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Featured Webstore: Eternal Rust

Image courtesy of FacePunch Studios PresskitThis week we are very happy to be talking to the owner of Eternal Rust. This blog post is part of our new

by Louise Posted on 23 December 2019
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Image courtesy of FacePunch Studios Presskit

This week we are very happy to be talking to the owner of Eternal Rust. This blog post is part of our new and weekly series on our webstores.

We think this is a great way for our readers to learn a little more about some of the servers that we support, or maybe even help you decide if you want to monetize your own server. Last week we looked at one of our ARK webstores, Ark Nerds, you can check out our post here. RUST is a very popular game for server monetization, you may have noticed that we support multiple popular servers, and the list doesn't end here, we have many more servers to show you, and many more server owners to talk to!

About RUST.

RUST was released in 2013 and became an almost instant hit with players due to the brutal and often unforgiving gameplay. Developed and published by Facepunch Studios, the wonderfully harsh world of RUST will be coming to Xbox One and Playstation 4 in 2020 (Tebex don't yet know if we will be able to support RUST on console, however, keep checking our blog for updates on this). Whilst the RUST universe continues to welcome new players to it's ranks with frequent numbers above 40,000 online according to Steam Charts, now is a great time to check out one of our popular RUST webstores and servers.

About Eternal Rust.

When you go onto Eternal Rust's website, you'll first be greeted by the simple yet slick design that takes you everywhere you need to go. Eternal Rust has a very active community which is the lifeblood of this busy and popular server.

With a combined 6 years of experience we bring you EternalRust.com, this is a fairly new community which has been built from the ground up, this community is run by members whom have played and experienced rust since the beta stages.

Along with our great community & staff members, we have many server features, some >of which that haven't been seen before

You can check out some of Eternal Rust's links here:

Eternal Rust Website
Eternal Rust Discord
Eternal Rust Steam Group
Eternal Rust Webstore

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Eternal Rust

So now we have heard a little about Eternal Rust, let's talk to the person behind this community. Let's meet Incognito!

I am the founder of EternalRust.com which has been running since August of 2018 and I operate under the username 'Incognito'. I've had a passion for games and running game servers since I started learning about IT back in school. I have recently just finished a college/university course for computing after being in college since I left school when I was 16, I am now 21. With that being said, I opened my first game server at the age of 14 which was on console and it was a simple rented server for the game 'battlefield'. After getting the grips of running a community and seeing how much people enjoyed playing something that I was 'in charge of', that's when I knew this is something I never wanted to give up with and my passion for this grew tremendously.

Hi there Incognito. So, it's great to hear that you've just finished a computing course, congratulations! It's great to hear, and I'm sure you're proud of your qualification for that course too. It sounds like you started running a server when you were quite young, so I bet you've learned a lot in those years of server management.

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Eternal Rust Cases available for purchase.

What made you decide to start a game server? For some, it's quite a big decision because you are responsible for other players. At 14 you began your first server for Battlefield, and you are still going strong, with a big community to look after now.

Honestly, I had been playing games since I was 11 up to a point where I was introduced to the 'Online' gaming world when I switched over to the PC platform. I was then later introduced to games such as 'Arma', 'Minecraft', 'Runescape' and later on down the line 'Rust' in which took over my life at some stages. I then acknowledged that some of these games allowed 'Player-owned servers' which allow players, just like myself to set up and configure game servers for other players to come along and play, after learning about this, my interest on this topic grew over the next year looking into it, up to a point where I started my first game server back in 2012 for 'Battlefield', Although this was a basic server that had minimalist configuration possibilities, this taught me many things and also grew my interest further when it came to running game servers, especially when I seen players playing and appreciating the settings I had set up for the server. I later moved over to PC where I become a server admin for an 'Arma 2' when I was 14, I then learnt that money can be made from running such servers, which is something I had previously not known about, knowing that I could possibly generate an income from doing something I truly had a passion about was crazy for me to hear, as I stated, at this time I was only 14 and knowing that I could make money from doing something I knew I'd enjoy was music to my ears. However, later on down the line, I realised that when running a successful community, money isn't all that important, the most rewarding part from a community is seeing players happy and receiving feedback on something you have created.

