Terminally Online
This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMO column. Every other week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we’ve all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
It’s become a bit of a running joke in the Final Fantasy 14 community that the MMO will never get Blitzball, with the game’s director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) playfully scolding players during Dawntrail’s pre-release when talking about Gold Saucer updates. Well, jokes on him, because Blitzball’s actually alive and well in FF14.
After attending a game, I simply had to see how it was done—and as it turns out, Blitzball has an entire rules document dedicated to it, one that’s over 140 slides long. It’s essentially its own TTRPG system—there are lanes, classes, mechanics for blocking, diving, tackling, and even taunting.
Yet despite being complicated, the end result is shockingly fast-paced. Which, as I have explained to me, settling in for a conversation with the EBL’s showrunners and rulesmasters, is thanks to a clever use of the game’s raid marker system, a /random chat command (which rolls a number between one and 1,000), countdowns, and in-game macros that help keep time.
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“What the audience doesn’t see is we have an entire channel behind the scenes,” Lakaera, who has had a hand in the game’s ruleset for years, explains: “All the players are drawn into it, the captains, the referees, everyone who’s organizing it. It’s constantly ticking down.”
“It makes it look like the players just inherently know when the turns go. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, there’s an entire mechanism we have to run these macros that say: ‘We’re starting this phase, we’re starting that phase, timer up, that sort of thing.'”
When a player wants to take an action, they’ll also usually activate their own pre-prepared macros: Given this is roleplay, they add a lot of sauce to ’em for flavour, but no-one’s waiting for anybody to write anything down and, bar a couple of pauses to sort out rules disputes, Blitzball moves along real fast for something that takes place entirely in a chat window.
‘Blitzball fever’
Inquiring into the history of the sport, I’m told by Ffon, fellow staff member, developer of the system, and co-founder of the EBL itself, that “We weren’t actually the first organisation to do this.
“A lot of us here originally came from an organization called Menphina Madness, or the Hydaelyn Blitzball Association (HBA)—they were running Blitzball essentially since the start of Stormblood, when swimming was unlocked.”
Ffon describes something called “blitzball fever”—basically “once you start playing, you just can’t stop”, which is unfortunate, given the HBA was soon to dissolve: “We only had two games because they played a double elimination tournament bracket, so we were very quickly eliminated.” Ffon got a taste, and that was that.
The EBL, then called the “offseason”, quickly became a home for lost Blitzball players when the HBA closed its doors: “We had a mass migration of players that flooded over into the offseason … We put our heads together, and we developed a crew, and we decided, ‘Okay, we’re gonna start a league of our own.'”
Lakaera tells me it was a huge task: “We managed to put this thing together in the span of about four months. That’s the format, rules evaluation, scheduling, getting the teams and the art assets done. We were essentially putting in like, work-hour hours—like eight hours every other day getting this set up.”
Over the years, the EBL’s made seasonal rules changes, too—they added a split to the outer lanes, switched up the turn order to make positioning more important, added new position-dependent skills, and more. In fact, tinkering with the blitzball ruleset has become such a project that the server itself has a dedicated testing team, says Ffon:
“In season three, we started to introduce getting more active public feedback, and that developed to the ‘open mechanics development’ role that we have on the server now. [People with that role] act as our play testers.”
‘Dice tell a story’
The real sauce, like with most roleplaying, is the feeling of being part of a bigger story—in case you’re unfamiliar, blitzball players aren’t just sports enthusiasts. They bring their own characters, with their own backstories, personalities, and traits, to the game: Adding this pastime as a chapter in the history of characters some of them have been writing for years.
As I speak to Luka, another staff member, their enthusiasm is infectious: “It just brought so many different people together—it allows you to make new friends and connect with new venues and guilds, and slowly, your character grows side by side with your team or with your fellow blitzers.
“I’ve watched so many people step beyond their comfort zone, [who were] encouraged by everyone in the EBL to try new things that they thought they never would—that I honestly thought I never would. The only reason I started playing was because Ffon asked me and it seemed interesting … I even run a team now.
“You have teams and whatnot that you can get behind very much like in real life—I’m a Hawaiian Warriors girl, even though our asses are never going to go to the Super Bowl. I’m a Buffalo Bills girl, they’re never going to get there. But you rally behind the team.”
Ffon agrees, stating that he’s seen people really come into their own by engaging with the community and taking the leap towards playing themselves: “On top of just being able to play Blitzball (despite Yoshi-P’s wishes, we will die in defiance) … You’re learning skills here that you can take elsewhere, like time management, event organization, creativity and plot.”
The [shooting character] only had a +5 bonus. So they rolled a 105, but they spiked past everyone.”
That’s not to say the games themselves, and the stories they tell, aren’t exciting either. In a way that had me nodding along as a long-time TTRPG nerd, Lakaera explains that the same tension between dice and narrative that can be found in systems like D&D can also be found here:
“Just like with a tabletop system like D&D, dice tell a story, and this is very much an instance of being able to experience dice telling a story—a player managing to roll really high to break through a bunch of players blocking them to take that last-minute shot, situations like that.”
