Fixing Rust

Not if it's modding Rust into being fun. That's impossible.

Play Ark on a custom server

Ark is fucking dogshit from design to gameplay.

This is what goes in the head of every Rust (or similar game) player's head, and the way you oversimplify it shows both that you'll never make a decent fun game ever and also why no one but retarded autists actually play games like these.

It's always said from a specific perspective, that you'll be the one doing the destroying and everyone else's job is just to make things for you to break and suck it up when it does happen.
What about talking about the game from the other side? Let's talk about a game that requires massive grind to build something whose only purpose is to amuse other people that need a target they can attack. Does that sound fun for you? Is Rust a tower-defense game? If it is, it's a really bad one, tower-defense games don't spawn enemies mostly when you turn off the game or give you pointless tasks to build up.

Let's also adress how tedious it is to build a base. It's not hard at all and it can be comfy too setting things up. But it's tedious to place everything down one by one and grinding the materials required for it. Again, it's not hard at all and doesn't even take that much materials. It's just one single simple task repeated 30000 times, that's why it's unfun.

Now let's adress PvP and how dire it actually is. People won't just steal from you, they'll break down your entire base and strip it of anything usefull so you stop being a threat to them. You lose literally everything including the physical location you were occupying the moment you lose PvP, forcing you to redo your base from scratch somewhere else.

You want to fix Rust? Fine. Here's the problems you gotta solve:
1. The goal of the game is to break other people's shit, but because it's only against humans then sometimes you'll have to take a beating and it's never fun to lose your shit and starting over.
2. There's no alternative to 1 because there's nothing else to do but amass resources that just make you a more valuable target so it will ALWAYS devolve into PvP
3. If there's a big difference between the power of factions, than PvP is pointless as the winner is decided before things even start. And if it takes a long time to get really good weapons and armour then you have a time requirement of several hours and some luck before you can even make it to PvP, being forced to do the same boring preparation from start if you happen to lose.
4. Because of 1 and 3, every advantage you can get to win is always welcome. Cheating and server drama become more prevalent since some people prefer to risk a ban than re-grinding their whole gear and others give no fuck that everyone's mad at each other because now they are easier to raid.
4.1. Because one of the basic advantages you can get is numbers, the game will always be dominated by clanfags that act incredibly tribalistic and hardly allow anyone not already a part of them to join up. And due to the nature of the game itself, there's no reason to be neutral or walk alone as you're just a target of bigger groups yourself.

Good luck fixing all that just with mods. The game is fundamentally broken and you only enjoy it because you get lucky or you have friends but might as well play Borderlands if that's your thing.
For comparison, The Forest is essentially the same but without the PvP autism and it's a far better game.

It's the exact same thing but with dinosaurs, it's your own bias that makes you unable to judge Rust on the same grounds you judge Ark.

Excellent blogpost.

Are you the same retard that made the New Vegas thread?
I already posted Deus. It's a great survival game from 1996 that far surpasses anything modern in the field of survival. Go find a free download link somewhere.

I'm actually a solo with an occasional friend. I wanted to rebalance guns to make them more skill based and allow cheap plays to be made once again.

I'm jaded and depressed, and Rust used to be my go-to comfy "make base, kill cunts, raid cunts" cycle, but at some point they broke something and I'm trying to figure out what it is.

I buffed bleeding and improved crossbow damage to try and bridge the gap between primitive and endgame, and tweaked a few other things as well, like airdrop speed and loot tables to help people recover from being decimated.

I'm biased, but not because I like Rust over Ark. It's the colors, font, and the look of the game that I hate. It looks like cheapo korean F2P game.

Plus, they had the guts to release actual fucking DLC in EA.

No, it's another retard that wants to move forward instead of clinging to oldie goodies.

I'm sorry OP, I love armchair game design too, but Rust is legitimately unsalvagable– It was never designed to be an actual complete product, let alone a good game.

There are too many fundamental features and quirks of the game that have been locked-in to pander to the god-awful community/reddit/etc and too many lazy design choices compiled with arrogance and ineptitude.

