filed by Agent O
Exciting (?) news, Agents!
Blaseball will be semi-returning on November 1 as Short Circuits, a set of two-week “pocket universes” experimenting with different combinations of mechanics. This post from The Game Band explains more.
At this point I think we all know better than to declare this whole shebang noncanon, considering what happened the last time we assumed that. So, strap in: we’re going for a ride.
Microphone Shock
Short Circuits was announced by an on-site cutscene:
EMERGENCY ALERT
GAMMA BURST DETECTED
The Microphone then tweeted “ONLINE”, causing Wyatt fans everywhere to yell in joy and/or confusion.
This was followed by the Mic showing up on the website as a cutscene, with the text “LOCALIZING…” except that the number of periods after it kept fluctuating between zero and five, filling the Blasebot channel with a flood of nearly identical messages.
“it’s fine don’t worry about it”, tweeted the Commissioner. “I was going to tell you”.
The Book, for its part, has been significantly altered. Some parts are more redacted than before, some less, some have been completely rewritten, and there is no longer a page 2. See this Twitter thread for more details on what changed.
Meanwhile, the Ticker has returned to saying exactly what it said at the beginning of season 1: “YOU ARE NOW PARTICIPATING IN THE CULTURAL EVENT OF BLASEBALL.” and “THE COMMISSIONER IS DOING A GREAT JOB.” Did it get factory reset?
Free Real Estate
You may notice that our usual players are missing. The Circuits will be played with new rosters that only last for two weeks each, specifically so that if they get !@#$ed up, which they probably will, our core team will not be affected.
Speaking of new rosters, we’ve already got a batch of new players fresh for the lore-ing. They won’t last long, and so the wiki people have decided not to have player pages for them. I’m not surprised. A batch of hundreds of new players every few weeks is clearly ludicrous to keep track of. And we’re getting another batch every Circuit, and we’re being told that there’s going to be multiple Circuits. So there’s plenty of room to play with ideas.
Because there’s no time to centralize it all, there’s no real lore process here. Adopt one or ten of the funny names and go wild. There’s a possibility that we might convert the coolest ideas into NPCs, but nothing’s nailed down yet. Do you think these new Spies teams are reluctant office-workers? Employees at an Agency front company? From the Houston Influencers AU? Dinosaurs? Have at it.
Anyway
The last bit of news is that the next season of Blaseball proper will be starting in the new year. Which is a while, but given that we’re getting experimental stuff in the meantime – and what’s more, experimental stuff on the Blaseball timeline of one game every hour for multiple weeks – I don’t feel like we’re being particularly deprived or anything.
As to the Debriefings – I’m not going to be doing a full debrief every day, owing to the whole dubious canonicity thing, but I might do something once or twice a week. Possibly Mondays and Saturdays, but no promises.
See you on November 1!