Brickadia - 3 Months later

zombie_striker

Hello everyone!

I'm making this post now that it is close to the 3 month mark for Brickadia's release. I wanted to know how the game is after the release hype has died down.

I personally only had joined a few times. While it was still active on server, (more than alpha), I couldn't really find much active discussions. Did the hate-mongers get bored, or are even regular player's kinda waiting till the next drop?

DingoAnanas

zombie_striker I am personally a bit decieved by some points.

First of it being the devs, despite their promise to not ban people for external content they post, got banned. It was a big drama and of course, andother broken promise.

Then come our own ban from discord, we managed to be able to ask the devs (via another person, what do you think lol), just to tell us they refused to unban us because of previous "discord violations" . So yeah, regarding the behaviour the devs promised to change, well, we know how it is and that we cant forgive them at all.

Now regarding the game itself, its nearly dead. It is full of glitches, driving is impossible in large maps, and the moment you start making soemthing interesting, you crash/lag every 20 seconds. The most populars servers are, well, not what i expected. I find less fun in joining servers after EA than before.

I am aware most players are waiting for the release of prefabs v2 to come back, and its very understandable. I have heard it might come with the steam sales in some days, so maybe?

They really need to fix the lag issues tho, otherwize people like @Brickitect and i will stop building at some point.

Considering they will never change their behaviour, the game COULD fail only because of the way they acts, the pedo affairs really drove a lot of people away.

Note: i started hosting back in A5, the constant lag and the lack of circle tool pissed me off a lot.

Also: The removal of the temp brick when you use others tool is also a VERY bad decision they took. @Rothary also complained a lot about this. They really need to do something with it. It look like the people who create the building system never do play their own game, isnt it?

Brickitect

The lagging/framedropping consistently every 5 goddamn seconds is making building just impossible. I am autistic as **** but even I hit the ledge of "I can't deal with this shit anymore".

zombie_striker

Didn't look at in-game players stats when I wrote this thread.

There are 18 players across 93 servers right now. Only 18.

zombie_striker

Thats less than a normal day pre 2023 alpha5.

DingoAnanas

zombie_striker Yeah, i suppose a very lack of content (contributors have access to map editor and we got 0 new maps in years), a bunch of dramas (pedo affair, bans for external content), that literally killed the game.

Note that i talked ingame with man people and they told me they hated the wires things. I can only agree with them. When you need to cover a whole vehicle with invisible bricks to make doors open, well, no thanks. a scripting language was supposed to happen but ye, devs being what they are, you got it.

Lot of people also dont understand how to use wires, and they give up. Lets say the tutorial doesnt give them any help to use one of the game main fuction. Its well buit, ok, that is mostly it.

Lets hope the fall steam sales will bring new people, but also prefabs v2. mmh.

zombie_striker

Hows the game been @DingoAnanas ? What about this site? We kinda sleeping till the next update?

DingoAnanas

zombie_striker Well, things got a bit complicated. Some weeks ago i joined a server, then people asked me stuff about our bans, then out of context [someone] snitched and reported me to the devs, then theses idiots banned me a 2nd time, for 24 hours.

I have decided to leave the game for good, so did i. I came back some days ago after i got contacted by people who donated considerable amount of money for me to come back. So i did. I still build but only in a5 for now, because building doesnt suck and there is also circle tool. (imagine removing circle tool, what a retarded move).

ea latest prefabs update also broke brickadia city for good, because the prefabs do a complete 3D render of the object in the bottom bar. But then it also full render brickadia city in 3D. it so double the vram. Some people reported the city now using 30gb of ram to render and load. The devs are really, really idiots. Whatever. Zebrelotesaid the map should be a world and not a prefab, but in order to convert it to a world, i first have to convert it, so loading a prefab, and it crash. I got feeeeedddd up by such incompetent team (ndlr => splitgate 2).

This game is empty, nobody plays it, it has no content, no modding, awful dictators moderation team. Yeah, its hard to stay here. I considered closing the website i put so much love doing, but i wont do this pleasure to devs. I wait nothing from the game now, this game will eventually get more people in time, but the vibe is gone and nothing will bring it back.

I did somethign that i never do, i started playing others games, and i have fun, so whatever happens, i wont spend much more time playing and building as i did before.

