So Lord Tony PM'd me 2 or 3 days ago to point me to this thread with the question of why people don't play this anymore, as if I decided it for them.
Well Tony, if I must attempt to answer your question, I would suggest that in general people are not very good at level design and generally didn't figure out how to make good arenas, and those with potential were usually squandered when bad creeper settings were chosen. Even when it was popular, I rarely had any real fun with it except on my own server or with a lot of meddling on my part on receptive players.
Most people weren't even really willing to throw together even the most rudimentary arena, which is kind of the opposite of my entire design philosophy, i.e.
this is blockland and if no creative building is involved what's the damn point of playing. This philosophy has been reflected in my other major mods, Rise of Blockland and Bot Wars. The novelty is gonna wear off pretty fast if you're not trying out different arena concepts like castles and boats and space stations and what-have-you.
As far as bad settings, most people tended to put the settings to extreme values and ignore the ones in the middle, when really I kind of found what was the most fun in the most situations and used that as the center point (except for growth speed, whose default is the fastest speed, and pretty much the cap of what BL can handle on most machines). People would set health and regen to the highest and then got frustrated when they couldn't really fight back at all and were basically playing passive keep-away... when that's the type of gameplay that such ridiculously high health and regen settings are FOR. They would set the hunting behavior to laser-guided and then die because there was no real way to set up a defense anywhere... well yeah, if you give an FPS bot total aimbot power, and your goal is a real battle and not a game of hide and seek, then you're being an idiot.
I never saw an obstacle course with no creepkilling weapons with a button at the end that would kill all the creeper and declare the players winners. I never saw consumable bomb stations where you could press a button once to destroy all creep in a wide area around the station, but it wouldn't work again until it was reset with a wrench after the game was over. I never saw trolly challenges where you had to get across a field of 1x1s but a random selection of them have been turned raycast off and creeper will pop out of them as you hop across. I never saw anyone doing any of the cool emergent stuff I expected to see when I gave people this kind of thing. The whole mod made me kind of disappointed in BL players in general. :\
I remember being holed up with like 4 guys in one of the "two ships" rooms shouting encouragement at them because i was the new captian (old one died, was mr wallet I think).
I posted a teaser topic for the mod about that session which you can all enjoy reading
here.Someone fairly recently asked me if I could make this work on a dedi with no admins connected as a self-repeating thing and I turned him down because I couldn't be bothered. But, if there's really this much interest in the mod, I might be convinced to put a little work into it, especially if the ratio of demand to work involved is very high. So no promises, but put in your two cents of what you'd like to see, and if anything sounds particularly interesting or is requested repeatedly... maybe.
