I mean it's still a going thing and I'm sure some folks here are still on it but, like... man. That site (game? Can we call it a game? We can call it a game) was The Thing at the start of the pandemic, and then for me it just kinda faded off. For my own sake, I figure it's interesting to look at why. Y'know, analyze my own media consumption and all that jazz.
If you haven't experienced Blaseball, it's essentially fantasy fantasy sports. Which... I don't do fantasy sports. And the implementation, and the betting, pretty much made it an idle game. Which... I don't do idle games, either. (Aside from macro crafting in XIV, which I can barely do a half hour before getting bored.) So maybe the question isn't why I bounced but why I got into it in the first place...
I guess ultimately it was because it was Bonkers, and Different, and we could all use things that are bonkers and different sometimes. At the same time, Blaseball was hardly ever about the game and the website, it was the community, it was the tweets and the discord and the fan art and everything that the people surrounding it were inspired to make. And there was a lot. Too much for me, I think. I struggle with large, highly active communities, from the XOXO Slack to the Dicey Dungeons "dicecord". Once it gets big, I just can't anymore. I swear it's not that I'm a massive insufferable hipster my brain just be that way
I did actually get some Blaseball merch when I was into it. A shirt, fan-sold, with a fan-made Seattle Garages logo. (Of course the Garages were my team.) It looked great, as t-shirts go, but the print quality was questionable, and within five or six washes the logo had faded to nearly nothing. Perhaps there's something poetic about even the physical artifacts of my interest fading away...
(This all comes up because I suddenly remembered, while thinking about XIV's Maliktender, the Blaseball character Malik Destiny, that the community just thoroughly decided Was A Mi'qote. Not a generic catboy, specifically a Mi'qote. And he was on the Seattle Garages, so of course he became My Player, because the hell with min-maxing and focusing on popular players. In this house we stan catboys.)