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Overview of the Main Differences
You should be familiar with how CA works. I will make a quick summary just for the sake of completeness.
As you enter duel, you will immediately notice a number of differences. First of all, you are on your own. Second, you only have a machine gun, and a starting stack of 125 hp. The map will provide you with weapons and items to stack up and frag the opponent, however being able do it may prove to be hard. It might therefore make sense to discuss the main game mode differences, and see how they affect the way you should think and act.
Weapons
As you know there is a number of weapons in quake, and I assume here that you are familiar with all of them. As you come from CA, what you should not be familiar with is what the lack of weapons means, and how it affects the game.
Think of a weapon as a key to unlock certain moves. If you got that key, entering certain doors (i.e. performing these moves) may bring you some advantage. If you don't have the key, you can still force your way through the same doors, but this is often suicidal or require extreme luck to be successful.
In CA you basically are the key master. You got everything you need for every situation. In duel, you start almost from scratch, and very often you will have to find your way with limited resources. You could think of this as a CA with very limited ammunition, where after 5 seconds of fight you would be forced to switch to sub-optimal weapon as ammo runs out. While this may sound horrible at first, lack of weapons adds a whole new dimension to the game, which is crucial to understand and appreciate duel.
Looking at the positive side, your opponent is exactly in the same situation. He may not have all necessary keys, and being aware of this is the first important step in learning duel. Basically, what is true for you, in terms of being dangerous or rewarding, it's true for him, with the understanding that his reward is your failure, and his danger is your opportunity. In practice, you should be ready to punish him, should he make a certain move his weapons do not support. And you should be aware of what is safe for him based on his weapon, and try to use this at your advantage.
Ammunition is a part of weaponry with a certain importance, as a weapon with no ammo is only a tiny bit better than no gun, and can lead to your death as quickly. Quake Live makes it quite easy to find ammunition for most weapons in most cases, but every now and then players make mistakes, and start a fight with a weapon just to run out of ammo mid-way. This happens to everybody, and while of less immediate importance for you now, it's something to keep in the horizon.
Items and Stack
There are no items whatsoever in CA. Hence, items may be quite confusing at first. In fact, I think items are one major blocker for CA players, because of the huge impact they have in how the game works. There is a number of considerations to make.
First, let's think about the stack, i.e. the sum of your health and armor points. In CA your stack goes only down. You start full (100 100 in early days, 200 100 now), and lose more and more as the round progresses. If you do your job right, i.e. fight close to team mates, and outaim your opponent, you should arrive at the end of the round with enough stack to chase and kill the last opponent.
In duel it does not work like this. The stack is variable, and maps have loads of items that affect it. Ideally you want to increase it as much as possible so you have an advantage over your opponent. In practice, doing so it's extremely hard, as your opponent will be there making sure this does not happen.
There is a great number of similarities between weapons and stacks:
First, stack can be a key to open certain doors. If you have 200 200 and your opponent 100 and 50, you can basically do anything to him. You can rush through a narrow corridor, eat two full rockets in the face, and still have a bit more stack than him and take the frag. If you are above 80 points total, you can survive a rail, hence you may decide to pass through a dangerous opening, should there be a good reason to do so, like items and weapons on the other side. Both situation would end up pretty bad without the appropriate stack. Being aware of what a stack allows to do is another big step in learning duel.
Second, similarly to weapons, what is true for you it's true for your opponent. If you know the stack of your opponent, you know what options he has, and consequently can distinguish between a crazy move you should punish vs. a potential calculated move you should account for, and possibly prevent from happening. Knowing the opponents stack is a hard skill to master. You have to consider what items your opponent has picked and how much damage you did to him, and sometimes the effect of just one health bubble or some armor shards may screw up your guess and lose you a fight. While this is true also in CA, information there is much less reliable, as you often have no idea how the fight went in other parts of the map, and team mates may not be able to inform you properly. In duel, all the information is there (partly visible, partly based on item awareness), and you can be sure that certain opponents will use it the proper way (and so should you).
Now when it comes to the actual items, there are a number of options one can pick, each with different implications. Learning what to do when is a matter of experience. You can read the detailed section later for a deeper discussion.
Spawn System
In CA players spawn randomly around the map. The most important thing here is to know the fastest route to the meeting point, which a player can learn relatively quickly by playing the map. When a player dies, he will not respawn until the next round starts, so there is nothing there to worry about.
In duel, the spawn system is quite complicated. When you kill your opponent, a countdown will start, and the whenever the player clicks fire, or the countdown ends, the game server will look at the position you have, get 50% of the spawns farther away from you, randomly select one of those, and spawn the opponent there. This may be quite confusing at first, but the main point to take is that, with experience, duel players can control where the opponent will spawn, and sometime even decide not to kill an opponent because he may spawn somewhere advantageous.