If you were to try to repair Rust, you'd just be making a new game from the ground up. There's nothing to save from that putrid scam, user.

I'm actually working on this with plugins to rebalance PvP, raiding costs, gather rates, certain gameplay mechanics, loot tables, etc.

It's an interesting project, I really want to make this work. Just think about what could be done to fix it up - I'm doing my best to try and improve it. I want to take this as a challenge and actually make it work. It's not only a challenge, it's actually a pretty good exercise in game balance when you think about it.

subnautica is already the worlds first non-shit survival game

Could you talk about some of the worst of those quirks? So that I don't have to go through the game myself to see what they are.

I think this kind of word-of-mouth broken telephone is why Holla Forums thinks all games are shit. Rust is really fucking broken, but this kinda shit just amplifies it to the point of insanity.

At least it has a release date, is anti SJW and has custom servers.

Keep sucking that Garry Newman cock though.

I've been shitting on Facepunch to their face for over two years now. Keep up that tribalist bullshit though

I'm literally working on a rebalanced custom server right this second.

WHO
GIVES
A
SHIT?

I'm actually enjoying myself finetuning the weapon damages on dummy players right now. I buffed crossbow damage to make it viable against fully geared people, and invited a friend to duel against - the crossbow turned out to be surprisingly viable.

1. No survival mechanics (food/water/etc)
2. No crafting
3. Character creation
4. No open world

I could go on.

...

Done.

The core gameplay of Rust is unsalvagable by intention; it exists solely for the purpose of being e-celeb bait and being spread via word-of-mouth between the lowest common denominator of gamers. The primary purpose of PvP Survival Crafting games is solely to propagate things like 'epic raid stories' and 'funny trolling videos'; this is something Garry himself has said, and is clearly evident with how the game is directed.

Rust was born out of the DayZ indie craze that spawned numerous zombie-survival-crafting-likes that still infest the market to this day with only gradual improvement; and in fact Rust originally had zombies in it, and they are a dummied out feature from one of the very first patches that was stated to return 'eventually', and this forms the prototypical issue of Rust's fundamental gameplay: It was never intended to be completed or good; there are massive missing segments of features, content, and polish that no amount of altered values or plugins can fix.

The gameplay of Rust is predicated upon a cycle of abuse; both receiving and then dealing it. Newly joined or freshly demolished players are spawned into the world with next to nothing, and must endure an hours-long cycle of incredibly boring resource gathering and progression (which serves no gameplay purpose other than to be a timesink that forces autists and retartds to be invested) that leaves them entirely exposed to the will of other, more veteran players and their weaponry at all times, and in almost all instances players will take full advantage of this to kidnap, murder, ransack, or otherwise grief these players (in fact the game has received several updates almost solely around promoting this idea). With enough mercy and time, a naked player will advance through the technology filler and incredibly lackluster base-building mechanics to protect himself and his gains from others, eventually finding themselves in the position of their murderers and captors, and capable of inflicting lasting damage on others of their rank– The only purpose of the gameplay and progression of Rust is to advance beyond other players with luck and time, and then abuse other lower-status players or attempt to reduce their peers to that state for self-gain and future abuse. There is little to no other objectives or progression that does not involve the ability to hurt, kidnap, destroy the progress of other players or to aid in preventing this from being performed on you.

This concept in and of itself is not completely terrible, but Rust's execution is lazy if you're being generous, and is malicious marketing in reality.
First of all, the concept is incredibly unbalanced from the get-go, promoting not emergent cooperation between players, but mass meta-cooperation and exclusion and abuse of others; having more players exponentially expedites the early-game vulnerability you suffer and even in that state puts you in an incredibly advantageous position compared to other weak or new players, making it incredibly easy to demolish their bases or outright murder them for their resources. It is next to impossible to compete against a greater number of players without both additional players and an impassable gap in technology; this gives major rise to things like 'streamer slaves' and online clans absolutely demolishing servers or hosting their own where they can always remain the majority, roflstomping any and everyone else into oblivion by stacking the playing field permanently in their favor.

