Downfall

Original:https://pastebin.com/pnDEvpm6

So lets get this straight. You're probably wondering what I am gonna talk about here right? Well its about that for a fact, blockman go now sucks.

But that doesn't hold any water right? I'm here to elaborate more on the topic. You see, BG (I'm gonna shorten Blockman Go to BG), was one of the best games out there at its peak. Everyday, when everyone had this wonderful experience of playing a variety of games (e.g bedwars, skyblock), there's so much fun out there with friends. Whats more surprising is that the quality of the game is very good for a Minecraft rip-off (For a stand-alone game perhaps meh).

This is the time when 2018-2019 Blockman Go is at it's best. Not much toxicity, not much spending, and overall, not much noise. The noise im referring to is issues, problems between bigger names inside the community and so on. Other media platforms mostly youtube, have bigger OG youtubers, who actually create diverse content for the community. It is also one of the factors how I game blows up and somehow dies, by media popualrity. If people keep watching videos on a particular game, obviously, that corresponding game will keep its community engaged and alive.

However in the gaming production, to not be left out from other games, developers try their best to make their game better and thats where updates come from. Developers provide new content for the players and community and thus, keeping players engaged. This is where BG took the wrong turn. Somewhere around 2019 (I don't remember the exact date, so don't quote me for that), BG decided to add a premium currency called Gcubes, which in return, replaced the purchasing power of Bcubes. IIRC, anyone who plays the game before gcubes update, can get bcubes by watching ads for free without paying that much of a buck. In all seriousness, I really thought that BG's move about gcubes for the first months they were added was good, but later on I found out that I was wrong. Youtube content started to take a shift. From actual funny moments to literal Gcubes abusing videos, in a course of few months. New youtubers especially those who have tons of spare cash would make "Gcube Abusing Videos" "Power of Unlimited Gcubes" you called those type of videos. That is one of they key factors for the downfall of BG, which not rooted from the content drought of the youtubers, but rooted from the addition of Gcubes.

What you see in media IRL happens real time. Just because you see it in a virtually abstract screen does not mean it does not happen at all, and you can fact check that. I might get a bit off-topic with it but I don't know how to describe it actually. Whatever you see in BG Youtube, will definitely and definitely impact your gameplay. Soon enough after these videos went to break a couple thousands, you would see people buying Gcubes then using it to their advantage. In my opinion, it destroys the challenge of the game, it destroys the mood instilled in all other PVP games where you learn how to be better than others by skill. It's not like you play a game to win by spending rather playing a game to win by actually winning using skill. This is a red flag for me as one who played alot of games before and got ultimately destroyed by thier own developers out of greed. Oh and runes? heck no. You know what is that about at its side of its story.

Later on around late 2020 comes the developers digging a deeper hole. They have added a season pass which everyone was wanting to get. Again, IIRC, it has some cosmestics which is actually acceptable for the bucks (Take a look at Battle Royale games, Most premium currency dont give an unfair advantage to the players, other than cosmetics that dont play a big role on the game, Im not saying this is true for all BR games tho), some runes, in game privileges and a pet. Then comes the large influx of players coming to the community in late 2020, and runes have been a thing. It's not uncommon for people to complain about runes. This is what happens when there is not a single balancing in the game whatsoever, a big gap between new people and people who played for a lot of time. Let alone skill difference between players with a unbalanced matchmaking system will make a game bad, and on top of that the months of old players grinding runes. This gap caused the toxicity between old and new players, not yet even considering the age of most of the players.

Now let me repeat, the toxicity. The toxicity of a community will grow overtime no matter what to the biggest of the issue to the smallest; and that is a thing that is true to any community. In BG's side, players saw this unbalanced, and unfair matchmaking system (Mostly referring to Bedwars matchmaking, and other smaller games that other people who main other games come to every now and then). Toxicity in any form is bad for a community and can be the reason for the downfall of it, and I can see BG is taking this path. Whether slurs, or any trashtalks in general that is meant to destroy someone's experience is toxic, and ruins the community itself, just give it time. I've personally have experienced this toxicity and you will never get a week without seeing some kids being toxic. But you might argue that the community is filled with kids, who dont know how to properly take responsibility with their actions, let me tell you this that, yes, thats true but still, toxic behavior is poorly if not, never monitored by moderators or someone in position. Never in my time playing BG I have actually seen someone gets actually punished for toxic behavior. Never.

Another thing that bothers me is the ego of the community. Everyone has the belief or atleast the essence of being better than others is always what you need and what you should do in BG. Everywhere you go even minding your own business would take you to someone saying "1v1 nub" "You're trash", and to sum it up, ego-driven hypocrites. You will encounter so much and will be filled with trashtalks from players you play with. Laughably, this becomes somewhat a breeding ground for ego, and toxicity in the community. From really any PVP games where toxicity can happen, it can transform to either harrassments, copypastas, rumors and gossips, all which prove nothing arguable from both sides but my point on an ego-driven community.

