Field of Peanuts — ‘Blaseball’ Diaries 2022 (Updated 2/4/22)

After finally wearing down the staff, Kevin Gossett is cracking Blaseball open, trying to explain, showcase, and highlight what makes this “sport” so magical. Along for the journey to the immaterial plane is Patrick McLean, the only staff member available (or foolish enough) to play along in this shortened testing season.

Warm Ups

Kevin Gossett, LA Reviews Editor: Blaseball is back this week (sort of) with Short Circuit 3. This is the third (and final) test run that The Game Band have put on while they work on ironing out the future of Blaseball. They’ve used these Short Circuits (note: be ready for puns) to try out new mechanics, betting options, election processes, major UI improvements, and more. The other thing to know about these is that they don’t take place in the main Blaseball universe; they’re one-offs that generate all new players for every team each time a Short Circuit starts. There does appear to be a lore reason for why they’re occurring, but I’d have to get deep in the weeds for that to make any kind of sense to the uninitiated.

Patrick McLean, Chicago Curator: Yes, Blaseball’s back and so is having a splitting headache. Seems like an odd coincidence, doesn’t it? As usual, you’ve done an amazing job of clarifying what’s happening at any given time. On paper and in high level details, I understand Blaseball. But what does it actually all mean? Or rather, how does it actually play? So, I’ve finally decided it’s time to give it a shot, playing for the very first time in this Short Circuits.

Kevin: I’m so glad someone finally took me up on the offer to join! That said, this is maybe not the best time to join Blaseball? Or is it actually a great time to join Blaseball? I have no idea. Either way, it may serve as an interesting experiment. Patrick, I know you’ve poked around the site some, but this is probably your first real foray into it. What are your impressions of the site? Any idea how you might participate in the cultural event that is Blaseball?

Patrick: Frankly, I can’t say I’m too impressed, at least with the main website. In setting up my profile, I was thrilled there was a tutorial. Yet, it’s arguably the worst onboarding experience I’ve encountered. I didn’t really need help understanding the “VOTE” tab is where I go to cast votes on rule changes — gee whiz, thanks. Any chance I can get context about why we’re voting on confetti cannons? No? Well, okay…

But the main reason for setting up a profile is picking a team. I’ve hitched my wagon to the Chicago Firefighters with my reasoning being based solely on hometown pride. From what I can tell, you can join any team you like — you don’t have to confirm if you live there or provide any reasoning or justification. And I’m not sure if that’s a homerun or a strike out. Player ownership and agency in ARGs and RPGs is important, defining what happens. Yet I feel it shouldn’t come at the cost of you having no idea what to do or what impact your choices will have. But why people root for teams in cities they’ve never lived or visited for baseball — or any sport, for that matter — has never made sense to me. So, Blaseball is right on brand there.

Pressing on, I read everything that’s available on the web site. While the more I read, the more I learn, the context never becomes clearer. At best, even after all the times talking with you, my understanding of Blaseball being “baseball with both logical and crazy additional rules that you vote for” is still all I got. Has it always been like this? Or is this due to the well-documented fact that they are experimenting with how Blaseball plays as a whole, currently?

Kevin: It’s actually a little bit of both! The elections have always been a mix of clear and obtuse. For example, a season 5 election saw one Blessing (team/player-specific bonuses) to vote for, labeled “Seduction: Swing Away. The best hitter in the league joins your team,” which is pretty straightforward.

A season 17 election, Blaseball participants saw one labeled “Xenomorph: Give your Team Acidic Blood.” Blaseball participants knew blood-based Blessings were strong, but had no idea what it actually did. (For the record, it was only useful for pitchers, and if they threw an acidic pitch, any runs scored off that pitch would be worth .1 run less. And, yes, you can have partial runs in Blaseball.)

Decrees are rules that modify the whole league and are voted on by all the participants. Sometimes they’re offered to voters with practically no information. The most infamous of those is from season 1 with “Open The Forbidden Book: It is forbidden.” Naturally, it won.

For whatever it’s worth, the election page has been totally revamped as of this season and tries to offer clearer distinctions between Blessings, Wills, and Amplifications (Wills and Amplifications are similar to Blessings, but are voted on solely by a team and not the whole league). To me, it seems like it might help, but I’m so familiar with those terms at this point that I don’t really know. Weirdly, the clearest election option right now (“Party Planning”) is probably unclear to you, but things like Musclitude, Base Thirst, and Chasiness are all player stats.

