Balancing the Balance

[Actually Chills]

I voted for breaking even, I also think limiting the number of entities per person would go a very long ways, regardless of how "render friendly" you feel your build might be. Do people really need 500+ composters? Can't they just use.. idk, 10? 

Make them upgradeable in the way PJs are or something. Maybe each upgrade requires X composters (increasing exponentially) while increasing the number of slots or the processing speed, idk how it'd work but it's an idea worth pursuing to tackle the absolute insanity that are pickle farms.

Also; if excess scrap and NW is the issue, GE needs to be looked at next because there's something wrong with it. Multiple times throughout the wipe I've gone overnight with maybe 100~200 diesel in it and come back with 50k+ raw hqm. Other times I'll come back with 1/3 or 1/4 that - so the rates are scuffing somewhere along the way (it has something to do with the daily server restart maybe? that is the time I generally notice this happening). I'm just one person, if multiple people are experiencing this (they should be? it's not like I'm doing anything different then they are) then huge numbers are being injected into the eco.  

[Vircingitorix]

I am for 1:1 but I'm afraid as a gamer, people will ALWAYS find ways to min-max a nerf. It is just in our nature. 

Nerfing one thing will lead to a different kind of problem that hasn't been payed attention to. (ie. plant farming). Wouldn't it be more tasking for the server when players decides to min-max that plating farm route? x9,000,000,000 water droplet entities along with 6+ windmills and 900+ lights to cover 20 floors. 

Perhaps a compromise where we test "one route" for a couple weeks and see the data then do another test route and compare the data to help with the scrap and lag due to massive server entities. I'm sure other players can understand the testing phases to help improve the server environment.  

[Speciekuip]

Do we have a test server? I would like to see what a limit of 50 composters and 150 large planterboxes can do. Potato's and corn would get a value too if you have made the correct clones.

Other part is to complete remove pickles and tuna cans from banditcamp.

[perez901]

why not add a cap to how many composters a person/group can have and keep the timer doubled?

[Heisenberg]

I don't get the constant need to nerf something all the time? If you say that there is no performance uplift of whatsoever, then why change things? 

You want to boost performance? Maybe limit Windmills or ban them all together. They create much more lag, when flying around.

Or maybe make it a rule to force everybody to upgrade their TWIG monstrosities by just making them decay, whether there are wood in the Tool Cupboard.

I have played here (EU Scourge) since May this year. I like the players, Admins are allright, very little toxicity. I keep to myself, run my own farm, always upgrade it at least stone, later on metal frags. I even bought VIP, because I wanted to support this community. But please stop this. Sometimes I help new or old players to get some stuff, bullets, mats or whatever.

 

If you want to get things under control, just limit the number of pickles you can buy from the Bandit Camp. At the time of writing this, my time is 06:40 in the morning and there is 

1594018 pickles left in the bandit camp. Just lower this number to 1 million or even less and let the farmers keep farming if they like to play that way and no more "fucked up economy".

 

TLDR

1. Limit or ban Windmills.

2. Force players to upgrade from twig.

3. Lower the daily amount of pickles in the bandit camp.

[chugalug]

I am surpised that EZ has not followed other pve servers and added building limits. Some servers have foundation limits and some also height from memory. Would be tricky deciding on the perfect limit and may drive some players away. Would help with server performance in the long run though.

[TiffDust]

voted:Adjust pickle buy price at bandit to force players to break even, but still allowing pickles found in the wild to turn a profit.

It still allows the incidental composters (maybe 1 or 2) that a farm (fish/cloth/berry/bear/worms) can use to return fert, that don't run 24/7.
Limiting pickles in the world just creates a line up where a few get pickles and others miss out.
Players would find a way around composter caps and building limits, it doesn't address that it's very easy to make scrap with a small number of composters.
A base filled with tons of anything (e.g composters which are smaller than a planter and hold 11 slots) is going to take awhile to render in, hqm seems the worst... the more stuff the bigger the base tends to be.
It is much easier to use lgf to fuel HQM quarry for hqm to scrap, but 20k a day seems more reasonable than +500k a large pickle farm makes.
Best thing to do with pickles is eat them.   Thanks for reading my TIF talk.