[1/2]

The second major issue with this concept is the nature of the always-online gameplay and severe lack of depth to the base-building mechanics. Because of the dog-rape-dog nature of the game, you must hole yourself up in as secretive and difficult to reach position as your are able to, and then create the most frustrating and time-consuming defenses possible; not because it is interesting or efficient, but because it is the only true deterrent against players molesting both you and your gains while you are gathering resources, out murdering others, or are offline. The entirety of Rust takes place in barren, randomly generated rock-fields dotted with the same setpiece locales desperately trying to emulate DayZ's resource-territory conflicts; and while this is its own issue, it boils down every base being not just incredibly easy to find, but almost always vulnerable to the same avenues of assault. With no advantageous terrain or concealment outside of abusing terrible map generation to force awkward platforming or terrain clipping, you must rely on your base itself to defend itself and you; however there is no meaningful or interesting way to do this with the game's painfully barren toolkits, so almost all base-building revolves around building a sturdy, layered shell of the most capable material you've progressed to; which relies on the previously stated tech advantage to be a boring and time-consuming enough bulwark to dissuade attackers into going after a less-prepared target. Unfortunately, at least when I played, the game gave enormous advantage to attackers by not only giving them effectively unlimited time to assault you (provided you were offline, or dead/locked out by others) but also by giving them toolkits that circumvented these defenses with only a slight tech edge even at the 'endgame'; better tools and explosives made short work of even reinforced metal. Given enough resources or time, and without an equal number of players actively defending a structure (which is simple to merely wait out), it was a near-impossible feat to defend yourself after being located.

Finally, the lack of purpose and goals in the gameplay not only leaves the game a boring sandbox when all it has is this abusive context, but that same emptiness only intensifies the issues. With nothing to strive for, players have only their own interactions to justify continued gameplay, which means there are only two forms of entertainment aside from progression: The abuse of other players and raiding their peers. With no meta or non-player threats, base-building has no reason but to grow even more heinously boring and bloated in place of any actual interaction, and the best defense becomes wanton slaughter and destruction; because the only way to stop someone from killing and beating you is to either have an entire horde backing you 24/7, or to find their base while they're offline/away/outnumbering them, blow your way inside, and steal/destroy everything they own then murder them on their bed or return. No matter how many funny voices, meme-filled youtube videos, etc that you see Rust always boils down to an absolutely barebones cycle of starting from scratch, surviving abuse, becoming the abuser, then seeking to maintain your status until it is taken from you when you cannot fight back; and there's always been no additional content (even inside of the cycle itself) to make this endearing outside of buyer's remorse or e-celeb worship.

tl;dr: rust is a shit game where you get abused, progress to being an abuser, and then start the cycle over when overrun/offline with nothing else involved

Didn't Garry Newman make this? Its unsalvageable.

This is accurate. It's all a horrible timesink with the sole purpose of demolishing others' progress. With no real goal to the game, there will never be anyone playing the "straight man" to the hordes of people set out to ebin grief others, unlike in games like older MMOs that allowed some manner of abuse.

Out of curiosity, how much time have you put in the game?

There's no skill with traditional ballistic guns except for reaction times and aiming. Unless you'd replace them with potato cannons that have firing curves and ricocheting projectiles, this is already a ridiculous idea that will never go anywhere.
"Cheap plays" are called cheap for a fucking reason, they only fill satisfying for the person doing them, everyone else feels like they lost trough no fault of their own. The only thing "cheap plays" do is make it frustrating for half the playerbase and invite cunts that make the server horrible for everyone else.

What, no "make base, be killed, be raided"? In all your time playing it? Oh right I forgot, it only happens to other players because you're that good at the game.

I already told you. Those "cunts" wanted to have fun too, they wanted to raid you too, but you can't both be winners. They got tired of losing, went looking for something else and the game has nothing but that to offer.
Cry "gitgud" all you want, at the end of the day for PvP to have a winner it must have a loser as well and if you ask me to dump several hours until I'm on equal footing to you, I'll flip you off and go play Counter Strike, where I get basically the same experience but you can just buy guns. Or Minecraft and actually have something besides shooting dudes, plus better base building.

