REBBL

A few people have been asking for some more details about the principal components in the previous post, so strap in for some more graphy goodness. We’ll even dive a bit deeper into the weeds by looking at the third and fourth principal components for each league, taking our level of explained variation just above 50%. Before we begin however, it’s worth raising a few important caveats from discussions I’ve seen.

One sure thing about Blood Bowl is that if you start talking about race classification there will be inevitable debates about which team fits where. After watching yet another of these discussions around the standard bash/dash/hybrid distinction I decided to see if taking a data-driven approach could provide an interesting perspective. To do so, we’ll look at matches from a few different leagues to see if our results are consistent.

For the relaunch of the REBBL Fantasy Blood Bowl League, there were two main changes I wanted to make from the inaugural season: Automate as much as possible (because it looked like it drove poor Harringzord batty tring to keep track of everything) Move away from SPP gain as a scoring system (because there are many ways to contribute to a match that don’t earn SPP) Having access to individual player statistics through the match reporting bot means we are in a position where both goals are achievable.

Last weekend saw REBBL’s family of one-day tournaments continue to expand with the addition of the tried and true format: a Cripple Cup. No apothecaries, no rerolls and no retiring means that the game plan for this tournament is to grind your opponent into the dust and hope you have enough of a team left to limp over the line to victory. By the end of the day 33 coaches had thrown their players into the meatgrinder, hoping to achieve glory before the injury toll became overwhelming.

The scouts have been out in force, carefully cataloguing pre-season preparations across REBBL in an effort to work out which teams will be on everyone’s lips as we get to the pointy end of the season. Even the seedier elements of the league have got in on the action, though one can only assume that their methods are unconventional at best. At the Nufflytics Institute, we do not believe in such terms as ‘effort’ and ‘thinking’ and instead prefer to focus on the purity of numbers to guide us to the season’s outcomes.

The supposed experts have already cast their eyes over the prospects in The Big O for this season. However, in what I’m sure was an innocent oversight, they appear to have forgotten to give Division Two the proper care and depth of analysis befitting it’s position as the best division in the league. Luckily, we here at the Nufflytics Institute are up to the challenge of providing the division the respect it deserves.