For example, Ffon tells me about a make-or-break shot, a fatal dice roll that decided a match: “We’re gonna go back to the year 2023, it is day two, where we introduce four new teams. One of these matches is the Radz-at-Han Radiance versus the Azim Steppe Nadaaminators. We are tied three to three, so this means we go to our overtime rules. It’s a 5v5 shootout, best of five wins. We tie again, which means we now need to go to sudden death.”
In sudden death, both captains meet in the centre of the field and play a final blitzoff to try and score a goal—no goalkeepers, no extra players, it’s akin to a duel in the wild west… just, y’know. With a Blitzball. “Everyone’s eyes are on Lakaera and myself. Blitzoff happens. Lakaera rolls a 774, I roll a 775. One over on a 1d1000 system.”
To give you an idea, the odds of rolling above Lakaera’s 774 aren’t too bad, around 22.6%. The odds of rolling exactly one higher, though? Literally, well, one in 1,000.
Capell, another staff member, recounts plenty of similar hype moments in their career as well: “I’ve [played] a lot … The moments that are most hype are definitely the ones where—for example, I remember someone was blocked by three individuals in the midfield, but despite that (the dice roll how the dice roll) they managed to make the shot and score despite being blocked by three people.”
Ffon chimes in: “It was three blocks, two dives, and the goalkeeper had a +30 to catch,” explains Ffon, “Whereas the [shooting character] only had a +5 bonus. So they rolled a 105, but they spiked past everyone.“
‘We all want to be heroes’
The EBL has made some real-world impacts, too—not just in bringing people out of their comfort zone, but also with actual charity drives for groups like Extra Life, which funds treatments and healthcare for children’s hospitals. One staff member, who helps to head up a lot of these initiatives, tells me it’s a point of pride not just for the good they do in the world, but the good it engenders in others, too.
“Everything that we do with the charity is a proud moment … It was (as far as doing charity work, doing stuff for others) about the feeling that it cultivates in oneself.
“I know that sounds really cheesy, but I think the proudest moment is seeing that feeling develop in others and that feeling spread, and everyone really become passionate about it and embracing it as ‘this just isn’t an add-on to Blitzball, this is part of a Blitzball for our community’.”
Kaisa explains—and this is an opinion I share—how MMOs can arm people who otherwise might not have the means to do good in the real world, too: “It can be really hard in-person sometimes to feel free to have that kind of connection with each other … but gaming, where we all have this shared passion, we’re already kind of connected.
“It becomes a little bit easier, especially for those who have social anxiety, or might be neurodivergent—as far as [Blitzball goes], it really is about how, when you do stuff for others, it makes you happier. It makes your life better. You then start to be more kind, even outside of the game, you start to think more about the world. It does have those ripple effects … Every year, everybody’s like, okay, what are we doing for charity?”
I take a moment to paraphrase current Critical Role DM Brennan Lee Mulligan, who once said that roleplay in TTRPGs can be training or practice to “do the brave thing”, and Kaisa agrees wholeheartedly:
“That’s the foundation of roleplay, or even playing fantasy games—in our daily lives, we’re often confronted with limitations. ‘You can’t do that, you can’t do this,’ and everybody wants to kind of imagine what’s possible with fewer restrictions. … We all want to be heroes.”
Blitzball and beyond
Turns out, blitzball isn’t the only sport people want to act out in FF14, either, as Capell tells me: “Not just Blitzball has come out of this RP community, but a bunch of people who came together [including myself] have built a community based around professional wrestling.”
There’s also a chocobo racing league, an upcoming magitek racing league—the RP community in FF14 is a web of connections, events, and organisations of players doing some incredible stuff.”
As a matter of fact, the EBL’s started an entire network, as Lakaera explains: “We started something called ESN, or Etheirys Sports Network … We’ve kind of left it as an open forum now to make it a hub where the different sports organizers can communicate, potentially discuss cross-promotion or different ways to cooperate with each other, and voice what their schedules or plans are so that we can collaborate smoothly and exist in the same ecosystem.”
The way the sport’s brought this slice of the FF14 community together really is a marvel. “We have people from all over the shard, it’s not a single server,” another staff member adds. “People come together to celebrate Final Fantasy 10 and bring in their own creativity, fun, their personality, into it.
“What makes it special is in the sense of belonging that forms along the way, where strangers become friends and shared passions turn into lasting bonds, and everyone feels like they’re part of something bigger.”
If any of this sounds like any sort of fun to you at all, I highly recommend—if you’re playing on the US Crystal data center—to check out the Discord for yourself. “We always welcome people,” says Ffon, “Even if you want to learn how to play, if you just want to be a spectator, if you just want to be a wallflower—we love our spectators—we love people that just help spread the word about what we do.”
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