descentchampions.org

Throughout the time that I've been in the community, I've always had the same question, Do we take for granted having a small community?

I'm just interested in what you guys think.

On one hand I really want a large community with server based connections.

But on the other hand I really enjoy having a small community where we all develop personal relationships.

Its sort of like an two-edged sword, with a small community you make a bond, or friendship, which could become a commitment.

But with a huge community, (Fortnite) you could leave without notice, or just meet someone to forget them the next day.

I prefer the small community. and I'm sure most of you do, which is why you're reading this.

Idk, just a shower thought.

-=-Edit-=-

Just to be clear, I'm aware that this is a dumb question, but there are some people I'm interested in hearing an answer from.

Competitively speaking I'd prefer to have awesome connections to my opponents and no sense of friendship than to be great friends with you guys but have truly crappy connections.

Fortunately I don't have to really pick which one I want. I mostly have good connections to good friends.

Pros and cons to both, I think. Oh boy chilly's gonna whine that he has nobody on his skill level again

As someone -- comparatively -- just starting out it's daunting to play against the same excellent pilots repeatedly. There's little to no mystery to it -- I can guess at the result of a match before it even starts. Even if people are flying on handles I haven't seen and jump into an open anarchy, I can generally figure out who they are after a bit based on a combination of piloting style, success in the match, and their pilot file's rank. I'd love a larger pool of players; queuing up for a ladder match and flying against someone I don't know or can't see their name would be great to take some pressure off, no matter the DCL rank outside the game. There's a lot of mindgame just in a name; what works on one pilot won't on another, and I think part of the match should be figuring that out on the fly...which just isn't doable in the current ladder paradigm.

Other side of the coin, there's -- some -- acknowledgement of improvement in a tighter setting like this one, which simply won't happen in a faceless, larger community. Folks know each other and can tell when someone's got a new ingredient in their dish. If it's something everyone else already has, like map knowledge, great. But I think where the map meta, technical meta, and ladder sit currently, almost everything has been practiced to stratospheric extremes. And if someone finds or plays some crazy new thing that truly mixes up how people play, it's a small enough ladder that it'll be learned and assimilated and countered very rapidly, making The New Hotness considerably less effective, if at all outside a single match or series. Which is cool because everyone learns everything all the time constantly at the same time in perpetuity forever...but it becomes A) settled and stale to the people playing and B) impenetrable to newbies, who are forced into learning a particular way/technique/style/meta, perpetuating the current one. In larger communities, there's a whole spectrum of success, and new techniques can bring the kind of success that's both rewarding and usable as a stepping stone into higher and higher levels of play, but with a tight community like this one we're down to the most extreme 15-20 edge cases, with occasional attempts to break in...some which stick longer than others.

oh you mentioned connections too, wired peers only please -- even Nintendo strongly implied it for Smash 5 lol

tl;dr same boat as jedi I guess it looks like