Facepunch Studios boss Garry Newman has some advice for Rust players who have grown bored with the game: Stop playing it. He acknowledged that the sentiment may come across as dismissive, but said in a message on Reddit that it's necessary to break the "ping-pong loop" that's holding the game back from full release. 

"I'm noticing a pattern, and we need to address it. It's something we need to get past as a community, not only because it's getting boring but because it has wider implications," he wrote. "We're stuck in ping pong loop. We release an update, you love it for a month, you get bored, blame the system, bitch for a few months, then we release another update—and the same thing happens." 

His concern is that the pattern will persist indefinitely, because the real problem isn't that the new systems are better than the old ones, but simply that they're "fresher." But Facepunch obviously can't keep overhauling the game forever, and thus Newman suggests a clean break for those unhappy with Rust. But he also asked that people who do end up quitting, or who think his attitude is unfair, give thought to "whether we have given you enough entertainment over the last three years to justify pocketing your $20" before getting angry.

"If you're interested in the game, if you play regularly and still get enjoyment when you play—we're definitely interested to hear what you think. We especially love hearing your stories, watching your videos, seeing your screenshots and paintings—all things that this subreddit has been very low on," Newman wrote. "If we want to leave Early Access then breaking this loop has to be part of that plan. We have a pretty good idea on how to push forward with Rust, but none of it is going to make the game more appealing to people that have spent their last 1,000 hours hating it." 

As silly as it sounds, it's actually very easy to find players with more than 1000 hours in Rust giving it negative reviews on Steam. Two of them are on the front page, along with a few 100-plus-hour negative reviews; one of them, with more than 1200 hours on record, came about at least in part in response to Newman's statement. It's an unfortunate reaction, but probably inevitable, too: Sooner or later, every game developer has to settle on what exactly they're trying to make, and no matter how good that final concept may be, somebody, somewhere, is going to be mad about it.  

This past week's Rust update brought some big changes to the way the first-person survival game works, including the removal of the XP and levelling system.

Developer Facepunch Studios detailed why players won't level up in Rust anymore, noting that it "completely changed the feel of Rust as a sandbox." Facepunch's Maurino Berry explained how the game "was no longer about new encounters and enjoying your time in the game world, but instead about how to level up as quickly as you can." This resulted in the game becoming boring once you had levelled to the max, making for an unsustainable gameplay model.

"New items we haven't even thought of yet would need to be hacked into certain levels, which would cause a never ending balance nightmare and item bloat (it was already ridiculous when you'd reach a level and have 12 things unlocked)," Berry continued.

"Eventually we'd like to never have to wipe and just have decay and resource management take care of the server, [but] XP was not compatible with this goal without all kinds of workarounds and hacks forced in like some sort of prestige system."

Berry concluded with the fact that XP negated the "'making lemonade out of lemons' feel" that Rust excels at, where your loadout would be consisted of whatever you could find and use.

Replacing XP is the component system, which makes everything craftable from the moment you start. This means no more locked items or blueprints. However, items beyond basics require the use of a component to craft, and these can only be discovered in the world components can't be crafted. Additionally, players will see the return of radiation, which has been remixed a bit. You can read more about the latest update on the Rust devblog here.

One note that Berry makes is an issue where the game chugs and pauses periodically. He says that if players experience this, they should press F7 and send an error report to the developer, mentioning "you're experiencing the same issue highlighted in the devblog."

I'm almost glad there's no first-person knocking animation in Early Access survival crafting game Rust if there were, I'd be sick of watching it by now and my virtual knuckles would be bloody and full of splinters. I've been knocking on player forts all night, dozens of them, in an attempt to go trick-or-treating for Halloween. It's not going well.

It began well, though! The admin for the Rusty Moose servers was kind enough to help me with a request: a way to spawn with a mask. Cognizant of the fact that I might die repeatedly, I didn't want to have to do any harvesting or crafting for my costume, so she was nice enough to place a few shacks around the servers, link me to the sleeping bags within, and fill a crate inside the shack with pumpkins. This meant I could spawn in the shacks, put a pumpkin on my head, and get right to work. Sure, I was completely naked otherwise, but a costume is a costume.

Time for trick-or-treating! Dressed as a nude man with a pumpkin on his head and nothing else on his anything, I leave the shack and head for the nearest visible fort, making almost fifteen feet before I encounter another player. This is a popular server without about 150 people on it, and not all of them ask questions first and open fire later.

