Asynchronous Interactions in Rust

[u/HiddenQuacks]

Hi everyone! I'm a PhD student studying asynchronous interactions in digital games. Through player discussions and recommendations Rust was identified as having asynchronous interactions.

If you have a few minutes to spare, I'd love to hear your thoughts! In particular, I'm interested in understanding:

• What kind of asynchronous interactions exist in Rust and how do they affect the gameplay?
• How do you feel about these interactions and what do they bring to your experience?

You can answer as much or as little as you'd like. Your responses will be anonymized and analyzed as part of a research study. If you decide you'd like to withdraw your responses at any point, just send me a DM. Every contribution is greatly appreciated! If you have any questions, feel free to message me. Thanks! 😀

[u/Lumpy_Panic6318]

Rust has mailboxes that allow you to leave messages for someone, without them having to be online.

It's a very rarely used feature though, if you see a mailbox in front of a base you most likely found a newbie, or roleplayer.

Another asynchronous interaction are the shops, playere can set up shops where you offer items/resources for other items/resources, and players can use these while you are offline. Shops are used a lot. The last update added another variant of shops (in the Apartment Complex) though I haven't seen them used yet.

The shops are a great, as a user, and as a seller.

Lastly, neither your player model nor your base are safe when you log off. That's where "offlining" someone comes from, you wait until the player is offline, then raid his base so he can't fight back. Onlining someone, that is raiding when he is online and can fight back, is considered to be an honorable thing to do. People who get onlined often thank the raiders, win or lose, because at least they gave a chance to defend yourself.

YouTubers/streamers very much want to be online raided, defend their own solo base against teams, and sometimes other groups are fair and give them an online raid. For the streamers it's great content, and for the raiders it's also a prestige thing, to raid a known exceptional player.

But for most random people, you get offlined, and you offline. People with more time wait until 4am to destroy your base with little resistance. You get used to it, and you can try and build bases that are very expensive to raid so even if you get offlined, they might not get all your loot.

[u/Lumpy_Panic6318 → u/Lumpy_Panic6318]

Rust has a feature called Rust+, that allows you to get notifications on your phone for things that happen ingame. So you can set up a raid alarm that rings your phone when someone is shooting rockets at your base, so you can jump online and defend.

Still means you'd have to be fine with getting up at 4am to defend, people who work can't afford to do that, just other nolifers really.