No, what you did was make an easy-to-find weapon comparable to late-game ones, giving the faggots that never build anything, just roam and kill, a good weapon to be assholes with. Great job.
That does nothing if the person with most guns can still get it for himself. Had you said "airdrop locations, closer to players with less shit", that'd almost be a good thing but not really.

So nothing to do with gameplay and almost nothing to do with game design. The game is shit too, arguably worse, but many of it's failings are also common to Rust and if you can't point it out on something you hate, you're not even gonna point it out on Rust either.

The problem with Rust and many other sandbox survival games is so simple: The bigger clan wins, unless offline-raided. The biggest challenge would be designing a mechanism that makes sure that all teams are of the same size and another that makes offline raiding impossible, yet doesn't mean the servers are flooded with buildings.

I think the best solution would be to build such a game from the ground up around PvE, but make this aspect as challening as PvP and make sure it contains everything people are usually looking for in a PvP experience. That means a PROPER AI, which is a rare sight. The thing is, most players who play games like Rust or ARK or Conan Exiles or whatever do not have PvP as the core motivation, but only play on PvP servers to have some sort of purpose. Give players a better purpose that you can control yourself. You could still allow PvP, but contain it to certain areas, and otherwise make such a game hardcore survival co-op. Make the PvE threat be so big that it becomes more interesting than PvP. Because you can control PvE, you can make sure raids are of a fair size and at a fair time.

It's a fad-riding cash grab, shit's about as un-salvageable as it gets.

Get good. Grind shouldn't equal victory.

Capped for posteriority.
Especially the "promoting not emergent cooperation between players, but mass meta-cooperation and exclusion and abuse of others"
I remenber trying a similar game called Hurtworld that seemed a bit more interesting only to realize a lot of what you said in your post.
One night, I was near a campfire when some dude came nearby and asked if he could stay by the fire (nights were cold and you either had good clothes, a fire or you'd freeze).
I just nodded (didn't had a mic) and he was there for a while, I think I even gave him a beef or something. When daybreak came, he went his way but during the whole time I was considering what an horrible risk I was putting myself in, allowing that guy, who has nothing to lose, near me.
Then the next day I was hunting a boar using spears and a guy with a rifle saw me. He immidiatly started shooting and I honestly can't blame him since I could have tried to kill him too and he had no reason to risk it or even share the boar with me.

OP, checkout The Forest instead. It has better base building, better combat, better survival elements and actual content\gameplay.
It solved Rust's many problems by including PvE enemies that you have to fend off who get progressively harder as you build more things.

Rust really needed a third faction controlled by NPCs that targets groups of players, with harsher attacks according to their number. It would stop the clans and streamer fags from ruining everyone else's shit since there'd be something keeping them busy and it would give an advantage to cooperating even if just temporarily with other players.

I'm also of the opinion that you need NPCs for your town that can be tasked to do basic tasks, like farming and mining so you have an incentive to settle down instead of just roaming but you're not forced to do that boring shit yourself.

Building stuff should start as it currently does, but it should progress to placing blueprints of how you want things to be and then having builder NPCs dragging materials and hammering them down. That way rebuilding all your broken shit is just a matter of making sure your NPCs have enough materials and giving them time while you go do something better.

Yes, it should otherwise it's pointless. And I'm not even saying it's a good thing but if grinding for materials, weapons, buildings, etc doesn't actually give you victory then what's the fucking point?

It has already been established the point of the game is to ruin other people's shit. If you can do it from the get-go without any investment, than nobody will build anything and everyone will just roam around with a crossbow, hoping to find the idiots that actually built something, kill them and take their shit.

Keep in mind that grinding is still baby-tier game design to gate content from the players so they don't complete everything in 15 minutes or less, but having no grind and nothing else to replace it? That's even worse.
For someone that says he's "in love with game design", you still have a long way to go.

