Author Topic: blockland: the community that killed the game  (Read 57526 times)

The final episode of Badspot's mailbag in which he has to answer for his actions (and inaction) toward his community and how it's had such a negative effect on them, his game, and people's perception of him if he ever wants to make or be involved in the development of any more games going forward
badspot is a destroyed loving bum he crashed and burned into drawing research for a living, cast into obscurity by his own incompetence. he will never use his extraordinary gamedev talents for anything profitable or worthwhile ever again and this entire ordeal was a massive squandering of potential millions

badspot is a destroyed loving bum he crashed and burned into drawing research for a living, cast into obscurity by his own incompetence. he will never use his extraordinary gamedev talents for anything profitable or worthwhile ever again and this entire ordeal was a massive squandering of potential millions
and yet here you are

his extraordinary gamedev talents
I think that's a bit generous personally. blockland is not that novel of a game, and the parts of it that actually are interesting were somebody else's idea (e.g. octree stuff from kompressor, VCE from zack0wack0, even events themselves I believe were first made by Space Guy?, speedkarting by Filipe, terrain bricks by GSF Ghost (and also a couple of other people but his were the ones that got adopted), the list goes on and on)
I don't think he's very good at the single act of deciding what should be in the game either. I am still a firm believer in the shaders update (which btw was kompressor again) being the thing that brought the game to where it is now. maybe keeping maps around wouldn't have ensured the game would always stay as lively as it ever was, but I definitely think it would've slowed the decline considerably
he is a normal every day guy. not a visionary

oh, that's me probably. I broke the forums by accident back when badspot first disabled hidden people and he was never able to figure out how to disable it for me
I'm also stuck hidden :(

Well, since we're trauma dumping now lmfao...

This game and its community has always felt like this weird collective enigma to me. Large enough to actually be a substantially diverse community, but also small enough where everyone more or less knows everyone and all their dirt over the years...and now its just one big messy pot of bittersweet? nostalgia. This game and multiple people within it have had profoundly negative and positive effects on my childhood and upbringing. To briefly preface- losing my parents a couple years ago was that traumatic event that happens in your life where your brain chemistry gets kinda altered and you look at life and just see things differently... so not only had I never dealt with personal loss before, it was both of my parents within the same year. So as a fresh 21 year old, this was the point where I'm(and still to this day) having periods of internal reflection and just re-brown townyzing my childhood and the interactions I had with my family.
My first research link was from some dude that was on BAC's Town server in 2010. I was 10 years old just making a house after school. I can trace all the issues this game has given me back to that one loving link lol. Also, I forgot the name(s), but do you guys remember the webchats people here would go on back in like 2010/2011? There is no reason me at that age should have been on those either. All the obscene and explicit conversations on those chats and these forums/in-game. Meatspin links on every other server which now that I think of it was probably my first ever consumption of gay media. It was just very confusing at the time and jumpstarted a lot of loveual exploration I definitely was not mentally or physically ready for, and neither was my family. My father tried so hard to keep me and my brother off these forums for years after he went through the forums and my posts as Jacky in like 2012. I had so many interventions and countless conversations about the weirdos and creeps on here and I would always be so frustrated and annoyed with how he would censor and monitor stuff growing up. But as a 23 year old with an adult perspective and trying to make peace with him now that he's gone, I can't really blame him especially looking back on the degeneracy here.

I've loved legos and building things since I knew how to walk. I have 10k+ hours on this game. I will always love Blockland, but you mfs did some damage ngl lol

i was about ~8 years old when i found out about blockland and it was 2 years later in 2013 when i bought myself a key and ended up joining the forums some months later. i think i found out about the game in some old youtube video or advertisement or something; i was very into lego-type games at the time, having been regularly playing roblox and minecraft and also screwing with a bit of lego stuff irl (anyone else have a mindstorms set? that stuff was cool). i know that many people pinpoint the death of the game on v21's removal of interiors and terrains, but as someone that started regularly playing the game after said update (i was aware of maps since i played the demo back when the game was on v19 or whatever), i found the community to be highly active for several years after with many cool servers to play around in and stuff to do in general.

