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Post #1
Before I start, yes this is alpha and I understand that. Alpha is a time for feedback, both positive and negative/constructive. I have over 130 hours on Rust now and by no means do I think it is a bad game. I do have experience with the Unity engine but I am not claiming to be an expert where I make relevant comments. I will try and keep this thread short and as straight to the point as possible for convenience. I do not claim that my ideas are perfect and with so many opinions on the game presented here I don't expect many people to agree with all of them.
TECHNICAL/NON GAME MECHANICAL ISSUES
1) Hackers
I'm not going to write a wall of text here because no doubt you have seen hundreds of walls of text complaining about hackers. It is clear Facepunch are looking into alternative cheat solutions to VAC and I am sure they are doing what they can. It is however an undeniable major problem with the game.
2) Exploiters
There are many game impacting exploits which should be fixed as soon as possible rather then saved for later. The main ones at the moment are:
-Barricade exploit (placing barricades ontop of pillars, then placing a pillar through said barricade rinse and repeat to climb). While this may be "creative", it is a problem because to prevent this happening you need 2 foundations wide around your whole house with pillars in every single possible spot to avoid it happening. This makes all bases look really ugly and adds a lot of extra economy expense to base building to prevent a very cheap (economy wise) tactic.
-See, shoot and place sleeping bags through doors (Done by alt-tabbing as someone opens their door, then alt tabbing back into the game after they close it, this makes it appear on your client as open). This is the cause of around 20% of "someone hacked into my base". This is a major problem for obvious reasons.
-See, shoot and place sleeping bags through walls (Done by renaming texture files to something invalid but the same length/byte size, then it doesn't render in game). This is the cause of atleast 50% of "someone hacked into my base" or "someone shot me through my walls". This is an even bigger problem for obvious reasons.
-Seeing through trees. While certainly not a game breaking end-all glitch, this has a major impact on most gunfights in any forest. This can be fixed easily in Unity by changing the minimum draw distance on the player camera and this should be done sooner rather then later. If I am wrong and tree collisions or models need to be rebuilt then in my opinion that should be prioritized over new furnace models and the like.
-You are invincible to mobs while standing on a foundation. Mobs not being able to path onto foundations is a major problem and allows people to farm zombie animals in complete safety. I imagine this was a quick fix to stop mobs running through walls since coding pathing for buildings is significantly more difficult then nav meshes but it needs to be addressed.
3) Admin abuse
While many people say stuff like "OMG its the admins server they can do whatever they like just find a new one", it doesn't make having your base dry raided from ground to roof by an admin spawning 200 c4 on multiple "no admin abuse" servers any better. At least 90 percent of servers have admin abuse and it is the MAIN reason why server populations are dropping, rather then the lack of content additions. While admins spawning 200 c4 to raid a base may be "the admin is just having fun on his own server!!!" its simply not fair to people who expected a balanced experience with no admin abuse. Losing tens or even hundreds of hours of work in some peoples case due to admin abuse shouldn't ever be apart of the game if they choose to avoid it. People by all means should be allowed to have fun on their own servers if they choose to, however there needs to be a way of differentiating these servers with "the admin just having fun" and the fair ground servers ("no admin abuse" in the title means nothing). There should be a new category for each server on the server menu, which shows if the admin can use the spawn items and other game breaking commands. People can then choose if they want to play on a server where the admin could potentially "just have fun on his own server" and a fair ground server. Of course admins could still abuse their power with bans, but most of the admin abuse problems would be solved with this change. Most admins simply mass spawn the c4 and raid out of boredom rather then deep hatred or anger, if this option wasn't there then the vast majority of the admin abuse problems would be solved. On a server with this option (admin can't use godmode or spawn items) there would also be significantly more trust in the admin. Another issue which plagues the fair admins is them being called admin abusers for "using godmode" in fights they barely win or being accused of spawning c4 in minor raids, which really limits their ability to play competitively on their own server. With a simple choice when purchasing a server being access to the godmode, teleport and spawn item commands and with this choice being visible in the server menu this would no longer be an issue and 99% of admin abuse would end.
