public play in ql stayed almost the same, but with win statistics/awards and newer/bigger pool of players its almost unplayable right now and far worse than in the later q3 days. and i am not talking about stupid ego-focused play here. the problem is that nobody is willing anymore to balance out teams and try to have the fairest and most interesting match. 3/4 public tdm matches i have played ended with one team having 2+ more players in the end.

and that is although id software now has far more possibilities to enhance the experience for everyone by. lets see what possibilities we have, by having a look at hon (dota clone) for example. right on their website you can see that they thought about the problem and took measures:

Leaver Protection:
Create and play in restricted games that can not be joined by players with a history of leaving games early.

it is that easy.
the exact system behind it doesnt even matter, just separate the players who want to enjoy their matches and are aware of their role in other peoples match experience from the ones who dont care. just mark some servers as "no leaver" and let only people with 90% completion rate in the last 50 games play on it. as far as i can tell this shoudlnt even require much work from id.

now this is imho the most important thing but there are obviously more possibilities.
- add an "auto balance teams" vote that tries to create fair teams based on the players skill rating. (also works great in hon)
- maybe its even a good idea to automatically make one player switch teams when one team has 2 players less.
- encourage fair play and interesting matches by ditching awards like

Shut Out:
Win a Clan Arena match (of at least 5 rounds) without losing a round.

and add awards like

Team Savior:
Win 10 matches after joining a team thats behind and has less players

- same goes for the stats system, it should not encourage players to get the cheap and unfair wins.
- ...

i am sure that there are many more ways to improve public play, but thinking about it feels like a waste of time cause id isnt doing any work with ql anyway. my 2 cents