Tomorrow, November 3rd marks the ending of the XP system and the introduction of Rust’s new component-based crafting system. Those who’ve had a chance to test it have reported some positive things and most folks seem to prefer it to the XP system, so I’m certainly looking forward to hearing everyone’s take on it!
With the new month and new wipe, I’ll be rotating our server to a North American-based server for a couple of reasons. First, I promised our NA players that we would; it’s really only fair that our player base get the opportunity to take turns between having 20ms ping versus 100ms ping. As someone who’s been playing from NA on an EU server this whole time, trust me: Don’t panic. It’s not a big deal, at all. The other NA players and I did just fine these last three months. The second, and much more important reason is this: It’s no secret that our server host has been kind of shit at maintenance and stability for Rust, and with the server based in France, our host has been able to tapdance around American consumer protection laws that would otherwise require them to either fix the server or refund our money. By moving the server to a US-based location, it gives us a lot more leverage to be able to actually force things to get done and to make the server actually stable and reliable, which have been big issues at times.
I’ll be closely watching the dev feeds and package releases tomorrow and expect that we’ll be up just a few minutes after the server packages are released. Tim has been kind enough to reach out over some social media channels to spread the word about our server, to invite some new folks to visit us during this awesome new phase, and to unleash some exceptional mayhem!
Due to the changes coming both to the map and to the crafting system, we won’t be doing a map vote this month, and I’m going to hold off on setting up an event schedule until we have a better idea of what the new crafting system looks like; I don’t want to risk early game imbalance. I will be doing some testing with supply signal drops and drop rates, as well as some testing with barrel drops, during low-population times. If it looks like presents and signals won’t break the game for folks, we’ll get back to using those as our daily giveaways and running some events that will give people a chance to win some new goodies. Until we’ve got a little more data on balance and loot propagation, expect events to be more along the vein of our primitive arena, labyrinth, and hunger games events.
Oh! I almost completely forgot to mention: With the new systems coming out, that’s going to change a lot of balance-related stuff. To that end, I’ll be resetting decay to default values, and toning down the helicopter a bit.