Thank you for the very thoughtful answer! The wonderful thing about the gaming industry is how varied it is, as most gamers will know there are so many amazing games out there and not enough time to play them all.

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Eternal Rust Player Marketplace

With so many games out there, and so many options with regards to server hosting, it can be very confusing for people out there who may be wishing to start their own server. With your experience behind you, would you have any advice to any people who want to start to run their own game server?

If I had to give a single piece of advice to someone starting a gaming community, that would be that no matter what, you must not give up, if it's something you truly have a passion about and it's something you truly want to work, then you must understand that it's not going to happen overnight and will take a lot of hard work, time and effort. Currently, this community I am running now, is my 4th community, the first two communities I gave up with, due to lack of spare time. I also had the wrong mindset at the time and I didn't believe they could be made into something as big as the other communities I was competing against (Yes, it's a competition, you need to put yourself in the boots of a player, why should they play your server and not the other hundreds that are currently available?), however I knew the possibilities that could arise from communities if done correctly, which is what kept me motivated, that as well as remembering how much players used to enjoy playing something I had created. When starting my third community, I took all my mistakes I had previously faced as learning curves and ensured that I didn't make the same mistakes again, this is when I started getting serious about this and the numbers of players that started to engage & play on my server showed that when you put the time and effort in, it pays off.

Acknowledging and learning from your mistakes is a key skill not just for running a server, but in life as a whole. Being able to do this in the context of your server is a great way of moving forward in the right way, and keeping your players coming back and choosing your server, out of the thousands of options available.

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Eternal Rust

You've put a lot of effort into your communities and here you are now, having learned from your early servers, you run a community with 8000+ members in your Steam Group, and 5000+ in your Discord. After all of the work you've put into your communities, do you find it rewarding running Eternal Rust?

As stated previously, you can't expect a community to just grow overnight, it takes a lot and I mean a LOT of hard work to get to a stage where you finally find it rewarding. At the stage I am currently at right now, I find it extremely rewarding, yes the community generates and income from player donations, however as stated previously the best reward is to see players happy and continuously returning to your community day in day out. Although I'm at a stage where I'm happy with my community, that doesn't mean it's complete and honestly communities will never be complete, players will always want more and in order to fulfill that need, you need feedback and engaing with the community is the best way to get the feedback you need, from the feedback you can then work on improving different aspects of the community, which in return rewards you with an even happier player base.

It's very important to remember to adapt with the times, and with game updates and new games that get released. When you run a server it's so very important not to stagnate, and to listen to player feedback and not dismiss players ideas so easily. What if there was an idea that would take your server to new heights?

For anyone who might be looking for a server to play on, tell us about Eternal Rust. Who is the server for? (Mature players? Kid friendly? Role-play? etc)

We currently only have server(s) on the game 'rust', rust is a harsh survival game, one where players are expecting to start from nothing and build their way up, you can then also take items and raid others within the game, this comes at a price. When someone is raided & killed, it often results in people becoming angry and sometimes their emotions will show, however with our community we have a dedicated staff team that allows other players to play safely and freely without having to deal with toxic behaviour. Yes, this game is hardcore, but we also have to withhold our reputation and make the play space a friendly one. Rust isn't a game for beginners, as previously stated, it's a harsh environment and getting started on a game like such can often become very challenging. We welcome all ages and all players to our community, which is why we hold a strict rule set to keeping the community and chat within our community family-friendly.

RUST is known for its unforgiving gameplay and it is great you have a dedicated staff team on hand to help players whenever they come across problems they need help with. The gameplay of RUST certainly isn't for everyone, you really do have to play knowing you can and will lose everything you gather and build, but it's great yourself and your team strive to make the player environment safe and friendly and free from bad behaviour. So, please let us know languages are allowed on your server?

Our community welcomes all nationalities, however we do ask that players keep it to English only in the global chat, this is so our staff team can keep the chat clean of any toxic behaviour and the majority of our staff are English, meaning they will need to understand what's being said and obviously if the global chat isn't in English, they would not be able to do their job correctly. We do, however, have external channels of communications within our community & server, such as team/clan chat as well as private messages, where players can speak any language they wish, they may also communicate via voice in-game in any language they wish.

