Hello there, everyone.
This is, of course, an issue that every game with PvP and looting has had to deal with for a very long time. In reality, it's not a novel situation. Games like this in the past tend to have a niche following of very tenacious, hardcore PK and/or grief players that slowly make up more and more of the player-base until they're all that remains in the end. Either because the game itself is less exciting to non-PK's, or because the non-PK's grew unhappy with the power balance and stopped playing. I think that's something a lot of people, whether they are PvP-focused or not, will at least acknowledge.
This game and others like it differ greatly from other games that have this kind of problem in that it's a first-person game with a real-life skill factor involved in a player's success, but a lot of the same problems exist. If anything, because players are not especially limited by time-sink activities and numeric skill progression requirements, all of the factors involved in the evolution of accepted/expected PvP gameplay or PvP culture in-game that would normally take a while to settle have been exacerbated, and again the reality is that many people are ready to acknowledge that it's probably not going to end well for the community.
When I first read about the game, I was excited, and not in some happy rainbow, minecraft creative-mode kind of way. I imagined the game would sort itself out to become something like the setting of Gothic 1, but the more I read and see about it, it seems like it's sorting itself out to become Lord of the Flies: The Game. I'm not even going to say that's a bad thing necessarily, but survival isn't really the focus, and it's only the mental construct of the game's setting and description that set it apart from any other deathmatch style game.
All of that said, I think that people who really want to see this game become something great should probably agree on a couple of key points:
* For a game like this, everyone should play the same game. None of this <insert contrived mode idea here>. If soft-core looting is eventually decided to be the necessary factor in making gameplay more palatable, everyone should have to deal with that as a consequence for not figuring out how to fix the problem. No one would expect the official rules of various trading card games to require you to surrender your entire deck to the victor (or to the nearest person who grabs it first) upon losing a match, but that's what Rust currently does. Likewise, official PvE servers should probably only exist for testing purposes, their existence only serves to dilute the community, especially if collaboration-oriented players are tending to play on them. Thoughtful people cannot solve the problem of rampant PvP on individual servers if they just exclude themselves, this is what killed the PvP dynamic of many, many other games.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
* "Emergent gameplay" being a stated primary goal of the developer, I'm entirely certain that suggestions involving an otherwise unexpected consequence of arbitrarily "undesirable" behavior by players, like a bounty system, appearance changes, a reputation system that's pre-built into the game, anvils falling out of the sky to smite evil-doers, &c. aren't especially helpful. Likewise, the hand of some benevolent God shouldn't magically shoo the bullets of big, bad, PK'ing wolves away from Johnny-come-lately while he walks around with his Jimmy out, teabagging a campfire and screaming into his microphone about his boingloins. Good suggestions I've already read are things like being able to see peoples' names from further away and the like. Things that can be baked into the game to help players avoid bad situations without explicitly trying to force players to conform to a specific playstyle.
Alright, that out of the way, here's what changes I think would help the game overall. Most of them involve slowing the game down to some degree, but while still preserving the skill-based gameplay and not just turning it into a survival RPG.
* Several people have lamented the ease and power of guns, and it seems easy to me to understand why. I can't imagine that guns will exist in their current state of accessibility, but that said, I think that guns should not be craftable at all. Have you ever attempted to create a pistol? I promise you that you will not be able to create a serviceable firearm of any type with any degree of lethality within a decade, nay, your entire lifetime, if all I gave you was a big rock and left you in an inaccessible place. Even if you are an actual gunsmith. Bullets on the other hand...not quite as difficult, but still not nearly as easy as the game would let you believe. I would be fine seeing those crafted by the handful via the concerted effort of players. I'm not ready to throw up my hands and say 'no guns!' yet, but on a sliding scale from CounterStrike to Chivalry, we should probably start somewhere between Silent Hill and System Shock 2 in terms of firearm and ammo valuability and availability. Being able to kill someone quickly should probably be treasured and measured out judiciously by players. I can imagine many would avoid carrying their best weapons with them for fear of losing them to an ambush...you know, after the whole secure storage issue gets attention.
TL;DR - Make guns and ammo rare, many people already think this is a good idea!
* Melee combat should feature much more prominently, but more importantly, being able to escape is probably something people don't think is viable in most games, even in games with melee combat. Someone heavily armed and armored should probably not be able to chase down someone who is naked. That in and of itself would probably tip the balance heavily away from mindless PvP and slaughtering ungeared opponents. Can't afford to waste the bullets, can't catch up while carrying and swinging around a 30lb sword or 15lb axe. This also would encourage even-level fights, since players with weapons of similar types/weights wouldn't be able to escape effectively from each other...at least, not without dropping them. In before everyone runs faster with a knife joke. As for bows and the like, well, naked guys are unencumbered right? It's harder to hit a faster target, not to mention arrows could be fairly costly. I'm sure somehow the increased run speed will end up being abused, but a naked guy shouldn't want to stand next to a guy with a sword, especially if there's a good, broad hitbox on its swing.
TL;DR - Make it so people can run away from fights instead of getting an axe to the back of the head.
* Killing someone can be made a lot more difficult, and being injured could be made a lot more costly overall. As it stands, getting hurt non-lethally just costs you some bandaids and a minute to wait for the health number to tick up. Being injured from fighting, even if victorious, could come with some pretty serious debilitations. For example, in one of my favorite "survival" games, UnReal World, I successfully hunted and killed a bear, but made a mistake by repeatedly trying and missing difficult (but rewarding) head attacks and ended up getting mauled in the thigh and passing out from blood loss, among other injuries. My character, like you would expect to some degree in real life, was unable to walk for three or four days as he crawled around trying to keep himself from starving while tending to the wounds. He eventually healed, but it's those kinds of situations where you find yourself truly disadvantaged that make "survival" challenging and entertaining. This can be somewhat difficult to simulate in a first person game, but I feel it's a compelling mechanic. "Why not just die", you ask? Well, dying could be more costly than being injured, and come with the same kinds of effects. That said, you shouldn't be able to starve to death within just one game day, even if you exaggerate the effect of not eating in order to get players to pay attention to it.
TL;DR - Make dying harder, make injuries more painful to get players to want to avoid fighting constantly.
Well, hope it was thought-provoking so far, I'll think about it some more and come back later.