The balance between the cost of building a base, and raiding a base, may impact the culture of a server. In the early days of the base building/raiding games (Garry's Mod DarkRP, and Cider gamemodes from around 2008) it may have been cheap to buy an apartment door (which acted as your base), but there were also players with huge amounts of in-game money which they could use to buy explosives to blow through a door, and buy guns to shoot the occupants. The in-game money was easily acquired through various means (not always legitimate). Rules prohibited violence in some cases, but the rules often backfired (making it harder to defend against imminent raids).

Rust (released in 2013) did better by enabling players to defend their base without restrictions. The potential issue of a few players hoarding weapons to constantly raid the rest of the playerbase was solved by routinely wiping the server. It was also more expensive to gain powerful weapons (especially explosives) because they needed to be crafted out of resources and components, which required tools and some level of infrastructure.

While many players enjoyed the ability to build a secure base in Rust, some still wanted to be able to raid cheaply, and may have turned to servers that had increased resource gather rates (perhaps because they didn't have much time to play, but still wanted to raid). A 2x server essentially halved the time it took to produce raiding weapons, but ofcourse the bases ended up generally being twice as large on such servers. It generally takes hours to gather enough resources to afford the boom to conduct a raid.

You were the only one that could open and close your doors in Rust in the early days*, but after an update, there was a point in time where it was difficult to build a base because the doors had an awkward lock system that required a key (which was easily lost on death, and could be used by opponents). It was fine after you'd established the base and built a proper code-lock (likely with the help of friends), but the mechanic had likely discouraged many solo players. The frustrating key system was eventually changed so that you no longer needed a key to operate your door, which gives some evidence to the idea that players enjoy being able to make a secure base without too much hassle (assuming that players had been complaining about the key system).

So the balance between cheap building and cheap raiding has played out dramatically through different gamemodes and updates over the years. Players don't want to spend too long either building bases or saving up weapons to raid a base, but it does seem to give bases and raids a better sense of meaning when they're expensive.

* An irrelevant point for this article, but speaking literally - I think there was a way to allow friends to also operate your doors.

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