Run away, the dwarves are coming!

I am getting ready for a new season of Blood Bowl.  I decided that I should play dwarves because I apparently love the idea of being incredibly slow and bad at football.  My league allows us 7 preseason games on the open ladder to get levelled up a bit, so I started up a new team and queued up for a game.  My first game was against Chaos, a team that is slightly faster than my dwarves and about equally terrible at actually doing anything with the ball.  Bashy team vs. bashy team.  Bash!

Both teams are pretty heavily armoured so we spent the entire first half bashing into each other accomplishing very little.  Beastman knocks dwarf down, dwarf stands back up.  Dwarf knocks beastman down, beastman stands back up.  However, I managed to control the left side of the board and with a little luck I injured one enemy and ran my ball carrier to one space shy of the enemy goal line.  My opponent made a desperate play requiring 3 rolls of a 6 sided die where each roll needed to be 2 or above, and made a block hoping to knock one of my dwarves down.

On the second 'please please not a 1' roll my opponent rolled a 1 and his player fell over, ending his turn and guaranteeing me a touchdown just before halftime.  I was in a good position at this point with one enemy player out and me being up 1-0, but my opponent was going to receive and certainly had chances.  I went to move the ball into the zone and score... and I couldn't enter the command.

Then I noticed that my opponent had disconnected, which prevents me from taking any actions.  I had to sit for 5 minutes waiting for them to come back, and I couldn't just do something else because if the opponent did return I would need to be there to play the rest of the match.  For the entire 5 minutes I looked at my ball carrier who had been told to score the TD but who was eternally stuck, waiting for an opponent that I did not need.  Finally the clock wound down and I got the victory, and all of my opponent's bonus cash and experience that comes at game end.

Now it is possible that my opponent just randomly disconnected, but that seems extremely unlikely.  Having just tried a desperate gambit to prevent me scoring and having failed it seems that my opponent not only wanted to concede the match but also wanted to annoy me by having me wait around for 5 minutes too.  Either that or they just ragequit without any thought, hard to say.

I was credited with a 2-0 win but I didn't get the experience for scoring those 2 touchdowns.  I did get 5 extra experience because my opponent conceded, but I would have gotten 3 experience instantly as soon as my dwarf scored the TD, so 5 isn't much of a reward.  I got all of my opponent's winnings though, and at the outset like this a big chunk of cash is actually quite useful.

I netted 12 experience and 80,000 gold.  That isn't amazing, but I didn't collect any injuries and I got a fairly normal amount of experience and a windfall of gold, so I shouldn't complain... but I am going to complain anyway.  It sucks to have an opponent ditch on the game.  I wanted to play!  I fought for an advantageous position and I wanted to see if I could maintain it.

What really got me is that if I had realized my opponent was likely to quit I would have clicked really fast to get that TD first.  I could have grabbed the points for the TD and then got all the bonuses for a concession too.  Next time I am in that position I will make sure to be faster to avoid getting screwed.

In any case it was time to queue up for game 2.  This time I was matched against orks, so it was bashy team vs. bashy team again.  Round 2, bash!  This game was a morass of orks and dwarves bashing each other in the middle of the field, and by the time the first half was over the enemy troll had injured itself trying to push over a dwarf and the fans had knocked one of the orks out cold.  The ball never moved more than 1 space from where it landed on turn 1, so it was still 0-0.  Lots of game left here, I thought!

Then the victory screen popped up as my opponent had conceded.  At least this time they actually conceded instead of just disconnecting so I didn't have to wait for 5 minutes, and I wasn't about to score so I didn't miss out on much, but it was still frustrating.  Again I had played well and gotten myself into a strong position and I wasn't able to have fun leveraging the advantage generated.

Don't get me wrong, having people concede to me on my first 2 games has been pretty good.  I have no injuries, I have lots of money, and I have a reasonable amount of experience for being 2 games in.  But it sucks to play chunks of games like this, and it makes me wonder if this is just a feature of playing on the open ladder.  I would totally get it if a team was getting butchered and they wanted to get away from the bashing they were taking but both concessions had only one injured opposing player and they had real chances at winning the game.

My victories also just don't feel REAL.  Sure I logged 2-0 both times, but I feel like I didn't actually win.

I was trying to figure out if conceding made sense when you were losing the game at halftime.  You get nothing from the concession but you do get to queue up again right away and hope for better luck or weaker opposition.  If you play another half game you get 35,000 gold and roughly 7 experience, 5 from the automatic experience and 2 from random stuff you accomplish.  That also assumes you lose the game, and you could win and do better than that.  If you quit and requeue you get 40,000 gold and 11 experience over a whole game.  That requeue option takes twice as long and doesn't get you anywhere near twice as much stuff, so at first glance it seems terrible in terms of reward per unit time.

But!

Requeuing could make sense if you are in a league where lots of people concede.  If you think you have a reasonable shot of being clearly in the lead at halftime then you stand a chance of your opponent conceding and giving you all the money and stuff in only half a game.  In a heavy concede based metagame you are really incentivized to duck out of a losing game to try to get into a game where you do well early and get conceded to.

Conceding also helps you get out of games where you are being dominated, and that probably means lower injury rates for your dudes.  Not a guarantee, but it helps.

In any case I hope that this conceding thing isn't a widespread thing.  I want to play!  I know that there is some restriction on conceding, something like 5 concedes per season, but I don't know what happens if you violate that limit.  Are you kicked out of the league?  Just can't hit the concede button but can still disconnect?  I don't know.  I definitely won't concede myself unless things are truly absurd.