So Rust is a survival game mixed with a whole bunch of other elements to make the game more fun for its users. But to be honest the game itself has no idea what it really is, this has lead to a huge decrease in players. The game is meant to be a survival game, but has become some form of a battle royal as many users just want to shoot each other.
When you join a new server you have no items and no blueprints to make OP items or stronger equipment. The blueprint system is probably one of the worst systems they have brought into the game. In many games the skills of players are separated by ranks thus players who are noob and still enjoy the game.
Rust decided to bring in the element of player vs player, which is ok, but the skills are not separate and neither is the equipment that gets used by the players. Players spawn in naked while the other players around them already have much stronger equipment, thus players start to bully others for the pleasure of kills.
This becomes a huge problem when seeking more users to buy and play the game as they come in and get no where in the game or have their base offline raided bringing them back to starting from scratch.
If we had to take a look at WOW(world of warcraft) equipment is separated by zones on the map and levels needed to do the quests to get this equipment. Their user-base is constantly growing. Thus Rust needs to either change the way their blueprint system works or turn the game into either a battle royal or the survival game it should be.
This is a screen-shot of me just spawning in to the server, getting attacked by another player and just escaping with 0HP.
I actually enjoy playing Rust even though I get killed every 10 min in the game