I happened to be able to see the 2017 one and it was so impactful I saved the date and made sure I’d make it happen. Cut forward 7 years and here I am with most of my immediate family (I have 6 siblings so having most is impressive).
It is an experience that can’t be captured by any form of digital or physical media and my only way to describe it is - it’s the closest thing to magic I’ve ever experienced.
I plan on saving up and going overseas for one as well.
I just play while appearing offline, but that’s a good idea if I don’t want to be appearing offline and I don’t want my playtime to be visible to them lol.
OP is not referring to private lobbies in a game, they are referring to marking a game private on Steam itself, a feature that hides from the world (and your friends) that you own or interact with a game.
To be fair, a lot of the game breaking launch bugs that hurt the game for me were with PVP (specifically, the instanced wars). I do know there were others but those PVP bugs are what I’ll always remember. The lag, the broken healing, the hatchet exploit, and a few others.
I bought a Rust ages ago, back when the development basically had it turning into a new game every year. Maybe I just got lucky back then, but never had a toxic interaction.
Cut to last year, when a group of guild members went to Rust so I redownloaded it after 5 years. Most of us only lasted a few hours and we tried half a dozen servers lol.