I agree it's the same with dark souls players that can beat the game without grinding by playing the game for months. Grindings is really not an excuse.

I think this needs a whole different approach though, because if I think about it it's obvious how this is gonna end: Since all these damn games come out early access, so will the AI and it will suck at first. Creating an AI that properly serves as a PvP replacement is hard, hard work and the devs will either give up half-way through or finish it waaay after the game was in its hype-phase, so noone will care. So whats left is to instead take control of PvP itself.

Again, the aspects you need to control stay the same: Timing of the raids and clan size. Keep this fair and balanced, somehow, and it will be alright. Here's one approach for that, a scenario that changes how the game works but allows its key content to stay the same:

Turn the game basically turnbased. The player and his clan start in a world where they first pick a location for their base, maybe by putting down some "core" into the world they need to protect and build a base around it. Then they have a limited time - maybe half to an full hour - in the "building & looting" phase. In that phase they are alone on the map with the wildlife and get to loot the environment for equipment and also build the base. After that, phase 2 starts: Raiders are allowed into the map and their goal is to destroy the core. They bring equipment from their "home world". If they succeed, they get rewarded with another building phase. If not they get raided again right away after the attack phase. Just an idea though, the reward could be something different. Also if they win, obviously, you have to start over from scratch. But on the other hand you get their equipment. Afterwards it is your turn to attack. That makes it a tough decicion what equipment to bring into the raid, as you also need some for defense. To balance this you only get attacked by raiders in their first/second/third attack phase when you are in your first/second/third defense phase and so on.

This also makes "survival" a true achievement and your goal becomes to hold out as many turns as you can, maybe with some cosmetic rewards for when you make it far enough.

Just gotta keep attackers and defenders balanced and shit's fair. You only get attacked when you are online because of the system and you only get attacked by groups of the same size, as there are different queues for different clan sizes. All you gotta do is find time where all of your buddies can play at once for a set amount of time and you're set for an amazing experience.

Of course it would still be a butload of work to turn Rust or any other game into that concept so it's probably better to start from scratch. But still. I dare to say this shit would save the genre.

I hate everything about this.

So you're saying that dumb investment of time by groups that have dedicated farmers should win over actually skilled players? Get the fuck out of here with that shit.

You are stupid

If nothing else, my life will serve as a cautionary tale to others.

That's actually an interesting design choice. It's essentially another game altogether but it's arguably much more fun and easier to keep balanced.

There's a small problem with groups too large or too powerfull to find a match for them unless you had that many people playing, but that's standard matchmaking problems. It could however be solved by allowing multiple smaller groups to raid together larger groups.

One thing I'd add would be scavenging missions where factions send their teams to a city or some remote location where they can find resources for themselves but rival factions show up as well. The goal here isn't just to grab the most you can but also to route the other party from the zone. This would give you a mission with high-reward but little risk of losing your entire base.

You could also have mid-road battles, where you can target someone specifically and they get a notification of that. After that, there's a "distance counter" between them and you where they get closer as time goes on but you can force a battle in open ground, driving them back if you win. The team that manages to reach the oponent's base gets to raid them.

And what the fuck does that mean? That you have good aim, good reflexes and you can use those to win fights despite having lesser equipment?
Great, now equipment matters for jack shit and you're an idiot if you actually try to get decent armor. All you'd be doing is making yourself a valuable target that is still easily killed by anyone with a crossbow and good aim.

Yes, I'm telling you that investing time to build and craft shit should win over "skilled players", whatever the fuck you think that actually means.
It's a bad thing that grind is rewarded that way but it's an even worse thing giving no reason to craft\building if "skill" still matters more.

That scavanging mission idea sounds like a interesting addition after you put a lot of balancing work in it; A competition for who can reach the lootzone fastest sounds like it is going to include a lot of situational luck, since all teams have to spawn at different points. Still, it's not impossible to keep that balanced, and would probably make for a nice amount of extra spice when the rest of the concept gets old!

shitter detected

Pathetic reply. But I'll BTFO you some more.

