the stagnation of blockland

[Menderman]

i have accepted that Blockland has long fallen so now i just spend my time in b4v21 recording stuffty videos and archiving older videos that are/were on YouTube. fortunately (or unfortunately) most of my fond memories from Blockland are singleplayer or LAN, which i can still do. so idk if i'm jaded or not but the lack of people playing nowadays doesn't effect me that much.

i agree 100%. i barely even log onto actual Blockland anymore instead of b4v21 because the game had more charm that way, being a tiny LEGO guy making their own LEGO city. it's a big reason why i even wanted the game. most of the time when playing v21, i don't even have the shaders on despite having a computer capable of running them, because they look like stuff, plain and simple. maps also looked bad but maps had charm, shaders just look bad unless i want to install a mod that tanks my FPS.

i honestly think maps should've gotten an upgrade again like they did after v0002 and RTB, but i'm pretty sure at that point Badspot stopped caring about Blockland and i doubt he would've put the effort for something he doesn't care about anymore.

[Ad Bot]

[Sabbin]

the thing is that blockland began as a casual tech demo, gained nostalgia interest for being 1:1 lego, then the already small playerbase transferred over to the redesign to our current blockland and remained small and niche for the 15 years or so we've been playing. Despite having a couple developers over time it remained infinitely smaller than most other similar games of the time. it also had minimal advertising outside of the few early 2000's sidebar ads I saw.

the lack of a large team meant moderation, administration, advertising, and development fell only on badspot and he more or less let the community do its own thing. the time to make blockland explode was 10 years ago when it was already booming, but that was before steam greenlight or anything like that. Even when it did hit greenlight it was mostly passed by as the upstart indie game scene started to rise, and by then roblox and minecraft had already gotten a pretty cult following in the sandbox builder realm. blockland is by no means the only game of its genre, despite how unique it is to us.

nowadays the indie scene is even more saturated than it was when greenlight hit steam and it's even harder to make your one-man-team game shine unless you either have extraordinary exposure or your game is absolutely stunning and impressive. And frankly, a 2005 torque-engine game is not, not in 2012, and definitely not in 2022.

I think it just remained quiet until it hit a saturated market and wasn't the lucky one to get boosted and adopted by the masses.

[Master Matthew²]

I've been here, I've tried this.

But I eventually made the unfortunate realization that everyone else made.

This type of game is not popular in the modern market.

People prefer games with a centralized multiplayer system, with arbitrary rules and guidelines,
where the game can go offline at any minute. The idea of buying skins and proving how much
more money you have to random people on the internet is filling the void of not actually
being able to do anything of worth with that money in the real world.

People don't care for long-term games that have a self-sustainable setup for a
future that has to be cared for by them.

Most people just want the game to be there, and when it isn't they find some other game
that's exactly like it somewhere else.

TL;DR the mindset is very different because of a whole set of reasons. Games like GMod, Blockland, Halo CE (Original) or Unreal are
no longer attractive to the market.

[AlexK²]

-snip-

general masses lack the mental fortitude to play anything more complex than aim and shoot game

[Nigel The Protagonist]

you don't even have to host anything that complex, las weekend was literally carried by loving default freebuilds and they were enjoyable because people were just talking and hanging out. literally most people just want to be in a server where they can hang out and have fun.

general masses lack the mental fortitude to play anything more complex than aim and shoot game

i think another issue is that when people try to learn another server that's fairly complex like despair fever, people are just richards to them for not instantly knowing everything and they leave and never play that gamemode again. also handicaps like 19 completely spoil the fun in more complex gamemodes by being just completely braindead.

[Kelp]

19 is literally defcon forgetzone 0 and shouldn't be allowed into any server

[HULKHOGANWWFWORLDCHAMPION]

who is 19

[Tendon]

Hosting a server in this game is time-consuming and labor intensive.  And then once a server is hosted the guests are not exactly... nice, to the host.

