Extended Siesta

See also: Off Season

By @jrfbz

An extended siesta is a lengthy break from everyday league operations, during which no games are played.

Unlike a traditional siesta, which will last a few hours at most, the extended siesta is intended to last at least one week, replacing the planned Season scheduling entirely. Also unlike a traditional siesta, fans are still able to use Blaseball.com to purchase items, view team rosters, read the rulebook, and so on.

The purpose of the extended siesta is to give the umpires and other league staff the opportunity to fix structural problems, implement large-scale changes, and to rest their tired flesh. Notably, it is also a time when the league will use Blaseball.com to speak to participants out-of-character by addressing themselves as The Game Band, a game development company, rather than as umpires.

Despite the lack of seasonal games, an extended siesta can still see major events with permanent consequences to all of Blaseball. For example, the first extended siesta involved The Commissioner repairing The Wyatt Masoning with the help of fans on Twitter.

Extended Siesta I (Seasons β3-β4)

By @jrfbz

The first extended siesta, occurred between Season β3 and Season β4. No games took place for two weeks (August 10-23, 2020). It coincides with the Drought period of The Discipline Era.

The Unmasoning

The Unmasoning repaired some, but not all, of the Unlimited Tacos roster.

See the main article on this topic: The Unmasoning

On August 12, The Commissioner addressed the events of The Wyatt Masoning in an official capacity on Twitter, by blaming the anomaly on a contractor and immediately beginning repairs. For the next three hours, fans were able to Like and Retweet specific tweets in order to repair the names of the Unlimited Tacos roster. The end results were mixed at best, with most players still retaining part of the name Wyatt Mason, and others gaining new errors altogether. Despite this, the official tweets remind that "the league bears no liability."

Messaging

During this extended siesta, Blaseball.com displayed the following message from The Game Band (speaking out-of-character) to all participants.

"Blaseball is taking an Extended Siesta."

Blaseball began as a small side project that we decided would be fun to share. We've been overjoyed -- and honestly overwhelmed -- to watch it explode the way it has. We LOVE this community -- from the fan art to the wiki, to the team chants, rituals and personalities that sprang forth. This is way, way bigger than we expected. Your creativity continues to fuel and inspire us.

BLASEBALL WILL BE BACK. We plan to bring you more exciting action every week. But to do that, we need some time to fix bugs, add some features, make the machines bigger, and breathe. Our team is exhausted and overworked. We need a little time to recoup so Blaseball can come back stronger than ever.

But we will be back. The Peanut demands it. It's not finished with you yet.

We really appreciate your patience. We’re expanding the team right now so we can be ready to relaunch, hopefully in a week or two. Follow us on Twitter and Discord to stay in the loop as we prepare for Blaseball’s return.

And a very special thank you goes out to everyone who has supported us on Patreon. For those that can donate, any help goes a long way. Blaseball was created and self-published by a very small team, and it's going to be independence that keeps Blaseball’s spirit alive.

Thank you again, Blaseball fans. We will see you very soon.

We can't wait to see what you create next.

- The Game Band

On August 15, the league tweeted that "The Front Office is aiming for Season 4 play to begin on Monday, August 24." This was the first confirmation that the extended siesta was to last for two weeks rather than one week.

Extended Siesta II (Seasons β8-β9)

The second extended siesta, occurred between Season β8 and Season β9. No games took place for one week (Sep 28-Oct 4, 2020).

Grand Siesta (Seasons β11-β12)

The third extended siesta, or the Grand Siesta, occurred between Season β11 and Season β12. The Coffee Cup took place during this Grand Siesta (Nov 17 – Dec 8, 2020), as did the non-canonical BlaseballCares Showdown (Dec 13, 2020), though no other games took place for four months (Oct 26, 2020 – Feb 28, 2021).

Grand Siesta II (Seasons β24-1)

The fourth extended siesta occurred between Season β24 and Season 1. Excluding the Short Circuits (Nov 1–14, 2021; Dec 6–19, 2021; Jan 24 – Feb 6, 2022), which broke up the siesta, there were no other games for seventeen months (Jul 31, 2021 – Jan 9, 2023).

Extended Siesta III (Seasons 2-β)

The fifth extended siesta, and the first of the NEW Blaseball, occurred between Season 2 and Season 3, and began on Feb 3, 2023, at the tail end of the Offseason.

Messaging

The Game Band created a Post at the start of the extended siesta:

An Update from The Game Band (2/3/23)
Hey Blaseball Fans,

We’ve spent the last year planning for the future, building and rebuilding the Sim, and figuring out how to run Blaseball in a way that’s sustainable for us as a team. Finally, after that long hiatus, Blaseball returned with a new Era. Rejoice!

…But that rejoicing quickly turned into some confusion and frustration. Put plainly, even with all the work we did, we still didn’t get Blaseball to where we wanted it to be for this launch.

