CQ3 seems to be somewhat losing its way and QuakeLive only has limited room to change due to asset limitations so I thought it'd be an interesting discussion. What might a new VQ3 gameplay look like?

A flamewar is almost inevitable but to make some attempt to head it off- I mean a strafe jumping gameplay with no QW/CPM style air control and am not that interested in discussing crouch sliding as I think its limitations and issues have been covered before. I'll expand on this when talking about movement. Netcode-wise I think it'd also be good to step back a little from the excesses of xerp and too much backwards reconciliation. I'm sure many would say 125 FPS physics and then argue endlessly about that. In a new game maintaining a bug would be unacceptable, what you want is similar gravity/jump height/accel rather than the bug.

So the changes I'd consider for a VQ3ish gameplay and why:

The most important change is to replace MG with a QW-style Shotgun. This should have a similar damage per second as the TDM MG, spawners should not be defenceless, but they should not have the long ranged ability that the MG gives. This is a big part of the mindless aspect of cess that's done huge damage to CTF and TDM.

Movement physics- something approximating the 125 FPS physics seems to be most popular, some fine tinkering with ground acceleration, ground friction and ground deceleration could really improve base Quake 3 gameplay for these reasons:

The most exciting aspect of Quake 3 movement IMO is to watch a player like Impulse's feel for the ground friction and the way he uses circle jumps with normal movement to take lots of speed around corners. A new movement could open up this aspect by slightly reducing friction to allow more from circle jump cornering. This is a more interesting mechanism than crouch sliding and extremely closely relates speed to player skill.

A slight increase in ground acceleration supports this form of movement and gives close combat a little more pace, linked with the most important change- if only ground deceleration is significantly boosted you can greatly improve player agility (importantly the ability to break LG locks) without really changing player speed around the map. The other obvious change to movement is the significant reduction or removal of the cripple effect where your movement is reduced while you're under the effect of knockback.

Personally I'd like to see ramp and double jumps, these add options for mappers and gameplay without significantly changing the VQ3 concept, it worked very well in Quake 2 and resistance to the idea seems mainly to be because people are used to what Q3 has and little more.

The resource levels in VQ3 gameplay are about right for duel, for CTF and TDM it would be worth considering a higher tier armour object that gives 150 armour so that pickups give 100 or 150, the lack of armour in team modes helps to create their cessy nature by making control less relevant. 50/100 works well for the kind of item cycling duel of VQ3. The main resource change I'd make would be to limit maximum ammo levels to around 15 or 20 rockets or equivalent. The limits in VQ3 are ridiculously high.

What sorts of concepts or changes might be interesting for a new gameplay based on the no air control style?