The KGB Oracle Forums Rust Server Update

Yes and no,

we can assume the wipes were relatively widespread (aka: it's alpha) so there ought be no appreciable fall off on individual servers without the entire game losing people.

It keeps getting glossed over that we had a slowly growing public population on our server until the SSR exodus. People now join and leave when they see it is so sparse, or don't join at all when they see 0 or 1/50. It's a logical fallacy to say "hey our server pop is bad after we left, so clearly it was going to fail anyway" As is saying "we don't want to raid each other and therefore we must go to another server"

Instead, the proper argument is "we don't want to raid each other, so we need a server (be it ours or someone else's) with a healthy population" That completely changes the dynamic of the discussion from this weird circular stuff we're doing here.

That leaves us with a question of: would we like to find a healthy-pop server (SSR in this case already being identified) to play on, or work to foster the old pop we had on ours?

Neither of those answers is wrong, and I support wherever we go. However, there are pros and cons to each.

The pro to looking externally is cost/administration - we aren't shelling out cash or time/effort to keep it running. The con is that we have little to no say in changes, even being friendly with Digi, he still gets to do whatever he wants with his server.

The pro to hosting our own is that we have ultimate control on events, mods, etc. The con is cost and effort of administration (the inverse of an external server for us to play on).

This is what I'm getting at with all the previous posts, but we appear to never quite touch on the actual topic - is cost an issue? is creative control an issue? If both are issues, which is of a higher priority to us?

I'm a control freak (shocker), so my vote is obviously with us being able to have our say on our own server (and if I was not back in school, I'd shell out to help with the server upkeep!). Other voices will vary and that is fine. Hell, dissent is great, not just fine! I think most/all of us will support whatever our decision is, but we can't just hover in this undecided spot of ambiguity.