I'm dropped so quickly I almost don't realize what has happened, though luckily I got a replay the next time I spawn. And the next. And the next. At least I can see the inside of my mask each time I'm killed, which makes the adventure a bit more festive.

I pick a different shack to spawn in, and finally get the chance to actually knock on a few doors. There's no answer on any of them, but all this running around lets me admire and critique some player forts. A common design theme seems to be It's A Big Box, but I also see a few It's A Small Box, several It's a Box With Another Box On Top, and more than one It's Part of a Box.

Also, in keeping with election season: It's A Wall.

At any rate, the amount of forts is impressive. The server was completely wiped not long ago, and I was a little worried there wouldn't be any forts at all. I was wrong: there are tons of them. Rust players certainly know how to build. They also know how to shoot you, stab you, and bludgeon you. It's a multi-talented community.

I knock on some more doors, but no one answers. I run into a player, the first I've encountered who doesn't actually murder me, and we chat for a moment. A few minutes later another goes hopping by, his dong flapping in the breeze. Gunfire echoes in a nearby valley. I see a deer and a horse and a boar. I knock on more doors, even yelling "Trick-or-treat!" a few times. Still, no one answers.

I run and knock on more doors. It begins to rain. A bald naked woman assaults me with an unlit torch, and chases me for a while before giving up. The complete lack of treats I've received means I'm beginning to starve, and soon, I'm dying from lack of food. Two heavily armed players run by, and one helpfully saves me from starvation by shooting me in the face.

I hop onto the other Rusty Moose server hoping to find less bloodshed and more snacks. I visit more forts, including one that looks like two Box forts climbed into a teleporter together and were spliced together to form a BrundleBox. I see a few wooden skyscrapers, at least one Octagon, and a homeless shelter (I presume for players who haven't built their own Boxes yet.) Still, no one is answering when I knock or yell "Trick-or-treat!"

I'm living longer there aren't as many hostiles here but that just means I begin starving again. At one point, I eat my pumpkin mask just to stay alive, but running around without it means I'm not a trick-or-treater, I'm just a naked idiot. I leap from a tall structure to kill myself, but wind up just severely wounding myself, and after I writhe around screaming for a while, I respawn, put on another pumpkin, and head out for one last pass.

After a long night of running around with a torch knocking on another few dozen empty forts, I see a wonderful sight. It's a fort, and someone's home: I can see a figure on the roof, outlined against the sky. Excitedly, I rush up to the door and knock. There's no answer. I peer up at the roof, then knock again. Still nothing. I look up at the roof again, just in time to see the fort's owner jumping off it to the ground, where he beats me to death with a rock.

Before he finishes me off, I hear him munching on something. In a night spent trick-or-treating in Rust, it's the closest I ever get to a treat. Happy Halloween.

I woke up naked on an empty beach, with nothing but a rock in my hands and an unlit torch. Before I d even had a chance to stand up, someone had bashed my head in. Just before my assailant finished me off, two naked people approached, killed my attacker and stood staring at me. While I waited for them to attack me too they looked down, dropped a rock at my feet, and ran away into the distance. My first minute of Rust was violent, brutal and oddly human.

You ve probably heard of Rust as the game that people were outraged about as it randomly assigns the gender, race and sizing of your character. This online multiplayer survival game has built a huge following and has developed wonderfully bizarre communities. I ve heard stories of warring factions who meet in a neutral ground ruled by a character who roleplays as the Swedish Chef from The Muppets, and people who wake up only to find themselves in a prison built by another player. It s like a social experiment with added nudity.

As with most survival games the formula of gather, build, die, repeat is found here. The difference that you start stark naked with only a rock creates an added vulnerability, and a feeling that you're trapped in the embryonic stages of technology. Resource gathering of course involves a lot of hitting trees and rocks and wandering about in search of food and materials. Unlike many of its contemporaries Rust's tree-chopping and rock-bashing has a sense of weight. This is a welcome change to the plethora of Minecraft-meets-DayZ clones on Steam, where gathering involves little more than pawing at various objects.

By gathering resources, crafting objects and killing either your fellow humans or wild animals you gain experience points which can be spent on new items to craft. Eventually you ll advance from the Stone Age to automatic rifles. Progress is slow but satisfying. However, once you die you can wave goodbye to your inventory and progress. Unless you ve managed to build a storage, ideally behind locked doors and defences, your stash is either lost with you or looted by your fellow players. Death can come quickly from starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, falling, radiation or being attacked and it s surprisingly brutal when it happens. Your character screams and writhes in pain in prolonged death throes.