Now let's take a word for the issue with skyblock. Unlike most games offered by BG, skyblock (I know theres a lot more non PVP games but Skyblock is the most known game of the said type) is more leaned to survival, building, and socializing. This is where things get out of hand. When BG Skyblock got released, there is not much thing to do. But with the addition of gcubes like earlier, certainly destroyed it, yet again. Instead of actually sweating the grind to be the top players in skyblock (Island Points) you can just cash your way up to there. At this point, this made my assumption on what BG Developers are actually trying to get. Money. They are too greedy, such that they need to ruin a game which in the first place you actually needed to grind to become rich, not smear your own money to be that. Everything related to the game asking you to buy gcubes in any form (e.g. Season Pass, Events, Skin)  has something to do with the greed into monetary gain. Ruins the point of skyblock itself. One thing was enough which is cosmestics, for richer players who can afford to bang a buck for it, but significant advantages in game? red flag.

Cant help to put examples so an example on what I'm pointing is the gcube shop on skyblock. In the early days of skyblock, amethyst armor is the best armor set coupled with an amethyst sword. And the fact that you can only buy it from the Gcube shop and nowhere else is the icing on the cake for this example. You would have distinguished someone from normal people who dropped some money in game and some who didn't, which in return made the majority label skyblock as P2W (which is Pay-To-Win) and later on quit. (Those who didn't quit will face something worse than this). Whats worse? Scamming. and I cant believe that up to today, is still an issue excluding outside skyblock.

So scamming in skyblock is so common that every minute, there is probably someone who is getting scammed at peak hours, and probably more when skyblock was more reached out to players last year. Simple issue but no fix.
The problem is the lack of a proper trading system for players to use to transfer or trade items safetly. Without this, every single trade just to get something will be done by drop trades. Someone will drop the item first to the other player, then that said player will drop the other item back to him, depending on what they have negotiated. This is the only thing scammers took advantage of, manipulation of trust. Obviously when you drop first, you face the risk of losing that item, and is really common especially when you dont know that person. Same goes for the other side.
This made people mad, which ultimately made them quit skyblock for good, losing their items such as the Cross Slash (Costs 2599 Gcubes or something I dont remember exactly which is obviously pay to win that a casual player will never ever bother to buy.) or something significantly valuable to them. This causes some players that got scammed to beg in mining lobbies, and its annoying (The feeling of annoyance is subjective, but if you don't find them annoying, you're a different specie). So whats the soloution to this? Add a trade GUI. Not even an original opinion, but repetitively said throughout the skyblock community. I wonder how this wasn't implemented yet out of all updates at the time. And if some developer is still reading, the damage has been done and Skyblock will not be better as before even if this is added. Too late, too bad.

When it comes to economy games (I doubt BG skyblock is even an economy game at the first place), most likely skyblock, duplication glitches and bugs are unavoidable and this became a big thing that changed BG Skyblock forever. On around June last year, I witnessed a duplication glitch and it was a total mess, everyone was duping. I thought it would be fun right? I was wrong and within few days, Skyblock was ruined for me and other players, forever. There's not a single point of playing a game that you need to be rich when you can just duplicate. Everyone was rich because obviously, everyone duped. No one who played less than a week didnt have a cross slash. If you know economics, dumping alot of stuff to the economy will cause lots of items lose their value, and this is exactly what happened to people who bought cross slash legitly, they wasted 2599 Gcubes, which is roughly $52 worth of Gcubes, only to be thrown down the drain, because the item they have payed for lost it's value. SB community is really big, that consistent moderation is needed, and perfectly, BG has absolutely none. People kept duping, and nothing is gonna stop them. Other than the fix of course, but it was really useless infact, the damage has been done once again and players still have their dupe stash, full of Cross Slash. It would've been good if they actually removed the duplicates or the wiped the skyblock data for people who duped, but nothing. Not a single duped data was rolled back. Apparently we would never see a trading update ever, BG have earned more money to the point that making this small change is not beneficial for them anymore. How did it spread? Youtube.

So youtube. here we once again. Youtubers typically around 1k to 10k subscribers at that time, spread the glitch for viewers and casuals to abuse. This is how word came to admins and mods actually, some do monitor content that will be flowing into BGTube. Some smaller youtubers got lucky and made it their most popular video on their  channel, mostly or totally because of the thumbnail showing thousands of duped items, and players who have none click in thirst of getting those items. Ego again, in thirst of becoming richer than others. All is shown from youtube thumbnails. "Clickbait".