in my personal opinion v21 is not what killed blockland, it's a combination of both this game having a relatively tight-knit community that aged out over time as well as the issues with this game's community that people in this thread have already elaborated on, specifically on these forums. being very young throughout my time here i was very naive and didnt really have a good sense of how to behave on internet communities, and many of my earlier posts were reflective of this. i can also remember a good amount of people here giving me stuff back then because of that (shoutout to me winning the "village idiot 2013" award in literally my first year of existing here). i remember being genuinely afraid of being the subject of drama threads and getting banned from servers and the like, and it was always a punch in the gut whenever people here would be less than nice to me. i do definitely subscribe to the point that this was an internet lego game intended for children and that the failure to moderate it as such was detrimental in the long run.

at the same time however, there were many positive experiences that i had with this game and many members of its community. not only did i enjoy the game itself, i met a lot of genuine people that were always willing to be helpful or just give me a good laugh. there are still a good amount of people here that i regularly interact with and i really do think the smaller size of the game's community was a benefit in this regard; you're not going to get these kinds of interactions on the roblox forums (rip) or whatever. so while i have had plenty of negative interactions with this game's community, i still look back fondly on the whole thing. i feel like this place was a learning experience for me that introduced me to both the light and dark aspects of the internet and it is experience that has helped me in many scenarios to this day.
« Last Edit: January 14, 2023, 08:53:38 AM by Mr Queeba »

reading through this thread and realizing how insane it is that i inadvertently sidestepped this forum's entire trauma potential by simply being a dumb handicap online and never taking anything on here seriously as a kid. truly the ideal way to experience the internet is by occupying it as an amorphous blob of impenetrable stupid.

on the subject of the game dying though i suspect it was mostly due to its old school release model (low priority on post-release content updates) and barebones mod integration, which there's nothing wrong with but it filters out the people who have become accustomed to live service/steam workshop paradigms. online games inevitably all die, imo it's kind of refreshing to see a game as old as blockland finally burn out in a mostly uncompromised state rather than dying after drastically metamorphosing and adapting to more modern trends (see TF2, and Fortnite eventually). people lament the wasted potential of blockland and how it could have been a serious roblox competitor, but the only way roblox was able to achieve such success was by becoming a shell of its former self. the game you love from all those years ago will either cease to exist through a standard death or through being perpetually modified until all the elements which drew you in are retooled beyond recognition or discarded outright to increase market viability. you can't have your cake and eat it too etc etc

I got permabanned on my first account, Anti-Block, because I dared to make the point that a large reason why blockland was a toxic cesspool was that Badspot constantly had high-publicity feuds with 15 year olds. He changed his avatar to judge dredd because he was "delivering judgement". Make no mistake, his refusal to hire moderation was far more of a vanity project than laziness. We all worshipped him for this cus nine times out of ten, the people he was banning were being richards, but now that it's been years and we see how many creeps were allowed to exist here, its pathetic.

Didn't Bisjac host "Mika's ass" as a website? Pretty sure homegirl was like 15 when she took that photo, just some child research inside joke that got posted around here. disgusting.

Didn't Bisjac host "Mika's ass" as a website? Pretty sure homegirl was like 15 when she took that photo, just some child research inside joke that got posted around here. disgusting.

oh my god 2009-2012 drama board was insanity

reading through this thread and realizing how insane it is that i inadvertently sidestepped this forum's entire trauma potential by simply being a dumb handicap online and never taking anything on here seriously as a kid. truly the ideal way to experience the internet is by occupying it as an amorphous blob of impenetrable stupid.
As someone who registered here as a naive 11 year old who just wanted to play an online lego game, i can attest to this