Our hope was to be able to iterate and improve post-launch, but as we tried to do that, we realized it just wasn’t realistic for the amount that needed to be done. And it was negatively impacting your experience. We need to make improvements. We’ve heard your concerns about things like accessibility, missing features, site navigation and performance issues, and often found you saying the exact same things we were saying to each other.

In order to get the game where it needs to be, we’re pausing the Era for now. This is NOT going to be a repeat of our last Siesta — we are going to come back as soon as possible.

We’re really excited about the Era of Blaseball we have planned for you. What you’ve seen so far is only the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

We’ll be posting & emailing you weekly updates as we make these improvements.

Stay tuned.

The Game Band
 @thegameband

One week later, on February 10th, 2023, The Game Band created another Post:

An Update from The Game Band (2/10/23)
Hey Blaseball Fans,

This week, the studio has been focusing on retrospectives: looking back to determine where things went great, where things went not-great, and generally doing a bunch of process updates to make sure we learn from our old mistakes. Not just with the relaunch, but also throughout the Era when we’re live again!

On top of the retrospectives, TGB’s dev team has been hard at work testing and building Blaseball interface updates like weather icons (they’re back!), bet indicators on live games, easier site navigation, universal game days, and more information you might want on past games in the ‘Schedule’ view. They’ve been going through known site issues compiled by QA and are working with designers on prioritizing fixes.

We would like to get some more feedback from you, yes you! We’ve put together a survey that will help us learn more about your experience and priorities, and we’re also beginning to organize user interviews.

See you next Friday with another update!

The Game Band
 @thegameband

The week after, on February 17th, 2023, The Game Band created yet another Post:

An Update from The Game Band (2/17/23)
Hey Blaseball Fans,

Thank you so much for your survey responses! This week, as we’ve been working on the web and mobile Blaseball experiences, that feedback has already proved extremely helpful to us. So seriously, thank you. We’re busy going through all your thoughts to make sure we’re on the same page about what fixes we’re prioritizing.

According to you all, the three most important features for us to work on are: Site Navigation (38.5%), Post-game event surfacing (29.6%), and The Feed (29.1%). We've actually been testing Event Surfacing and a reworked Site Nav since the start of this Siesta, and a large majority of other issues, like the frustrating mobile experience and accessibility concerns, are already high priorities for us.

As we move forward and solidify our plans, our team is still working hard on bug fixes and improvements, so we’re going to start including Patch Notes whenever we can in this and future updates.

You’ll hear from us soon about user interviews.

See you next Friday!

The Game Band

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Patch Notes 2/17/23

Web client

• Fans now have the ability to reset a forgotten account password
• Some behind the scenes work for [FAN-FAVORITE MECHANIC SPOILER]
• Backend styling and efficiency updates

Sim / Backend

• New tiebreaker logic
• Reorganizing some election setup code
• Setup for [SPOILER] mechanics & weather
• API stability improvements
• Fix bugged batting lineups due to player roster changes from weather effects

Mobile

• Backend styling and efficiency updates
• Betting & navigation improvements
• Past game outcomes & weather results
• Deep linking support
• Fix login session persistence
• Schedule improvements

 @thegameband

On February 24, 2023, The Game Band created another Post updating on development progress:

An Update from The Game Band (2/24/23)
Hey Blaseball Fans!

This week has been a lot of testing and prioritizing. We’ve spoken in the past about how excited we are to show off what the design team has planned for this Era, and we’re testing a bunch of it to make sure it’s as functional in execution as it is cool in our brains. Continuing with this theme, our game designers are fleshing out and balancing Era mechanics. We look forward to showing you when the time comes!

We're also testing some Blaseball social features for further down the line: Community staged a company PVP (against ourselves) and asked TGB employees to cause as many problems as possible, in order to test our tools so far. It was very illustrative, and our team members are abundantly creative for making mayhem.

Everyone here, but especially our engineers, were so happy to see your responses to last week's patch notes! We are going to make sure to include them going forward whenever we have them.

Finally, those retrospective conversations we told you about have really come to fruition with big process changes internally, which translates to lots of positive improvements in the longer-term development of Blaseball.

Our path forward is looking a lot clearer, and we should have more concrete info for you very soon.

See you next Friday!

The Game Band
 @thegameband

COMMUNITY REPORTS
The remainder of this article contains lore created collaboratively by the Blaseball community.

Implications

It is currently unclear what the teams and players do during an extended siesta, which can last for hundreds of days in seasonal Blaseball time.

The lack of official league correspondence and the lack of media coverage for star players may be a deliberate tactic from the league to keep their most valued assets within the realm of Blaseball (both physically and mentally), as studies show that extended periods away from Blaseball could lead to players realizing that they do not have to play Blaseball.

Rumors are prevalent that the spacetime-ravaged Los Angeli became home to several league seasons in alternate dimensions, allowing the most dedicated of Blaseball players to get their fix while their main dimension was still in extended siesta.

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