[MunkeyCheez]

badspot didn't even post once within 2021

[Tezuni 2.0]

Badspot forgeted over Ephialtes for being better than him.
Badspot forgeted over maps for stuffty shaders nobody uses.
Badspot forgeted over the steam greenlight launch.
Badspot forgeted over the players of this game.

The writing was on the the wall a decade ago.
He denied it for years with his satirical "blockland is dying" compilation without realizing the irony was all on him.

The dumb forgeter killed a game that would have blown roblox out of the water years ago because he was too stupid, lazy, and narcissistic to adapt to the times and show an ounce of humility.
Literally could have retained the features beloved by the player base and even added microtransactions while making it F2P and had a massive success bigger than Minecraft.

The only reason to blame for the stagnation of blockland is the creator himself. 
The community tried to keep this game going at every opportunity but the creator fought it at every turn.

[Goth77]

general masses lack the mental fortitude to play anything more complex than aim and shoot game

legit. truer now than ever

[soldier101@]

The only reason to blame for the stagnation of blockland is the creator himself. 
The community tried to keep this game going at every opportunity but the creator fought it at every turn.

I couldnt agree more. Sad the way things ended up.

[MunkeyCheez]

Badspot forgeted over Ephialtes for being better than him.
Badspot forgeted over maps for stuffty shaders nobody uses.
Badspot forgeted over the steam greenlight launch.
Badspot forgeted over the players of this game.

The writing was on the the wall a decade ago.
He denied it for years with his satirical "blockland is dying" compilation without realizing the irony was all on him.

The dumb forgeter killed a game that would have blown roblox out of the water years ago because he was too stupid, lazy, and narcissistic to adapt to the times and show an ounce of humility.
Literally could have retained the features beloved by the player base and even added microtransactions while making it F2P and had a massive success bigger than Minecraft.

The only reason to blame for the stagnation of blockland is the creator himself. 
The community tried to keep this game going at every opportunity but the creator fought it at every turn.

based. man is too busy drawing research

[soldier101@]

based. man is too busy drawing research

almost forgot about that.

[Køtt]

Bit of a self-rant/self-vent but coming across this post by a discord friend, I can't help but feel guilty seeing this post and the rest of the people I genuinely miss only because I haven't contributed much in terms of content regardless of the current state of Blockland.

The best I could do was host gamemodes I personally enjoy, like Mafia Madness. Even then, I wasn't mentally cut for that because I had plenty of issues moderating anything myself. I really wanted to learn Torquescript and its engine to at least provide a lot of good and original content at about 2016-2018 despite how outdated it seems and I wanted to learn it ASAP, otherwise, it would have been too late. Problem is, again, it was outdated, but I had school, other bigger things to worry about than coding, I had Python to learn first as well, and I was just really forgetin' stupid honestly. Excuses which could have been cared to manage, which is probably why I feel guilty about it today. I really loved to learn how gamemodes like Crown's Prison Break and its maps (what was that add-on...variables, or something?) are programmed, and other cool games I played back then. Instead I spent more time in Drama and Off-Topic for god-knows-what than anywhere else; I only have myself to blame for that. Perhaps that's where the guilt hits.

Didn't really matter how the community was, didn't really matter how Badspot was acting at the time, I just had plenty of time to make some stuff while there's a form of community left. I have a lot of people to thank for trying to get me into the coding side of the game, but I guess it just wasn't meant to be, given everything back then. Now I just really look at posts like this and think about some good throwbacks, the could-have-beens, etc, and I even see some people I missed talking to and seeing here. Is it still too late now, even if the future looks bleak, I wonder?

Has anyone else genuinely felt this type of guilt some point? Even if Blockland were to skyrocket with players and community the next week or so, that guilt is still passive in me. At the end of the day though, I'm just coping, but I'm also just chilling. :/

I can probably offer my hand into going through TS for the community once more, even if it's as simple as hosting, though I don't want to promise anything. It seems like some people here are already suggesting ideas for what games to host here, but as for me, I haven't thought of anything yet; I just wonder if it's too late now.

On another note,

open source now (i will simply kill the hackers)

This idea seems strangely interesting to me.