If I was a "shitter", I'd be happy with your changes. I could grab a crossbow very easily and spend the whole time ruining everyone else's shit with no effort even if they had full armor and better weapons. You failed even here, making a change that appeals to shitters, not base-builders.
Keep trying though, this is a learning process for a lot of people.

I have alot of fun bad experiences

If a cunt with a crossbow wrecks you when you have an AK, you're a shitter. Seriously. No matter how strong the crossbow is in terms of raw damage.

Crossbow takes several seconds to reload, isn't very accurate at long range, only has a single shot per reload AND has a travel time. If a cunt with a gun can't kill me when I have the crossbow, he's shit. It's that simple.

Don't get good loot if you know you can't use it. A proper AK player will fucking shred a crossbow player, no matter how buff the crossbow is, or strategic the player is.

Your argument contradicts itself. If they have better armor and better weapons you're at a disadvantage no matter which way you spin it. If you beat them and take their shit - you fucking earned it.

Here's an idea:

Power dynamics, you cunt. Do you understand what those are?
Crossbow vs armor&weapons, what are the odds of the crossbow winning?

If he can win at all, fuck getting armor, just use crossbows they do the job too.
If he can't win, every single change you're making does nothing.
And if he has 20% odds of winning, every single time he does will feel like luck, not skill, by everyone.

Stick this in your fucking head, "open world crafting survival games" should NEVER weight how good you are in a fight higher than how good your equipment actually is because you spend the majority of the game gathering said equipment, not actually using it.

Anyone that wants "skill-based shooter" will stick to arena shootes, tactical shooters, anything really in those genres that exists by the metric fuckton and where you can indeed test your skill against someone else on equal grounds, instead of relying on your clan, your grind and other bullshit nobody ever likes.

Your incessant focus on the combat itself shows you do not understand what actually makes this genre fun and ironically, you focus exactly on what screws the actual fun of the game.
But do write your plugins, try to get some players and watch as, no matter what you, it will ALWAYS play out like usual Rust servers do.

That's an idea but if players can't visit\raid other player's base, you miss out on that.
But having a mainbase in orbit and several small FOBs on the ground that are limited in what they can do but easy to build (and destroy) certainly would help.

The idea is that even scaring off a player is a detriment to them as it wastes rocket fuel and disrupts their stream of resources. Anyway, a player would have the ability to remote launch and land his structures. One launch type would take five to fifteen seconds and the other instantly, but is less fuel efficient and damages thrusters. If a player dies on the surface, landers automatically start the former type of long launch.

Here's how a raid might work:

Or alternatively:

Also the bigger the lander the longer the lit-off.

I should add that building surface only structers like walls and compounds would be possible, but they would be unwise to permanently inhabit them. "End game" might be building a giant static mineral collector that flings dust and smoke into the air while being very loud.

Nah fuck you, the problem with all of them is that they are heavily weighted towards attackers with defenses being constantly and permanently nerfed.

Which means there is zero reward for mass cooperate and timesinking.

That could work. As long as the player always had enough fuel to send landers down (but not necessarily enough to come back) it would be nice, otherwise you could get players locked in orbit without fuel.

You just said the same thing he said by other words.
Defenses are nerfed so people can't just make an inpenetrable fort that nobody can raid, which would make attacking a base stupid.
And considering that defenses are the biggest reward out of grinding, they are often nerfed so large clans of players can't make places new or lonely players can never get into.

Maybe a way to fix the fuel problem would be to sacrifice a lander for re-entry and having to land in water, or if if a player is out of options he can spawn in a one use drop pod.

Anyway, the whole orbit shtick was just to make semi-believable fluff for a mechanic that makes player buildings disappear when they're offline; giving players the ability to control it more turns it into an exploitable survival tool, adding fuel limits cheap abuse of the mechanic, adding automatic/manual launches with timers makes pvp viable while limiting the damage of raids, and all of these make the mechanic more seemingly in line with reality, or "immersive." It's getting more and more complicated the more I consider it.