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The Pipe n' Poob Tavern channel aims to capture the unique player interactions that occur in Rust while roleplaying at zerg proportions.

This channel was ultimately created to document an attempt at a roleplayers meta. Rust can be as much a game of diplomacy as shooting. The vending machines, apartment / hotel, and casino are designed to be more productive than boring towers surrounding a locked down compound. While we have reached zerg proportions, I started with this idea as a duo, when wooden shop fronts were released, and have carried it forward with amazing results. The allies I've made from returning gear after fights, or getting people up and teaching them the game has resulted in a booming shop/role player town/zerg compound. People are worth much more as allies than defeated enemies. All of the Pipe n' Poob Tavern's successes up to this point are rooted in this idea.

The iteration of the Tavern in March 2023 was documented in a Rust News article.

The Tavern in March 2023:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2947197415

References

https://web.archive.org/web/20241216165947/https://www.youtube.com/@ImaPoob/videos
https://web.archive.org/web/20240825212901/https://www.pipenpoob.com/

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Journey of the paintings

In August 2023, an art gallery was built, which was raided, with the paintings being stolen. At the end of the wipe, the raider returned the paintings that he still owned, and explained that the others had been stolen a second time when his own base was raided.

I wondered if paintings slowly travelled across the map, being moved from one base to another in successive raids, perhaps changing hands several times before a wipe ended. Wanting to test this theory in November 2023, I painted 50 small wooden signs with gnome characters and placed each one in a locked wooden base.

Each gnome had a coloured hat, with each colour indicating a certain area of the map - a red hat indicated that the gnome was originally placed in a base in the north-west area of the map, so if a red-hatted gnome ended up in the south-east then I'd know that it must have been looted by raiders and had been taken on a long journey. I asked around during the wipe if anyone had seen the gnome paintings.

Unfortunately, no evidence was found that any of the 50 gnomes had moved at all. I guess that players either weren't interested in them, or didn't admit to having stolen them.

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Fighting for Culture

I have fond memories of the initial Rust gameplay, but was concerned as updates drove the conflict by motivating the players to build near each other, contesting the resource-rich landmarks that contained the components now needed for firearms. Progression was present in Stranded, but Rust was now an arms race, which in a dark period had led to players frequently losing interest in a wipe after only 24 hours – destroying the sense of progression.

The popularity of Stranded fell off in 2014 as Rust was the new big thing, spawning a wave of survival FPS games over the following years, but that old concept of creative drama seen in roleplay was now replaced in the genre with genuine arguments and competitiveness to the point of motivating some to turn to cheats. It seemed whoever got the best guns by the end of the day (or just used cheats) dictated the culture.

Some roleplay items were sprinkled into Rust, such as painting boards and instruments, but these creative outlets felt like little more than light seasoning on the meat of violence. Out of 300 bases I mapped in a recent wipe, marking them on the island map with red dots (looking like an outbreak of measles) only one was an art gallery.

A slice of the map. Red squares were active bases. Grey were inactive. Yellow was the gallery:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3384807583

I felt like I had watched all these games and game modes evolve into vicious creatures, as a deviation from the deathmatching in Quake led to some roleplay in Half-Life mods, but this discipline was lost – returning the scene almost completely to deathmatching. Like wolves bred to be dogs, they evolved to return to their roots as wolves.

It would have been generous to call even the one roleplay structure I came across a "gallery" though, as it was no more than a wall with a few lines of colour across it. There was clearly room for more colour in the grey background of the stone bases dotting the landscape. But the deathmatching harming the roleplay was now a recurring theme, and the first gallery I built was burned down with the loss of every painting. Building a gallery felt like a waste of time when conflict was clearly the norm.

My first art gallery in flames, as a well-armed player started burning it down:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3361568966

There can still be more to the killing though. After 1,000 matches of Counter-Strike, I couldn’t say I remember any particular one, but I could chat for hours about the roleplay storylines from Gmod. Some of them weren’t even that playful or dramatised, but even the slightest roleplay can give meaning to otherwise routine gameplay, and that gameplay often did revolve around conflict. The key thing was some spark of dramatic context that we’d play into.

As much as I appreciate the creative initiative behind RP, I wouldn’t want to force it onto the scene though. The state of reddit (the subreddits of TF2, Gmod, and Rust) has been awful for the forced attempts at changing culture. I was permanently banned from /r/tf2 five years ago for posting TF2 memes despite them having the #1 popular spot. I was permbanned from /r/gmod eight years ago for posting a Gmod gameplay video.

The reddit mods could have just removed off-topic posts, and let the on-topic ones get sorted by the karma system. There was no need for them to interfere, and it was certainly pointless for them to do so because to this day the TF2 subreddit is still mostly TF2 memes, and the Gmod subreddit is still mostly Gmod videos. Attempting to force changes in culture was clearly a mistake. I wrote 500 articles about Gmod, but I haven’t been able to post any of them to the Gmod subreddit due to the pointless banning.

Even on /r/playrust my Rust memes would get removed despite them being upvoted, and I then got indefinitely banned from the subreddit without being given a reason. Some users of the subreddit had been unfriendly to roleplayers, telling ones that criticised how the game updates lent towards competitive deathmatching that they should stop complaining and just leave.

The Government is a safe-haven where an art gallery can exist with a level of dignity to it – free to be built, and protected (as all citizens of the Government find their buildings protected). There have been calls to shutter the doors of the current gallery, over concerns that it is not easily defensible, but even Winston Churchill may have agreed with it remaining open.

While the United Kingdom was under threat of bombing and invasion during the second world war, Churchill was against the idea of sending the National Gallery paintings to the safety of Canada. Even before the war, he had said: "The arts are essential to any complete national life. The State owes it to itself to sustain and encourage them."

Two gallery paintings had been destroyed, I personally suspect by enemy action. This probably happened during a battle when two bandits ran inside and fired from the roof and out of a window, before being killed by Government soldiers storming the building only minutes later. During the fighting, a fire had been set near the entrance, and the painting nearest the door (a recreation of the background of Edvard Munch’s piece The Scream was destroyed) has since been replaced by an artwork depicting flames.

Battle of the Government gallery building, October 10th 2022:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2876408119

Out of the cutting of many trees and the blowing up of many bandit hideouts, the drama of the gallery paintings is a memorable storyline for me – one that I’d share with other people. Even through the loss of paintings, something is gained – a storyline worth telling. The destruction of some art was all that these uncultured bandits were capable of. Roleplay is rare in the scene compared to the days of Stranded all those years ago, which I think gives all the more reasoning to it being protected in its endangered state.

Access to the gallery roof was closed, and the windows were reinforced to negate any advantage to bandits trying to occupy it. The (now useless) water-catcher on the roof has been removed after a call was made to reduce the number of unnecessary assets in the area. The building was made for the people, and it’s future is in their hands. To me it represented the openness of the game concept – something that could have been swapped for any other creative structure.

It could have been a coliseum for all sorts of staged battles, or a supermarket full of convenient vending machines, or an apartment building that offers individual rooms for new members. The merit of such a building didn’t need to be based on utility alone, but could be engaged with just for the sake of fun.

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