How much does your DCS experience rely on community contributions?

[SharpeXB]

I would put myself in the None category as I mostly do SP and the occasional foray into MP reveals it to be inconsistent and disappointing. MP is too small and limited to probably a single Cold War sever. If you’re looking for a different era you’re just SOL. And even the most popular severs just run the same missions over and over again and then eventually die out. Plus the server owners do odd things to the game that get frustrating after a while or are just plain stupid. It’s easy to see why 90% of the players have never been online. I could be interested in community made missions and campaigns but the amount of DLC content out there is so great I could probably never play through all of it. I stay away from any unofficial mods as they don’t appeal to me, are a pain to manage and can break the game. 

[fagulha]

I use a ton of mods and scripts to enrich my DCS experience.

Thanks to scripts i can randomize my missions and have killboxes, for CAS as example, with voice overs.

Mods, textures, scripts, including cockpit liveries and no issues or crashes. And for sure i would enjoy DCS less without the extra content from the awesome community.

[Raisuli]

I'm forced to fly SP only and have the A-4, massun people, some Navy/NATO ground objects for atmosphere at bases, then TacView for figuring out just how bad I am.

I avoid mods to the extent possible.  If DCS has better object libraries I'd go down to TacView as my only mod.

[draconus]

My own usage is medium - I play almost exclusively SP and use missions that come with modules or play DLC campaigns but I also play free user made missions and campaigns - some of them are real gems, top notch quality productions.

This is totally managable and still fun to use only built-in content or DLC for most beginners if you want to fly popular modules in SP. Might be a different story for less popular ones or MP.

This goes a bit deeper under DCS skin though. Ex. some HB missions use CTLD and MIST scripts or some paid DLC campaigns use user made skins. Also some user made mods are getting into DCS core recently. This shows there is no hard line between pure DCS and community made content any more.

Having said that I stay away from mods and 3rd party apps as much as possible.