GalakStarscraper wrote:Bakunin wrote:Darkson wrote:
The "story" is a load of BS told by people that don't have a clue and are prone to passing misinformation as gospel.
I only know what I heard. But okay, what as the real story?
For the question then becomes, why wasn't the WE nerfed more?
Why wasn't the more 'fun' and probably better "break tackle khemri" roster chosen? etc.
The only other WE nerf that was ever proposed beyond the change we made to the catcher was to remove the Tree from the team. %wise the team was just above where we wanted it to perform and the final vote was that nerfing the catcher should do enough to get the team down to a 55% win rate. Babs did fight viciously to keep the Tree on the team for flavor not power reasons and Babs is a loooonnnggg way from being a power gamer. Because of their abilities maybe Chet, JKL, Paul or Ian might get that accusation but I did not at any time see a BBRC decision to create rules to help with power gaming. The BBRC developed Tier goals for the rewrite to CRP and that is what we focused on. Tier 1 55%-45% / 1.5 50% to 40% / 2 45%-35% / 3 35% to 30% Given that these tier % were a key focus for us to reach (and a lot of the stats show we did nail those pretty darn closely even these years later) ... it is difficult to prove evidence of power gaming decision made by the BBRC to keep in their items.
As for the Khemri ... what you see with the Khemri team was the one example of a deadlocked jury. All BBRC members agreed the Khemri team needed altered. We just could not find consensus on how to do it. ALL BBRC members had their OWN idea on how it should be fixed. It was literally a case of each idea getting one vote. The rules of the BBRC per Jevis required ALL BBRC to vote yes on a rule change for it to become official. So since we all agreed something really needed to be done we had to spend a long time in discussion to come to a compromise that all members would be willing to agree to. The current Khemri team is that result. The side effect of this is that all BBRC members will tell you that they are not happy with the Khemri team but what you don't realize is that if you dug into that you'd see that each person had a different result they wanted. So it is not that the Break Tackle team was wanted by a majority and got killed somehow .. it was the one topic that the BBRC members could not through debate and discussion win over the majority to their 1st choice.
That would be my feedback. Whoever told you the BBRC were a group of power gamers was clueless. Jervis personally invited each person on the BBRC ... these were not gamers who went to him ... he picked them from what he saw in the forums about their ability to rationally discuss rules and a desire to make the game better. I did not witness anyone trying to make the game more power gamer friendly for them. Such accusations were common (I was frequently accused of overpowering Halflings) ... but definitely had no evidence to support them being real.
I want to be very clear so I saved this for my final sentence:
The BBRC was the opposite of a "failed experiment". In my opinion it was the one of the very few times I've seen GW get something right.
I told myself I'd read this whole thread before I responded, but I have to chime in here, because I think I'm the historical record here.
Originally, the only BB resource on the internet was the BBOWL-L email mailing list, run by Dean Maki. When he couldn't manage the list anymore, he handed it over to me, and I simultaneously ran the BBOWL-L list and created the Bloodbowl.net website. (Though by that time there were a few more BB resource on the internet, I still believe that the mailing list and bloodbowl.net forums were among the most heavily read and frequented.)
Jervis came out with the disastrous 4th edition "one-skill-per-action" rules update after one of his infamous bathtub rules design sessions. They were, almost without exception, reviled -- it was one of the very few times the BB community had ever come together as a group. He welcomed feedback, though, and I hosted a chat session on bloodbowl.net where he fielded questions and thoughts from large group of users. We eventually prevailed and he decided those rules were poorly thought out.
About that time, GW spun of the Specialist Games division, headed by Jervis. He contacted me and a fellow bbowl-l pundit, John Kipling Lewis (jkl for short), about the formation of the BBRC. He envisioned it as a seven man crew, with he and Andy Hall as representatives from GW, and asked for suggestions. I recommended Dean Maki, as well as Stephen Babbage (babs) and Chet Zeshonski. We became the original BBRC group and wrote the LRB3 and LRB4 rulesets.
Dean had to step away for personal reasons, and I had to take a break because my first wife was very ill. (Being a caregiver and de facto single parent is tough.) I stayed on as a non-voting observer, chiming in occasionally, and I'm proud to say that I recommended Tom Anders to replace me -- because I think Tom has done more for Blood Bowl than any other person who's name doesn't rhyme with Pervis Pohnson. (I think I recommended Ian as well, but my memory is a little foggy on that point.)
I have to say that I learned a tremendous amount about game design from Jervis, and -- OSPA aside -- his input and advice always helped us produce rules that were cleaner, easier to implement and less complicated. When BBRC members had wild hairs that we wanted to write up, we were encouraged to do so and submit them to Citadel Journal/Blood Bowl magazine (Chet and I published some Vampire Count teams in this way), but those were strictly optional ideas -- they were not to be included in the core rules.
There may have been the occasional sacred cow to one or two of us, but as a group of seven our consensus was not tied to them. Jervis' intent was to create a ruleset that could shine in either perpetual league situations OR in one-off beer and pretzels type scenarios. Aging, while unpopular and somewhat kludgy in 4th edition, was specifically designed to limit long-term teams that became skilled enough that they didn't suffer from the traditional injury bug. (In our defense, the extra dice rolls are very simple in digital formats but a little overwhelming in tabletop formats -- I recognize that this could have been, and was, improved.)
Another change imposed on us was the marginalization of the special play cards, as Specialist Games' budget would not allow for them to reproduce the separate Death Zone expansion. That's why they're tied to the cards in a playing deck now, as a means for people to reproduce the effect of drawing cards without an actual set.
I have a ton of saved emails from my days on the BBRC. I'm not sure about the legality of posting them, as I was under NDA at the time, but I assure you that there are none of the smoking guns people are expecting to find.
(All jokes aside, you know the effort & hours you've put in to this game, and so do I).