There are obvious advantages to playing as a team in Rust, which can be fun, but there seems to be a limit to how big a team can get, as demotivating issues are magnified when the group has more than around 15 active members.

The larger a group becomes, their demands for space and resources become more stressful, and they may struggle with chaotic teamwork whilst becoming bigger targets on the server. Not all members might fit onto the HUD’s team system UI, and it can be hard to get your voice heard if the group’s voice channel is often busy.

New members might not enjoy the culture of a busy team, and might even be treated as “expendable” due to the “social surplus” of having so many members. One clan leader suggests that “the number of close relationships is limited to 15 people when tackling a cooperative goal based task like Rust“, beyond which point members “become less interested in de-escalating internal conflict“.

The constraints may have been noticed more often in the early days of Rust, when clan leaders rented Teamspeak servers for communication, before Discord was released which broke the scene up into countless smaller groups as any player could now make a free voice channel on Discord. Some of these Discord groups have now grown in size…

A graph supplied by a Rust clan (The Government) shows that after an initial period of growth, their average Discord voice channel activity settled into a consistent level – any dips in activity appeared to be balanced with a resurgence, before then hitting the “group ceiling” again. They had an automated rank system that gave power to their 15 most active members, and had around 100 other members that were also active at some point during a wipe. Many of the members operated out of separate bases, each housing a few of the members.

The number 15 also comes up in the study of Chimpanzees, which live in communities that typically range from around 15 to more than 150 members but spend most of their time traveling in small, temporary groups consisting of a few individuals. Somehow, I doubt that this would be the first time that the behaviour of the Rust playerbase has been compared to Chimpanzees…

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