PSA: The sooner you realise what is happening, the sooner you begin to understand the state of the game affects all of us in the end
This is not snarky sarcasm or memes here this time:
People are blindly sleep walking into watching this game enter its entropy phase.
I don't know if its pride, fear of losing advantages or just pure ignorance
But truthfully, the game is deep in an entropy phase that is going to kill it in the future. Some of it is loss of identity, some of it is loss of purpose, some of it is just intentional enshitification through bad decisions or imbalance that feels good patch by patch but harms the long term health of the game.
In the end, it affects all of us as players of this game the same. From the lonely grub rat, to the leader of a 30 deep clan.
The effect on all of us is simple: "What is the point of continuing to play?". We all actually experience this as newbies when we first start learning and playing as a legitimate question, but deep into playing this game, it begins to come back.
I post not to actually shit on this game, but to actually get people to realise where its headed before its too late. Every type of player is necessary and needed to make rust what it is, every layer is part of the inner multi systems of this game, of which without them, the game becomes hollow and pointless.
The direction things are going skews that and is slowly eroding what keeps people enjoying this game.
The game plays for real when all player types interact. And as such, addressing the need for some semblance of balancing is crucial in order to save this game in the future. It doesn't mean a solo has to be OP against a clan, thats not what is being said. But the intentional changes made that only trends to the highest clan count needs to be addressed, it is literally canibilizing the rest of the game and its systems.
In short: the game is no longer a sandbox game, it is no longer truly strategic and no longer respects your time, even if you have everything and are on top. The experience is in "earning it", "fighting for it", "putting in time for it". We're beginning to lose that.
I'll leave you with these questions: We all love this game, and we're all part of the same community, but you don't want to see this game die a slow death due to people not wanting to admit things are too unbalanced now do you? People are quitting, cheaters are beginning to fill the concurrency numbers, its starting to affect new players now.
You may be having fun now, but when the day comes where either the game starts to feel boring because it just feels too easy every wipe or the game is too hard/near impossible just because you're not the right team size when it wasn't like this before.
That question from the beginning will begin to dawn on you once more: "What is the point of continuing to play?".
Thank you.
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Also PS: no group limit servers are literally the way the game was intended to be played. If you have fun on group limited servers, don't let this discourage you, you have your fun. But a honest acknowledgement has to be made here: non-group limited servers are default rust as intended. Every balance discussion should be aimed towards that alone, changes do not scale properly to group limited servers due to the game not actually be designed around them, hence the lower pop and concurrent activity numbers in comparison as wipe progresses, many people do not feel it actually gives the proper rust experience when played long enough, there's always the sense of "something is missing", "this is too easy", "server dies too quickly", can we stop pretending that isn't the case please?