Status Report #002

Cheating is still a huge priority for us. Thousands of people have already been VAC banned. Even though VAC is doing a great job, a lot of people think it's not responsive enough. What use is a hacker being banned in a week, when he's on the server annoying you right now? We agree. So we've been talking to a few different companies about other anti-cheat solutions. If we go for one of these, we want it to be super super lightweight. We don't want to force you to install an obstrusive third party program. We don't want to make you sign up for another system. We're also taking steps to deal with some of the more obvious of these problems ourselves. This is something we're hoping you'll start seeing the results of quite soon.. but please understand that we're doing this from scratch - and these things take time. The very last thing we want to do is rush out a system that accidentally bans legitimate users - and then have to unban everyone. There needs to be no doubt that a specific steam account has been used to cheat. It's important to realise that there's a lot about our anti-cheat measures that we can't talk about, for obvious reasons. So it might look like we're not doing anything about cheats. But please keep in mind that making the game as cheat free as possible is in our interest just as much as yours. It's our game, of course we care.

We feel like we aren't making it clear enough that the game is Early Access. Rust is still in development. This isn't 95% finished, like a regular beta. This is 10% finished. We've got the bare bone foundations of a game here. We're still developing it. This isn't just is trying to make excused for putting out a buggy game. This is how it is.

We really feel like we're letting you down with the slow release/size of updates. We've been trying to throw out weekly updates, but this isn't consistent. We're looking at our work-flow and trying to identify ways to get stuff done faster. A lot of this is us thinking to ourselves "is spending 2 hours tweaking the colour of that texture a good use of my time". But there's a lot of ways we want to enpower the community to help us out. These are things we're thinking about right now, and stuff we hope to be experimenting with in the future.

We're not looking for more GSP's right now. We're happy with the small group we've got. We'll make a news post appealing when we're looking for more.

We have a Trello up with issues and stuff. This is just for us. You can see what we're working on, and we're trying to post updates regularly on the cards so you can experience the progress. This isn't all we're doing, we have a private board too - to hide some surprises/secret stuff we're working on. This isn't somewhere for you to post bug reports, issues or requests - but you can certainly sign up and give us a vote on the cards you think are important or are looking forward to.

The huge attacks we were seeing on our servers a month ago seem to have stopped. We have reports of people attacking individual servers, this doesn't seem to be any more of an issue than in a game like TF2. Servers do start to suffer once they've had 200 people building stuff on them for a week or so. This is something that was impossible for us to test before we had 200 people that wanted to play. We are looking into performance issues, and fixing them where we're can. This is an ongoing thing.

We are blown away by the popularity of Rust so far. It doesn't even seem real yet. Our original plan was to release on Steam Early Access, without making a big deal of it, and slowly build up a bigger fan base by releasing regular updates, until we reached a point where we felt the game was ready for a bigger audience - and then start advertising it and bringing more people in. The unjustifiable popularity is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because we've sold 750,000 copies in a month and a half, and this is an amount we never even imagined selling over the game's lifetime. We've been the number one best seller for two weeks, we never imagined ever being listed. Rust has already made us 2/3rds the amount of money that Garry's Mod has made in 8 years - and we never imagined reaching GMod's popularity ever again. We've been the fourth most played game on Steam at points, reaching 50,000 online players - this is more than we could have ever dreamed of. But it's also a curse because the amount of people playing has kind of given us a sensory overload. We see all these amazing things happening, voices from all directions, ideas, bugs, cheaters.. and we're scrambling to catch up with everything. So please don't be offended if we're not doing what you want us to, if we don't respond to emails or tweets, if we're not administrating the servers properly. We are still adjusting our trajectory, there's still a lot we want to do.