A 7 year-old finds out about Quake, learns that it's free, and to a 7 year-old, free is what works. He joins a server, where he is greeted by a bunch of assholes who accuse him of warping (he doesn't even know what warping is - he's 7), call him a cheating cunt, and after abusing him for a while, kick him off the server.

In another case, a 9 year-old goes through a similar routine, except is kicked for being a bad player. After all, according to Quake, if you're not a professional, you should be murdered.

In both cases, the kids go play some other game, where they don't get kicked or abused.

I get that people in the Quake community value the professionalism of the game, but there have to be places where people who are not professionals can actually play the game... free from abuse and ejection. If every kid who decides to play Quake gets kicked off the servers for having a bad internet connection or simply not being up to the standards of professionalism demanded by the many self-appointed, vigilante adjudicators of who and what is acceptable within a public server, then there will be no players left.

In no reasonable game do professional players compete against children. Even if Quake is so dysfunctional that such a thing is required, there should still be mechanisms to protect children from being the subject of abuse. I'd say Quake is worse than Catholicism, except that Quake players don't realize that the people they're abusing are children.

It's simple to create an environment where everyone is welcome. And that is precisely what a public server should be. Any other type of public server can only function to decrease the player-base.