of tackling the issues presented and try to keep from boiling over into tit for tat responses about conduct. I see that as a separate issue to the point of this particular thread.

I agree with Raveen. There are too many permutations to reliably say what might happen if you compensate for most of the bugs. (The exception is the “having 12 players on the pitch” bug – leave one at the back, and also the bug with Hypnotic Gaze – using it is just cheating.)

As an example: If Daigaro had left Gandalf two turns to move back into position, that would have at least as much an effect on the result as the treeman’s being out of place: 2 turns less to score back in, which is crippling for a slow team. This would then have an effect on every other coach whose league position relies on that result. You would have to enforce the same compensation on all other players, when it might be impractical – what if it had happened in a kick off on Turn 14, and the other player needed those two turns to equalise?

If there was an elf where the treeman would have been, it would have had the same effect on the Blitz kick off roll with regards to tackle zones.

The way I see it, it's much fairer to play the game that is infront of you. There is no reasonable way to decide what the fairest course of action is. The fact that glitches occur at all is inherantly unfair, but so is rolling double skulls twice in a row.

In the case of the missing Treeman, I wholly think the onus was on Gandalf to fix the issue as best he could. The whole fiasco could have been avoided by moving his lineelf on the outside edge to the position that the Treeman would have been in. The Ogre would then have been unable to take any action during the blitz. In addition, this is a known bug and I hope everyone takes on board the fact that you should not select any of your players whilst the opponent is setting up.

With regards to The Unthrown Pass, I watch the reply twice and could see no reason that the elf should not have been able to pass the ball. This is unfair, but as Raveen said there is no fair way to deal with it. The situation got worse because Gandalfs player then failed a GFI and the ball went lose. But, had it happend to me, I don't think I would have expected my opponent not to take advantage of that unfairness. The whole point of the game is to try and engineer as much misfortune as you can for your opponent, and then take advantage of it. No body would give someone a free pass because they rolled an unlikely number of ones, and I don't think we should be expected to give someone a free pass because some unlikely line of code got run.

My knowledge of the game is far, far less than everyone else here but from everything I have read I agree with Rav, lawa and id3. I can appreciate Gandalf's frustration but in no way feel that Diagoro was culpable. I do feel that it was a problem that could have been easily resolved at the time between two highly experienced players, and agree that it should be the responsibility of the player who is at a disadvantage to highlight the fact.

It appears that glitches (of varying severity) are an unfortunate truth with this game and are something that at some point the majority - if not all - of us will experience. It is a shame that it represented such a significant problem in that particular game but the best we can do now is learn from the precedent it has set.

In a league where direct communication is so prominent - lack of my dulcet tones aside - I cannot see any reason why issues like this cannot be directly discussed between the two players in real-time, even with the two-minute time limit.

My personal opinion is that if there's going to be a discussion during the game it needs to be very quick and both parties need to agree. I think we've all fallen foul of that 2 minute time limit belting along at us

I have absolutely no problem with two players reaching an agreement and sticking to it, no matter what they agree (unless they're trying to game the league). What I want is a default for when there's no time to reach an agreement or the two parties disagree regarding the appropriate way forward.

Raveen wrote:What I want is a default for when there's no time to reach an agreement or the two parties disagree regarding the appropriate way forward.

That's a good point. Do you think that a single default action would be possible considering the unpredictable and varied nature of these kind of problems? Maybe the best action if there is no time or both parties disagree is to, well, just get on with it?

Otherwise we could end up with a Pandora's box of rules, caveats, defaults and actions.

That was my point exactly Andy, it's the only default that there's ever going to be.

andy wrote:Do you think that a single default action would be possible considering the unpredictable and varied nature of these kind of problems? Maybe the best action if there is no time or both parties disagree is to, well, just get on with it?

That's exactly my understanding of Rav's proposal:

* Play the game as it appears before you, unless you come to a quick resolution that both parties agree to.

However, I guess the reason we are here is because we met the follow up question: what if both parties don't agree? Again I would say "then play the game as it appears before you." If there are really serious greivances take it up with the Commisioner after the game.

Edit: Rav got there first. Oh well.

That's that then, yes?

It would be nice to get a view from the rest of the league participants.

DaigaroOgami wrote:It would be nice to get a view from the rest of the league participants.

Those who have real jobs...