Month: July 2018

Christmas In July, Part 2

I know that I rather dropped the ball this wipe with regard to the tree decorating contest. Right now, I’m getting tallies of all the completed trees to date, and everyone who attempted the christmas tree challenge will be getting some goodies this wipe:

1. For every attempted tree found in your base, you get 100 small presents.

These can be converted into 2 Large Presents, 10 Medium Presents, or some combination of Small, Medium, or Large. You’ll get them as smalls so you can decide how you want that parted out.

2. Our players with the most trees, OneMagicalWizard (4.8), CHILL (4), and Jakolanter (2.9) will receive a collection of Christmas-themed decorations for their base, a stack of presents, and a stack of duct tape to help them in creating a secure tree display area for today’s wipe.

3. Our top tree whisperer, OneMagicalWizard, will receive an additional stack of tape, as well as an extra stack of presents.

This wipe, we’ll be having our Winter House Contest again! As we did in the end of December, we’ll be doing both a Christmas Tree collection contest and a base building contest. As before, all players will have the opportunity to create their ideal vision of a holiday home/base/building/monument of their choosing! With all of the new building and decoration options available to us, this promises to be one of the most creative build contests, EVER.

– Christmas Tree Contest: We’ll be hosting a challenge for all players who wish to participate! The top 3 participating players with the most fully-decorated Christmas trees at the end of the wipe will receive special prizes for the August 2nd wipe! For folks not interested in the contest, this is a great opportunity to sell those ornaments. For everyone in the contest, it’s a great chance to win some pretty snazzy prizes!

– PRIZES: For both the build contest and the Christmas Tree Contest, there will be 3 tiers of prizes:

Grand Prize: On the 2 August wipe, start with 100 pills and 1 month of Settler Patron status (Includes access to the patron’s lounge in-game, as well as the daily opportunity to meet and mingle with the admin staff and access to over $2,000 worth of skins, an in-game vending machine at your personal monument, 240 Duct Tape, custom base design assistance including 1 windmill, a custom landmark designed conveniently near your base to grant convenient access to a pumpjack in-game item, and a custom 1-car garage designed for your base. Month of settler is non-transferable, offers no exchanges, and combines with all current subscription products.)

First Runner-Up: 75 pills, 100 tape on the 2 August wipe.

Second Runner-Up: 50 pills, 50 tape on the 2 August wipe.

Thanks, all! See you next wipe, and looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with! –MDR

Full Disclosure, Transparency, and Rumor Control:

This evening, I was forced to remove a member of the administrative staff. It was found that the admin in question was using their powers as an admin to create items and give them to friends, and that the admin in question was also playing and benefiting from those items. In particular, a member of senior staff and I found that a metal base had been created, armored doors had been placed, and it appears very reasonable that garage doors had been spawned and placed for this base.

This, of course, calls into question any and all actions from the player and the admin for legitimacy, and in this break with public trust, the admin has been removed, and their player account has been banned from Serenity Valley Rust servers. As we don’t know how much benefit was given to the player account through admin action, while a ban appeal as a player is certainly on the table, we owe it to you, our players, to make certain that they are unable to play until a BP wipe has leveled the playing field. My commitment remains, 100% to the integrity and enjoyability of your play experience on our servers, and we will continue to carefully monitor and jealously pursue any hints of wrongdoing, whether from a player or a member of staff.

In addition to the server’s rules, all of my staff are asked to follow several additional guidelines beyond the standard community guidelines, in order to preserve the fragile trust that exists between player and administrator and the good faith that everyone can enjoy a fair play experience. These guidelines are are:

1. Integrity First
2. Excellent in Everything We Do
3. Service Before Self
4. Always Avoid the Appearance of Evil

I am deeply embarrassed and and immensely disappointed that your trust was violated, and I will redouble my efforts to instill the best behaviors in staff and work to guarantee that no such further lapses in that trust occur.

Tower Racing is BACK!

For our Christmas in July events, we’ll be returning to our very own Rust Sport:  Tower Racing!  For those unfamiliar with the sport, small teams are given a 2×2 building without a roof, a handful of supplies, some basic tools, and then charged with raising, defending, and raiding against the tallest tower in the arena.  Teams are randomly selected, given a uniform, and unleashed.  At the end of 1 hour, the team with the tallest tower, WINS!  Guests are welcome to watch, but must not interfere. Raiding an enemy tower is permitted, and encouraged!  It may not be enough to build the highest–you might have to knock someone down!

This event will run on Saturday at 6pm, and again Sunday at 12pm, and 8pm, with all times being in the central time zone.

The winners of each round receive a full, custom set of metal gear, AK-47’s, a chainsaw, a jackhammer, and 1,000 scrap. The first runners-up will receive roadsign gear, semi-auto rifles, and 500 scrap, each.

Serenity Valley Christmas in July!

We hope that everyone had a great time for the 4th of July yesterday, and that you’ve still got all your eyes and fingers. With record-breaking high temperatures hitting all across the Northern Hemisphere over the last month, it’s time for us to do our part to cool things off! Several of you have already heard a little bit about the promo, but here’s the really real official word:    Christmas in July!

For the next two wipes (starting today, 5 July, going until 2 August) we’ll be running the in-game Christmas event, and running a series of joyous events during the weekends to show off some Christmas spirit, keep things really cool, and show off the spirit of giving! In addition to the wintry festivities, July is our Donor Appreciation Month, and all donor tape is doubled for the wipe, and any donations made during the month will receive 25% bonus tape for the duration of the donation!

A summary of July’s events include:

  • Tower Racing Event
  • Pookie Stacking Challenge
  • Tree Decoration Contest
  • Christmas House Decoration Contest
  • Regularly spawning Christmas Presents
  • Special holiday collectibles available for purchase in the store

Rather than writing up another post for each of our in-game sports, we’ll actually be creating some new permanent blog pages to detail these sports, in order to give teams time to form up and practice their team strategies in advance of the events.  Be looking for those pages later today or tomorrow evening.

As always, find us on Discord or Facebook should you have any questions, and a member of staff will be with you ASAP!