[CaptainOfCoit]

> Turns out several lived near the server's location, in Texas, and at one point my friends

Also ended up in a similar situation multiple times (bunch of randoms found some server we liked, sticked around for matches across weeks, eventually became regulars and eventually figured out we lived nearby). Sometimes we'd bump into each other on other servers too.

After a couple of times of hanging out we've found out why (probably at least) we came across each other, we all default to sorting the server list based on ping (latency), and since we were all geographically close, we tended to end up on the same servers.

[cableshaft]

Texas wasn't that close to me (I was in Illinois), but the server was hosted within a data center, and had pretty low latency for me anyway.

Also it was very consistently up and low latency compared to other servers, so that's why I kept going there at first. Later on I kept showing up because I got to know people on the server.