Recently I've read the sad news about former world's top Q3/Q4/QL player Av3k, who couldn't make a living out of his skills for the game and was busted with drugs and guns, which leads him into a very real prison.

We all hear "quake is dead". But QL is a beautiful perfected game, so how can that be? I would like to give you my vision of it.

Quake is where it is for a lot of reasons, one of the most important of them is that it requires shit tons of skill to comfortably play. And even a good player is usually very tense, since the game is very demanding and requires your full focus every second of the match. It's not World of Tanks where everything is so slow even sloths can play it. It's high paced, very config-perfection, aim and movement demanding, and on top of that strategy, positioning and arithmetics are required too.

But the main thing is - Quake Live punishes for any lack of these hard skills tremendously.

There's no good way to start playing QL, and there're no servers with players of corresponding skill leve at your area. To make it worse, most of veteran players are pretty arogant - they kick and ban inferior players with no words and explanations, never try to help them.

So, players can install tanks or DoTA 2 and play it with their friends at Friday evening drinking beer and feeling good (and having 300 ms ping). It is not demanding and they always can find competition of their skill level (including other lazy players with beer). So their community grows, and where there's a community, there are money for tournaments and pro-gaming.

QL on the other hand has absolutely no room for beginners or generally regional non-top players. If developers could manage enough free public servers with begginer skilled players, then the fresh blood would start coming into game, because game actually looks pretty stylish and beautiful and just by watching it you can understand how perfected and polished it is, which makes you want to try.

But the problem is - there are not enough players for beginners to play with and there's no way to play duels on adequate maps without buying Premium. Yes, the public servers that are always up have a very crappy map pool, you can't vote for maps on them and there are very few of these free servers. I don't know why ID does it this way, it's a very bad strategy for the game.

I think Quake Live has potential to grow, but it requires actual work in that direction and total focus on bringing and keeping new players. Hope someday ID will find their way to understand and do these things.