This team has an habit to kill everything that could make the game to win, so much potential wasted, its impressive.

I also wanted this forum to be like a second RTB, with people posting mods, saves, and cool stuff, because discord suck (also the discord is an extention of their dictatorship management, banning everyone they dont like), and i was hyped when you talked about badges and omegga things here. But yes, all of this died.

For the devs to make the "next update" they will first need to fix all the shit they created in the actual game lol, i doubt this will happen soon…

zombie_striker

DingoAnanas
I hate the fact that I was basically right in my previous post, regarding the doomed spiral they are on. They are both hitching the entire success of the game on the community to make stuff for the game In spite of the dev team, while also making it as hard, tedious, and fragile to do so. Their own decisions are ruining the chances this game had for plausible success.

I really do not seem a future for this game as we speak. The rot that started this problem is now evident in so many other aspects of the game, I highly doubt there is any way to actually save it without excising the team. As much as it would be easy to blame their ego, they can still make working games that are fine with an ego like that.

Legit, if I had the money/capital to hire a bunch of Godot/UE devs that would be willing to straight up copy blockland on a better engine (no cars-as-bricks shit, no re-writing of the scripting gui, no complex physics shit or microbricks) and make it simply a moddable-engine that just works, that's open (either as open source, or atleast make the modding/scripting language open source) this would be such a profitable thing. If you could just be competent about making your product, have decent PR skills, and be as flexible and open as you can regarding the product, this should be soo easy to do right.

DingoAnanas

Lol i dont Imagine theses funnies opening the game at all. After all, they said to ppl doing mods they were not allowed to spreading them outside personal copies. It send a very bad signal

zombie_striker

@DingoAnanas
Before I go and start a new thread, is there anyone on this forum that has done modding for Blockland? If not, do you have the discords of old members, or maybe even old forum posts talking about the backend for Blockland? I'm curious what tools and systems were needed back then to make mods, if there is anything to learn from when doing my own thing, or anything like that.

DingoAnanas

zombie_striker I guess you could ask Some TBD (the brighter dark) or queuenard. There is also the BBC blockland content creator discord, or maybe TBD discord, a lot of people who coded for bl are on it, and they really do good things

Queuenard

zombie_striker

DingoAnanas

The Blockland forum still contains tons of examples for scripts. Searching is hard but maybe I can solve this if I get a public database up. Modeling isn’t my thing and isn’t exactly a written process like code so it’s hard for me to think of an analogue. The Discord communities are not run by competent people so the information there is going to be trapped there and eventually lost. The Blockland Fan Forums is open for business as long as you have a Steam account with Blockland purchased and of course freely accessible to guests unlike the other incompetent communities: https://forum.bcs.place/index.php

DingoAnanas

1-9. They failed to appeal to the category with the largest influence: modders. There is no game without us. I have literally deployed small fixes to scale Blockland up and that's still with the barrier of needing to reverse engineer. Brickadia can't even exceed 25 players. When they did have 20-25 players, the connection was shitting the bed at over 100 megabits per second.

10-17. It was obvious the game was going nowhere (with modding in particular) because a mature and driven developer would have been implementing small additions in the developing mod system in small time increments. Suddenly talking about adding mods after doing near nothing for 8 years is not going to change minds except for the least educated Brickadia fans.

Say what you want about the developers not understanding the community and not even playing, but maybe they're just trying to imitate Blockland's developers?

1-2. The maps problem (not to be confused with Brickadia's MAP problem) is easily avoided by actually having player-added content. Once again, the lack of mods or any vision at all is the culprit.

2. I disagree about the "difficult to mod" part because player objects, client objects and bricks are certainly in an object-oriented structure. You don’t have the total object-orientation and hierarchy of Torque but you can start creating a partial script-exposed hierarchy. If you're starting a modding system from scratch, you take baby steps. Unfortunately, once again, these people are simply not capable of thinking about the future or just don't care. They only live in the present and consoom or want you to consoom.

They also want the benefits of 3rd parties contributing mods and content for free but understand nothing about the symbiotic relationship (even if barely maintained) that Blockland has: modders work for free and the game’s developers listen to the modders and contribute features they need and don’t interfere.

