The Blockheads. Amazing Potential, Sad Future

General Discussion
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#1

I wasn’t sure how to title this topic.

But it’s evident I need to say something about this game after observing on and off for a few years.

The Blockheads.

A 2D Block-based sandbox game, sharing small similarities and big differences compared to other voxel-based/2D/“blocky” games.

It has unique features unlike most other games.

  • Crafting that takes physical time.
  • Control of multiple Blockheads.
    • Queuing specific character tasks
    • Allowing for multitasking to an extreme level
    • Tasks will still continue EVEN IF YOU LEAVE THE GAME/SERVER.
  • Simple (and optionally specific) server searching
  • Easy server setups with IAPs (I will touch on previous funding with Time Crystals)
  • Built-in method of area protection (Ownership signs)
  • Not a mobile P2W game, and still fun
  • Extremely unique economy system via the trade portal
    • Economy is a global marketplace, where everyone can impact prices when buying and selling.
    • You can view prices like a stock market, right at the trade portal or on the website http://blockmarket.theblockheads.net
    • Although controversial, the discovery system is excellent.
  • Built-in way for new players to grow in a server via jobs at a trade portal
  • A customizable HTML welcome message for joining a server. What other game does such a thing?
  • Owner portal system for server management
  • Milla’s powers (as support to help with issues and fixing worlds)
  • Expandable inventory via baskets (and technically infinitely expandable)

All these things, are the basis and framework and guts of an amazing game. You have the familiarity of sandbox, to do what you want. You have the twist of global trade, with the ingame currency. You can use your premium currency of time crystals whether to speed up crafting, teleport, get rare items, and you can obtain time crystals without paying, via jobs, ads, free offers, meditation, and mining.

So see, there is great potential. But that’s not all I have to say.

Who the blame rests on cannot be the shoulders of a single person, group, or entity.

So I’ll elaborate.

This game has bad, bad issues.

Let’s start with the most prevalent.

Hacking.

If you play on online public servers, you’re bound to see a hacker or some script kiddie eventually. Their jailbroken device and patches, killing people in one hit, not being able to die, instantaneously teleporting, instantly breaking blocks, these all have the potential to be a massive threat to your experience.

Time crystal issues

Then we move on to the controversial issue of time crystals. Hacked or not.

There were old exploits, and some right before 1.7.

Most remember the issue with time crystals being able to be duped as an item.

This in turn led to loss of revenue for Dave.

And thus servers couldn’t run on time crystals anymore and instead by real life money.

But while that issue was with dupers and hackers, Dave has some blame to take as well.

As soon as word is caught of such exploits, there is an obligation for both Dave and the community to communicate. The community must notify, and Dave must fix it promptly.

I think it’s safe to say both didn’t happen.

Which leads to servers being switched over to being paid with real money.

Course, there was the possibility that servers would’ve switched over anyway, exploit or not.

And now that leads us to today.

Duping

Dupe glitches always need to be fixed fast.

Yet they’ve always appeared for the last few years.

This in turn has ruined the potential of the unique economic system reliant on the supply and demand of players.

Yet the blame cannot go with just one person or entity.

Both the community and Dave are to blame.

The community, on one hand, should have not destroyed the economy via duping.

Dave, on the other hand, should have fixed the glitches that were ruining a core mechanic of the game promptly. Just like with time crystals.

And that leads us to the continued issue of hackers (and generally rule-breakers) today.

Hacking and Duping Today

After seeing Dave’s intentions to focus on Sapiens and not fix this game, I’ll lay it out here now.

I’ve seen servers in and out, being bombarded by hackers.

I’ve seen MULTIPLE worlds where it was more respectable to be a hacker than not.

Getting cool items isn’t impressive, like a jetpack when duping just makes them worthless.

Everyone has super shops, servers have duped starter kits with pole gear, super shops, portal chests, and time crystal items.

All revered end-game items, are just as common as any other item.