When it comes to clickbait, there's nothing that will beat BG Youtuber's content. (I will not mention names.) Bigger youtubers typically > 50,000 Subscribers do this often. They would put something like "FREE WINGS""FREE GCUBE" "USING HACKS" or some similar stuff, then just put some gameplay and then nothing else. Thats what you called clickbait. If your gonna call me overreacting a bit to clickbait, open your eyes and see the bigger picture of youtube channels built out of clickbait, without any real content. Thats why BG content tries and fails alot, so many repetitive clickbait videos that aren't even fooling anyone, except brainwashed kids who are eaten up by the system. Generalizing BGTubers like this is bad however, there are little to few youtubers who actually knows how to make real content, minus the clickbait and misleading titles. The spread of clickbait in the BG Youtube community is and always be dragging the quality out of most youtube videos with BG content. Moreover these clickbait "content" creators (clickbait is not content in any way)  doesnt seem to care about their fans, I've browsed through hundreds of comments of one youtuber who literally can't create proper content without clickbait, and you guessed it, nothing happens. Whats more dumb is that the viewers dont even care either, infact, it's not even suprising to get clickbaited on a BG video in 2021. Like I said about they don't care, all I could see is people begging for Gcubes in the comment section, begging for an add or something from the youtuber. That is what we get from absolutely zero participation and engagement from the youtubers and fans, you get people talking nonsense (Probably kids but idrc).
And on too of that, BG actually defends all content creators, whether they clickbait or not. Why? It is because of Gstar code. People become somewhat fans of these Bgtubers, clickbait or not, and when they tell their fans to use their Gstar code, people will be willing to topup using the corresponding Gstar code because they support this creator. This income is then normally like a normal topup, goes to the developers. A little trick for more monetary gain which not a lot of kids can comprehend. (This illusion works because of the +5% Gcubes that goes to the "content" creators)

Now let's tackle about performance. When it comes to performance, BG stutters at this point. You cant even run the game smoothly without any lags without a high quality phone. Don't tell me my phone is bad or whatever, my phone can run HD games such as PUBG, LOL, MC, CODM and so much more, but what does it take for a block game to lag? Its ridiculous how a block game beat an HD Game in terms of lag. A literal block game. Zero management whatsoever. Over the past years, this is untrue but with the introduction of lots of new quirky stuff, unnecessary particles and details? This is out of hand for a block game. Once again a block game. My phone have decent specs to run those said games but how much more with people who have a worse phone than mine? How much more will they lag than me? This issue about lag also made some people quit, and it is around 10 months already without a single fix. I will compact this another topic into this paragraph namely poor support. Poor support in the sense of; the developers does not care about the issues on their own game. Like in all seriousness, there is no reason to not fix the lag present in all games. Monthly updates evidently suggested they (developers) are avoiding  the need to fix their problems in their own game. It doesn't matter how many players experience a certain problem, if the developers don't benefit from fixing it, they wont do it out of sheer greed and lust for milking money from the playerbase. However I arranged this thread, however these words are put together, I expect nothing to change in BG at all.

Last things last I want to talk about is the abandoned games and copied games. BG abandoned so many games that you wouldn't be surprised if a friend tells you to play a game that you didnt know it exists, because it is too buried by the bigger games such as Bedwars, Eggwars, Build and Shoot, Skyblock and much more. There are many games that are abandoned and definitely discontinued, for me, it is because they wouldn't gain something from it or simply put, not beneficial; leading cause: income. They will not earn the same money from bigger games, well surely they earn some cash from it but they are nothing compared, or negligible to the amounts bigger games can give.

Blockman go itself is an obvious Minecraft ripoff from the naked eye. But when you dig deeper into the actual game, you will find countless copied games that BG didnt gave credit to. There is no originality from any single game in BG other than recoding it and changing the overall looks. From what I can tell, surely, BG will do give the same feel of the original game but you may ask to yourself, why play a rip-off game when you can play the original? Theres actually no point to play a rip-off game to actually just get the feels and experience, just play the original. Lets try to break down the games BG have copied to their respective creators.