3. Using Discord as project/produce management is a predictor of being asocial and having repulsive personality traits, so this is no surprise.

4. This forum is probably going to be the sole proof this game existed (besides the Steam Community)

zombie_striker

1. Again, not happening, their personalities do not facilitate long-term and forward thinking. Brickadia will be a dead-end product just like it was a year ago.

2-6. Function exports are very easy to write. They would have done it already if they cared.

csotinger

Do you guys believe that the game can become popular eventually, or just have at least a few thousand of constant players?

If yes, how would you achieve that?

DingoAnanas

csotinger That an answer that would requier complete overhaul of the whole shit that happened with the devs.

To resume: What i am going to say is simple, if the devs follow what is written in this message, the game will live, but you can trust me when i say they have a too large ego to even consider them being in the wrong.

Lets see how the game is currently: (I cite Rothary for this point)

so even at this stage the game still has nothing to do for the average player who doesnt give a **** about actually creating something themselves
like yeah the gallery exists which is an improvement over blockland, cos u can actually play or toy around with sht ppl have made, its all there accessible to users thru the gallery
but that still doesnt help when theres nothing for you to really do with any of the prefabs
and none of the worlds inthe world gallery are actual real gamemodes
cos again, no gameplay gates or sht thatd allow them to actually be something like that
so the game has the same exact issue as blockland did with gallery being a kind of bandaid solution that fails to address it due to core features still missing in the game
the issue being that theres nothing for you to do in the game (unless ur into creating things)
so like ok cool sandbox game u got there but i (as in the average player) dont really care about putting in the time and effort required to actually create something, i just wanna play all the cool gamemodes others have made like everyone does on roblox
but those gamemodes do not exist because they cannot be created in the game due to missing features
and now the game is already out and this is the state in which it released, this is what all the hype was spent on
theyll never get the hype back
game may slowly improve into what it actually should be over time
but people already moved on
the potential was lost
game released too early, but also too late
too little too late
too slow development resulting in too much missing when the game finally did release

Note: The dramas relating to the devs/mods being selfish/not able to understand the community/never visit people ingame/abusive relating to the bans-kicks of people (roth and i were never allowed to come back on discord, and i am still banned from steam), and the pedo affair drove a lot of people away.

What the devs should be to fix the game:

The vehicles system is here, so they should use it. Considering we dont have proper bricks made maps (the larges ones we have like brickitect city or my brickadia city dont work well under the latest version), the devs should use their so called "contributors" so make MAPS. I know about the existence of a summer peak with grass (it was nice) but six considered it wasnt good enough and we since never got any map anymore. Of course we have 30000 guns and other useless shit related to cosmetics nobody need or want. I mean its cool yeah ok but it wont keep people in the game. Maps defo would, i dont know why they didnt make any. If they are not capable of doing some, maybe buy them from the unreal engine store? i dont know. But map could at least add good content to the game. People would be happy to build on differents map. Imagine, 8 years of dev, 2 maps, thats 0 effort, a joke.
Of course, modding. But unreal engine is known to be a difficult system to mod, so i dont think people will even see proper modding, or at least not in a close future. The devs did show their inability to code this anyway, and considering their previous failures (splitgate 2) i dont see this doable. Devs stated people could mod, but it was forbidden (???) to show it or release things. What a nice idea.
The lack of communitcation. Its simple, the devs/mod dont exist. Where are they? i dont know but not with the community. You can not talk with them about issues, they dont want their decisions to be talked, they usually block you for that, and when they got a bad day, they ban you. They should hire community managers that are neutral and out of any dramas. Which is currently not the case. One of the actual community manager did a trantrum when someone asked them to make more generic items/guns. Maturity issues.
They did ZERO advertisment, nobody know about the game, the steam events that happened recently did bring them some players but thats all. Did you know this little dead forum is the only existing plateform where you can talk about the game? Such conversation is not allowed on the discord, this exact message i write would be blocked and ill be banned (its ok am already banned). So this website get all the attention from exterior, and if someone wants to know more about the game or its content without wanting to join the discord (phone verification? **** you), all they see is no content and dramas. Its a nice first approach, eh?
Their inability to fix existing glitches (but to create new ones, heh). We reported lot of new ideas/glitches to be implemented/fixed but as usual, we got no answers, or when we got some, they didnt even understand the meaning of our words and answered outside the context. We since stopped reporting them stuff, why anyway?