4) Desync
While occasional movement desync may be unavoidable and a constant point of development during alpha when they get to network refinement, there are a couple of things which should be looked at right now over all other areas of the game. The main thing which needs to be fixed as soon as possible is bullet desync. What I am referring to is when you get a hit on your client but the hit is not transferred to the server. This is visible against both players and animals and in rare cases it can sometimes be seen with arrows as well. The reason you can tell you got a hit with the gun is because you were aiming directly on your target and the blood splatter animation appears, which means that you definitely hit your target clientside, but the hitmarker doesn't appear and the damage is not inflicted serverside. This can occasional be seen with bows (mostly against red bears) were it is even more obvious as the arrow goes literally right through the target. Anybody who has ever had this glitch during an insane firefight knows how incredibly frustrating it is. I presume this might be the N-step fix being overzealous and stopping you from inflicting all damage for a second after a moment of minor packetloss, but I could be wrong. Just for reference this usually happens on moving targets, so it isn't the n-step fix doing its job as I am not ever disconnected/lagging at the time.
GAMEPLAY ISSUES
1) Lack of progression curve
Undoubtedly the biggest gameplay issue is the progression. The lack of difficulty in it, the randomness of it and the lack of smoothness in the curve.
Lack of difficulty-I'll start off by saying that every mob in the game can easily be taken down with the bow (starter weapon) and no mob in the game can kill you if you hold the shift and w key simultaneously (and don't run into anything). This isn't hard enough. Red wolves should be a proper threat and run slightly faster then the player. They also need a flat 50% resistance against bows to encourage guns to be used on them. Wolves should also inflict some kind of slowing effect (say 10% per bite for 5 seconds) which would make packs of red wolves and bears more of a threat. Bears need a flat 100% resistance to bows and need their health tripped. The drops for both these animals should change accordingly, however you should be able to recover the majority (90%) of your ammo from their corpses. While pulling bullets out of a corpse and them somehow being fireable makes no logical sense at all, it would allow animals to become bullet sponges without the loot tables needing a ridiculous buff and item durability would become the main economy sink while farming. We need stronger mobs for stronger players. There needs to be boss mobs in the wasteland area which are a match for 5 man Kevlar groups, hopefully with more interesting mechanics then just being bullet sponges. These should be the sorts of mobs which drop c4 blueprints, not a 1/1000 chance of a bear dropping one. This brings me to my next point, the randomness and the lack of smoothness of progression.
lack of smoothness in the progression curve- Right now for noobs we have bows, stone hatchets, hand cannons, cloth armour and wooden shacks. One tier up we have pipe shotguns, revolvers, leather armour and metal hatchets. The last tier has a multitude of military grade weapons among other stuff. The problem here is the stages aren't defined enough, there is not enough content and the top tier content is too easily acquirable/achievable. While a lot of this simply comes down to it not being implemented early in alpha, we need a lot more noob/cavemen tier gear (spears ect) and everything else needs to be much harder to achieve. No doubt the funnest hour on a server is the first one where people are forced to do ghetto base defense against ghetto raiders. This stage should last a couple days rather then half an hour. While the tiers should be more defined, I have my own opinions on how this should be done and I will leave it for a separate suggestion thread. Also the loot distribution mechanics need to be changed as right now the games progression is more luck based then skill based...
randomness of progression- You can have access to c4, explosive and m4 bps in the first hour or it could take you 5 days. Obtaining a c4 bp shouldn't be farming incredibly easy mobs for 5 mins (like my last server) to 5 hours until a lucky drop occurs. Obtaining guns shouldn't be running around an unprotected area looting crates for 5 mins to 5 hours until you get the drops you want. Obtaining the top tier content should be difficult, rather then doing something easy for a varied period of time.
2) Lack of ownership mechanic
While some people reading this header may expect me to write something incredibly carebear, this isn't really the case. I know Garry has mentioned a couple things about this on Trello but this is my take on the issue and it seems nothing is being done about it atm. There is nothing balanced about ruining a 234567 wood base with a 60 wood ceiling in the place of a staircase. Although if replacing someones doors and claiming their house is alright is a highly debated topic, I think we can all agree it is far too cheap to simply sabotage someones base at the moment. I think a good compromise is allowing people to destroy any object placed on their own foundation with around 100 pickaxe hits regardless of if its properly damageable in game and disallowing people to connect foundations to your own, or making them "owned" by the same person. This way you with some effort you can reclaim your house even if griefing has occurred (ceilings/pillars in stairwells) , but it still allows people to inflict serious damage and assert territorial dominance.
