Messages

46

Off Topic / Re: blockland: the community that killed the game

« on: January 22, 2023, 04:04:00 AM »

maybe badspot was so sour about us lot was because the lego deal fell through and he theorised we were to blame somehow

IIRC the Lego deal was back in the v0002 era, when there was like 100 players, I can't imagine him twisting his anger on the community then.

47

Off Topic / Re: blockland: the community that killed the game

« on: January 20, 2023, 03:10:23 PM »

agree !! also I completely forgot about cortex command that was a pretty sweet game

i played the hell out of that game at 10 fps on my crappy HP, that game was so unoptimized it's hilarious. fond memories, I actually made a mod or two for that game rather than blockland, I think cus 3D modeling for blockland always felt so beyond my capabilities, I wish i had at least tried.

48

Off Topic / Re: blockland: the community that killed the game

« on: January 20, 2023, 01:56:48 PM »

I think I have a pretty good example to highlight Blockland's uniquely stuff management. There was a game called Cortex Command, 2D combat game, it was included in one the early Humble Bundles, I think either 2 or 3. I fell in love with the game and logged like, 300 hours into it. The game was the alpha of alphas, there was barely any content for it - this term gets thrown around a lot, but it really did feel like a tech demo. It wasn't a particularly good game either, its main selling point was having every pixel simulated, think Noita, and also some beautiful pixel art. But nonetheless, it had a thriving mod scene, insanely thriving considering how small and feeble the game was, due to it being easy to code and having developer support. Anyways, the game gets a couple updates, they add an official "campaign" that was just retooled skirmishes, but no content. Developer radio silence for years, eventually the developers add an update to the game's menu that advertises their new game. The mod community eventually moves on, the game dies, so it goes.

So, we got an indie game with a good selling point and foundation, but not much content, that garners a loyal fanbase, who begin to mod the game and populate it with free quality content. The game is watched over by disinterested devs who don't impede the modders, but don't reallly help them much. The devs add very little content, and eventually start to advertise a new game they're more passionate about. Sound familiar?

The community for Cortex Command was as placid as it should've been. On the forums, people published mods or discussed mods, or gave help to fellow coders. There was an off-topic board where people would post what games they were interested in. There was some drama I think, usually from stolen assets, that was quickly arbitrated. Meanwhile on Blockland, you've got insane non-stop Drama, kids constantly private investigating themselves, rampant grooming, DDoS attacks, forgetin credit card theft?!? It's a Lego game where you build castles with your friends! Hell, Cortex Command was hyper-violent, all the enemy units would explode in bits of gore, talk about explicit - none of that rubbed off on the community.

Where do these communities differ? One of them has a hateful dev who constantly shows contempt for 8 year olds on his forum, and three moderators to control the posts of like 10,000 active users, and the other one had a larger moderation team for a far smaller community of posters, and devs who didn't use their forum as a sounding board for their misanthropic rants

49

Off Topic / Re: brickadia devs stop grooming challenge [IMPOSSIBLE]

« on: January 19, 2023, 11:25:32 PM »

he said hit the gym not hit the roids

Synthol injections are actually epic based the winged hussars were all synthol guys

50

Drama / Re: Plastiware was arrested for child research

« on: January 19, 2023, 08:38:23 PM »

okay of all the the possibilites Plastiware coming back to try and clarify was not one I foresaw what the hell

51

Off Topic / Re: blockland: the community that killed the game

« on: January 19, 2023, 08:23:37 PM »

ohh i meant he was in his mid to late 20s when he posted that - when we were friends i think he was 26 that was like at least a decade ago

oh no that's what I was getting at, Goth77 is 29 (according to his profile) which means he would've been 18 when that was posted, and Bisjac would be 24-25

52

Off Topic / Re: blockland: the community that killed the game

« on: January 19, 2023, 08:11:18 PM »

Pretty sure they're around my age, give or take a year or two, I don't know for sure. What I do know is that 2011 was my junior year of highschool, and I knew seniors 18 or 19 years of age that were dating freshman that were 2 or 3 years younger than them. It's more common than you might think in that aspect. Digging up dirt on someone from a post that was 12 years ago doesn't exactly do much justice - 12 years is a lot of time for someone to change their entire personality. Within that time their entire outlook on life could change.

mid to late 20s

Bisjac is definitely older than you by more than a year. And the existence of Romeo Law romances does not invalidate the creepiness.

