Yeah, also I believe Unreal Gold is already free so people will be getting fucked by paying 1.99 or whatever Steam charges. Not that it's a lot of money
You've obviously not set it up properly
You've most likely not unticked the 'standard servers only' box in the server browser as most servers run with mutators.
There are about four to five 10-12 slot TAM servers that are usually full at Europe in the evenings. (These are found under the DeathMatch drop down menu) Edit: Download for more servers: Team ArenaMaster 3.141
There's also a couple of duel servers that are regularly populated.
You won't find any TDM servers anymore, but there is a PUG at #tdm.pickup.
You'll always find one or two 10 slot DM servers that are full - these are vanilla demo servers.
remove vsync, framebuffer 1, dont use antialias, use opengl fixed renderer with fps cap, untick direct input if you have that, and use a mousefix, anir on xp, for whatever on newer OS, same feel as raw input in quake for me.
but they tried what ID always didn't want to do. they took they 15 year old game, added nice graphics and tried to make it noob friendly. and it kind of works in a sense. it is very interesting to see. maybe a way one could lower the entry barrier for quake as well.