A Real Sense Of Community

It's time for a small confession. I've never really felt like Dust had much of a community. I'm not talking about communities that play Dust, but more of a general community that comes from people sharing a common interest. This likely stems from reading too much War Room drama and anything Beers says. I also tend to lone wolf a lot when I grind out my weekly SP, only grouping when someone else sends me an invite. Beyond that though, it seemed like the Dust playerbase was split up into alliances and corps.

More recently however, it feels like I'm noticing those "barriers" no longer existing. If you swing by the drunk night channel that DS runs, you'll find people from everywhere just squading up to have a good time. Doesn't matter the corp, the level of skill or even if you're drinking, anyone can join in.

There was also the R&D PC match I was running this weekend. It required at least 16 people to actually pull off and there were only a few GIANTs around to help out. I knew a couple CPM members were coming, but numbers were still in the single digits. I decided to send out a tweet and VD7 showed up with DS to help out. With numbers still looking too low to test what I wanted to try, VD7 and DS both started spamming channels to find outside help (I wasn't testing anything that would be gamebreaking). Suddenly the test channel was flooded with people from random corps willing to help out. After pulling everyone into the match that we could, people listened to the instructions given and we got some great video footage recorded.

About a week ago, Scott Smith (former EG manager) said that Starcraft didn't have a real community on the show Climbing the Ladder, before he asked that the show's host use another word to describe. His point was that 100,000+ people sharing a subreddit doesn't make a community. A real community is like the 20 or so guys who show up to Quakecon BYOC every single year.

The last couple of weeks has shown that Dust is moving more towards the latter than the former. I just hope the game can improve enough over the next couple of months so we don't lose all that too.