Whew. That was an extremely long-winded way of answering only part of your question. But yes, there’s always been this element of, “What am I looking at?” even if it’s a little easier to digest now.

Patrick: Oh, I can confirm that whatever “Party Planning” is makes little sense. But, like any immersive performance, I’m down to try piecing together context on the fly!

But the “main, formal” web site is only one part of the Blaseball experience. I know you’ve mentioned it, but to get the “full” experience, you MUST join the Blaseball Discord server.

Any other time, I’d dread joining another server. But it’s in the Discord where things not only became clearer, but I caught flashes of why you, Kevin, are enamored with Blaseball. On one of the “homepage” channels, what’s happening for the next two weeks is very clearly laid out. There’s links explaining when games are playing (including a season schedule calendar) along with “notes” from the creative team on what they’re trying to do and how they’re making things better in these Short Circuits. These details are a godsend. But having key information buried so deep into the Blaseball process seems like a true disservice.

Anyways, I joined the Firefighters’ channels in Discord and read over the details. While what they were talking about was, at times, nonsensical, their tone was calm and friendly. I took a risk and dropped a comment about how I’m new to the game, looking to support my hometown team as best as I can, and welcome any pointers. Several people responded right away by providing Google links with further information on how things work, including specific local and character lore. These docs were clearer on what’s happening and what to do then any of the “official” Blaseball information I had seen. I realized I had underestimated the fan support in making Blaseball what it is and what makes it worth playing.

Now, we’ll see how I feel when I start actually having to play ball tomorrow while making bets, though. But I wanted to play around with betting first before getting into it, so more on that later I think.

Kevin: Some of the items you mentioned, like the developer blogs and calendar, are new in the Short Circuits. And they have been hugely helpful to me as someone who’s been participating for a while now, so I hope they stick around. Like any good ARG/immersive type thing, it helps set some expectations, which in turn makes it easier to buy into the concept and fun. That said, as you mentioned, the information is not easily accessible and needs to be sought out. Whether that’s an intentional choice to preserve some of the mystery and strangeness of the site, I’m not sure.

However, the folks on the Blaseball Discord are hugely helpful in getting newcomers up to speed with everything. Until you brought it up, I had almost forgotten that’s how I got started at one point, too. It’s not optimal to need to join the Discord server to fully understand how to play, but in doing so, folks will get more of a taste of their team’s flavor. That can be important to helping someone stick around and to see some of the ways they might want to engage with Blaseball, whether that’s sticking strictly to the site, diving into the stats and strategies of improving a team, or in creating fan lore for the different teams and players.

The team you joined has my favorite slogan of any of the active Blaseball teams right now, “We Are From Chicago,” and is second only to the Downward Dogs, “Oooooh Big Stretch.’’ (The Downward Dogs are a team from Blaseball’s Pre-History, which you can read about in the Library, if you haven’t found that yet.)

I’m curious to see how you feel tomorrow once you dive into the actual mechanics of Blaseball, and whether that’s betting, watching games, voting in the upcoming election, or figuring out what those weird player stats I mentioned earlier are!

Play Ball

Kevin: Now that we’re at the halfway point of the season, have you given betting a try yet?

Patrick: Yes! I’m finding it to be Blaseball’s the most accessible and easy to understand aspect. Which is probably a good thing as it’s only one of two ways to be involved in the game. From what this rookie can tell, people make free, no cost wagers on either team playing in a matchup, along with any other concurrent games. Then, depending on the spread of teams picked — and how bold you’re feeling — you either win big (which we’ll get into later) or get nothing. Basically, Blaseball is mimicking baseball sports betting.

Kevin: The sports betting thing is one of the reasons I’m drawn to betting on Blaseball. It scratches that itch without needing to wager anything real, but also incentivizes deep dives into player and team stats to understand the pitchers, defense, and offense of each team.

Patrick: The “Bet” tab is expertly designed and its interface is incredibly easy to use. With one click, I can see who I’m betting on, the percentage of how likely I will win, and what I’ll get if I win. And as I bet on more teams, the page updates, giving me revised betting odds. But the “home run” achievement is showing the likelihood of which team will win or lose as a percentage rather than as odds. It’s simpler and much easier to understand than traditional “3 to 1” similar odds listings. Has Blaseball betting always functioned in this manner?

Kevin: Betting is the thing that’s seen the greatest quality of life improvement during these Short Circuits. During earlier seasons, you used to have to bet immediately before any given game to earn anything, but now you can bet up to 12 hours in advance, which means participants can pay less attention to the site.

