The most exciting time to play in games like Rust is at the wipe. Everyone is back on equal footing, and there is a mad scramble for resources and territory as players establish a new order. By Monday the server population has halved, by Wednesday only 10 people are online giving their guns away, and by Thursday the queue has 100+ people in it once again.
Starbase doesn't wipe ever, which is more immersive and leads to deeper interactions over the long term and more significant strategy and politics, but it means we lose out on the fun of starting again from scratch. This fun is what keeps a huge number of people coming back to Rust.
My suggestion is to add small moons with a unique resource, let's call them 'comets', that spawn somewhere outside the belt, then travel inwards towards Eos and burn up into nothing after 48 hours or so. Maybe one comet would spawn per weekend, and every active faction on the server would need to fight to establish a foothold and set up mining operations on it if they want to extract as much as possible of the rare resource. Ships above a certain size would burn up if they get too close to the comet, to prevent established groups from leveraging too much of their existing power - the idea would be for everyone to start on the comet with a relatively equal power level, and establish a self-sufficient operation there without bringing in resources from the outside.
It would need to be balanced each week so that the comet is just the right size to accommodate the server population. Too small and it'll be chaos, too big and everyone will just mine separately in peace like in the rest of the game.
Starbase doesn't wipe ever, which is more immersive and leads to deeper interactions over the long term and more significant strategy and politics, but it means we lose out on the fun of starting again from scratch. This fun is what keeps a huge number of people coming back to Rust.
My suggestion is to add small moons with a unique resource, let's call them 'comets', that spawn somewhere outside the belt, then travel inwards towards Eos and burn up into nothing after 48 hours or so. Maybe one comet would spawn per weekend, and every active faction on the server would need to fight to establish a foothold and set up mining operations on it if they want to extract as much as possible of the rare resource. Ships above a certain size would burn up if they get too close to the comet, to prevent established groups from leveraging too much of their existing power - the idea would be for everyone to start on the comet with a relatively equal power level, and establish a self-sufficient operation there without bringing in resources from the outside.
It would need to be balanced each week so that the comet is just the right size to accommodate the server population. Too small and it'll be chaos, too big and everyone will just mine separately in peace like in the rest of the game.