The trade portal prices are incredibly out of wack due to duping.

And trade portal prices being like this aren’t new either. Before the introduction of platinum coins, top level items cost more gold coins than your inventory could hold. That’s more than two thousand gold coins.

It’s common to see a “duping setup” on almost every online public server.

Hackers are incredibly powerful. Milla may rollback worlds, and cloud ban hackers.

But if you are a server owner, hackers are impossible to stop.

You ban a hacker, they just come back.

You ip ban a hacker, they just get a VPN and come back.

Milla or someone else cloud bans the hacker, THEY COME BACK BECAUSE YOU CAN UNDO CLOUD BANS!

I see servers with secret “hit lists” to attack other servers, ruining them.

One server I play on has a staff team that’s partially made up of hackers, and anyone banned, the owner clears the blacklist every day. Yet it is somehow safer than most servers. That’s the backwards atmosphere.

In the end, I don’t care what it takes. I just want Dave to fix some things.

  • Patch duping
  • Stop hackers/script kiddies, even if any measure you put in doesn’t stop them forever. Get a proper anti-cheat.
  • Rework cloud bans (or even normal bans) or some way to seriously make it harder for a banned person to return for extreme offenses.

Even after all of this is fixed, the economy is in shambles.

But if these issues are sorted, this game may actually recover.

People will feel safe to make a new online public world.

Maybe, this has been all for nothing.

In the end, if you see this, thank you for reading.

And Dave, if you ever see this, thank you for your consideration.
Good luck on Sapiens!

-Andy

5 Likes
A better cloud-wide economy
#3

Well said!

#4

You make many good points and all of the things you suggested can be fixed easily except one code hacker (as I like to call them) convince people to put a code some where like the welcome message on a server blockheads does have a good anti cheat but code hacking is just convincing to put a code in a welcome message wich then In turn locks the server then they can tell the server console through code to admin them wich gives them a lot
Of power I don’t believe that’s a easy fix really the only fix for that would be to tell every single server owner on blockheads to not put in a code in the wm unless you know the code or it’s someone you trust a lot so as you make good points some can’t be fixed as easy as you would think.
-aj
Ps (Sorry if I messed up on any grammar and that sort of stuff)

#5

Certain people are able to remove the malicious text. Also, Blockheads doesn’t have an anti-cheat.

#6

Actual they do as I heard from Milla a server I was admin. On wanted a server rollback and asked me if I could see if I could do it so I emailed blockheads support Milla respond with we haven’t had a hacker problem for awhile
Believe it or not our security isn’t bad enforcing that there is some kind of anti hack or anti cheat whatever you call it code hacking is just a result of a admin putting something in the welcome message when they shouldn’t have
-aj

#7

I feel a few of these “problems” in regards to things like Dave’s response time is because his actual job is raising and providing for his family (I’ve never seen mention of another occupation, so this is my guess), whereas both The Blockheads and Sapiens are like side hobbies that just happen to make money. Not to mention, he’s also one person, and no human is an omnipotent inexhaustible content creator, he’s subject to ailments, obligations, exhaustion and burnout like everyone else.

I think the delay also shows just how much he cares about the community built up around his games. Instead of quickly releasing a badly-coded patch that likely would have made issues worse, he took his time and even gave advance warnings for some of the changes so people could hunker down and get ready before they took effect (à la many months of warning before credit change).

2 Likes
#8

Thanks for your incredibly well-written post. Dave is busy developing a new PC game. This is his focus at this time.

#9

Im sorry for being nosy. Whats it called?

#10

Sapiens. :slight_smile: Should be fun

1 Like
#11

That’s not nosy. I should have linked to it. Thanks Porky. Love the new avatar…

2 Likes
#12

I understand he has a lot of things to take care of, and that he is only one person working on two massive games by himself. I am not trying to be rude to Dave in any way, but I think it would be nice for Dave to be a bit more transparent with us about his view of what he plans to do with this game.