Combo betting is also new, and something I have mixed feelings about. The concept of only being able to bet on multiple games (essentially a parlay in normal sports betting) is interesting, but because of the sheer randomness of Blaseball games, you can go hours between winning even if you’re making safe-ish bets.

Betting has always been odds-based, and I think that’s as much a function of the ease of use it provides, and how the simulation that makes up Blaseball’s backbone is built.

Patrick: Being new, I chalked combo betting functionally to how sports betting works with baseball. But is there anything else of note worth about this Short Circuit?

Kevin: There’s a lot in this Short Circuit (and the previous two) that are quite different from how Blaseball has been run in the past. During the Discipline and Expansion Eras, seasons were always 99 games and ran for a single week: the regular season was played Monday through Friday, playoffs were on Friday and Saturday, and elections for rule changes affecting the next season were held on Sunday.

We initially labeled this season a “short” season, which isn’t true at all. This is the longest Blaseball season ever and each team will play 162 games over two total weeks. Plus, elections are being held periodically throughout the week (not just at the end of the season), and this weekend will feature a tournament of the bottom 12 teams in the league.

All of these changes have led to their fair share of bugs, err, features. I’ve been mostly running into these features on the betting page, where it’s telling me I lost certain bets that I actually won, even though my total number of votes keeps going up. While occasionally frustrating, The Game Band’s developer diaries and openness about using the Short Circuits to work out things before everything comes back for real have helped contextualize the changes and why things might be breaking right now.

Patrick: I’m digging the “bug as a feature” gimmick. If I wanted to bet on a mathematically based sport where nothing “surprising” can happen, I’d do so with real-life baseball. And I’ve made it this far in life without ever doing so, so I’m not starting now.

But let’s dig into votes, as this is the other way to be involved with Blaseball. In making bets, the “payout” on a successful wager is a “vote.” Or really, votes, plural, as typically winners get anywhere from 10 to over 20,000 votes. With your votes, you can go to the “Vote” tab and use those votes in any number of ongoing elections. And in the classic Chicago way, you can vote more than once.

Yet, I have no context of what these elections mean. I’m supposed to vote on what kind of party I want. Does what I vote for even matter?

Kevin: The elections and what you vote for do matter! Mostly. A big concept you’ll learn about if you hang out in the Blaseball Discord for long enough is the idea of “wimdy.” It’s based off of this tweet, and was commenting on the Dalé winning an election with 0% of the vote. At times, wimdying a vote can be very funny, but it can also be supremely frustrating for teams who’ve dumped enormous resources into winning something beneficial for their team. This can still happen, but over time, The Game Band has added in other types of things to vote on, like Wills and Amplifications, into the elections, so teams can improve without relying entirely on luck.

And even a few hundred votes is a big deal right now because people are just not earning a lot of them. I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds, but in the late Expansion Era, it was common for individual participants to be sitting on hundreds of thousands of votes. In fact, a quick scan through the Blaseball Wiki reveals that there were several Blessings with over eight million votes on them, and a particularly contested Blessing in Season 20 saw almost 11 million votes. In fact, it appears that there were more than 67 million votes cast on Blessings alone that season.

Seventh Inning Stretch

Kevin: We’ve talked a lot about Blaseball here, but have barely talked about the actual happenings of Short Circuit 3, which is probably not that unusual for someone’s first season. I thought the Midseason Fiesta, a tournament of Blaseball’s worst teams, would be a good, more focused thing to chat about next.

However, in true Blaseball fashion, the Midseason Fiesta… fell apart rather spectacularly. Everything was going great in the first game. Then, the bugs/features reared their heads in game two of the tourney, when all of the teams that were supposed to be in Enhanced Party Time, were just…not.

That small bug was just the beginning because suddenly teams were playing in multiple games at the same time. Eventually, teams were scheduled to play against themselves. A Siesta was called, which is when play stops (and it seems like the players just go to sleep in-world, I guess?). And finally, the Midseason Fiesta was canceled.

It was strange, and funny, and what-the-fuck-is-happening. In short, it was deeply Blaseball. Did you catch any of this live, Patrick? How do you feel about it?

Patrick: I did, but ultimately fell off quickly. The randomness of the bugs/features gimmick is great for explaining away gameplay and web site issues. And while the same effect occurring in Discord is most likely equally intentional, it falls flat for me. The pandemonium of God-knows-how-many people responding in real time to the Fiesta’s cancellation was overwhelming. When it became clear that this was not a gimmick, I logged off the server.

