Dust 514 Community Helps Raise Over $8000 For Family In Need

For those not already familiar with this, the family of community member Jason "Quickgloves" Selby was recently struck with tragedy when his son Weston was born prematurely. Since then, he has been staying at the hospital with his wife and child, praying for Weston's recovery. While doing so however, he has been unable to work and would be unable to pay for their stay near the hospital.

Looking to support their friends, Christina Lockerd and Kimberly Bullock set up some fundraisers to help support Jason so he could stay by his child's side. News quickly reached the Dust community and a thread was stickied with details on donating. Donations started coming in along with a large amount of well wishes.

Shortly after, a fundraiser event was announced by drunk night organizer "DS 10". Donations of money to the fundraiser gave people a chance to win in game currency (ISK) for both EVE and Dust from a lottery. Billions of ISK were given out to those helped raise around $3000 in just a few days and the overall amount of money has now passed the $8000 mark.

It seems so surreal that I was talking to Jason a few weeks ago about he and his wife Amanda playing Diablo 3 together. I can't imagine what it's been like since then and I can only hope it all works out. I've already donated what I can, but the fundraisers and forum threads are both still open if anyone wants to send him some support.

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.