blockland's been suffering from a negative feedback loop of there being no good servers so nobody's on and then people don't make good servers because nobody's on
the idea that i could be spending massive amounts of time on something only to have 10~ people playing on it is what made me stop for good
That negative feedback loop is because of the inherent issue of Blockland now.
Blockland now requires multiplayer to be fun. Everything about Blockland is built to lean against multiplayer.
Back in the Pre V21 days, with all the maps, builds and content available, even if you were on the game alone,
Blockland could be fun.
Blockland became dependent on Multiplayer at a time when it should've leaned a bit further into Singleplayer.
When a game's multiplayer is dead, the singleplayer is all that remains.
If the game's singleplayer is worthless, and the multiplayer is dead, the game dies.
Maybe instead of nuking everyone because they disagreed with his decision making process.
Badspot should've taken his own advice:
"Might does not make right."
When V21 was announced, the community was divided, and most people at the time agreed that while the shaders looked nice (in the trailer)
it wasn't worth alienating map developers and people who liked playing on maps.
What'd badspot do? Called them all whiny caveman who 'no liked change'.
But it was an
OBJECTIVELY BAD CHANGE.v21 traded a gameplay feature for an aesthetic feature, that's a
BAD TRADE.
The community was upset, and he decided to call them cave men, that's loving ignorant.
And every time ever since that update, whenever there's been an issue, his "fix" is to remove the
feature/make it unusable.
Keys, gone.
Forum registration, gone.
Maps propbably could've co-existed with shadows and shaders, but because he couldn't get it to
work they way he wanted, he decided to nuke maps.
also IIRC he claimed something about Steam GreenLight not accepting games that didn't have shaders,
which I'mma put a big X to doubt on that one, assuming I'm not mis-remembering this.
As I've said, the community can only do so much, but when the developer actively fought against keeping the game
alive, there's not much we can do.
The Steam Forums are basically worthless.
The BLF is inaccessible to most.
We lost RTB because we went to steam and Ephialtes presumed that meant
RTB was going to get replaced with the Workshop, as did most of us.
(Also behind the scenes stuff apparently happened between Ephialtes and Badspot.)
But basically (TL;DR), If Badspot really wanted to try to let Blockland float on it's own, He'd:
- Set up the Steam Forums to be a Mini BLF, sans the insane BS that happens here.
- Set up the Steam Workshop to allow COMMUNITY CONTENT FFS
- Make an official Before v21 launch option to select between Blockland and Blockland Legacy (PreV21 features like maps)
- Link Blockland's username system to Steam's.
- Advertise the game.
- Stop being so adversarial with the community.