I'm not even sure how anyone put up with me for how much of a dumb kid i was back then, i'm lucky that i was somehow able to stay out of bad groups and find a bunch of good friends here

people lament the wasted potential of blockland and how it could have been a serious roblox competitor, but the only way roblox was able to achieve such success was by becoming a shell of its former self. the game you love from all those years ago will either cease to exist through a standard death or through being perpetually modified until all the elements which drew you in are retooled beyond recognition or discarded outright to increase market viability. you can't have your cake and eat it too etc etc
there's probably a middle ground between 0 moderation and the game being ruined from attempts to maximize profits

I'm not even sure how anyone put up with me for how much of a dumb kid i was back then, i'm lucky that i was somehow able to stay out of bad groups and find a bunch of good friends here
same, pretty much the worst thing that happened was i lost my key and i wasted a bunch of time being one of the three libs on here

I have never posted on Something Awful, but I did post on a forum called Blockland Forum, and that is my inspiration for the KiwiFarms. This is my official statement: The KiwiFarms is DIRECTLY INSPIRED by Blockland Forums, owned and operated by Eric Hartman. Badspot is his nickname. ERIC HARTMAN is my PERSONAL HERO. Everything that I do, I do to respect the memory that I hold so fondly in my heart for ERIC. HARTMAN. AKA Badspot, the founder of Blockland and the operator of the Blockland Forums. Everything I have ever done has been done to impress ERIC HARTMAN, of BLOCKLAND FORUMS, Also known as Badspot. ERIC. HARTMAN.

idk how I missed this. I hope I'm misinterpreting this and you're not saying it's ok these things happened because otherwise the game would be dead.... ?

yeah the game is most notable for it's horrors but that's not a good thing

pls clarify lol

oh no i dont think its good lmao i should have said so originally

i just keep this is mind whenever i visit cause i like to watch it all burn while i play my lute

Found this game back in around 2010 and only because I saw an ad on youtube about it while I was watching roblox music videos. Didn't really get on the forums for a year a two after I played the game, but hoo boy yeah honestly everyone's right, how did we let what happened here go on? I would bring up my memories to friends that didn't know about the forums as quirky stories and they would always go "that doesn't sound good, you guys just accepted it?" and i've been thinking about that for a while now. I wasn't the most active member around but from my point of view whenever someone was being tribal or loveist, they kinda just got away with it and we would just say "Yeah thats just how they are haha" while moving on. "Nigerian Cunts" and other slurs felt so common place here but fortunately I didn't say many of them (from what I can recall atleast)
Despite everything though I still hold my memories of blockland highly as I met my best friend of 12 years now and counting, and made a very good handful of friends that I still talk to on a daily or weekly basis and I will be ever grateful for that. I hope that everyone that wasn't a groomer or something equally vile is doing good now, genuinely. I never knew about anyone's background so reading through this thread really opened my eyes at the people behind the posts. It does feel funny that we were all similar in our real life situations at the time, as I was also a really lonely 11 or 12 year old when joining the forums. I do miss the good times where I used to see a lot of people interact on the forums and always wanting to talk to some of them but was too shy to say anything lol.
It would be really interesting to have a video essay about the forums and the good and the bad the community was involved in, i've always wanted that since the sharp decline in the player base and forumer activity. Thank you guys for the good times. I hope this thread gets to other people in the community to hear their insight on their experiences and opinions on the forums and the game itself.

been playing and mod making for this game semi-regularly for over a decade so i guess i have a few things to say in regards to this topic

Badspot created a fairly successful game in a time when there weren't a billion other lego or even building or even online indie games out there, and yet he went nowhere. Why? Because he is not a good or nice person, and that is why his community was known for being not good, for being not nice, and it's why this game died when it did and it's why over a decade later he has 600 followers on twitter. It's why he still mentions almost 20 years later that he "made a game once."
Everywhere you go on the internet you are going to find people being jackasses, that's just life, dude. We were all young once, and I'm sure plenty of us made some stupid posts that we regret. Nobody is perfect. The main problem the forum had back in the day were young teenagers starting flaming wars leading to other stupid drama, which if pressured enough could turn serious because things escalate. some people are just looking for the attention. The issue was and always has been forum moderation. When there was a decent sized moderation team, people were regularly getting banned because of their stupidity - sure maybe Badspot & the other moderators were a bit harsh at times, but in the end they were doing what they felt was right to address problem users...most of the time, anyways

