The real issue isnt that blocklands playerbase is shrinking. Its that the majority of the current playerbase are kids from steam, most of whom literally have no idea this forum even exists. Thus the forum ends up seeming sparse (the clan discussion board has gone the way of the AoT board, with only about one or two new posts every day, and with the oldest thread on the 1st page dating to over a month ago).
If Badspot implemented Steam Workshop for Blockland, that would solve a lot of problems, and help with server quality significantly, but at this point I am starting to lose hope that will ever happen.
Too bad the steam workshop is a steaming load of stuff, and here's why:
If an author removes the addon, its gone from your subscriptionsThis really sucks if the author "Leaves the community" and nukes all their creations
Iffy Updating SystemIn many occasions I have seen the Author required to delete their workshop item and have to re-upload it as a new item, due to the workshop not updateing addons sometime for a strange error. This causes people the frustration of opening their game launching it, only to realize their addon is gone and they have to look through the workshop again, re-subscribe and restart their game, and unnecessary tedious process.
False DMCA Complaints and Copyright WhoresThese are absolute bullstuff, if you have heard of the rappelling mod in gmod, some douchebag named magenta is constantly filing dmca complaints because he/she believes they hold the rights to any kind of mod that uses similar code, aside from that you also have starfish companies looking for anything in the upload image to forget you over, that means if you use a font that for some reason is copy written and is not for free use, your workshop item will be unlisted untill you remove said infringing content, this can be hell if you used that same font in all the addon images, because that means you need to remake all of them.
File Size Limits Yes, I know there might never be huge addons but still, this causes people to make separate workshop items that must all be subscribed too, not to mention the horrible spam of "server packs" that sometimes take up a whole page or two on the workshop.
Sorting through addons can be horribleNotice I said "can be", that's because some games implement this in a good way like besiege, where as other games like gmod have terrible tags and there will most likely always be some type of addon in the wrong category ex. a dupe in saves
Would kill the forums for addons, and ONLY ADDONSMany games have experienced this already, due to the workshop being an option that shows up on the game page, new players resort to that instead of checking the community for addons, therefor their forum community reduce in size or become inactive, people stop uploading stuff there and you know the rest...
Garrysmod is a Grade A+ example of how "well" the workshop works.
The way the workshop is know and how it functions would ruin the game instead of help it, the only thing I could possible see the workshop be good for would be saves, but again sorting through the workshop is done poorly.
Also I am unsure about this but, I think if the cloud servers go down, workshop items are unavailable, but I might be wrong on that one.
