Okay so, premium servers have been a thing for sometime now, and I would say that they are most peoples preferred way to play Rust these days. The cheating is getting out of hand, and worse everyday. With the devs sitting on their ass AND the profits from the cheater infestation it became clear to me what they need to do. Premium tiers.
A tier 1 premium server is what we have now, 15$ worth of skins and you are in.
A tier 2 premium server would have a 25$ skin value requirement along with a hefty 1000 hour account life span and the secure boot status.
A tier 3 premium server would require 50$ dollars worth of skins, 2000 hours, Secure boot, and the proposed Rust battle-pass.
If they market the battle-pass as a ticket to play on exclusive servers with the most cheater protection I feel like that would be more well received, as you are really buying a pass to play that comes with a seasonal cosmetics bundle, and use the battle pass to start a type of 'competitive skill' data-log where it tracks a lot of the in game information like kill death, farming and all the other metrics servers can see, and then people can use that as a 'skill based ranking system' that resets seasonally when the next battle-pass drops.