While playing I have met almost just as many friendly players as those intent on murdering me, which can feel like a rarity in online survival games. While there s no singleplayer mode, there is still plenty of opportunity to focus on your own survival and settlement building. Of course there are still battle royale deathmatch servers if you fancy a spot of human-hunting. The lack of lumbering zombies (often a mainstay of survival games), puts the focus on human interaction and all the potential for friendship/betrayal that entails. Do you run and hide, or risk exposing yourself in the hope that other players will help you out?

There s an eeriness to Rust's world. Sprinkled throughout the green and often pretty environment there s abandoned industrial buildings that house valuable materials. From time to time an airplane will fly overhead and drop supply crates. These crates become a focus point leading to interactions between players that often end in death.

The mysterious planes and dilapidated buildings made me reflect on the chaos happening around and how bizarre the whole thing must look from above. Rust doesn't take itself too seriously. Before too long my character was running about the place with mismatching wellington boots and a pumpkin on his head. Thanks to a pleasant environment design and little humorous touches (like the pumpkin) Rust doesn t suffer from the brown overbearing barrenness that some other survival games do.

The environment isn t perfect however. I have seen quite a few trees, rocks and dead bodies floating in mid-air, and textures pop in and out as you run about. Slow progression can be frustrating as you can find yourself starting again from scratch regularly. Early levelling up follows a similar line each time so you ll be repeating yourself a lot in the early stages of character growth.

Fortunately the developer of Rust, Facepunch Studios, is regularly patching and updating the game. There are weekly developer blogs on the website that outline updates as well as what the team are currently working on. There are also regular blogs to keep players up to date on the rest off the very active Rust community. It feels like an actively growing product, rather than an unfinished game that the developer occasionally patches. For that reason, and the solid amount of interesting features already currently available in its alpha state it s one of the most fascinating online survival games available.

Disclosure: Facepunch writer Craig Pearson used to write for PCG up until about five years ago.

As far as Early Access survival games go, Rust is among the most loved. Although Garry Newman isn't currently working on the project, Facepunch continues to chip away at it under the supervision of lead developer Maurino Berry. One of Berry's recent additions was XP, which introduced a little bit of structure (ie, the permanent short term goal of grinding). Although the system was welcomed pre-launch, it appears to be conflicting with the studio's and the fanbase's longterm vision for the game.

As spotted by PCGamesN, Berry wrote on reddit recently that, in the future, Rust would not have XP at all. Fans on reddit and in the game's Steam review section have been vocal about how the system doesn't quite work, and Berry has recently offered his own thoughts. Basically, the system appears to mute the chaos that arises from Rust's previously more freeform and less quantitative sense of progress.

"As I ve said before, the XP system had huge praise until it was released, and then lots of people hated it," Berry wrote in August. "I m not deaf nor blind to this, and I m leaning towards the whole thing needing a rethink.

"In some ways the XP system is the antithesis of what Rust was all about: it forces players to do things in a certain order and takes away from the sandbox feeling of the game. We added this because people were bitching about how grindy hitting barrels and hoping for blueprints was, but I neglected to realize that the randomness could actually lead to some interesting situations and forced you to work with what you had."

Berry's suggestion that XP will be removed entirely seems a little informal, and the studio might opt to revamp it instead, but the fact that it's a concern is good news for anyone whose recent falling out with the game is a result of the grind.

The latest Humble Bundle is all about surviving, which means if you're keen on strategy, resource management and harvesting lots of... stuff, then it may pique your interest. The base level games, available on a pay-what-you-want basis, include sci-fi turned based strategy Tharsis, Early Access fantasy survival game Savage Lands, and the narrative-driven post-apocalypse of Kholat.

While that's a lot to love there for some players, the next tier is arguably the real boon. If you pay more than the average donation (which is currently $5.11) you'll get Rust, Space Engineers and Shelter 2. In my humble opinion, $5.11 for Rust alone is a pretty good steal.

The deal is over here, and elapses in a bit less than two weeks, so... no huge rush, I guess.

Marauding across post-apocalyptic lands and clubbing things with a rock just got a touch more structured. Early Access survival epic Rust has just been patched to include a wide-ranging XP system.

From now on, you'll be awarded new-fangled 'experience points' for battering things with rocks, harvesting, fishing, feeding people, and so on. In a bid to reward cooperative play, you'll also receive XP for things others accomplish using your tools or materials the 'Ownership' system.

"An example is a Fish Trap," reads the dev blog. "If you make the trap but someone else uses it, you ll get XP. If you cook food and hand it to another player and they eat it, you ll it earn as well. If you harvest resources and someone else uses them to craft something like a hatchet, you ll earn XP."

