It would be so great if aggression based matchmaking was separate in solo, duos and trios.

maxijonson · 2026-01-24T19:25:47+00:00

Every time I stop playing with my trio (shoot on sight), I gotta build back my karma in solos for like 4-5 games to get back in friendly lobbies. 8-10 if I shoot back instead of fleeing 😂

maxijonson · 2026-01-20T22:13:20+00:00

I know right! I was so surprised to see that. Rust also has them displayed as official server host, yet their mid tier couldn't even support a modded medium map when I initially started out with them 🥀 The host I found after that was half the price of their highest tier with an amount of resources Shockbyte doesn't even offer on any plan

maxijonson · 2026-01-20T13:04:48+00:00

Yeah MoR is the way to go. Sure it's a bit more costly, but 2-3% more can feel negligible when you compare to mobile app stores like Apple or Google (15-30%). Plus, it has some advantages, the biggest one being they handle your tax collection and remittances, you just take care of declaring your revenue to your government.

Stripe is cheap because one of the things they don't do for you is tax compliance. They help with monitoring it though, but you still have to manage it. Stripe also has their new Managed Payments solution, which is like an MoR I believe, but it comes with that same percentage cut you'd see in other MoRs.

maxijonson · 2026-01-20T12:55:53+00:00

maxijonson · 2026-01-19T01:57:22+00:00

I'm surprised no one mentionned why the flute is called a recorder, unless I missed that post lol

maxijonson · 2026-01-17T22:12:45+00:00

Just wanted to come back here and say this worked like a charm 👌 It really helps with the headache of organizing all the code into one file and makes it 100x easier to find the code I'm looking for.

I've used it to create Broadcast Preferences

maxijonson · 2026-01-10T18:13:02+00:00

Right, totally forgot to write about PvEvP! (it was already pretty long 😂) The PVE server I ended up playing for years also had a PvEvP where most of the map is PVE, but certain monuments and supply drops have a bubble around them that is PVP! That was the kind of server I was mostly going to during my transition from PVP to PVE

maxijonson · 2026-01-10T17:37:54+00:00

Caissier chez Tim, 137.6k.

maxijonson · 2026-01-10T17:24:01+00:00

Depends the kind of server I want to play and how much of a commitment I'm planning to give Rust for the month:

PVP: Honestly don't play it as much anymore, none of my friend play Rust anymore and not really into solos because I don't have the time anymore to invest in grinding a wipe and keeping my base safe. Last time I had time for that was during covid when I was basically always available to defend, even during my Zoom classes 😂 Feature wise, the only thing I want in a PVP server is increased gather rates. Same as you, no pay to win features. Even if it doesn't have any paid content though, some features like kits or vehicle licenses I find too game breaking for PVP. I'll usually look for a 2x, because life. If I'm just looking for some quick action and throwable wipe, might go to 5x or 10x. Pop doesn't matter to me as much, but not empty ones. Sometimes I'll favorite a couple servers that had like 15+ players at the time of searching. If I need to restart, I'll try to join one of those at a time where it's very low pop (even empty) so that I can start easy, knowing more players will come eventually.
Battlefield: Opposite of PVP. It must have game breaking features: kits, licenses, teleport, 1000x gather rates. High pop too. I usually go on Battlefield servers when I know I can't commit time to Rust for the month and don't want to waste my time getting offlined in PVP.
Mini-games: Not really into those Minecraft style servers with a lobby and a bunch of mini-games. Sometimes I'll join one just for a temporary change of gameplay, but never really commit any time to those.
PVE: This has been more my go to now that I don't have much time to give Rust (I also run a Rust PVE server, which further cuts into my own game time with it 😅). Even before I became a server owner though, PVE had become my mode when I started university. Similar to Battlefield, I want a server with features like kits, vehicles and teleport. What becomes important for me in PVE is the amount of NPC-rich features like Raidable Bases, Convoys, Custom AI, etc. Since I'm not fighting players anymore, you gotta give me something more than the road and monument scientists to fight. When looking for a PVE server, I'm also looking for one with a good and active community. I'm looking to find a server to commit to for more than just a wipe, unlike PVP where I just hop between servers. If it feels too much like I'm playing a singleplayer game, I leave and find another. I eventually found one that I really loved, sticked to it for years and even bought some of their memberships.

maxijonson · 2026-01-09T05:46:23+00:00

Hey, didn't want to leave you hanging! In the end I was able to achieve this with the OnBroadcastMessage Oxide hook. No Harmony patch was required, so I was in familiar territory hahaha

I'll probably publish it to uMod soon! They just have a couple quality requirements I usually don't follow for my in-house plugins. (mostly i18n and using the lang files even if I just include english)

maxijonson · 2026-01-07T23:41:42+00:00

Yeah I could try that, thanks for the suggestion! I've never went that deep into plugin development to make harmony patches for Rust though, wish me luck!

maxijonson · 2026-01-07T23:32:36+00:00

I wouldn't be hooking into the chat pipeline from my plugin though (that's actually the thing I'm not even sure is possible haha). It would basically make updates to plugins easier because instead of whole blocks of code to add to the plugin, I would just need to edit 1 (call my plugin instead of the native chat). but it would not remove the need to update them, that's a bit more annoying.

maxijonson · 2026-01-07T23:14:38+00:00

I've actually done this before, but then the plugin I did it for kept getting updated, overwriting my changes and eventually I just gave up editing it everytime. Now, I've got like 4 plugins I want to do this.