     First and foremost, Minecraft is one of the games that BG mostly copied. Its blocky appearance and cartoonish looks of the logo already tells you something that it is a minecraft rip-off.
     Next up is Roblox. After some days or weeks of playing, you can notice striking similarities between BMGO and Roblox, from their Graphic User Interface, Style and Layouts. Roblox is not necessarily a stand-alone game but it is more of a gaming platform than the former. BG then takes this idea, making BG composed of sub-games like just like Roblox. I would say the least that Blockman Go is a knockoff of both previous games, namely Minecraft and Roblox; Minecraft for the gameplay and mood, Roblox for the gaming style.
     BG's biggest hit, Bedwars, is one of the most popular games in BG is an ultimate rip-off of Minecraft's Bedwars. Whether its from Hypixel or any Minecraft server, it is still what it is, a copy from minecraft. To be fair, BG did added some new content such as props, but it adding a slight thing doesnt mean you can or should just get any game and label it as yours.
     BG eggwars is copied from Cubecraft eggwars and it is very much the same as bedwars except that it is not beds, but eggs, not much of a difference, and up to this day, one of the discontinued games of BG.
     Skyblock is then copied from Minecraft's maps called the same name.
You start with a stair shaped island with a tree and a chest containing stuff in order to survive and expand your floating island. Apart from the original map, BG claims that they have added new features such as boss fighting and island mining to the original skyblock experience, however, this is adding that experience to the original map single player skyblock. This idea is mostly stolen from Hypixel's skyblock, where boss fighting is from Dungeons and Cave mining respectively.
     Build and Shoot is also copied from Pixel Gun 3D, which resembles a block game with guns, probably with somewhere in the mix of reality and fictional guns. It can be also a copy of Fortnite but I noticed the kitchen map in BAS is literally the same as Ant's Life map on PG3D.
     Blockman Strike is copied from the original Counter Strike, and even at the friends list shows "Counter Strike" as the name to tell in the code what is Blockman Strike.
     PUBG Battlegrounds like in the name, is a rip-off of PUBG. Nothing new is added.
     Build and Shoot Battle Royale mode is more likely to be a copy of Fortnite as it combines fictional guns with some realistic ones similarly to Build And Shoot.
     Murder Mystery 2 is copied from Among Us, and it obviously blatant. Character design is copied aswell as The Skeld map.
     There are alot more games copied from their respective games but they are not worth mentioning anymore from the amount of exanple I have already given.

You can take the argument that these games are not copied but just inspirations of the original game but calling something copied by a different name doesn't make it to be something other than what it really is, which is copying.

About the region update, in late August, BG added an update about regions where you can only play with people with the same region. I saw this update very widely from youtube and friends dm'ing me about the issue on this particular update. This update infuriated so many players to the point that I, someone who doesn't play BG anymore that time, got curious about what was actually happening. I've done some browsing that time and apparently some Vietnamese group bought a part of BG and released the said region update (Assuming this is true). The first thing that came to me when I heard the news break out is why would they release such an update that would divide players insted of uniting them? This update made it so that you cannot play with other people with a different region as yours. Words cannot describe how this shattered the connection between people among their friends from other "regions". My point is that why would you divide your playerbase such that something big that they can do for many years got removed. Its not just a feature to overreact with, but the inability to entirely play with your friends from different regions is way off the line. If only the "new" developers are actually knowledgeable enough to know that uniting your playerbase to a common positive idea will make your game a better and a friendly place, nothing of this would happen.

Now let's talk about what actually is their motive behind this update. Playing with other players from different parts of the world, particularly far timezones from each other cause connection lag or in other words, a high response time (ping) between either the two and I assume they wanted to fix that. Developers then ended up removing games with people that have different regions by adding the so-called region update. For me, this was the worse way they handled this problem. There are literally just more good ways to fix this situation other than pulling the plug such as improving or buying new server hosts which can then improve ping for both players. Out of all the money I talked about earlier, there is no reasonable way they couldn't invest some for server improvement.

 At the end of the day, people buy in-game stuff for real world money to support the development of the game, and not to be stolen from.
These sudden update made people go against it because BG is keeping the whole plan in the dark for all players. Simply put, they are not expecting to break their friendship they worked so long and hard to build only losing it to one, indecisive choice from the BG devs all in one go. Metaphorically speaking by pulling the plug, they didn't bothered or pursued to improve server quality, connection, configuration, etc. but to completely terminate cross-server gameplay. Dividing a community instead of uniting them will not make a community any better; and taking something important from players that they had from the beginning is way worse. Some didnt only lost the ability to play with their friends, some lost their friendship as a whole.

In the end its all a theory about why did they added this update, and if this comes out as false, BG developers will forever remain a mystery as this "update" is and will definitely be the last nail on the coffin.

What actually makes BG bad is the combination of a bad, toxic community and one-sided developers. And speaking of the age range, the age range of the players are mostly kids below 10 year olds. You know why? It is because Minecraft is a popular game that is locked behind a paywall, which not all can pay to play, so thats why younger kids tend to play BG instead while the ones who can afford Minecraft,  typically older teenagers, will do play on it. That explains why BG is full of kids and young people, and in a result, toxicity in the community. And this is how Blockman Go has rotten in a few years.

This pastebin is my whole criticism about BG out of all my time I spent on this game. There is nothing I would wish for to make me come back to BG, I just want to clarify why I suddenly vanished from this community. Thank you for years of memories and experience.

 Signing off...