So far, your server sounds great and it's been awesome hearing about how Eternal Rust got started, we are nearly at the end now and we'd love to know if there is anything else you want to tell players? Why should players log on to Eternal Rust?

The motto of EternalRust is "A unique experience you'll never forget" and we try our best to live up to this. We have a range of unique and custom plugins that we are confident can't be found on any other server, we have spent a lot of money on these custom plugins and spent many hours making sure the overall experience of our community & servers is one you'll never forget. Something you can expect to find on our servers but not anywhere else, is a player to player marketplace which allows players to list their items on a marketplace platform for other players to purchase, a custom case plugin that has an animation like the CSGO unboxing and finally a perk shop that allows you to spend your in-game coins on VIP perks and ranks as well as many other features. On top of this, we are always open to suggestions for future changes & additions to our community. We are also working daily to improve the experience as a whole, recently we have just finished the performance overhaul of our community, resulting in the server being a lot more stable in terms of performance, many of which have complimented it based on how smooth the server is. Although the community only launched last year, I had another community before this one in which I owned for 3 years, after some complications I decided to part ways with the other founder and create eternal, after eternal was released it took just over 4 months to gain a stable population, up until now where we have a steam group of over 8,000 and a discord of over 5,000 which his a huge milestone after just 1 year being open. We are more than confident that it will continue to grow and we look forward to making the community much better than it already is based on player feedback.

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Eternal Rust Perk Shop

Sounds like a lot of work has gone into the custom plugins. That sounds awesome. With all those years of experience, do you have any stories you'd like to share with our readers?

I have many stories that I'd love to share, however finding the best one to share is challenging due to them all being as good as one another but I'll try to include some of the best moments I can remember off the top of my head.

We often host events on our server in which players can take part in to win VIP ranks and even perks from our webstore, players love getting involved, especially when they know they can earn rewards from doing so. One of the times, we were a hidden loot event which required players to hunt for a hidden loot container within a section of the map, we hid the loot and announced the event in chat, players were turning up overtime and were hunting this loot container up to a point where one clan had found it within the first 5 minutes and due to this event being announced hours prior, we didn't want it to end so sudden so we had a plan.

In Rust you can call in airdrops which are triggered via supply signals (A smoke grenade used to signal airdrops), we announced in chat that we were going to be trying something new and named the new event "Chaos Event". These airdrops are usually rare to acquire, however, for this special event, we had given ourselves 30 to use during the event which would in term give players something to fight for due to how good the loot is from these airdrops. What we first planned on being a mini-event, lasted just over 2 hours, we had people teleporting back and pvping constantly and at one point had over 50 people in the same area at one time, helicopters we flying over, airdrops were landing, people were pvping, everyone was having a good time in general and up until this day, we haven't had an event as crazy as that, however sometime in the near future we want to try and replicate the fun that we had that day, although us admins can't play the server, our fun is watching others have fun.

OK, so we're about done now. Is there anything else we haven't covered?

  • All community information can be found on our webstore/website.

  • We are open to suggestions on improvement.

  • Without Tebex we wouldn't be where we are today and that's due to the many features Tebex has to offer, not only that but their speedy replies when it comes to support has helped us in many situations, something which I have haven't found elsewhere when using other support systems. We would and still do recommend the Tebex donation system to other communities that we engage with and would recommend any community looking to monetize their experience to go with Tebex as currently there is nothing better out there on the market and that's a fact.

Thank you for being with us through your journey, we really do appreciate the loyalty and your kind words. We would like to thank Incognito for taking the time to have an in depth chat with us, we wish you the best of luck with your server and we hope you continue your journey with us for a long time to come! Also, Tebex would like to wish Eternal Rust and all of our valued merchants a very happy Christmas and New Year.

If you would like to begin running your own webstore, you can check out our pricing here. We recommend new and small servers begin with the free Starter plan. If you already run a webstore, and you'd like to discuss having your webstore featured on the blog, please contact Tebex support here, we would love to hear from you.

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