Also once again, there's seventeen galaxies between cancelling someone for 10 year old posts, having them lose their job, and us remembering how much of a creep a forumer was. This place gets like 20 eyeballs and the feds are (probably) not a pair of them.  And hey, if Bisjac wasn't all talk and did have victims, I hope that he does see the inside of a jail-cell

I think at 14 years of age it's rare to even recognize the issue with that. cus like at 14 ur moral framework is not really that evolved. and as a 14 year old you do feel attraction to adults, which just makes it harder to realize that it's not right for it to go in the other direction. you believe that you can consent to a relationship like that, so why wouldn't that belief extend to someone else your age? at least this was my experience at the time, and I am very fortunate that my not-so-responsible interactions with adults (or older teenagers) didn't end up with me getting hurt. I think the only way to address this is to teach kids about love and how  to approach it safely earlier in life. my first love ed class was in the 10th grade, where they showed us shock images of STI symptoms and told us to practice abstinence. that's not useful loveual education, first of all, and it was far too late. reactionaries start foaming at the mouth as soon as you suggest it, but the fact of the matter is, you can't keep people safe from dangers they don't understand18-19 years olds should not be dating 13-14 year olds. just because it happens, it's legal, and it's sometimes even considered to be normal, doesn't mean that it is good or healthy

Yeah I had the same experience, however I grew up in super liberal, where there was way more progressive love education, and even still I still knew girls who dated older dudes and vice versa. It's crazy how pervasive it is.

53

Off Topic / Re: blockland: the community that killed the game

« on: January 19, 2023, 06:42:04 PM »

mid to late 20s

repugnant. i figured as much.

god damn, people love posting tepid "cringe" but this is real weapons-grade nuclear cringe, that loving icy shame that comes from realizing you didn't really question this stuff at a young age. In that way i try not to feel "guilty" about it because we had no agency here -  if I at 14 reported Bisjac or Otis or JimmG for creeping on preteens I'd either get radio silence or probably get called a moralcigarette or something.

54

Off Topic / Re: blockland: the community that killed the game

« on: January 19, 2023, 04:55:20 PM »

https://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=140601.0
everyone who participated in this thread is on a watch list now

no permabans handed out for this grade A behavior, what a forum.

She either legal or not. I like em both, and I don't ask a lot of questions.

;D

how old was he when he said this? Cus I remember hearing Bisjac was 30, and that was probably seven or six years ago when I became privy to that fact.

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Off Topic / Re: Foxscotch reveals the truth about love

« on: January 18, 2023, 12:55:35 AM »

night fox, do u have any advice for soapers, that is folks who wear soap shoes to grind rails?

56

General Discussion / Re: how did you find out about blockland's existence

« on: January 16, 2023, 12:00:00 PM »

• Block Eye Entertainment's "Door of Perception" (I think that was the name, unfortunately the video is no longer available as it was copyright strike'd :( )
  

dude this video was so important to my childhood. Interestingly enough, not only is the original video gone, the original song "Battle of Bongo Hill" has been successfully wiped from the entire internet, I think I found it only in a different form on some weird mp3 site. Definitely a sample dispute or something. Someone has re-uploaded the video with different audio, luckily.

57

Off Topic / Re: blockland: the community that killed the game

« on: January 16, 2023, 04:14:11 AM »

Hey, I have tons of positive memories of the forums. I used to climb into bed and post long into the night on my busted ass psp 3000. Made friends, shared art, acted like a dumbass, good times. I personally never got groomed, I did get sent nsfw stuff when I was too young tho, but it was from fellow kids.

My frustration stems more from coming back and viewing the entire forums history as an adult. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, when viewed as a whole. Look, we're not filing a class action lawsuit against Badspot, we're just calling out some of his stuff. The man is not beyond critique, no one is.

Personally, when I go to the "blocklanders you remember" threads that have popped up as of the mass exodus, I feel a palpable sense of regret, because I see that at the end of the day, the people who are really remembered are the ones who spread fun, hosted servers, made builds and add-ons. I feel like I wasted so much of my young life posting inane stuff when what really would've made me happier was y'know... playing blockland. And as time has gone on, and friendships I made through blockland have seemed more tenuous than ever, I personally don't know why I come back.

58

Off Topic / Re: blockland: the community that killed the game

« on: January 16, 2023, 02:30:06 AM »

Basically:

• There is no reason to think that any additional moderation could have done anything but lower the activity on the forums.

