CONCATENATION BUG

filed by Agent O

So the Spies got knocked out during semifinals as per usual by the Canada Moist Talkers, leaving the way clear for the Seattle Garages to take it all. Meanwhile, the game’s programming has also as per usual gone terribly wrong.

Stability

Despite the pleas of a few of our more bloodthirsty fans for the sim to remove Kofi “Strikes Out Swinging” Chocolate from our roster by any means necessary, absolutely no weather events happened to our team. At all.

I mean, there were a good number of weather events elseteam – we witnessed five night shifts on the other teams we were playing against – but us? Nope. Nada. Nuh-uh.

Good. I didn’t want to have to make angst lore for the Department of Applied Thaumaturgy crew (as we have been dubbing this set of players).

Talkers-Garages Championships

We made it into the playoffs because we were the only team with a positive win-loss record in Liquid Good at the end of the season. We would have failed to make it had we been in any other division. It was not a particularly good win-loss record either – we played well enough except for a dip on Wednesday that everyone other than me attributes to the Wednesday Curse, but we’d assumed we’d get creamed once we actually entered playoffs.

Instead, we swept the Hades Tigers 2-0 and proceeded to a hard-fought series against the Canada Moist Talkers. According to the Talkers, we made them really work for their victory. They then went up against the Seattle Garages in the Internet Series.

The Seattle Garages won the championship.

For the first time ever.

Is This Peanut Fraud 2? (spoiler: no)

The season champion betting system had two closely related but distinct bugs happen to people who bet on, and subsequently won, bets on the
Seattle Garages winning this season’s Internet Series.

These were due to the accidental use of “string concatenation” – that means that the code was written such that 1+2=12, which may look patently ridiculous to us but computers don’t have common sense.

• The Feed would display your total number of votes that you won from the season champion betting attached to your previous vote total, rather than added to it
• Your actual number of votes you won from the season champion was actually the number of votes you got from the per-game bet with the season champion votes attached to the end of it

This bug led to a level of vote inflation that even the Expansion Era could only dream of. Numerous people had more than a million votes to toss around. The devs said that they could not fix the bug in time for the elections, so people may as well just spend those votes. And spend them they did. So the election results hinged entirely on the relatively small number of people who believed in the Garages.

There has been some speculation that this could be considered Peanut Fraud 2, though I really don’t see it. I mean, nothing’s sitting on the site rotating aggressively at us.

…For legal reasons, I have been asked to specify that that is a joke.

Double-Oh Circuit

The election was heralded by some strange text:

EMERGENCY ALERT
CURRENT ALTERNATED
ARC DISCHARGED
STATIC

Circuit 00 (Peanuts, Mild Cards, Snow) passed. One player from each team was also sent to the Static. As expected, we sacrificed Link Rodriguez… with 96% of all our Charge votes agreeing on that.

Other teams were either clearly coordinating or clearly not coordinating. The Core Mechanics had a nearly evenly matched argument about whether to send along Mira Moom (54%) or Poncho Tardigrade. The Canada Moist Talkers dropped Curtis Darkness off with just 24% of their votes, meaning that every other option received fewer votes than that. The Kansas City Breath Mints’ Demarco Invasion was ritually sacrificed with a near-unified 99% of their votes.

Silence

At 10PM Texas time Sunday night, the little rolling counter on the front page reached the moment when it said the “Broadcast” would be cut off, and the Emergency Alert text showed up to enforce this fact:

BROADCAST INTERRUPTED
NO SIGNAL

This text then remained on the site, completely blocking everything and, at time of writing, is still there. And with a proclamation of “SLEEP MODE” on Twitter, the Microphone – and the site – went to sleep.

According to the events calendar on the main Blaseball Discord server, the next Circuit will not start until at least the end of the month, if not the next. This is because American Thanksgiving exists.

Meanwhile, the Commissioner is completely silent on the matter of what is going on with the Microphone.