Just getting back into rust after a long hiatus and my god has it changed. Some for the better and some for the much worse imo.
I do like that they tried to touch on how fast people progressed but for the most part it hasn’t really changed. Big groups get richer and solos/ duos struggle even harder. As a duo our strategy used to be very diverse in the ways we got scrap and progressed; fish traps, farming, trading or roads/ monuments all used to be fun to theme a wipe strategy around. Now we just wait and buy fragments from outpost or by the time we finally get 5 wipe is almost over. No real feeling of progress or fun in crafting a game plan. Game used to revolve around scrap now it’s value and all the methods of getting it are kinda useless.
I get the intentions behind the change but groups easily have t2 with a few hours then they sell any extras for sulphur to raid neighbours and snowball even harder.
Maybe a small change like making fragments have a small chance to be found in normal crates, making road roaming more appealing. Or maybe make it so you can craft them for a lot of scrap (1000+) to bring old strategies back in and give small groups a chance. The best change I believe they could make would be to put t2 and t3 behind a time gate so everyone is restricted early on in wipe.
Still love rust but despite all their meta changes large group snowball is worse than it’s ever been. This just increases the amount of offline raids killing off server player bases too early.