people lost interest in ql since id implemented the AC back in may and, sadly, coders seem to have given up (even paid cheats are now discontinued) trying to find a way to beat id's anticheat.
Refreshing view on ql's popularity issues. I doubt it's correct though. There were other factors in may.
Why? QLHook/Whitelight gets you banned immediately (according to page 82) and this is not an id software site so we can talk about qlop (the offline client/server), cheating (which does exist and is somewhat interesting to know about that) and throw shit at them without consequences.
If it were working then you would have a point since it would hurt the community (us), but finding working QL cheats is as easy as writing that on google.
edit: according to the forum there are working timers that get you banned nonetheless but not immediately. Then again making a simple one with sounds takes one minute to anyone that knows how to turn on a computer.
Also they literally laugh about circumventing bans in one second lol. From that page what they do is creating new accounts (doing all necessary measures), get banned after some time and repeat.
Well... According to this, there's people cheating in QL right now. I don't know how accurate those numbers are (or even if they're not made up). But that "Total Sessions" number scares the shit out of me.
Fact is that I've seen people cheating in duel even after this new AC was implemented. (Actually, it seemed to be always the same guy with different usernames, but we can never know.)
The cheating forum on the OP says there are 0 accounts that cheat all the time. It's just creating a new account over and over, or getting busted immediately with an old account.
Obviously there were lots of cheaters in the past since QL didn't have an anticheat for more than a year or so....which is another aspect that syncerror is directly to blame.