How could 'we' get more people to play Blockland? Just make good servers and invite your friends to play.
Personally, I think the lack of player retention on Blockland is mostly just due to the age of the game, but I think the loss of RTB didn't help either. At the time it was the predominant social hub for Blockland, with most communication happening over its IRC channel, and with most new add-ons being released on the RTB mod manager. When it went away there was really no way for new mod-makers to disseminate their add-ons to a large audience (a bb-style messageboard doesn't really work well as a hub for addons). Thus the incentive for mod-creation went away and the number of people making new add-ons decreased, in my experience at least.
I don't think it would be reasonable to expect Badspot to implement this, especially considering that 99% of Blockland's 'target audience' has already been met and either purchased the game or decided not to. But if we had infinite resources to improve the game, I would suggest adding back all the original features of RTB, plus some sort of Steam Workshop-esque system whereby you can upload smaller parts of builds (lamps, sofas, houses, castles, etc) and allow players to load them in duplicator-wand-style, while keeping track of how many unique players have used the build. That way there's an incentive for people to share builds, and new/inexperienced players can learn to copy better building styles by using pre-built artifacts.
