So, I didn't play Quake 3 (or video games, really) when it was in it's prime but lately I've switched over to it since I can't ping under 70 to any QL servers anymore. Why in the fuck are we even playing QL?

1. Persistent stats are more annoying than anything - they just cause people to play like assholes in an effort to preserve their accuracy and win ratio. Stuff like qlranks.com is awesome, dont get me wrong, but it could be done with q3 just as well. The actual in-game stats that are counting everything all the fucking time are what cause people to be idiots.

2. The few QL-only maps that are actually decent aren't enough to warrant staying there when we can just make whatever maps we want.

3. Fucking rockets feel *so good* in Q3. The knockback and pop-ups make it way more fun, since there are a shitload more opportunities for crazy over-the-shoulder flick air rockets. I thought I would hate it because I'm a noob, but the slower q3 rockets are a lot more fun and I can actually hit shit with them. In QL you put a rocket at somebodies feet and suddenly they weigh 30 tons.

4. I live in IL, and can ping 20 to Chicago like I should be able to. Not like QL where they get shitty routing from the shitty provider they use resulting in shitty pings for everyone involved, and then never acknowledge or comment on it. Being able to spawn servers anywhere in the world for much cheaper than it costs to lease a q3 server is nice, but ultimately kind of pointless when none of the locations are capable of providing you a ping that's actually fun to play with.

5. CPM is way more fun than PQL

6. It doesn't really cost anything to play on most servers, and Quake3 with CPMA and cnq3 really doesn't take more than 15 minutes to get set up if you're not retarded. The only trouble with it is that the game is so dead it can be a pain in the ass to find all the shit you need to download. This would be easy to fix. We could just package up everything needed into one big zip file (minus the actual q3 pak, if you care about being legit with a 13 year old game I guess) and host it somewhere prominently. You would pretty much just have to extract it to wherever you want and go. If you want a legit cd-key so you can play on the few servers that still check it, you can get one for a cheap one-time fee that you don't have to re-up every year for the cost of a brand new, triple-A title.

7. GTV - quakelive is never going to get it.

8. RA3 (to be fair, I've never played this since I'm about 10 years late to the party here, but it sounds like fun)

9. Mods. Mods everywhere

The only compelling argument I have for staying in QL is that it has a much higher active population right now. But that's just like saying we're all playing QL because we're all playing QL. Fast-paced deathmatch games are more or less commercially dead, which Quakelive has shown us. At least with Q3 the community can take it upon themselves to continue supporting and developing the games, and keeping the genre alive. These games aren't profitable anymore, so when you put a for-profit company in charge of them, you end with the mess that is Quakelive: a bunch of people halfway satisfied with an ok game that will never get any better because its being maintained by three fucking people that probably have better shit to do anyway.