The Fall of Blocksworld

## Blocksworld

What was once a creative, bustling game 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, a version 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 Labs, a development group 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 were 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.

### Mature content

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 updating 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.

### Loss of Rights to MLP & Transformers

Before 2017, My Little Pony and Transformer 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.

### Financial issues

Another significant factor to the server shutdown was lack of funds from the app itself. As more players lefts and some became inactive with lack of updates, money from players purchasing coins and advertising revenue eventually decreased enough one could speculate that Linden pulled the plug on the servers because of this. It is also known that Linden has legal quarrels over the owner(s) of the once-popular worlds.com website for copyright-infringement over Second Life, Linden’s biggest source of income which one cause on to speculate this would be another reason to cease the funding of Blocksworld and it’s servers. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p9LWzr-\_ibI

## The end of Blocksworld

To try and turn Blocksworld around, Linden Labs started releasing silly updates that nobody liked. These included:

### Pay-to-Play worlds

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% stopped 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 is 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 under service. However, Blocksworld has been shut down for good. What was once a vibrant, funny, 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.