Bottiger
Administrator
I wasn't going to bother writing this, but since @Obruhma made a thread about it, I thought I'd make a more formal thread with an in-depth explanation to whatever fans we have left so people know that this decision wasn't just made on a whim.
There are many reasons why we've decided to shut down the Rust servers and will probably not return.
1. Flawed game design encourages people to leave the server
The way the game is played is that multiple groups join a server at the start of wipe with the intention to dominate the server. A single winner emerges which means everyone else gives up and finds another server to start on. Once everyone else leaves, the group that dominated the server gets bored and leaves themselves.
This happens to every server except ones that are 9 years old, run by youtubers, or given official status by Facepunch. Having blueprints off or not having a blueprint wipe doesn't seem to change this behavior.
2. Flawed game design highly favors people with no life
In order to win, you must monitor your base 24 hours a day in case someone decides to attack it. Someone can wake up at 4 am and attack your base while you are sleeping and not able to defend it. Plugins that defend your base while you are offline seem to be unpopular. This is likely why the game has very high player counts but probably few unique players.
3. Rampant cheating and poor tools from the game to deal with it
Cheating is a very bad problem in Rust, more so than in any other game. In Rust, if someone is cheating they can singlehandedly ruin 10 hours of progress per legitimate player they kill. We found multiple cheaters on our servers every week.
Despite how bad cheating is for the game, Facepunch has done little to combat it. It was only a few months ago that they made spectate mode able to see where the player was aiming which meant it was pretty much impossible to tell any but the most blatant of aimbots.
Even after this feature was added, it is still a giant hassle to monitor someone since 80% of the time is spent crafting or running from place to place. This means there are few people willing to admin, and of those that do, many only became admin so they can use admin tools to cheat by spawning items or scouting bases.
4. Facepunch grants a few communities a monopoly on the vanilla game mode
Like TF2, Rust splits servers into "official" and "community". However unlike TF2, most of these servers are run by a 3rd party that Facepunch has selected through favoritism such as being around since beta. There is no way for any new community to apply for this status.
Why is this a problem you might ask?
Just like TF2, a server being categorized as "official" gets 10x the number of players. However there is even more to it than that. There is a flaw with the Steam server listing code that it only returns 5000 ips deemed closest to you through a geolocation database. Rust has over 20,000 servers (probably even more now) so your server will only be seen by a small fraction of total players... unless you are an "official" server which is grabbed from Facepunch instead of Steam.
Because "official" servers get so many more players than "community" ones, this is really the only way to sustain the server without selling pay2win kits. They are the only servers that get enough players to sell queue skips as people would not pay for a queue skip if the server never becomes full.
We did not want to sell pay2win kits to maintain the server.
5. Facepunch ignored the server listing issues after I told them and messaged them a fix for over 2 years.
Only when I had a fix for an unrelated bug they were interested in, did I get a response
As mentioned in #4, I discovered long ago that there were major problems with the server listing in the game.
We first had a server in Europe, and only people in the US could see the server because the geolocation database said our IP was in the US. This means nobody joined the server because the only people who could see the server had bad ping. We had to message the owner of the database to get it updated, then we had to message Valve to update the database. This took 2 months to get fixed.
Shortly later on, the number of Rust servers surged above 10000 (Steam only sends the 5000 closest to you). This means that players even in the same region stopped being able to see our server. There is no way to fix this.
I sent a message to someone at Facepunch with my findings along with a fix around 2019-2020. He acknowledged my message but 3 years later, this issue has gone unresolved and makes it a daunting task for any community that isn't 9 years old to establish a player base in Rust.
Only when word got out that we had a fix for a crash that was plaguing every Rust server did he respond to me, and made no mention of the server listing issue.
----
There are too many fundamental issues with the game that will probably never be fixed.
Thank you to all the admins and players that stuck with us.
There are many reasons why we've decided to shut down the Rust servers and will probably not return.
1. Flawed game design encourages people to leave the server
The way the game is played is that multiple groups join a server at the start of wipe with the intention to dominate the server. A single winner emerges which means everyone else gives up and finds another server to start on. Once everyone else leaves, the group that dominated the server gets bored and leaves themselves.
This happens to every server except ones that are 9 years old, run by youtubers, or given official status by Facepunch. Having blueprints off or not having a blueprint wipe doesn't seem to change this behavior.
2. Flawed game design highly favors people with no life
In order to win, you must monitor your base 24 hours a day in case someone decides to attack it. Someone can wake up at 4 am and attack your base while you are sleeping and not able to defend it. Plugins that defend your base while you are offline seem to be unpopular. This is likely why the game has very high player counts but probably few unique players.
3. Rampant cheating and poor tools from the game to deal with it
Cheating is a very bad problem in Rust, more so than in any other game. In Rust, if someone is cheating they can singlehandedly ruin 10 hours of progress per legitimate player they kill. We found multiple cheaters on our servers every week.
Despite how bad cheating is for the game, Facepunch has done little to combat it. It was only a few months ago that they made spectate mode able to see where the player was aiming which meant it was pretty much impossible to tell any but the most blatant of aimbots.
Even after this feature was added, it is still a giant hassle to monitor someone since 80% of the time is spent crafting or running from place to place. This means there are few people willing to admin, and of those that do, many only became admin so they can use admin tools to cheat by spawning items or scouting bases.
4. Facepunch grants a few communities a monopoly on the vanilla game mode
Like TF2, Rust splits servers into "official" and "community". However unlike TF2, most of these servers are run by a 3rd party that Facepunch has selected through favoritism such as being around since beta. There is no way for any new community to apply for this status.
Why is this a problem you might ask?
Just like TF2, a server being categorized as "official" gets 10x the number of players. However there is even more to it than that. There is a flaw with the Steam server listing code that it only returns 5000 ips deemed closest to you through a geolocation database. Rust has over 20,000 servers (probably even more now) so your server will only be seen by a small fraction of total players... unless you are an "official" server which is grabbed from Facepunch instead of Steam.
Because "official" servers get so many more players than "community" ones, this is really the only way to sustain the server without selling pay2win kits. They are the only servers that get enough players to sell queue skips as people would not pay for a queue skip if the server never becomes full.
We did not want to sell pay2win kits to maintain the server.
5. Facepunch ignored the server listing issues after I told them and messaged them a fix for over 2 years.
Only when I had a fix for an unrelated bug they were interested in, did I get a response
As mentioned in #4, I discovered long ago that there were major problems with the server listing in the game.
We first had a server in Europe, and only people in the US could see the server because the geolocation database said our IP was in the US. This means nobody joined the server because the only people who could see the server had bad ping. We had to message the owner of the database to get it updated, then we had to message Valve to update the database. This took 2 months to get fixed.
Shortly later on, the number of Rust servers surged above 10000 (Steam only sends the 5000 closest to you). This means that players even in the same region stopped being able to see our server. There is no way to fix this.
I sent a message to someone at Facepunch with my findings along with a fix around 2019-2020. He acknowledged my message but 3 years later, this issue has gone unresolved and makes it a daunting task for any community that isn't 9 years old to establish a player base in Rust.
Only when word got out that we had a fix for a crash that was plaguing every Rust server did he respond to me, and made no mention of the server listing issue.
----
There are too many fundamental issues with the game that will probably never be fixed.
Thank you to all the admins and players that stuck with us.
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