Man, those huge discussions remind me of the good 'ol 2000's, when all we had were forums
Anyway, I see two main "armies" here:
Arctic, who thinks that the game would be boring without monsters
and
Miwarre and fox, who insist that this game should remain relaxed.
I'll leave my opinion here too, since I'm a member just like any of you
RW is a great sandbox game. I'd call it "Minecraft on steroids". I've played Minecraft, Rust and other sandbox-oid's. Every game has their own pros and cons.
So here's the first thing I've learned: - There's no "perfect" game.
There will be always that choice between relaxation and battles.
For instance, even if you'll make it flexible, this will bring some consequences.
Any flexibility or modding splits the community. The more options there will be, the more poorly populated servers people will have, each with their own set of options.
Take MC as an example: it ahs so many mods. The only reason why you don't notice the community split is because there are about 2 millions of active players, spread across the 10.000 servers.
Past days, I've switched to creative mode when playing RW. I never ever played creative mode in Minecraft (I dislike the sole idea of having infinite stuff, makes things too easy for me), but I just cannot stand the idea of having to bear the long mining speed we've got here in RW. And chopping trees is even less acceptable
So that's what made MC mining interesting: the enchanting table features.
The concept of progressing, going through lot of mining and leather farming in order to get better gear seems very attractive to me.
Thanks to the enchanting feature in Minecraft, you could notice the difference between Iron, Diamond and Enchanted gear.
I think, a great starter for RW would be the capability of upgrading your gear. Go from Iron to Alluminum -> Steel -> something else.
Make a chainsaw for chopping trees.
Make some resources rare and give us the ability to craft better gear. That would motivate us to keep mining, farming and gathering resources.
In my opinion, this would bring more interest to the game and attract more people who are more than FPS fans.
I mean, I do play FPS. A lot, actually. I just logged off from Planetside 2. So yeah, when I'm in the mood to kill someone, I go to Planetside 2, Mass Effect 3 and so on.
They already have everything I'd like a FPS to have, and it will be hella hard for RW to beat that.
So here's where I agree with some folks here: RW is not and will never be a FPS.
Not that it should not have monsters. RW's caves are scary, and add some additional scariness to them would be fun
But personally I don't see it as a priority.
RW needs some limitations, something, that would motivate us to mine, to expore, to farm.
As I've said, the capability to improve your gear with genuinely rare resources would be a great starter.
That's my opinion.