[IRON]

Bye bye people ✌

[icysea]

I understand that I am in the minority here, but I liked the farming.
Not for the scrap, but for the other items you can acquire, like GP.  I enjoy sharing ammo, fireworks, etc.  Y’all might not like the farmers, but you gladly take piles of loot that we worked for. And we like sharing. 

It also gives me that “daily task” feel that brings me back at constant intervals.

I view the RustEZ servers as more for enjoyment and socialization, so I focus on the sharing and group benefits. 
 

If the size of pickle farms are the problem, then increase the speed of composters to make it faster, requiring less composters. Or, make it so you get something different for the trades.

There is already no real need for scrap on the server other than for making life fun for others. Why take out what makes you unique? The EZ part… :)

[CtrlAltDel]

Increasing the sell price of pickles is the clearly better choice.  As many others have said, if you simply increase the composting time, you'll just end up with bigger composter farms.

But please take a moment to think out the scenario.  If you adjust this, what becomes the new meta?  Fishing brings in between 1k-1.5k per hour, running tunnels brings in about 2k while its uncontested, but the next biggest farm will come from selling cloth which is effective for both scrap and net worth.  This will inevitably create monstrous lag-inducing structures and there will effectively be no change to the way things are currently being done. 

I would prefer to encourage gameplay related activities myself (ie, encourage players to shoot things, run monuments, etc), so perhaps the best answer is to set the vendor trade quantities at bandit camp back to official settings.  This should also fix the impact of the current yields of HQM from the quarry, as well as many other "if not this then that" metas that would arise (selling crude oil, selling corn, breaking other things down into HQM, etc).

Edit: also as others have said, increase the decay on twig by like 20x-50x.

Ctrl out.

Edited October 3, 2022 by CtrlAltDel

[Death]

10 hours ago, Heisenberg said:

I don't get the constant need to nerf something all the time? If you say that there is no performance uplift of whatsoever, then why change things? 

 

16 hours ago, Death said:

It allows players to easily farm millions of scrap per week with minimal effort, which has a huge impact on both the player's progression, the progression of the server, and the player economy.

[san]

Is the intent solely to slow down in game scrap acquisition speed, or to also slow down net worth gain?

[Death]

1 hour ago, icysea said:

There is already no real need for scrap on the server other than for making life fun for others. Why take out what makes you unique? The EZ part…

Scrap is used for researching, progressing through the tech tree, buying resources, etc. Scrap is a huge part of the economy. Also, the making life fun for others I assume means giving them a bunch of stuff. If so that does more harm than good. Sure they appreciate an easy start but you'll deprive them from a major component of the game, which is farming for the stuff you need. That will drastically decrease their motivation to play.

[Death]

2 minutes ago, san said:

Is the intent solely to slow down in game scrap acquisition speed, or to also slow down net worth gain?

Both

[san]

2 minutes ago, Death said:

Both

Got it. Would there be any benefit to removing oversize stacks again? That way one person can't take all of the stone from outpost in one go and hold it in their inventory until stone is for sale on the black market. 

[Death]

Just now, san said:

Got it. Would there be any benefit to removing oversize stacks again? That way one person can't take all of the stone from outpost in one go and hold it in their inventory until stone is for sale on the black market. 

We'd rather work to make it it impossible to do so than impose more tedious restrictions. While we're only focusing on scrap production right now, our plan is to touch everything and ensure the potential on yields for GE, quarries, PJs, etc, are balanced and don't compromise the value of certain items.

[Lord McGuffin]

11 hours ago, Heisenberg said:

I don't get the constant need to nerf something all the time? If you say that there is no performance uplift of whatsoever, then why change things? 