3)Lack of permanence/character progression
When a character that has been on a server for a month dies and respawns in the wild, the only difference between him and a newspawn is the crafting items availability. While I'm not saying a system where the person who has stared at the screen for the longest wins should be implemented, there needs to be a bigger difference between newspawns and server veterans who have just been raided. If character progression was almost as important as item progression then being raided would be far less painful and that feeling of starting over would not be as bad, without effecting the feeling of triumph for the raiders. Stats and character progression which add convenience rather then combat advantages would make the game remain skill based and add a layer of RPG depth to the game. Things like the more wood you have cut the more you get get out of a wood pile; and the more wood walls you craft the cheaper they're to craft. These effects wouldn't be too strong, but they would allow people with more progressed characters to get back into the game faster after being raided. For example if you had already made a giant wood base but were forced to relocate you would be able to get 1.5x as much wood per wood pile and build wood walls for 3/4 of the price. Most of this paragraph is merely my opinion and I am sure a large amount of people want even the current rpg aspects removed rather then more added.
4)Lack of combat balance and Lack of momentum based movement system
The short time to kill due to abundance of military weapons is the main problem here. Although this is an fps, instant kills and combat lasting 1 second doesn't work in full loot pvp games. Getting killed without a chance to react and losing hours of progress without a chance to react is a terrible mechanic in full loot games. Everything needs to be weaker and healing needs to be slower. While getting a jump on someone should certainly come with an advantage, as I've already mentioned losing hours worth of work with absolutely no chance to react simply sucks. Although time to kill in an fps can never be as long as a game without guns, it needs to be extended to suit the games context in my opinion . You shouldn't be able to move while bandaging or using a medikit and it should be a 10 second process interrupt-able by any damage (other then bleeding). Combat needs to feel more personal, more brutal and more solid. The main thing preventing this happening is a lack of a momentum based movement system. Anybody can hold W and shift while shaking their mouse and become a dodging god due to poor hit detection and no limits on turn speed and velocity transfer. People should be able to shake their mouse as they please with no artificial limits (think Skyrim style artificial sensitivity limits while sprinting) to prevent fast turning , but turning your mouse 90 degrees shouldn't transfer all your velocity in that direction instantly. Similarly turning your character 180 degrees should make him slide a bit in his original direction as he turns around and then he should slowly accelerate up to full speed (rather then do an instant spin on the spot and maintaining full speed). Hitting someone in the head should make his aim flinch violently, hitting someone in the leg should slow movement speed by an equal amount as the damage they do. Each hit needs to feel more impactful and satisfying (despite being less damaging), but finding a good balance between skill, speed and time to kill would be difficult no doubt. This might be able to be quickly fixed in Unity by reducing the friction and changing the acceleration curves to be more exponential for the player controller. Two more problems preventing the combat becoming more personal is the lack of character identity and the poor melee mechanics.
5) Poor melee combat mechanics and lack of player collision
Players being able to run through each other is a major issue, especially in melee combat and other close range battles where people continuously run through each other to avoid hits and it becomes a contest of who can more effectively abuse that (something I am very good at in rock/melee/shotgun fights lol). A quickfix for this in unity would be applying a capsule collider to players rendered client side. The second thing I wanted to cover in this paragraph was the melee combat mechanics. They simply need more depth, a melee battle should ideally be a display of skill rather then a display of clicking/lag abuse. I have my own idea about how melee should be done (which I might cover in another thread) but I would think the poor melee mechanics of the current builds are simply because it hasn't received any quality development time yet. I don't imagine the game will ever have a combat system like chivalry or mount and blade, but if more focus comes to the "caveman" section of the game then we will need a lot of focus on the melee combat.
6)Lack of identity
The major issue here is everybody's character looks the same, all similar structural bases look the same and all Kevlar groups look the same. We need more personalisation for our characters and houses. We need armour dyes to identify with groups (would make group combat much better), we need character customization (coming soon?) and we need visual options for our bases. Two 3x3x10 wood bases should look totally different. Visual decorations may not be important for immediate survival but I believe they would add a massive layer of depth to the game. We need flags and many other ways to make our bases visually unique.
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Anyway, if you read this far then thanks, I will likely add more to it soon or as the game progresses or my ideas change.
edits: Lots of shuffling/reformatting.
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As soon as you mentioned "Admin Abuse" I stopped reading.
Nothing your going to say after that has much meaning, you've already proven yourself to have a complete lack of understanding of the dynamics of game servers and how to run them. You may have shit ton of hours in game, but that doesn't make you qualified to comment on how to run a server.
