A reddit post titled What game pissed you off so much that you uninstalled it immediately? contained a comment that read: "I played rust for 10 minutes. Killed and robbed twice uninstalled so fast." The comment was upvoted, so it seems that there are many players that didn't enjoy the bloodthirsty culture of Rust. It's noteworthy that the scene wasn't always so bloodthirsty, as one of the cultural predecessors (Garry's Mod Stranded) had rules against random warfare on some servers.

Even one of the more social and cultured groups in Rust (The Government) had an issue with bloodthirsty members shooting players so constantly that members couldn't even hold a conversation with a random player, because the player would get shot by a teammate, and a lot of the time the players that were getting shot were fellow members of the Government. Jump checks were sometimes called before the target was shot, but even this could be frustrating, as team members would have to constantly jump just because some bloodthirsty teammates wanted to shoot every player they spotted (even if the victim was unarmed and minding their own business).

There's an opinion that if a player wanted to just go around shooting other players then they might wish to play Call of Duty or Battlefield, which may be better suited to those particular mechanics. And that shooting unarmed players (in cases where self-defense is not an excuse, such as at long ranges or at spawn beaches) is an unsportsmanlike thing to do which drives "chill" players away from the game, potentially making Rust less social, and contributing to the evaporation of creative culture, resulting in only 0.3% of Rust bases being creative structures by 2023. Groups in rust typically value deathmatching experience and skill when seeking new members.

Pointlessly anti-social killing

A discussion from May 2014:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230531182013/https://old.reddit.com/r/playrust/comments/24m35d/why_are_people_so_aggressive_in_this_game/

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