There are advantages to playing as a team, so players become friendly and form groups. Some groups may have the ambition to become the largest group on the server they play on, but may struggle to grow as some issues become more common and magnify as their group gets larger. The group ceiling is said to be between 15 to 50 active members. One of the most common reasons that a group gets stuck at this ceiling is that members become demotivated.

The larger a group is, the more resources and space it takes up, which increases the likelihood of the group being at war with its neighbours - constant war may burn team members out due to the constant pressure to commit to the conflict.

The more members a team has, the more chaotic it becomes, such as becoming too large for the team system, resulting in higher rates of friendly fire which can be frustrating, and can also break alliances when allies are mistakenly shot. Chaotic teams may erode a member's sense of agency, and result in lazy teamwork, which in turn creates an unwelcoming culture for new members.

It may become too difficult for a team leader to effectively manage team coordination if a team becomes too large, and could result in further chaos if a team leader becomes demotivated. Voice communication becomes especially chaotic in larger groups, as it's difficult to communicate important information over everyone talking, and it might not be enjoyable to stay in a busy voice channel.

As a group becomes larger, it may become so insular that it disconnects itself from the stimulating buzz of the Rust experience, sometimes building far away from a spawn beach, and ending up just grinding for resources with little interaction with other players. Members of a large group either live in a secure village where little cultural deviation is seen (if anything interesting even happens at all) or they suddenly get raided by another large group which feels more like a Battlefield game (unless the raid happens overnight, in which case the game may have felt pointless). The larger bases required for housing a large group often have an impact on performance, as some members suffer low framerates around large clan bases or villages.

There may be a social aspect, where the number of close relationships seem to go little beyond 15 people when "tackling a cooperative goal based task like rust". The state of a group having more than 15 members has been described as a "social surplus", where members become less interested in de-escalating internal conflict, so arguments are more likely to become dramatic and escalate, seeing entitlement, over-reactions, treachery, and perhaps even civil war.

A ratio of players that would enjoy supporting a team might not enjoy the constant drama that surfaces when the group reaches this ceiling. I suspect that many good teamplayers (that could have otherwise helped increase the average scale of Rust's groups) don't enjoy Rust's culture in general, as it became increasingly bloodthirsty over the years.

Certain factors raise the group ceiling, but don't seem to raise it beyond around 50 members. There has been a theoretical model proposed which removes the limit by using programs to automate the difficult aspects of building and maintaining groups, but it has not been fully tested. Currently the factors that have increased the limit involve the team system, clan table, a rank system, and a democratic model.

In the early days of Rust, group sizes were typically larger due to the reliance of a few Teamspeak 3 servers for voice communication, before Discord empowered the rise of smaller groups. An example of a group appearing to struggle with a ceiling is The Government, where its scale was shown in a graph to be around 15 active members.

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