Smash has been nothing but good to me, and over the years it has helped me create friends, rivals, and emotions of incredible hype and awe-inspiring jealousy. We all come here for the love of the Smash game series, whether it be one game or all of them. I initially came to this sub after not knowing about it for god knows how long(even created an account and retired my lurker badge) so that way I could embrace this series on a personal level with others that I didn't know. Even though this is true, I feel like there is a divide between new and old players.

Being 22, I'm at the age where I was able to experience and enjoy all the Smash games in their glory days, while still being caught in the middle of new and old players. It's interesting to see people wanting a revive in Smash after Brawl grew low in popularity and Melee died, and at the same time complaining about the new people within the community(mostly, if not exclusively, on social networks). A lot of these posts, while seemingly shitty or circlejerk-ish, are the result of our community expanding. It is what we asked for.

As our vets become older, they become wiser and well versed in Smash. They pass their knowledge down to a younger, less experienced group who will use that knowledge to grow and expand on in the future. This is how any community works, and has been working in the Melee community forever. The Smash vets and gods have passed down their knowledge and helped their respective competitive community to leap into levels of accuracy that couldn't have ever been predicted 10 years ago.

Now that we have grown in size due to ROM, the Smash Brothers, and the highly anticipated release of Sm4sh, we are paving a way for new players to enter our community and we've seen a lot of negativity from individuals because of this. New(and younger) players love to be entertained and honestly I don't mind the front page. It is the result of our community growing. We don't always have to post about competitive gaming, or talking about who is a better character, or how to unlock things anymore. We are bringing about a new generation of Smash players who will grow and be passionate like we are.

What I'm saying is even though we have a group of people younger than us, and in some cases less mature, we shouldn't try to differentiate ourselves from them out of pride. They should be welcomed with open arms. They shouldn't be downvoted because they have a question you thought was universal knowledge or because they are misinformed. This promotes are gated community where you need to learn to be with us, but you need to already be with us in order to learn. While some might come here for a quick funny post/comment, there are plenty of people hungry to participate and hungry to learn from us. We should be willing to teach. This goes from terminology to Smash memes and anything regarding the competitive scene. We have a great opportunity to teach people, and I just want to ask that we do that.