You want to boost performance? Maybe limit Windmills or ban them all together. They create much more lag, when flying around.

Or maybe make it a rule to force everybody to upgrade their TWIG monstrosities by just making them decay, whether there are wood in the Tool Cupboard.

 

1. Twig doesn't cause any more performance issues than other materials, Death destroyed that myth at the last "Town Hall". In fact, he pointed out that HQM is slightly worse than twig, wood, stone, etc.

2. It's simple really: MONEY = BIGGER BUILDS = MORE PERFORMANCE ISSUES. The more scrap you have, the more stuff you can buy (duh). When you have all the scrap you could ever need, that means you can buy all the resources/objects you want, build as big as you want, add all the X-Mas lights/Disco stuff you want, etc., etc. Rust is built to be a survival game, not a "Life of the Rich and Famous" game. It's not meant to have so many players with so many objects all over the place. So of course performance becomes an issue.

3. If it were up to me, we'd remove the purchase of HQM for scrap from Bandit as well. On US Pure we have performance issues too. I don't think we have a pickle farming issue (much), but getting rich by pumping HQM at quarry is definitely a thing. I'd say keep the quarries, fine, but remove (or nerf...) sale of HQM at Bandit, so the HQM quarry is used for building, not for getting rich. That would reduce the number of objects, and reduce build somewhat. I'm convinced we'd see a performance improvement.

Edited October 3, 2022 by Lord McGuffin

[slayersenpai]

As a first wipe player. I honestly never  used  more than 10 composters at once, that were mainly used for farming fert and enough scrap to get more pickles. Some scrap was definitely got. 

 

But flying my mini with very basic skills became impossible on US survival on alot of the map. 

 

Ive seen suggestions of limitations on composters, seems the best option but like other said, ppl will just go build another one somewhere to get around it. Shame. 

 

Voted to break even, the rate already is sloooow

[Heisenberg]

1 hour ago, Death said:

We'd rather work to make it it impossible to do so than impose more tedious restrictions. While we're only focusing on scrap production right now, our plan is to touch everything and ensure the potential on yields for GE, quarries, PJs, etc, are balanced and don't compromise the value of certain items.

I guess its time for me to find another server...

 

55 minutes ago, Lord McGuffin said:

 

2. It's simple really: MONEY = BIGGER BUILDS = MORE PERFORMANCE ISSUES. The more scrap you have, the more stuff you can buy (duh). When you have all the scrap you could ever need, that means you can buy all the resources/objects you want, build as big as you want, add all the X-Mas lights/Disco stuff you want, etc., etc. Rust is built to be a survival game, not a "Life of the Rich and Famous" game. It's not meant to have so many players with so many objects all over the place. So of course performance becomes an issue.

 

My current net is 6.2M. I wanted to get 10M or maybe 20M networth. It doesn't encourage me to spend it. Build bigger base etc. I just want to log in, run composters and pumpjacks, help others with trades (i'm not talking about giving new players M249s etc.) and go to sleep. If you break it for me, then i'm off.

 

Just set a foundation limit, like you have set sleeping bag limit. I don't get it, with these actions you encourage people to go elsewhere, where they don't get screwed by staff.

 

I just want to Eat, Sleep, Work, Rust, Repeat. 

[Stanx]

Yeah, go and do that with Pjs and ruin your cash cow. Makes sense. Agree with Heisenberg. Might be time to find another place since all the things I enjoy are being removed 1 by 1.

[Death]

3 hours ago, Heisenberg said:

My current net is 6.2M. I wanted to get 10M or maybe 20M networth. It doesn't encourage me to spend it. Build bigger base etc. I just want to log in, run composters and pumpjacks, help others with trades (i'm not talking about giving new players M249s etc.) and go to sleep. If you break it for me, then i'm off.

I imagine in your head you don't think you're effecting anyone else's gameplay, but that's not actually the case. Your massive farms cause client lag, and you wiping out the npc vending machine's trades to maximize credit earnings effect players farming modestly.

