So, about those Zergs…

 

 

 

 

This and similar questions crop up once or twice per year. They deserve an answer, and this was covered in part in an earlier post.  In short, we do already have rules in place regarding zergs and zerging; it’s covered under our “Don’t Be a Dick” rule:

 

A large group of people showing up and working together isn’t not newbie friendly. Moreover, the newbie friendly element of this server isn’t on restricting people from playing the game, but giving people the chance to play the game in all sorts of different ways, so they can learn what parts of Rust work well for them. Some people want to be a part of a group. Some people want to solo. Some people just want to farm and build, and others just want PVP. All of those are completely valid, and all get equal representation and protection.

Being a newbie friendly server is about giving people the opportunity to learn the game without having a 10-year old screeching in their mic calling you a retard faggotjew while farming you for kills on the beach and talking about how recently he fucked your mother. Being a newbie friendly server is about giving people a positive, supportive environment in which to learn the game, it’s mechanics, and nuances. It’s not about protecting people from the consequences of their actions. People, generally speaking, hate injustice, and when a big group shows up and starts throwing their weight around, a bigger group forms and pushes their shit in. This is the constant swing of the pendulum, and is a part of a natural kind of oscillation of violence in Rust. Further, because players are paid in rad pills to play the game, and because items are available in the shop every wipe to help them either skip the grinding of scrap and air drops and monuments, recovering from a bad hit is never that difficult, and if someone joins the game just before a BP wipe, they still have access to resources in order to swiftly put them at parity with other players who’ve been playing through the whole BP cycle.

If what you’re looking for is a PVE server, that’s the keyword you need to be searching for. If what you’re looking for is a roleplay server, that or RP are the keywords that you need to be looking for. This is a newbie-friendly server, where people can come and learn the game in a non-toxic environment, and where rules and systems are put in place to help people to advance and recover more quickly while they learn their favorite parts of Rust. If you’re playing on our Main server and a big group is menacing you constantly, report them. If you’re playing on our Main server and you feel threatened or have been raided by a big group, use your voice. Seriously, this isn’t just a first-person shooter. The thing that distinguishes Rust from so many other games is the social aspect, the fact that you’re dealing with real people, real situations, and things like diplomacy, deception, and clever dealing with people can do more damage than bullets, blades, and bombs.

The First Blood Champion: FEROCIAN!

The last 12 hours have been INSANE. There’ve been four different pretty major upsets in the ordering of our winners, including one getting knocked completely out of the running!

BLOOD CHAMPION: Your Blood Champion, and the top overall winner for this wipe was Ferocian with 50 points scored! Well fought! I know you worked your ass off for that one!

CHAMPION: Our Champions, the best in class, being our first and second runners-up are JoYoung with 36 points, and Cynixret with 21. A great effort to you both! The added rewards on both servers will help you to continue to hold and exceed at your championship!

CONTENDERS: They weren’t the very, very best we saw, but our contenders showed a lot of grit, a lot of determination, and made a damn fine show of their work on Red! September’s winners are Jakolantern, with 20 points in a last-minute leap forward in points, Jezter with 15 points, and finally, jpellis, sliding into the top six in the LAST FIVE MINUTES of the game, with 8 points!

Each of these six will be receiving some nice perks on Main in the form of a new currency: Blood. Blood can be used to buy duct tape, houses, cars, and other special awards! In addition, from 4 October until 1 November, each of these players’ skulls is worth 5 points, each! Last but not least, each of these players will gain access to another kit, designed to help them gain and maintain the edge from their previous victory–especially now that their skulls are so, SO valuable!

Finally, each month there will be a Chosen One, a winner granted victory by the grace of Lady Luck. To be eligible for the Chosen One award, a player must play 10 or more hours in the month, achieve 1 or more kills, and collect any combination of wood, stone, and ore with a total of 200,000 or more. 17 players were eligible to be Chosen this wipe, and the randomly selected winner is: GREENJOKER with a final score of 5 points, and great play overall, including a stunning 2.0 Kill/Death Ratio, I believe he’ll be a kick-ass contender for the October wipe!

New Month, New Wipe, New Crafting System!

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.