The Fall of Blocksworld

The Fall of Blocksworld is a series of events that caused Blocksworld’s downfall.

Blocksworld
Blocksworld was once considered a creative, bustling game but has been reduced to a wasteland. Let’s look at what made Blocksworld spiral into darkness.

Overview
Blocksworld was a creative game available on iOS devices,and later in its life, on Steam. Players would use blocks, which they could buy with coins, a currency made by having people play your game or buy models that you built. By putting blocks together and coloring them, players would be able to make a fun game with an array of coding tools. Players could also purchase coins with real life currency and could also buy “Sets” that would contain special blocks you couldn’t get anywhere else.

In 2013, Blocksworld was purchased by Linden Lab, a development group from San Francisco, CA that has since primarily focused on their controversial video game Second Life.

Decline of Blocksworld
From 2013 until 2017-ish, Linden Labs continued to see Blocksworld grow not only as a game where you could build anything, but also as a social platform. Community Challenges would be released on weekly/monthly basis, which featured a contest to see who could build the best world based off of a theme, determined beforehand by the Linden Labs employees. The last of these kinds of contests were sadly held in 2017.

Blocksworld “Wars”
One of the things that started the decline of Blocksworld were the “Wars” that made-up governmental groups would declare on one another and would publish worlds depicting the other group getting beaten up with violence. Linden Labs did not actually enforce rules that declared these worlds as “bad.” Many people thought this ruined the PG theme of Blocksworld, and as it caused way too much unnecessary drama, many people stopped playing due to it.

Adult Stuff
Many players had made themselves infamous by uploading adult content to Blocksworld. Linden Labs didn‘t do anything about it for a long time, but eventually they banned players such as Joey Slikk.

Lack of Updates
After 2017-ish, Linden Labs stopped adding and updating new Sets and Challenges, which left the community in a state of limbo. The only updates were patches to keep the server running and small moderation make sure no innapropiate content was on the game.

Loss of Rights to MLP & Transformers
Before March 2nd, 2016, My Little Pony and Transformers sets were available to players. These included blocks to make Ponies and Transformers. This was a popular Blocksworld hobby, until the sets were removed from the shop as Linden lost the rights when they didn’t renew and pay Hasbro, the owner of MLP and Transformers, to keep using them. This led to multiple popular players leaving, as it was all they did.

The End of Blocksworld
To try and turn Blocksworld around, Linden Labs started releasing unnecessary updates that were poorly received by the community. These included:

PTP worlds (Pay-to-Play)
Linden added new software in December 2015 which included worlds achieving the “Elite” (2000 plays or more) status or higher to be permanently pay to play. This meant that players would have to pay 1 coin to play these kinds of worlds. This sparked outrage in the community and many players left. This was the first hard hit that Blocksworld took.

1 World Per Day Limit/ 3 Models Per Day Limit
To help combat poorly-made worlds, Linden released software that players could only make 1 world and 3 models a day, or pay 50 Coins to make 1 more piece of content. This sparked total outrage and chaos as many players used Blocksworld to communicate with their friends; now, they could only do so every 24 hours. Thus, people started resorting to making models, which had an unlimited limit- until Linden caught on, ruined it for everybody, and made a 3 model limit. After this, Blocksworld got super unpopular and Linden almost 100% stop developing it.

Firing of Leslie
Leslie was one of the main Linden employees, noted for being the nicest, in many players opinions. Linden had kept him around only to help keep Blocksworld from getting hacked or flocked with adult users, but as Blocksworld kept getting more and more unpopular, Linden had to lay off Leslie. This was a mistake, as he was the only person who could have fixed Blocksworld, which we’ll talk about in a bit.

Hackers
After Leslie left the Linden team, multiple players found ways to exploit into Blocksworld and upload their own pictures. This meant there was a possibility that adult content could be added to Blocksworld. Luckily, there wasn’t. After 2 months or so, Linden finally caught on and banned the exploiters.

Error 505/503
One day, a glitch happened. Players trying to log into the Steam version found themselves stuck at the loading screen with Error 503: Could not log in. This arguably killed the PC version. On handheld devices, publishing worlds stopped working for most people. Models would not go into your inventory, and coins altogether stopped working. When a world was sent to be published, players would get the Error 505 message. The ironic thing? Leslie was the only one who could have fixed it. Yet they had fired them due to Blocksworld‘s extreme unpopularity.

Shutdown of Blocksworld
Blocksworld was not worth much to Linden at that point. It was extremely unpopular, and while they probably looked at options that included fixing it, it wouldn’t be worth it, considering Blocksworld’s already poor reputation.

Server Shutdown
On June 17, 2020, Linden had silently shut down the Blocksworld servers. The app was soon removed from Steam and the App Store. Players get a message telling them that the Blocksworld Server is down for maintenance. However, Blocksworld has been shut down for good. What was once a vibrant, fun, creative game you could play with your friends, had been turned into this.

Linden Labs has now moved all development to Second Life, a life simulator game just like the Sims.

As of now, Blocksworld is offcially gone. However, a modified unofficial second server exists.