November 26, 2023

Relearning the game

"Huh?! A post from J? What's he want now?!"

Retirement's not for everyone and there's usually a party right? (I'm sure there were a few celebrations at least). Likely some of you will have noticed that I'd been running around for the best part of this wipe without the usual pink name and you probably have questions.

So let's rewind a bit and I can explain.

As one of the halves of team Pi (put J and T together), we want to bring the best Rust experience to our players and that's one of our paramount objectives. Did we think that SV needed a bit of course correction? Sure and that's a good thing.

While T's been busy handling all the front and back end stuff, I've had a chance to play and by play, I mean really play. I'd set myself some objectives to see what the game is like at the grass roots:

  • No skill tree.
(OK, so I spent some points in Chad...)
  • No trading.
(...and I have a few vending machines up (I think a Waterpipe was the only thing that sold...)
  • No freebies (this was the easiest to stick to)

Why? I wanted to see what it was like for a solo player without any of the assistance of the plugins or community. You guys are great and it's what we believe keeps you all coming back, but we want to hit as broad an audience as possible - Chads, noobs and everyone else in between.

This has thrown up some tweaks to the SV progression and meta that we'll be fine tuning in subsequent wipes.

Implemented Changes

However there are some immediate changes that have also been made too:

  • ☑️Renaming items should no longer be exploitable
While it was fun utterly horrific and vomit inducing to test the horse speed. It should now no longer be possible
  • ☑️Black boxes for images should now be a thing of the past - This is caused when imgur has too many hits on a specific image. So a big thanks to @BadlyWayne for kindly hosting these for us.
  • ☑️ Turrets are back at MAXIMUM POWER or at least 1000 can be firing at you, or your RaidMe targets, at once, rather than just 12.
  • ☑️ Players should no longer be killed during the purge cycle.
  • ☑️ Facemasks should no longer break when you headshot your teammates but NPC damage should remain unchanged.
  • ☑️ Custom loot in washing machines, lockers and grey metal boxes have been updated.

Thanks to all the players that made use of the Reporting feature on Discord, this is the quickest way to get a resolution of something you might be facing in game and keeps a track record of any thing in the past.

Oh before I forget:

  • ☑️ Karen kills are now back on Player Challenges
  • .... and, speaking of challenges, /pc2 is now live for beta testing and all of you have access to it, if you'd like a different view of the challenges.

T says hi, and fills in:

  • ☑️ The slapping was a fun thing but we had to remove it due to weird teleportation situations.
  • ☑️ We had to tweak the armour break settings due to it breaking a liiiitle bit too quickly.
  • ☑️ Recycling speed has been monitored and adjusted.
  • ☑️ The timers in between auto purges has been decreased to not cause lag.
  • ☑️ More items have been added to have bigger stacksizes.
  • ☑️ We said we wouldn't release water bases until wipe, then I realised we don't wipe next week so.. It's free to use now and craftable instead of you guys being able to buy in in /s. They cost wood and metfrags and require a WB1 to craft. To craft them, hold a blueprint within TC range and press which foundation you want to build and place them like you've always done.

Anything else?

While you may know me for the God weapons and their puzzles, you will likely see less of these extremes going forward, at least until we've nailed down the core gameplay loop. I'd love to do more events for you all, and I promise they won't be too difficult (I've learnt that lesson at least). So if you have suggestions hit up the discord.

Currently we're toying with:

  • Simple square escape room - T and I have some massive builds saved with elaborate puzzles in them for 1 or 2 players, but we ultimately never get around to launching them. Talking 15-25 puzzle themed mansions. So we thought, why not strip it back. Keep it simple, just a box and put some electric wizardry in it hooked up to some puzzles in it. If you'd like it give one ago, build it and we'll come try it out!
  • Monthly BP wipes - Since this wipe seems to have been keeping people busy with trading, hunting for blueprints and chat has been super active and same goes for people and people have stayed a lot longer than they used to, we've decided to go with a monthly BP wipe. We understand this doesn't fall out well with everyone but with all the extra scrap just laying around waiting to be found it shouldn't be that hard to get to your basics, regardless if you're an oil rig farmer or a loot goblin.

Enjoy the rest of your wipe!