So please stick to "GAMEPLAY ISSUES" those are more up your ally.
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I've run multiple servers across multiple games. Please read the paragraph before making a comment about said paragraph.
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That doesn't mean you were any good at it. Find a stronger argument.
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Here come the gold members with inferiority complexes who need to prove their dominance even on a feedback thread. As I said, read my paragraph before making a comment about said paragraph. I never claimed to be some kind of expert at running servers, all I asked was that he read what I wrote before commenting on what I wrote.
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I own a server and I have to disagree about your take on admin abuse. As an admin I have "root" access to the entire server. This is what being an admin means. What a server need to do is setup Rust++ or similar and grant limited admin to other players. There will ALWAYS be at least 1 admin that has access to everything and this is the way it should be.
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Like I said in the paragraph about admin abuse, people would still be open to running servers however they like. There would simply be an option for people to purchase servers without access to these commands. I don't see how you can disagree with more options.
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That just doesn't make any sense from an administrative standpoint. I don't know what kind of admin would want to buy a server where they have limited permissions. The key here is you need to FIND a good admin and server. Once the game is more flushed out we will see server communities forming and servers that can be trusted. The state of alpha does not allow this to happen yet because of many underlying circumstances like bugs, exploits, hacks, limited spectating etc etc
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It would be a server where the admin wouldn't be a gamemaster of a sort, but another player who also shares the dream of a hacker free, yet abmin abuse free vanilla server (which doesn't seem to exist). Its the type of server I would buy. Like I said, the lack of this option hurts admins as players as well. Almost every gunfight I have ever seen involving an admin winning results in godmode accusations.
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Sounds like distrust and bad sportsmanship. That sounds a lot like the "you killed me therefore you must be hacking" mentality. I don't think the game should have its features stunted because of childish tendencies like that.
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The admin abuse is kinda bullshit.. There are ENOUGH servers without abuse, it's just the people that yell abuse most of the times and everyone assumes it's true, even without any proof.
Not even to mention that admin abuse isn't the #1 factor that ruins the game not even close, there are so many servers without the admin actually doing anything besides banning and acting properly as he should.
Cheaters, that's a problem.. No content (eventually) that's a problem.
Admin "abuse" is annoying yeah it might be, but just look for a server, if you join ask around get some knowledge instead of thinking "oh it's fine, í'll just ragequit if they abuse"
Alot of people cry and yell at the admins which is super annoying, even if the admin doesn't do anything wrong they simply assume and find a way to ruin a reputation of the server because they got owned or raided or anything..
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That was kind of the point, once you made the Admin Abuse statement I stop reading. Cause frankly I lost respect for your opinion right at that point, so why would I want to read more in this case?
Admin Abuse is just this simple, find a server with solid adult admins. If the one your playing on doesn't, then move, don't play there any more. No harm no foul. You are entitled to nothing.
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Saying "here come the gold members" doesn't mean anything, it's just a way for you to brush our comments under the rug. I payed for gold because I wanted to support the company and I felt like postal deserved a couple bucks for dealing with the shitheads in this subforum.
All of this has been suggested before. Your thread is no different, no better, no worse than all of the others.
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I'm sure there are ways to combat admin abuse, probably not so much for item spawning but at least for god mode you could make a clear indication to the other players god mode has been enabled or at least make it so you can't engage players if you have it enabled.
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And I think you mean "superiority complexes".
No one wants an inferiority complex.
Damn, automerge has failed me.
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No, I mean inferiority. People with superiority complexes do not give the slightest rats ass about what people they perceive to be below them think. People with inferiority complexes desperately care about the opinions of others and as such need to assert their superiority in every way possible. These people desperate to be better then others on an online discussion board certainly don't have superiority complexes. Thats enough of this psychology bullshit anyway.
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Sounds like a good idea to me.
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I don't really care for your gold member status and you don't need to defend it, but it seems most gold members on these boards are quite simply dickheads. I'm sure some of them are likely great as well.
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It is distrust, but the distrust is totally justified. I've played with clans which are the admins and I've played against them. I've seen godmode in gunfights (even accidentally some times) from both sides. It certainly happens and there is no doubt about it. As I've already said, it would simply be another option for admins who want to run their server as a vanilla server and play on said server without there being a chance of admin abuse.
Agree x 4
Late x 3
Winner x 3
Friendly x 1
Dumb x 7
Zing x 1
Disagree x 1
Funny x 1