Note: Now imagine paying 30$ for a game with 0 content, with no mods, maps. I also offered the devs to co work with me on this forum to make the game more known, their answer was to ban all mentions of it in the discord. I personally have no trust in them, and i dont think they really care about their own game anymore. But its only my opinion.

I dont know if this answer will suffice, maybe more people will have more ideas.

zombie_striker

csotinger

A way for the devs to fix it? No, not really.

Unironically, the best way to fix it is to divorce the devs from the community, and make the community be the ones in charge of the game.

Start by having us set up EOL servers/networking, such that we could build our servers without fear of the devs having any retaliation against us.
Either using the decompiler/custom modding editing, make a modded server architecture that can detect specific inputs (player locations, interactions, projectile hit locations, chat inputs, player rotation and aiming) and easy scripting systems (almost like omegga) so that we can start making our own things. Omegga might be enough, but for complex object grabbing and cache'ing, it wont be good unless you create a global plugin other plugins can reference for this data.
Have either the community or some other organization fund creators who make cool things for the community. Either make it a "membership only", where all membership funds go to supporting creators that make cool things, or utilize Youtube to make sure ad-revenue goes to creators that help with this content.
Advertise the membership and EOL system, so you can more people coming DIRECTLY to this, and avoid the developers and their wackyness. New members that pay Devs to join *(so devs remain quiet and content) while we get a private space unmoderated by them.
Do regular elections for admin/mod positions, or make sure there are no forever-bad-moderators allowed through some sort of filtering.
Decenteralize the system, and make it voluntary. No one shall have more power over another individual as others do to them, so either let different people do their own thing, or only combat/censor/deplatform people who are combative to others. The system should still work fine even if all blocklanders die off and are replaced with newbies.

The Aidakcirb server (which is the omegga people doing modding stuff for brickadia) is kinda quiet, but they're prob still doing some stuff. I will ask there if theres any platforms currently I can work off of for EOL or actual server detection. Other than that, unless someone wants to set this up and do the work in spite of the devs, this game is basically dead at this point.

Totodile

zombie_striker Do point 3 implies micro transactions despite we paid 30 fucking bucks for this empty shell?

zombie_striker

Totodile Kind of, thats is what would be REQUIRED at THIS POINT to bring back old heads, and to keep them here to make content to revive the community. Most of us are no longer teens playing Blockland and making stuff for free. We have jobs and lives now, so in order to dedicate the knowledge and time needed to rebuild that kind of playerbase, you would need some monetary incentive. It won't need to be a lot (The base game consumed a big chunk), but any little incentive to try and keep old heads would have built up. Having just a few people who know how to build/script make stuff would snowball, as having more things faster makes more people join, which means more paying members, which means higher rates of return for devs, which means more incentives for devs to keep creating.

No, not microtransactions. Shitty Microtransactions gate-keep and ruin the product by making sure less people have their hands on it. The subscription would be more to support creators, receive updates or custom modifications from devs, and instead try to be a way to incentives producing things in order to make the subscription worth it. The closest parallel would be "You're not buying horse armor, you're donating to the undertale kickstarter". You're sending money so developers can be paid fairly for their work, not simply so you can buy a product.

Queuenard
I also agree. Without any existing modders (see above) the game is dead under their hands, and they won't let us mod it. I proposed a hypothetical, but even I - probably one of the few dumb ones with a large enough ego to attempt it - know I really shouldn't take on this project cause the devs would make it so hard for me to get anything done.

It is dead in the water, yes. AND, the fix in my mind seems simple, but we don't have the people/resources/situation to do it. So, for all this is to say - Its fucked, I spent 30 bucks to play for 96 Hours so far (or like 0.30 cents an hour). Considering I have half that rate for Cyberpunk and Fallout New Vegas (like 300 hours each), its not even being buggy or lacking content that fucked over that price. It really is just lack of modding, so its dead.

DingoAnanas

For now the main issue i have is the lack of garbage collector, or inefficient one. Memory leaks (the micro shutters everyone has) means a lack of coding skills from the devs. Should have used unity. Less bricks but more modding abilities at least.