Official Hardcore Rust: Halfway through the mode's 1st month long wipe, servers are lacking players.

Though reactionary, this comes from a place of honest sentiment. I will pick up the game again, surely. That wasn't the point, the point is that I want the mode to be great and "shine" because it can. It just needs more players, that was the point I was trying to make. I couldn't do what I 'wanted' to do or have a "normal" experience because there weren't enough players to populate the servers whether people were ever "ESP'ing" or not.

I'm well aware of these things now, especially after making the video and looking back on the events and myself. I am not sure where the line exactly becomes blurred into more of an emotional response. The point was to demonstrate the process in which players could potentially go through that pushes them away from a server, and another one, until it's the game entirely.

There is a line between having a 'normal' and "healthy" 'PvP' environment and just killing the game by griefing players into oblivion, whether there are monetary motivations or not. I've seen some of the most competitive as well as 'toxic' player environments, they don't always necessarily go hand in hand.

For one example, in Asheron's Call there was friendly "gentlemen's" duels as well as the 'Darktide' server which was the opposite extreme. Darktide was full of 'Kill on Sight' PvPers in a game where you dropped potentially anything at all not 'bound' to your character. I also saw another end of this extreme on 'Darktide' where it made it difficult to go to any town at all to sell and trade your 'Pyreals' for paper note currencies with no encumbrance value.

It was really cool that it was such a challenge and danger, literally a 'gamble' to go to a town when you're level 20-80 or what have you and everyone there is lvl 126 (or above, later). There's nothing you can do when you get surrounded by people double your level and multiple times your strength, you just die and you drop based on the 'value' algorithm.

Not everyone looted everything all of the time, especially if that were that much higher level and your gear that you dropped was relatively 'junk' to them. Griefers though, will specifically target you until you drop your actual gearset. Just to set you back, and in the interest of fair and legitimate PvP for the server standard experience. You see very similar type of behavior in 'Rust' with looting of players, some people will take everything just so the other person doesn't get it, same concept.

The fundamental difference between these games specifically when it comes to Asheron's Call is that, whatever you logged out with you kept for the time being. The griefers could stay standing at the spot and many would, but for how long ultimately. You're just wasting their time at that point and you have the upper hand, because only you know when you're going to log back in. In a game where you can't actually physically log out, it creates a whole different level of griefing.

In this scenario you can wipe someone's entire progress with no immediate consequence to you. It doesn't seem bad at the time, but if you're goal is to have a 'healthy' multiplayer PvP game it's not necessarily the best strategy. Overly griefing everyone until the point where they don't play the game means that eventually there will be no people left for you to grief. Much in the same way that eventually, I got tired of not being able to go to any town and use NPCs/Merchants in Asheron's Call. That's why I stopped playing Darktide and mained other servers like 'Morningthaw' instead.

I just wanted to experience the content and play the game, and the regular servers had opt-in PvP. That way you could just toggle when you wanted to be a PvP character and you could get "griefed" by a max lvl 275 when you're level 200 and-a-buck or less. You would get instantly squashed, but I also get to choose when I get instantly squashed. And I also get to choose what I'm wearing when I do that so that if I am at risk for actually being looted, I don't lose my 'actual' best gear if possible.

Mouse:
Logitech G Pro X Superlight Wireless
400 DPI // 0.50 sensitivity in-game

Music Attributions:
[All music provided copyright free courtesy the YouTube Audio Library.
Tracks in the order that they appear];
1.) "How Far We've Come" - Cooper Cannell
2.) "Ngoni" - The Mini Vandals featuring Mamadou Koita & Lasso
3.) "Kobe Natoma" - The Mini Vandals featuring Mamadou Koita & Lasso
4.) "Ischia" - The Mini Vandals
5.) "Meeka" - Steve Adams
6.) "Decision" - The Tower of Light
7.) "Échappé" - Dan Bodan
8.) "On Foot" - Underbelly & Ty Mayer
9.) "Metamorphosis" - Quincas Moreira
10.) "Ouagadougou Shuffle" - The Mini Vandals featuring Mamadou Koita & Lasso
11.) "Dream Lagoon"- Chris Haugen
12.) "Lost in LoHI" - DJ Williams
13.) "First Class" - DJ Williams
14.) "Orange Chicken" - DJ Williams
15.) "Falling Rain" - Myuu
16.) "Natasha's Fall" - The Whole Other
17.) "Rene's Song" - Loopop
18.) "Magnetic Lullaby" - Amulets
19.) "Oceans, Rivers, Canyons" - ELPHNT