I've thought of a way to do it.
First off, I miss playing Rust. There's been a ton of stuff added since we last played, and I really want to explore it. I also want to play on the Shadow at full detail. I've never played Rust like that, and it's a shame because the game looks quite gorgeous.
So, I propose to restart playing Rust on a weekly basis, on public servers. The reason we stopped playing is because we reached a point where we had done everything in the game and had no goal. But now I have thought of a goal. The goal is to create the largest Rust clan ever. The other clans call this disparagingly a "zerg", but that's because they are morons who can't grasp the concept of an army. The US has the largest military in the world, but what does that mean, that they are a "zerg"? So fuck the other clans, and let's build the largest Rust army ever. We'll basically be playing Rust like PlanetSide, which is what Rust is: PlanetSide with base-building.
Now, if you guys remember from the old days, recruiting new players was quite easy. All I had to do was make a few threads in the Steam forum, and I could flood our voice channel with new players all day long. The problem was RETAINING these players, because we didn't play often enough to keep them interested. And the other problem was retaining control and a direction for the group after it passed the 8-10-player size.
So, I have no quick solution for these issues, BUT THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT OF IT: we wanted a goal we hadn't accomplished yet, a difficult goal, to keep us interested and invested in the game, and now we have found it. Rust is a war game -- the best war game ever made -- and we have finally hit on the ultimate goal of it: raising and organizing a fucking army.
I mean, imagine how awesome it would be to have a 50-player army flood a server and wipe everyone else out, slapping our clan tag over the burnt out remains of everyone else's bases! I wouldn't be surprised if at that point the other clans started allying against us lol, essentially moving closer to my model of Uberust on public-run servers. Some servers would probably even ban us lol.
Remember that our focus now WON'T be the base we are making any particular week. If one week we make a crappy base that doesn't last long, but recruit five new good players, that week will have been a success. Remember my Uberust posts, where I explained that what Rust is missing is a leaderboard? Some kind of score to keep us interested long-term? Well... this number will be our army number. How many soldiers do we have? That's the number we'll be trying to increase. And as we increase it, our performance in the game and the extent of our dominion every week will naturally increase to follow suit.
I want us to start properly organizing ourselves into squads and platoons. The squad and platoon leaders will be long-time CULT members, and all the new guys from Steam will be in the green category on Discord. I will be assigning green players to you, and it will be your job to take them to a separate voice channel and turn them into an efficient little unit, while I stay in the base and direct the squads and platoons as if I am playing Civilization. You guys will be playing mostly Age of Empires -- especially when you get around 10+ soldiers each -- and the players themselves will be playing Halo pretty much, and STALKER in the monuments, and Minecraft when they are farming for us.
And as for Uberust... IF we manage to become the biggest clan, and all the other clans know us, it should be quite simple to talk to them and get them to come to our server with us, where we will be able to create a weekly leaderboard with special rules and mods and such.
So. My body is ready. Who is with me?
P.S. There won't be any obligation to play a set number of days a week. People can play whenever they like, or not at all, if they are burned out for a while, which can happen with such an addictive game as Rust. But the ideal goal will be, eventually, to have enough trained officers so that the clan will be operating 24/7. Obviously, this again is a tough goal, but that's precisely what we need to keep us interested in the game, as I explained.