Rust's Developer Is Officially Tired Of The Complaints

Facepunch Studios have had to deal with a lot of criticisms over time due to the spotty development of Rust. The game started as a DayZ clone and then they removed the zombies and people complained. They locked people into race and gender roles that they couldn't change and people complained. Well, now the developer is officially tired of the complaints.

Over on Play Rust sub-Reddit Garry Newman, the founder of Facepunch Studios, made a diagram showing how there's a cycle of reactions from the community, where each new update is followed by lots of praise and then lots of complaints and then another new update arrives and the cycle repeats. Newman decided to lay down the law in the post, writing...

The post wasn't that short, there was actually some nuance sprinkled in there. Essentially Newman explained that Rust was always going to be going through iterative periods, and after each new iteration people would be excited about what the new update brings to the table, but then after that they would get bored a few months later and complain in the Reddit threads. Newman felt that the community needed to "get past" that point due to "wider implications". He feels as if the community is stuck in a loop.

He tells gamers that if they're bored to move on to something else, but that it's not very constructive to incessantly complain about stuff and waste time "hating" on it.

The interesting thing is that a comment just below Newman's comment tells a very different story. That comment explains that it's not people "hating" on Rust just to hate on it, but that different people like different things, and that if Newman truly paid attention to the sub, there's a consistent ring of complaints about several key features in the game. Now, I don't play Rust nor do I regularly engage in the community, but it is interesting that the complaints listed by user Arm-the-homeless were complaints I saw from gamers several years ago back when the game first game came out.

I remember back when Rust first launched there were a lot of complaints about how PvP was setup, and Arm-the-homeless says that a lack of PvP hotspots is something people are still complaining about to this day. Servers dying quickly is another issue I've seen infrequently. Now, Arm-the-homeless mentioned that complaints about raiding options were recent, but I remember from back in the day people complained that organized players who were well armed were basically operating an impenetrable fortress. Complaints back then circled around comparisons to DayZ, where more emergent opportunities were available to take down organized bandit groups.

One complaint that the post also mentions is that a lot of Rust players aren't fond of the grind. I can't speak to how frequent complaints about grinding is, but the Steam reviews regularly complain about a lack of ways to fend yourself off as a newb from more experienced players. This was something that was criticized back in 2013! At the time, Dean "Rocket" Hall addressed kill-on-sight mentality by implementing item degradation into DayZ to curb players from instantly killing other players. It definitely worked for the most part, but the user reviews on Steam don't mention any sort of preventative methods for killing on sight, and these are reviews from within the last few weeks.

So, in a way, the counter-criticism from Arm-the-homeless is true... there are some things people are complaining about that they were complaining about since three years ago that either haven't been addressed or altered to increase the quality of life mechanics in Rust. Whether or not some of these longstanding issues -- and the incessant complaints that surround them -- will ever be addressed by Facepunch remains to be seen, but Newman doesn't seem to want to face these repeated criticisms anymore.