Uberust

[recoil]

From Discord:

icycalm - 07/22/2017
Don't worry, every game will be better than the last, the way we are refining it etc.
If we can get some cool leaderboard up, perhaps with kills per player and team wins, it could get big
Proper competitive Rust
All I need is a few clan wins to put in a leaderboard, and then I can have a blog up that we can advertise
And by "clan" I mean "squad" -- Alfa, Bravo, etc.
I want to call the game "Alex Kierkegaard's Uberust", though I will mention it is a team effort
Without NighAligned's idea we would be in a pretty bad state, I think, but without my idea of a true episodic format we wouldn't even have rented a server (edited)
I think, so far, these are the two key concepts of the design: A true episodic format, so that the players are never absent, and no respawns, as in Siege and PUBG and every good PVP game ever
I just wasn't bold enough to think of the no respawns, because ever since PlanetSide I have struggled to imagine how a game of that scale could work without them
The trick in Rust, is that, the way we play the game currently at least, it is nowhere as big as PlanetSide, so getting kicked out for an hour or two is not such a big deal
Even in Rust, in the public servers, it wouldn't work
The only reason it can work in our server, is because of the episodic format + small number of players, so games are over quickly
It might still work when we have say 300 players, but the players will need dicipline to tolerate being kicked out of the game for weeks
I guess in that case you'd need several servers running Uberust, so that if one player dies in one server, he can join another one that is starting in a few days
But at the scale of PlanetSide, you get to the point where people would be treating every firefight almost like a real firefight, and they would just be sitting behind cover for hours blindfiring
I think a mod that nerfs the hit points of walls and doors would also be helpful at some point down the line
Defences are way OP in this game, and it has to be addressed (edited)

[icycalm]

I think in order to get this party started we need to set a time next Saturday, and go to the Steam forum and challenge a couple dozen clans to fight us. All we need is one of them to show in order to have fun. If two show it will be amazing. And there are DOZENS of clans in the Steam forum.

It would help a lot if we had a site to show them, so perhaps the best move would be to be a little patient for a couple of weeks, and just run some tests to finalize the server with mods etc., and then after I have recharged my batteries from making the Cosmic War site sit down for a week to make the Uberust one.

The other reason the site would be helpful would be due to the leaderboard. A leaderboard would entice the clans to show, and a win on that board would keep the winners at least invested in coming back.

I wish I had the energy to make the site back-to-back after the CW one, but I just don't right now. The moment I feel rested enough, however, I'll dive into it.

[icycalm]

I think we should go for the Clan Wars/Clan League format here too. I don't think that any clans in Rust have heard of the "Clan Wars" idea. They are just used to being thrown into a server to fight randoms and other clans, but without anyone ever winning. So the idea of a clan-only war with a leaderboard will sound enticing to them.

Robo, how about you start designing logos? And I will start looking for a template, and work slowly at it, maybe half an hour a day, and we'll see how much progress we make.

So, to start with, I'd say we need Wars and League emblems, and an Uberust logo.

[icycalm]

Fortnite – Battle Royale Announce Trailer | PS4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFsnKORnfF8

This seems quite similar to Uberust. We have to check it out.

[icycalm]

Though of course it's only 100-player, will probably have timers that will dumb down the game to 10 minutes or something, and far inferior artwork.

[icycalm]

It seems that our experience of ARK wasn't unique. From the BRN Discord:

Nicb1
Yeah we used to play it a while back. Got tired of the big clans on the map constantly wrecking our shit though
You either play with another hardcore massive group
Or cower in some obscure as fuck corner of the map and hope for the best

icycalm
That's because the maps in Ark are tiny, the playercap is small (only about 60), and the players have dragons with which they can traverse the map in minutes and find you where you are
In Rust the playercap is huge (up to 500), and you can only walk around, meaning to go from one side of the map to the other can take HOURS in the largest map (edited)
We tried Ark too, but it's massively inferior to Rust
We tried Conan Exiles, Empyrion, you name it
None of them are anywhere near as good as Rust

If you add to the above that ARK's combat is deeply unsatisfying, while Rust's is hella fun, I think there's no reason to think we'd have been better off making UBERARK than Uberust. Because even if we fix the above problems via modding somehow, we'd never be able to fix ARK's crap combat.

[recoil]

With the first Uberust completed, I'd like to share a few thoughts on how we run the server and decide who wins.

First rule, the last Clan tag standing in the server wins.

Second rule, all randoms are welcome to play. We shouldn't kick people that want to play and have no VAC bans, if a clan doesn't want a player, send them to other clans or let them loose into the island. We shouldn't turn away players that are willing and able to play.

Third rule, any tactic is fine to use to win aside from blatant cheating. Spies, alliances, and negotiating between clans are allowed.

I think these rules would solve a lot of issues I saw with the first game, allow us to use any map size, allow random spawns, would keep us from having to mod the game too heavily and would keep the spirit of Rust. In essence, the clan that can navigate and survive all this madness wins and gets the point.

[icycalm]

There is a pretty simple way of getting Uberust started.

First off, we could do it by simply playing between us. But there are not enough of us to sustain the game for a long time. So the only thing we are lacking is enough clan members.

However, attracting players to the clan from Rust has never been an issue. When we are actively playing, we can get dozens of new people in every week from the Steam forum, as long as we keep playing. Of course, when we stop playing, those people leave.

So the solution would be to play official Rust for a couple of months, constantly. It wouldn't even have to be ALL of us. As long as a handful of us were playing, perhaps on a rotating basis, we could grow our Rust players to 50-100 easily over a period of a couple of months.

And then, we simply invite them to a round of Uberust one day, at which point we will have more than enough people to divide ourselves into four or five nice-sized teams. And if the game is as fun as I say it is, we should have no problem retaining most of them for future rounds.

So the only question is whether we are up to the lengthy commitment the above will require: not merely the two months to increase the clan size, but also the running of Uberust in the long term after we start it (because if we stop it, it will be a bitch to restart it).