I have over 5,000 hours in Rust as a player. I also was the owner and admin of a Rust server for 6 months. I spent thousands of dollars getting the best servers, custom maps, custom map assets, quality of life plugins, and anti-cheat plugins including cheat detection auto demo recorder that uploads suspected cheater video to my Discord, etc. I eventually gave up because cheating was just far too prevalent. Easy Anti Cheat and Valve anti-cheat is just garbage and than it is left up to me to break the news to players that I know their cheating. It became exhausting and depressing to realize so many people cheat on Rust so I shut down my sever.

Unlike most server owners I offered no VIP and I refused donations. I had no conflict of interest when it came to banning players for cheating.

I love Rust but it desperately needs much better anti-cheat. There are way too many people using ESP and aimbot cheats. I'm sure if Faceit could solve Rust's cheating issues they would make bank.