Quake Live, quite popular game with an active scene and several gaming modes. Well what's wrong with that? Well nothing, except that it's using just a minor bit of it's potential due to several decision ID made during the years.
Popular gamemodes about a year ago:
- CA
- TDM
- CTF
- FFA
- Freezetag (Premium)
- The others spawned somewhat a year ago but I will not count them in to this list yet (Premium).
Gamemodes that has lost most probably like atleast 75% of it's active users during the last year:
- TDM
- CTF
(talking about public servers, not the active clan scene)
So the question here is that why? Well most of you probably has realized that ID changed the map rotation standard. The effect on it on TDM was enourmous. Since it was not hard to find a TDM game a year ago before this was implemented. State of it now is: 1-2 games that aren't pickup to join during a day (4on4)? The question is why they had to implement something that would mainly kill the whole scene of public TDM. One of the easiest gamemodes to understand. Also the TDM-scene clanwise was very active at that moment but I doubt it has increased since there is nowhere to find new players. You most likely have to play several other mods and have somewhat good skill to even be intrested in the world of QL TDM. And if you don't like it you wount continue it.. So how can we see a growth here? It's not like this would need some major coding to be fixed.
CTF has had somewhat the same thing, but not even close to as big difference as in TDM. Most of this also just because removing favorite maps to only players paying, so it's impossible to have all months a really nice map pool. This doesn't affect the paying customer in other ways than that very many maps will most likely not be played every month. If not playing pickups, but all people don't like pickups, some people like this "arcade"-mode better but not too much thinking and too advanced tactics. But even the paying players doesn't get to play most maps if not arranging a game him/her self. This will also require most likely spamming around on irc and recruiting friends, sitting at the computer for a quite long time. So is this what the premium/pro players is paying for? Not enough players to play premium maps on publics? I doubt most like this.
FFA doesn't have a too big issue with this, since the variation of "good maps" is bigger and the requirements of the maps ain't as big as in TDM/CTF.
CA is also more flexible than CTF/TDM, but a big part of players doesn't like playing narrow & big maps which mainly is spam only. So it only affects a bit on the CAs public scene.
So how to fix this? Simple, implement different rotations on different gaming modes. So for example TDM has several "favorites" in the pool. This will do that more people will play TDM on publics, which means that ID will get more paying customers. Same with CTF. I don't like playing Siberia only this month. There are other good maps but most of the new ones has major fps-issues while the older ones doesn't. So atleast in my case only somewhat nice "top map" this month is Siberia.
Split "top maps" in to 3 different rotations in TDM and CTF and keep this game alive. With these 6 rotations (?) the quality of the public maps choices are too narrow for them to be intrested in to paying anything to get to try the gamemodes. So do yourself a favor and double the map pools for both TDM and CTF!
Yours, paying customer: G_Uru
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