Timer
Another difference between CA and duel is the timer. In CA the timer is almost never influential, except for the round limit which is present these days. Since a round draw is not necessarily bad, a player can simply decide to let the round restart, and hence the timer brings no real pressure.
In duel, the timer can be your best friend or your worst enemy. With the time limit of 10 minutes, you often find yourself toward the end of the match with a certain score difference, and the need to either chase and frag your opponent, or to run for your life and so to say "kill the clock".
To keep the analogy of the keys, the timer is an evil guy who starts closing doors as the match reaches the end. As the end of the match gets too close, there are options no longer possible, simply because they take too much time. A player may be forced to take worse options, or even options he cannot afford (due to lack of weapons or stack) as the alternative is a guaranteed loss. Ideally, you want to make sure you are never so desperate, but in practice, this is a reality every player faces every now and then.
Mind Aspects
One of the main points of attraction of CA is that it's fun. I remember the countless evenings I played on ra3 servers, with CA being a binds spam fest, and the duel arenas as a diversion. With the evolution of the community, the social aspect of CA may have gotten a bit worse, especially because of the contrast between those who played it competitively and those who just wanted to have fun. However it is still possible to find the same kind of atmosphere, where you just want to enjoy the core mechanics of quake, and spam on the chat when you are waiting for a round to end.
A key difference is that duel is mostly competitive, and often, not fun at all. In fact, if you approach it the wrong way, duel can be just a lot of frustration.
Here are some reasons why:
In duel, if you do a mistake, you are the only one to blame. The only luck factors are spawns, lag, and the cat jumping on the desk at the wrong time, but other than that, if things go bad it's all on you. This is amplified by the expectations. If you think you are better than your opponent but he beats you, you will get angry. In CA you often have the team aspect messing things up, and the one to one rivalry is often diluted as in the end you want the number being one of your strength. In duel, you cannot escape this: it's hard not to have any expectations, and it's even harder when you fail at meeting them.
In duel, things can snow ball pretty quickly. Say you screw up in a CA round, and instead of keeping high position you are knocked off the platform and die. Your team loses the match, a team mate may write in team chat something about your mama, but then it's over and you can start a new match as if nothing happened (besides the team score). In duel, if you make a mistake 30 seconds in the game, you may be paying for it the remaining 9 minutes and half. Or even worse, you may work hard for 9 minutes and a half and fuck all up with one single bad fight or decision. Rage gains a whole new dimension in duel, and if you are the kind of person that smashes things when angry, you should make some serious consideration whether or not you should play duel. I'm only partially joking here.
You should be familiar with how CA works. I will make a quick summary just for the sake of completeness.
As you enter duel, you will immediately notice a number of differences. First of all, you are on your own. Second, you only have a machine gun, and a starting stack of 125 hp. The map will provide you with weapons and items to stack up and frag the opponent, however being able do it may prove to be hard. It might therefore make sense to discuss the main game mode differences, and see how they affect the way you should think and act.
Weapons
As you know there is a number of weapons in quake, and I assume here that you are familiar with all of them. As you come from CA, what you should not be familiar with is what the lack of weapons means, and how it affects the game.
Think of a weapon as a key to unlock certain moves. If you got that key, entering certain doors (i.e. performing these moves) may bring you some advantage. If you don't have the key, you can still force your way through the same doors, but this is often suicidal or require extreme luck to be successful.
In CA you basically are the key master. You got everything you need for every situation. In duel, you start almost from scratch, and very often you will have to find your way with limited resources. You could think of this as a CA with very limited ammunition, where after 5 seconds of fight you would be forced to switch to sub-optimal weapon as ammo runs out. While this may sound horrible at first, lack of weapons adds a whole new dimension to the game, which is crucial to understand and appreciate duel.
Looking at the positive side, your opponent is exactly in the same situation. He may not have all necessary keys, and being aware of this is the first important step in learning duel. Basically, what is true for you, in terms of being dangerous or rewarding, it's true for him, with the understanding that his reward is your failure, and his danger is your opportunity. In practice, you should be ready to punish him, should he make a certain move his weapons do not support. And you should be aware of what is safe for him based on his weapon, and try to use this at your advantage.
Ammunition is a part of weaponry with a certain importance, as a weapon with no ammo is only a tiny bit better than no gun, and can lead to your death as quickly. Quake Live makes it quite easy to find ammunition for most weapons in most cases, but every now and then players make mistakes, and start a fight with a weapon just to run out of ammo mid-way. This happens to everybody, and while of less immediate importance for you now, it's something to keep in the horizon.
Items and Stack
There are no items whatsoever in CA. Hence, items may be quite confusing at first. In fact, I think items are one major blocker for CA players, because of the huge impact they have in how the game works. There is a number of considerations to make.
First, let's think about the stack, i.e. the sum of your health and armor points. In CA your stack goes only down. You start full (100 100 in early days, 200 100 now), and lose more and more as the round progresses. If you do your job right, i.e. fight close to team mates, and outaim your opponent, you should arrive at the end of the round with enough stack to chase and kill the last opponent.