Interacting with others is the primary means of fostering multiple streams of XP. As you level up, you get a greater choice of items to spend your XP on, allowing you to carve a unique path through the game's upgrades rather than become a one-man building machine. I suppose it stands to reason that one person would have a hard time becoming both master fisherman and AK-47 designer.

Dev Facepunch warns that the feature is incomplete, so expect ongoing balancing work.

It turns out y'all really like your post-apocalyptic nude survival games. Rust has now sold just over three million copies on Steam, as revealed by Facepunch's Garry Newman this very morning. And that's not the only Rust stat doing the rounds: Newman has plastered a load of infographics over on the official site, and they're pretty interesting!

DID YOU KNOW, for example, that 48% of Rust owners have played for more than 20 hours? And that around two-thirds of sales happened during the game's first year of sale? Also, there's this picture of a bear looking down a shaft, which is pretty swell:

Rust is currently enjoying its biggest sale ever on Steam: 50% off. (Cheers, PCGamesN.)

The latest Rust devblog is here, and as ever it's an interesting read: a mixture of stuff that's going to be implemented, stuff that's probably going to be implemented, and stuff that maybe who knows hey wouldn't it be cool if this was a thing in Rust? NPC scientists are in the last category, I'm afraid, but if we all poke Facepunch with a big stick until they agree to include them, I reckon they will definitely include them.

Here's how NPC scientists will work, when Facepunch relent and add them to their game:

"I want these guys to have a weird, unsettling feeling," says Facepunch's Paul Bradley. "I felt like you could capture this by hiding their faces completely behind dirty face masks. I also think it would be cool if they somewhat ignored the player as they went about the island conducting their research, only really acknowledging you if you got too close and threatened them. It would be cool if you could hear them communicating to each other with muffled, distorted voices so you can t really understand what they re saying. Just to add to the creepy factor."

The rest of the stuff in the devblog is less exciting, but there are few gratuitous shots of digital bums and willies, if you're interested. Also some lovely sky textures, plus work on dungeons continues apace. (Thanks, RPS!)

Head over to the Rust store page on Steam and you'll notice a new option offering "Items available for this game," including clothing and firearms, that can be purchased for real money. It's the first (and, as far as I know, only) implementation of "Item Stores," a function introduced in the latest update to Steam that enables developers and community creators to sell in-game items directly to players.

The Rust Item Store exists, and will continue to exist, alongside the Community Market, and pricing will often be different. The Red Shine Pistol on the Rust Item Store, for instance, goes for around $3, but costs just under $5 on the Community Market; the Forest Camo T-shirt, on the other hand, costs the same $3 on the Item Store but can be had on the Market for 5 cents. That might sound a bit sketchy, but product descriptions on the Item Store very visibly include the Community Market pricing as well.

"Part of the reason for having the market prices next to the listings is to make it clear to people if the price is lower somewhere else. Items will come and go from the item store, but they'll be available on the market as long as people are selling them," Facepunch Studios mastermind Garry Newman explained. And while the Rust Item Store currently features studio-made items "as a test for the system," it's mainly in place for community-created items.

Newman acknowledged that the Item Store bears some surface similarities to the paid mods fiasco that caused so much upset earlier this year, but noted that the products it sells are strictly cosmetic, and they're also given to players through random, timed drops in the game, meaning that nobody will be excluded.

"I think the [paid mods] launch on Skyrim gave a really negative vision of what the future looked like. Instead of showing how it would lead to better, more supported mods, it showed how you were going to be asked to pay for the shit you were getting for free yesterday," he said. "Pretty much all the modders I've spoken to would at least like the choice to sell their mods. Personally I think they deserve to be able to make that choice themselves. It's not a choice that should be made by us, or Valve or by the neckbeards on Reddit."

He expanded upon that thought in a post on his personal blog, in which he said that Valve's approach is good for everyone, including people who can't, or don't want to, spend money on this stuff. "They hate traditional microtransactions because it s a paywall. But on Steam they play the game and get random drop items, and can then sell and trade those items on the marketplace," he wrote. "It s not unfeasible that a player will make more money selling items than the game itself cost."

Newman said the backend for Item Stores has actually existed for some time now, and that as far as he knows it's available to any developer who wants to use it. "Steam doesn't really partition features off for certain people, everything they add is there to be used by all developers," he said. "We're just agile enough to have gotten there first."

I imagine it won't be the last.