None of us are happy with all the current problems, and I think most of us would be a bit less irritated about them if Dave would tell us IF he ever plans on fixing them, and WHEN he plans on fixing them if he does. Even if his answer is “I’ll try working on some of these problems after the first couple bug fixes of Sapiens,” that is still 100% better than us all being left in the dark thinking nothing is ever going to happen. I don’t see how or why it would take him more than a couple minutes to tell us what he is wanting to do with this game. I know those two minutes would be appreciated very much by many people. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#13

Well I’m The Opposite Of Normal And Dabbing Is Great :rofl::upside_down_face:

1 Like
#14

It’s not that he’s not being transparent. You’re asking for information that does not exist. He doesn’t know. I don’t know, as a result. We are meeting next week to go over things. that may result in new information. No promises.

1 Like
#15

Could the game get shut down when sapient is popular?

please no

1 Like
#16

I feel like you should make a new topic for that

#17

This is terribly long so here’s a spoiler:

My Response

As I was told by a hacker a while back, the one way to stop them is to make the game server based and not client based, basically: all online. Hackers basically take advantage of the game itself for themselves, and not the servers, which is how they’re able to do all that they can do.

This was an issue since 1.5. We all knew about it. And it was informed to the public that it was bad slower than it was happening all the way through the end of 1.6. Dave definitely knew about it, and he tried to stop it. He ultimately did, I guess, since there was no other easy way to stop it.

Let me tell you something my cousin said to me when I saw him duping when he played:

“I don’t care”

And I imagine he isn’t the only one that has or has had that mentality towards duping.

As far as fixing them goes, he tries. During Beta testing, we all try. Online, offline, everything. And we miss it (obviously)(sadly). Often times it’s not a big enough of a deal to push another update just to fix a bug. He’s a one man army, it’s different for other games because it’s usually many people working on it.

It’s been like that since I can remember.

Refer to earlier, making the game server based and not client based: that would require him to remake the whole game. Basically, the Blockheads 2. In my opinion, not worth the time or effort.

It might a bit, but this era of games is kind of going out of style, as far as I’ve seen. Most games I played like this in middle school have died off, with the exception of Minecraft.

2 Likes
#18

Minecraft is growing while games like The Blockheads have since been put on the back burner. A lot of these Minecraft inspired games are indie games, meaning updates are extremely infrequent.

Some examples:

The Blockheads is still doing okay, but again, it has since been put on the back burner by Dave. It’s a client based game.

Survivalcraft and Survivalcraft 2 are completely neglected by their developer and only a small group of players still play the game. Communication between the dwindling community and the developer is non-existent. As far as I’m concerned, both games are client based.

Deepworld is also completely neglected by its developer and only about thirty people play the game each day. That number is still dwindling. The developer of deepworld recently announced that he could no longer pay for the servers that the game ran on and that the game would be shut down by the end of August. Script kiddies and scammers had been driving the player base away for years and although the game had an anti-cheat that detected if your device was jailbroken, it didn’t always work. I’m pretty sure Deepworld is a server based game.

There are probably many other Minecraft inspired games that I missed, but all (or most) of them will be taken off the App Store due to neglect and/or old age in the following years. Also, as you said, sandbox games (excluding Minecraft and maybe Hytale if it ever releases) are going out of style. It’s inevitable.

#19

I don’t know many details about how this game is structured, but from my understanding, there are data files that players modify when cheating. Maybe a solution could be for the server to validate the client data. A player would change data in the files, and the server could detect if something did not look right, and prevent the players from joining. If this could work, it would at least make it more difficult for players to cheat.

2 Likes
#20

;( Where is Kaalus? No updates in so long…

#21

How Sapiens does has nothing to do with it, really. The Blockheads will run as long as its viable. It may be that the game remains available long after the hosting platform does. There’s no way to know how and when any of this might change.