So, I’ll give you “strange” and “what-the-fuck-is-happening” is spot on, but I wouldn’t have labeled the cancellation as “funny.’’ At least, not for a new player who’s still trying to make sense of Blaseball. While it goes against Blaseball’s fabric, I wonder what a boon it would be to have a season where nothing “goes wrong” and the only gimmicks happening are those on the field, not underlying software issues. (I’ve a working theory that Blaseball might be trying to do too much right now.)

Speaking of too much, let’s talk about Blaseball’s Discord. There’s a lot going on in there. Being over a week in, I’ve pretty much stuck to the “Announcements” and Chicago Firefighters channels. The conversations I see suggest I’m missing out on events and information on other channels. Do you have any recommendations of what I should focus on?

Kevin: This was one of my worries about someone joining during a Short Circuit. That said, the other two Short Circuits have gone off without as much game-breaking weirdness. This is the first huge bug I’ve seen in a while (and I honestly can’t remember the last one of this size). And for people who’ve been around a while, it was funny, but to your point, it could be off-putting for people still trying to get their bearings.

To your other point about Blaseball trying to do much, well, that was actually the theme of the previous era. The Expansion Era piled on concepts and modifiers and stadium options and gifts and several new suns (I’ll explain below). By the end, there was so much add-on stuff that some of the basics had become almost meaningless. After that particular season, the developers noted that the huge number of changes was part of the story they were telling, but they also recognized the need to make Blaseball more accessible.

(Fun fact: In the main Blaseball universe, Sun 2 exists because a feature that was supposed to roll out after the championship game rolled out during the final game of the series and Sun 1 collapsed into a black hole. Those happy accidents are the bugs that are incorporated into Blaseball in a fun way.)

If there’s too much going on right now, the Short Circuit does seem like part of an effort to “dial things in” so they’re ready to relaunch, for both veterans and newcomers.

As for the Discord server? That’s a big question. I don’t frequent the main Blaseball Discord all that often, and the per channel setups are unique from team to team. The Tacos “general” and “watch” channels were my main ones when I first started. “General” is for general discussion and “watch” is for watching and talking about games being played in the moment. That said, I do keep an eye on the Tacos side Discord, or “sidecord,” and mostly peek into the “watch” channel and the “strategy” channels. There are also channels for different kinds of fan art, creating non-canonical lore for players, and more. My question back to you would be, what are you interested in doing on the server?

Patrick: It’s less about interesting things to do and more about points of interaction for me. I’ve come to see Discord as being the ballparks where fans are watching the games being played.

Part of this feeling is having seen games at Wrigley Field and Fenway Park. When watching a game at those iconic fields, you can feel how history has shaped those ballparks. I see similarities with that in Blaseball’s fan art and non-canonical lore sections. But while Wrigley and Fenway house history for only the Cubs and the Red Sox, respectfully, Blaseball’s Discord houses all its teams’ histories. There are clever, talented fans posting art work and comments, but they sail by quickly with little context. So I can’t appreciate any of the fans’ work.

Relatedly, in case you can’t tell, Blaseball’s Discord is incredibly active. Intentionally or not, I love how this mimics walking through Wrigley or Fenway during a game. It’s reminiscent of how effortlessly you can turn to the stranger next to you and talk about the latest play. I had thought, or hoped, this would apply to Blaseball’s Discord as well. And to be clear, while everyone I’ve encountered has been beyond helpful and nice, the conversations I see happening can be as cryptic as signals from the first base coach to the batter at the plate. Unlike IRL baseball, Blaseball fans are involved, strategizing on how best to use votes won. And as I’m still learning the context at large, the best all I can do is nod along right now.

Kevin: The more we chat, the more I realize that joining during a Short Circuit as a new participant is maybe not the best idea. It’s an easy time to get ramped up on the game, but loses some of the Blaseball flavor, for lack of a better word. That said, your assessment is accurate: Blaseball is A Lot to take in. That’s somewhat tempered during the main timeline as people focus more on their favorite team and players. Jumping into a team’s “watch” channel can still be confusing, but if everyone is spamming an emoji of a rat with a crown on its head when Rat Mason goes up to bat, it feels easier to jump in and participate by doing the same. Cheering on your favorite players is the closest it feels like to watching a sporting event with friends or other fans.

It’s also easier to get attached to a player (based on their stats and abilities, lore, art, etc…) during the main timeline when you know they’re not going to disappear after the season like they are in a Short Circuit.

Blaseball runs periodically throughout the year and will fully return during 2022.

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