Blood Bowl 3 developer Cyanide Studio has responded to an open letter from multiplayer community organisers raising concerns over the state of the game, assuring them that better tools to run their multiplayer leagues should arrive “before the start of season 1”. The statement was published on Steam on Wednesday, a day after the open letter warned the game’s community would wither without better tools for multiplayer leagues.
Cyanide says that “having the advanced admin tools ready is one of our short term objectives” for Blood Bowl III, but that it hadn’t expressed this on the development roadmap, instead focusing on elements “understandable to everyone”. The firm adds that “a dedicated part of the team is currently working on those features”, which will be added to the game “progressively”.
In the “next couple of weeks”, Cyanide says it aims to give league administrators the ability to add additional administrators or commissioners onto league boards, add and remove teams from ongoing competitions, and seed knockout competitions. These were all among the priority features requested in the open letter.
The statement adds that after this, the priority will be to allow admins to “advance each round manually, reset a match so it can be replayed if a crash occurs, admin specific match results, including spp and gold, and ticket teams for competitions without them needing to be on an admin’s friends list”.
Cyanide also states that, although “readability and reconnexion to ongoing matches” appear relatively far off in the development roadmap, “these issues are very high on our priority list” and the team hopes “to be able to implement them sooner that what is stated on the current roadmap”.
The joint letter was produced by the Blood Bowl 3 League Owners community group, and signed by the administrators of 39 multiplayer leagues, representing communities of thousands of players. The letter expressed serious concern about the viability of Blood Bowl III unless fixes to league administration tools were made quickly.
Watching the ongoing development of Blood Bowl III is almost as tumultuous as a game of Blood Bowl itself – though we recommend playing Blood Bowl Second Season Edition, rather than watching it. Or if you need something a little more soothing to do, might we suggest painting miniatures for a new team?