I'd argue at 6.2m credits you've already beat capitalism. There's no point in farming credit anymore, unless that's the only enjoyment you get on our servers which in that case we've completely failed you. I will continue working to ensure you have meaningful activities to do outside of an endless grind to inflate an arbitrary number.

52 minutes ago, Stanx said:

Yeah, go and do that with Pjs and ruin your cash cow. Makes sense. Agree with Heisenberg. Might be time to find another place since all the things I enjoy are being removed 1 by 1.

Profit is not a deciding factor for us. We've proven this many times in the past. If our changes impacts how you use our store then so be it. Our aim is to ensure balance and offering players a meaningful experience outside of standing in your base all day refilling composters for ridiculous profit.

[BRO]

As someone who has literally never built a farm in any wipe (participated in 3 so far), didn't even know this was a thing.

Yet I knew people around me were insanely rich - scrap + HQM + Diesel + everything and it didn't make sense to me until this thread.

I've spent the last 3 wipes grinding endlessly to get even remotely near 1m scrap or 1m net worth. I've stopped playing until the next wipe at this point since I realized that was a futile effort and I should spend next wipe most likely on another server with less economy issues.

Amassed about 6.9k (nice) scrap at any one time and that was solely from selling stuff with Vending Machines. Roughly 60k-ish net worth but I also used the money to buy things in the shop that otherwise would have taken too long for me to obtain or to research due to having a life and a newborn. Never really thought the Net Worth part really mattered, nor did I think having anything more than 6k scrap at a time for a solo player is even remotely necessary.

The fact that people are out here unironically hording a virtual number for sake of hording it is baffling to me. You're telling me people care about how much Net Worth they have on a server that will wipe it every 3 months anyway? Or the amount of NW/scrap you can stockpile in the first week so you can sit in your base and not play the game for the rest of the wipe?

At that point - I'd consider the following:

1. Foundation limits. You are allowed a total of 4 TC's. If you're on a team of players, that is more than plenty of space that you may not even end up utilizing all of by wipe day. This limits the size of farms unless their sole purpose is to farm, which at that point - why the hell are you playing Rust?

2. Nerf pickles to all shit. Nobody needs that amount of scrap. Not that easily. Rust is and has always been about survival.

3. Buff the shit out of Zombies for Scourge, All Animals for Survival - I'm talking there should be roaming, sprinting, 28 Days Later zombies on Scourge in packs of 10-20 or more. The kind where you fuck around and find out. Animals - wolf packs should literally be a pack. 3 wolves is a scouting party. 16 is a pack.

4. Consider PVE/PVP zones. Make more incentive to actually interact with the game. Some servers implement this by making Monuments PVP zones, or simply have random events that create a zone every X minutes/hours/etc in specified locations that is PVP-enabled. This could be anything from Gas Stations, Oil Rigs, or even Heli events. Get people out of their fucking bases because that's ridiculous.

[TiffDust]

Hi @BRO Networth doesn't wipe, ever.
 

[Postanou]

What about putting a cap on net worth? Like 500k or 1M and then anything above that is wasted? That way you don't have to tweak values/prices/composter rates.

It appears to me that too many players only grind to get that number as high as possible, and forget what net worth is actually meant for.

Waste of time buying and adding custom monuments to the servers when players only grind for net worth.

[sniper22]

So, I have been around for about a year now, and I will be voting to break even on Pickle Farming.  When I first joined, I was turned on to this meta of do this to max out getting scrap etc, buy this many stacks at this amount to H key spam godlike game play.  It burned me out so quick that I just moved on to try other things.

 

I do think we have a huge issue with farms the size of launch site, I've died several times trying to fly from point A to Point B only to find that some massive farm was in the path.

 

I would like to vote for a limit on the number of composters one could have, along with slowing them down processing wise.  This could entice people to try other things, get out of the base, or just get mad and play somewhere else. As we all know you cannot make everyone happy, but I am sure there is a good balance to be had.