Regardless of whether or not more moderation would've made the forums more or less active, the point is that Badspot's style of moderation, which was not only lasseiz-faire but also outright hostile, lead to a toxic environment, and is embarassing in retrospect considering how much actually heinous stuff went on unperturbed.

• Furthermore, thousands of people frequently used and enjoyed the forums every day for years.
• Most people who casually enjoyed the forums moved on silently, leaving only those who couldn't let go of the nostalgia or who were just here for drama.
• These people, being kinda weird and neurotic, were pretty much the only remaining members after 10 17 years.
• These members represent a severely skewed sample of users. Also, like all humans, negative memories stay in their mind more than mundane ones. The fact many of them experienced unpleasant things is not representative of how the forums were 10 years ago for the vast majority of users.

Not to give too much import to being a degenarate poster, but being here for 10+ years also gives one a perspective on the entire history of the forums, a breadth of knowledge that all those thousands who came and went might not have. I can tell you that having been here for my entire teenage life, as well as being privy to plenty of other game forums, barely anywhere was as cloistered and hostile as here. It's nuts. And it wasn't the fun, cute, lego sandbox game that was the cause for that.

Look, it's true that trolls and predators pop up on any internet space. No matter how child-proof your website is, if there's kids and teens involved, predators are gonna try and get in. And it's also true that 99% of the grooming, abuse, etc. is done on a secondary site - in chatrooms usually. But that doesn't mean that having more moderation would've been beyond the pale. All the stuff I hear about grooming, and I just imagine "man it would've been nice if there was a  roper way to actually issue complaints and get people banned for external stuff, rather than everything being funneled into the gaping maw of the Drama thread".

tl;dr All your bad experiences are just confirmation bias. Everyone who had good clean fun on the forums with no issues already moved on.

Bonkers take. There's no way to glean that from some activity charts. It's just as empirically possible that many people moved on after having a horrible time, and why wouldn't they when 90% of the drama threads were just kids being dunked on for being cringe?

brown townogy wise, there's a co-op house and one day you show up and all 15 roommates have clawed each other to death, and you're like "well eventually all humans perish, such is the natural state of life", and like sure that's true, but what happened there was patently abnormal. The BLF experience is not how forums for indie games usually go, and I don't think it was the radiation coming off of the digital lego bricks that was doing it.

59

Off Topic / Re: blockland: the community that killed the game

« on: January 16, 2023, 12:20:44 AM »

If anything, the question should be "how did Badspot manage to make this forum as good and successful as it was for as long as it was?" Getting people to post 10 million times on your website is no small feat.
And the answer was a hands off approach. Not scouring literally every thread for any post that might be slightly off-topic and deleting it, so users who view the thread later are wondering why half the comments are just replying to non-existant posts.

i think colten and many others have made good arguments that the "hands-off" nature has had far more negative impacts than positive ones. it was a forum in the 2000's and we were all teens, we would've posted anywhere, there's nothing "speciall" about the blockland forums aside from connections that could've been made on any forum. Well that and a great ui, which is now gone, rip the blue sky.

also, you posted earlier about the popularity of furry and brony threads implying they were the entire catalyst for creep stuff, but now this was a "good and successful" forum?

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Off Topic / Re: blockland: the community that killed the game

« on: January 15, 2023, 05:15:50 PM »

hey not to be that guy but make a separate topic to discuss that it has nothing to do with the OP

hey it is nice to see the unquenchable argumentative spirit
of blockland still lives, there's life in these old bones yet lol

to steer back to your OP, I tend to not try to get wrapped in "what could've been" mentalities, everything has a time and place, I don't desire or expect blockland to have a second renaissance. But also like, if badspot would've just had a shred of trust in his community, and had brought some talented young modders into the fold to try and advance the game, at the very least the game would've continued to progress past the brick physics update, instead of just stalling out completely. Badspot made a fantastic playground, and then 100,000 kids came in and started churning out content every second, and the entire time he just treated us all like little silly toddlers. There was some community outreach; adding new default saved builds, making wrench events default, letting Eksi make the official Steam trailer, but other than that Badspot basically never gave the community the time of day, and that's why now the game is pretty much abandonware.

This issue is petty in comparisom to the issue regarding all the abuse that happened here on his watch, but its another nail in the coffin, another byproduct of being completely callous towards a community of teens and kids.