In duel it does not work like this. The stack is variable, and maps have loads of items that affect it. Ideally you want to increase it as much as possible so you have an advantage over your opponent. In practice, doing so it's extremely hard, as your opponent will be there making sure this does not happen.
There is a great number of similarities between weapons and stacks:
First, stack can be a key to open certain doors. If you have 200 200 and your opponent 100 and 50, you can basically do anything to him. You can rush through a narrow corridor, eat two full rockets in the face, and still have a bit more stack than him and take the frag. If you are above 80 points total, you can survive a rail, hence you may decide to pass through a dangerous opening, should there be a good reason to do so, like items and weapons on the other side. Both situation would end up pretty bad without the appropriate stack. Being aware of what a stack allows to do is another big step in learning duel.
Second, similarly to weapons, what is true for you it's true for your opponent. If you know the stack of your opponent, you know what options he has, and consequently can distinguish between a crazy move you should punish vs. a potential calculated move you should account for, and possibly prevent from happening. Knowing the opponents stack is a hard skill to master. You have to consider what items your opponent has picked and how much damage you did to him, and sometimes the effect of just one health bubble or some armor shards may screw up your guess and lose you a fight. While this is true also in CA, information there is much less reliable, as you often have no idea how the fight went in other parts of the map, and team mates may not be able to inform you properly. In duel, all the information is there (partly visible, partly based on item awareness), and you can be sure that certain opponents will use it the proper way (and so should you).
Now when it comes to the actual items, there are a number of options one can pick, each with different implications. Learning what to do when is a matter of experience. You can read the detailed section later for a deeper discussion.
Spawn System
In CA players spawn randomly around the map. The most important thing here is to know the fastest route to the meeting point, which a player can learn relatively quickly by playing the map. When a player dies, he will not respawn until the next round starts, so there is nothing there to worry about.
In duel, the spawn system is quite complicated. When you kill your opponent, a countdown will start, and the whenever the player clicks fire, or the countdown ends, the game server will look at the position you have, get 50% of the spawns farther away from you, randomly select one of those, and spawn the opponent there. This may be quite confusing at first, but the main point to take is that, with experience, duel players can control where the opponent will spawn, and sometime even decide not to kill an opponent because he may spawn somewhere advantageous.
Timer
Another difference between CA and duel is the timer. In CA the timer is almost never influential, except for the round limit which is present these days. Since a round draw is not necessarily bad, a player can simply decide to let the round restart, and hence the timer brings no real pressure.
In duel, the timer can be your best friend or your worst enemy. With the time limit of 10 minutes, you often find yourself toward the end of the match with a certain score difference, and the need to either chase and frag your opponent, or to run for your life and so to say "kill the clock".
To keep the analogy of the keys, the timer is an evil guy who starts closing doors as the match reaches the end. As the end of the match gets too close, there are options no longer possible, simply because they take too much time. A player may be forced to take worse options, or even options he cannot afford (due to lack of weapons or stack) as the alternative is a guaranteed loss. Ideally, you want to make sure you are never so desperate, but in practice, this is a reality every player faces every now and then.
Mind Aspects
One of the main points of attraction of CA is that it's fun. I remember the countless evenings I played on ra3 servers, with CA being a binds spam fest, and the duel arenas as a diversion. With the evolution of the community, the social aspect of CA may have gotten a bit worse, especially because of the contrast between those who played it competitively and those who just wanted to have fun. However it is still possible to find the same kind of atmosphere, where you just want to enjoy the core mechanics of quake, and spam on the chat when you are waiting for a round to end.
A key difference is that duel is mostly competitive, and often, not fun at all. In fact, if you approach it the wrong way, duel can be just a lot of frustration.
Here are some reasons why:
In duel, if you do a mistake, you are the only one to blame. The only luck factors are spawns, lag, and the cat jumping on the desk at the wrong time, but other than that, if things go bad it's all on you. This is amplified by the expectations. If you think you are better than your opponent but he beats you, you will get angry. In CA you often have the team aspect messing things up, and the one to one rivalry is often diluted as in the end you want the number being one of your strength. In duel, you cannot escape this: it's hard not to have any expectations, and it's even harder when you fail at meeting them.
In duel, things can snow ball pretty quickly. Say you screw up in a CA round, and instead of keeping high position you are knocked off the platform and die. Your team loses the match, a team mate may write in team chat something about your mama, but then it's over and you can start a new match as if nothing happened (besides the team score). In duel, if you make a mistake 30 seconds in the game, you may be paying for it the remaining 9 minutes and half. Or even worse, you may work hard for 9 minutes and a half and fuck all up with one single bad fight or decision. Rage gains a whole new dimension in duel, and if you are the kind of person that smashes things when angry, you should make some serious consideration whether or not you should play duel. I'm only partially joking here.