Rust is getting better every week now and things are getting quite interesting. At the rate things are going the Hellhawks might be making a comeback. If anyone needs me I'll be playing in the Texas PVE server (official). The TeamSpeak is up at voice.hellhawks.com. If you haven't checked out Rust in a while. Now would be a great time to join us!

If anyone is interested in joining an RPG and helping out with a new Hellhawks guild, just let me know. You can hop on the Wolfsbane shard in Rift and message 'Jakuan' to get in.

This wouldn't be the first time I've created a guild. The Hellhawks of Orion, Eberron (Dungeons & Dragons Online) are still going strong after about 3 years or so (the new leader is my faithful 2nd in command, Vicious). In Rift (store page) I've been flying solo, leveling up my characters (Defiant), and getting the guild started. Currently have a lvl 60 (max lvl) mage with Grandmaster (max skill level 375) Outfitter/Butcher/Forager. I'm working on a Warrior (51, almost Grandmaster Weaponsmith/Miner/Forager). I even managed to get a couple guild levels in.

I haven't previously made any formal announcement of the guild nor have I attempted to promote it in-game. Basically this as fresh as it gets aside from the small evolution I handled myself. Its a great chance to get into something different and essentially start with the founding of the guild. The hope is to create guild where new players can comfortably enjoy Rift. As in: good people to talk to, helpful & respectful teammates, event/raid/party participation, etc. If this sounds like something you could do, just message 'Jakuan' on the Wolfsbane shard or message me in Steam with the character name you wish to have invited.

While we're not disbanding the Steam group or ending the Hellhawks services or Rust gameplay, we have decided to retire our Rust server. The main reasons being the instability of the host machine and issues with the legacy server software. We still have many Rust players, we just think its time to let the server go and look forward to better things in the future (hopefully something good with experimental branch finally maturing). The server has 5 days left as of today. After that we'll still be right here on Steam, and we still have our Teamspeak. Still being Hellhawks in the world of Steam gaming. Just missing a Rust server. Hakuna Matada. We'll still find something fun to do. That's the wonderful world of Steam for you, right? So keep those skills sharp! We might still need them.

We decided that the server didn't need one-man-army's and could use more teamwork. We've adjusted & reset the leveling system to help remedy the situation. It should be a bit more PVP friendly.

The new max level is now 50. We hope that by bringing the max level down we encourage more team work with individual roles. For instance one member could take the damage while other members do the damage. Your team can have a medic constantly providing medkits, one gathering ammo, a cook providing food, etc. But ultimately we want to avoid having players turn into one-man armies taking on entire teams by themselves.

Reputation names have also been updated:
(Thanks TheFool for the help)

• Villain -20
  
• Bandit -10
  
• Thug - 5
  
• Bully -1
  
• Neutral 0
  
• Friend +1
  
• Defender +5
  
• Avenger +10
  
• Hero +20

Also, we do realize a few players have worked hard to level up (by the way, congratulations to johnniejet for being the highest level player in the last run). But it was easier to start everyone fresh than to recalculate everyone's levels to rebase with the updated configuration. Plus this way at least we have something to do besides just automattically be dropped to 50 with nothing left to achieve. That and we get to clean up a lot of inactive players' leveling data which does help tidy things up a bit.

We finally nailed what was causing the increasingly worse lag spikes we recently encountered. Further testing is in order but we're seeing drastic CPU & memory improvements without sacrificing any plugins. The key was in the accumulation of player data in both Oxmin as well as the L.E.S. leveling system.

I ended up writing some JavaScript code that reads the Oxmin or L.E.S. player data, cleans out the extra players, and returns the cleaned up data so that it can be saved back to the server. Once saved, the server was restarted to clear the old data from memory. After that we seen very promising performance results.

The players that get removed from Oxmin are the ones that have connected to the server fewer than 2 times. The players who never leveled up from 1 are removed from the L.E.S. system. The resulting data is significantly trimmed down and player data saves are performed much faster. Apparently allowing the server to run more consistently due to not getting hung up saving so much data. Or at least that's my theory and the performance monitor shows very clear evidence of improvement.

Anyways, I do plan on providing the cleanup form publicly for other server owners to use. But first I'm going to tinker & test it to ensure that its use can help maintain strong server performance. But I'm feeling pretty hopeful that this will be a tremendous help for any other Legacy Rust servers still running out there. If anyone wants to help test, just let me know.

Anyways, enough blabbering from me for now. Go enjoy Rust. I'll keep everyone posted we go.