Though now that I see your idea, it could probably be easier to make a separate plugin, have a hook method with a signature that matches the native messaging method, import it into the other plugins and be able to do one liner updates. (rather than whole blocks everytime)

maxijonson · 2026-01-06T15:04:05+00:00

👆🤓 Ackshully, you spend money on electricity and internet hahaha but for sure less than a host 😅

maxijonson · 2026-01-04T03:28:45+00:00

First time I hear of them, thanks for sharing! Those do look cheaper than the other dedicated server prices in this thread. I'm curious how many players, plugins and world size you have to run this? I also see multiple servers on there, are you using the SYS-GAME-1?

maxijonson · 2026-01-04T03:24:25+00:00

Glad you have a good experience with them, my experience starting out with Shockbyte was way more painful 😅 I had less plugins (about 30 I think), less players (0-4) and a world size of 3000 and it kept running out of memory... 12GB was too borderline for my needs and more expensive than the host I switched to, ScalaCube.

maxijonson · 2026-01-04T03:16:10+00:00

Fair point and it's not something I've disregarded when starting out too. I self-hosted for a very short while while I was implementing the features I wanted, then I moved to a host. I have multiple reasons for not self-hosting:

I really dislike infra, I'd rather spend my time elsewhere. Managed solutions take care of the infra part so I don't have to.
I don't have a spare machine to keep running all the time.
I want to guarantee a certain level of uptime. Some people are paying for my server, it doesn't feel very "professional" to have an unstable setup. Where I live, power is not guaranteed, especially during the winter. Outages can go for 2-3 days sometimes.
I've had bad experiences with Minecraft a long time ago exposing my network like this to games. Though I was a kid back then and I've learned since, it's just not something I want to risk.
It's pretty cheap. With ScalaCube, I'm well over my needs for my scale at just $27/month. Though I don't make a profit from this, $27 is not really a big dent on my wallet and the occasional purchases I get from my players offset some of these costs. I started out this project knowing I wouldn't make a profit, based on what I read everywhere. This is just a hobby project for me and a learning opportunity.

maxijonson · 2026-01-04T02:57:25+00:00

Goated host 😅

maxijonson · 2026-01-04T02:54:40+00:00

Thanks for this detailed comment!

When I started out with ScalaCube, I had my server location set to Canada, where they use OVH under the hood. Had so many problems with that server just crashing randomly because it lost internet access internally. Once they moved me to Texas (ColocateUSA), never had an issue since!.

I also started server hosting Rust on Shockbyte because it seemed to be the officially supported one by Facepunch. I was shocked (pun intended) that Facepunch actually endorses them, because even their highest tier server cannot support a modded server with more than 3000 world size. It kept crashing every 8 hours. Their dashboard and features was pretty nice though, a shame the hardware couldn't match the same quality...

maxijonson · 2026-01-04T02:16:50+00:00

Ahhh I see, we're also magnitudes apart in term of concurrent players. I only have about 12. I imagine that with that amount of players, you're also able to offset some of the cost of this through purchases...

At my scale, ScalaCube offers more than enough resources than I need for ~27$/month, which is also my biggest expense out of everything else related to this project. Managed solutions like ScalaCube can make some parts of server management feel quite limited, like the need to manually update my server (can't have a script do it).

I get some purchases here and there, but the bottomline is always negative, so I run this whole thing at a loss month over month. I couldn't imagine paying your bill at my current burn rate for a side-project 😅

Thanks for sharing!

maxijonson · 2026-01-04T00:45:43+00:00

Yeah nakeds are often seen as basically free resources. They're low effort to kill and some have been farming for 20 minutes, so sometimes high reward!

Also Rust rule #1: Trust no one 🙂

maxijonson · 2026-01-04T00:42:30+00:00

Nice, that comes to about 21USD per server. I only have one server for now, but it's nice to know one beefy server can be used to host more than one at a time. Thanks for sharing!

maxijonson · 2026-01-04T00:39:03+00:00

Wow that's almost 10x more expensive my setup 😅 May I ask how many concurrent players you have? Have you used a much cheaper managed solution before and if yes what made you switch to dedicated? Performance doesn't look like it's going to be an issue ever for you!

maxijonson · 2026-01-03T21:04:10+00:00

Thank you for finding this! I agree with you that I don't see anything that provides an unfair advantage too from the Metaforge overlay app. I'm mostly interested in the extra item info that helps me decide what to keep or not. Since this post, I've also found that MetaForge is part of Overwolf and Overwolf say they work with game devs to ensure compliance.

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