There was never any attempt at hiring moderators or moderation in general outside of the rules which were judged VERY arbitrarily (as were permabans/unbans) and he made little to no effort at keeping out repeat abusers until it became clear that his the same toxicity that he festered in had projected onto his community and made it impossible to sell get into the game and then boom suddenly we get modera- NO wait that never happened, you just had to buy the game to post. I guess if it's the trolls or the gp at least youll know the trolls will keep paying.
plenty of people were permanently IP banned from the forums, this was back before you needed to own the game to have a forum account. The issue was that simply by using a VPN the offender could make a new account and be posting again within a matter of seconds, doing the same toxic stuff as before. To address this issue, Badspot made it so that each BLID is tied to their forum account - I really don't see how that is a bad thing...

He had people who were so passionate about this game churning out content, hell Ephialtes and then ran an entire dedicated server rental service and created an entire client to do what Badspot was too uninspired to do, and he managed to drive them away by being a gigantic starfish.
Wait, you think Badspot was the starfish in that situation? Ephi wasn't exactly a nice person himself....see an example here:
https://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=250264.msg7227840#msg7227840

A person who needed help on an issue cross-posted a topic about not being able to join servers. Ephi moved the topic to help, and then proceeds to ban said user because he expressed that he wasn't getting help in that particular forum section. Come to find out later the real issue was with RTB servers all along. I wonder if Ephi even felt a shred of remorse for banning someone over something so trivial, then discovering it was his own mod causing the problem in the first place? Somehow I doubt it.

Here is another example, where Ephi scolds a user that asks about embedding adfly links into their add-ons download links:
https://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=249288.msg7194731#msg7194731
At least user "Sevara" was bold enough to call him out on his hypocrisy.

I don't blame any of you for how this forum operated, but Badspot I do blame you for the traumatization of dozens of children.
Why is it Badspot's fault? If anything it's other user's fault - just look at your topic title it's called the COMMUNITY that killed the game, right?? The weirdos, the groomers, the sickos - those are the people that gave the game a bad reputation - and those are the kind of people that deserve to be banned

This forum is, and I don't mean this as a compliment, a monument to what could've been.
I can agree with that, although I feel it's better to look at the positives instead of the negatives - at least most of the weirdos went over to Brickadia

Despite everything though I still hold my memories of blockland highly as I met my best friend of 12 years now and counting, and made a very good handful of friends that I still talk to on a daily or weekly basis and I will be ever grateful for that. I hope that everyone that wasn't a groomer or something equally vile is doing good now, genuinely. I never knew about anyone's background so reading through this thread really opened my eyes at the people behind the posts. It does feel funny that we were all similar in our real life situations at the time, as I was also a really lonely 11 or 12 year old when joining the forums. I do miss the good times where I used to see a lot of people interact on the forums and always wanting to talk to some of them but was too shy to say anything lol.
It would be really interesting to have a video essay about the forums and the good and the bad the community was involved in, i've always wanted that since the sharp decline in the player base and forumer activity. Thank you guys for the good times. I hope this thread gets to other people in the community to hear their insight on their experiences and opinions on the forums and the game itself.
That was quite a wholesome post. I too have made some great friends from this game over the years.

Personally, this game has been nothing but a blessing for me. It's a fun way to express my creativity with my friends and family. I feel sad for the people who have had a bad experience here because of unfortunate events or the disgusting nature of toxic individuals. I wish nothing but the best for this game and hope someday the community can regrow into something better than it once was. I know I'm being highly optimistic, but I will continue to play with friends and create mods as long as possible. If baddy ever decides to shutdown the master server I hope he at least makes BL it free and open source / a way to host without needing authentication to master server as the final goodbye so that people who still want to enjoy the game online with friends can do so

« Last Edit: January 14, 2023, 09:31:23 PM by Goth77 »