did they announce they will stop the free to play model? i hardly think so

No, you still have to pay.

why do you say it would not be ftp anymore then

Can you read

you write its not going to be FTP anymore.
i say it will.
you say i am right.

??????

plz delete ESR m8.
gg

Basically, he doesn't know what Free To Play means and claims QL isn't F2P.

If you want a non shit experience on ql, you need to pay.
Realm of steel rats is super fun.

idk
I guess I need my premium in order to play on servers with ramp jumping and stuff (without begging for an invite). But apart from that I don't think being standard would change much, if anything.What does your experience tell you about that? What do you need for the game to not be shit for you?

If you want to play duel on a map you want, you need premium.
If want to play with your friends who are on a premium server, you need premium.
I think that's reason enough.

Splitting the userbase is an awful idea. There is no reason why ID should ask for such a large amount of money for doing nothing. Hosting is cheap, especially gameservers.

Where is the improved netcode? Higher default tickrate(40 is much too low), or even a queued system for duel?

who cares for graphics when everybody dumb it down anyway?

I remember when sponge (?) told once on IRC it's about 10% of players only uses picmip_omg settings.

Who cares for graphics when all you care for is seeing these damn keels clearly and landing your shot at them?

or robots

No one wants to pay for a cut version of 1999 (no custom content, no custom servers as in renting your own servers, no LAN... etc)

Part of the appeal of quake live is that it is centralized. If they allowed you to use your own offline servers, they could easily be configured to just operate outside QL.

If they allowed completely custom mods, again there would be a dissolving of the centralization.

Custom content such as maps and texture packs would be great, but it is again destandardizing, and if QL sells anything to make money for the project, they could get into some legal issues because they'd be profiting from content they didn't own. Content creators could reasonably ask for a piece of the pie, and there just isn't enough money for that.

You haven't even done any major changes to the game.

Sure they have. If they hadn't QL would never have gotten as popular as it is. It is much more popular than Q3/CPMA.

Everything that has been added to baseq3 was already done by the community for the community FOR FREE (OSP then CPMA).

Not everything, but I still agree somewhat. There are two problems though. One is the potential legal issues that stem from selling things that came from the community.

The other is the resources available for the QL project, which have in my opinion always been too small.

With better resources they could have implemented many things based on previous community contributions such as OSP/CPMA.

Not even the massive advertisement campaing that is launching it on Steam can save the game if it's still the same graphics and limited content

They aren't relying on Steam to save the game. They want to make quake live more accessible to new players with interface and gameplay changes as well.

They are doing what they can do with the resources they have. They don't have the time/money to completely redo the game with the latest and greatest in graphics tech. Besides as a quake player, isn't gameplay more important to you than graphics?

and most importantly, not free to play.

It is free to play.

Subscribers just get perks.

Not sure if you intentionally or unintentionally avoided the LAN part, but the thing that made Q3 so damn popular is because you could play the game with your friend in the basement or just pull the cable through the window to neighbour house.And Im not even going to bother describing eastern cyber coffee`s LAN scenes..

Secondly, even tho I agree with the centralisation part, THEY ABSOLUTELY SHOULD let you incorporate your own server in QL system, because small comunities with known tradition are being expelled right now.

its not 1999 anymore. anybody has internet. and enough internet to play with 10 people through one connection.

berlin pls

That's what I meant by 'offline servers'. LAN.

I agree with you that LAN support would be great, but the reason it isn't done is because of how easy it would be to just trick the system into thinking it's on a LAN when it's over the web, and then you have the decentralization issue again.

I agree completely that it sucks royally about communities being cut out. I really wish this weren't the case, and it's really lame that the LAN party feature is lost in QL, because LAN parties were awesome.

Now your LAN party has to connect to the net, and hope that you get a good ping locally. Really really lame.

Some solution probably exists, but is likely beyond the capabilities of the available resources.

LAN parties are awesome.

FIIIIIXXEED

Yeah, the LAN party we had recently in Sydney was pretty awesome.. (n)
Even though it'd been organized MONTHS in advance and people had paid, booked flights all the rest. Id decided to pull the plug on us with no notice and leave us high and dry with no LAN.
Under the current system, in order to run the official LAN client, id needs to rcon in and authenticate it, or something similar... so essentially they had pulled the plug on us in the 11th hour. The official reason given was that they were busy "Working on an update that would bring more players to the game." So we pretty much knew they were porting it to steam a while ago. I don't think anyone is all that excited anymore to be honest. Anyway,
Thanks to the hard work of our community, everyone pitched in their skills and we got a fully functional pirate LAN server up for sydLAN with 12 hours notice. It even worked with the standalone client!
Nice one id! The Australian community remembers!

that sucks :/

Good post.

lolcs

Le – Settlers Project

Please explain what you think is so important about centralization, and why decentralization can be bad, I'm ignorant here.

It's much, much easier to form a community around a small, simple, and easily understood system that doesn't take many clicks to get into.

Client and server are updated automatically, maps downloaded automatically, friend's list helps locate your friends and where they're playing, your games are kept track of, there are only a handful of mods and one set of client config settings.

When everyone goes off and does their own thing, populations drop for any one particular thing. It becomes difficult for newer players to get into the game. They don't know what's popular and how to find their way there.

There are a zillion mods, and a zillion versions for each mod, each with its own zillions of config settings, and requiring a zillion special pak files with a zillion maps and assets.

It becomes a complicated, unrecorded, unregulated, and unpredictable wasteland of digital discombobulation.

Thankyou.

Centralisation means any poor decisions by id are binding and/or globally felt

and I'm not sure but it seems that nowadays are more cheaters than before, cuz you "needed to have some knowledge in computer/internet" to make it work, its a shame.

The free experience is shit and annoying, no one that wants to play casually (99%) is going to bother paying for the extra shit.

The free experience is shit and annoying

...sooo that means it's worth it to subscribe?

no one that wants to play casually (99%) is going to bother paying for the extra shit.

Even though the free experience is annoying?

What is it that you want exactly?

I don't necessarily agree with him, but when the free experience is "shit and annoying" and people don't want to bother paying for other stuff, then people will simply leave for another game. That should obviously be avoided.

The solution to this is to make the free experience better, whatever that means.

iirc the point in f2p is to have a large playerbase playing for free while a few people actually give money to the game to finance the whole thing (which is certainly not the case with QL). The point in that is to get the casual audience (or people who don't want to pay in general) and also to keep up a bigger playerbase, I think.

The solution to this is to make the free experience better, whatever that means.

They absolutely plan to do that as was made clear in the steam post.

Keep in mind that removing map voting and introducing the rotation resulted in a huge influx of subscriptions. Everyone was against it, no one liked it, yet it pretty much saved the project.

I still hate it, but it's hard to argue with good ol' fashioned cash.

I think players are looking at it from the point of view of having subscribed, and then going back to standard. Newer players won't have this experience though.

Subscriptions are not disputable however the service provided is.

Not it ISNT. Because its available for free since 1999. Inb4 then play Q3.

Sure they have. If they hadn't QL would never have gotten as popular as it is. It is much more popular than Q3/CPMA.

lol

it's not popular at all. It's more popular than q3 and cpma.... but the game is not popular at all.
it was in 2009 and 2010... but not now.

You make it sound like the game has been doing well and we have this huge community.

I only miss one feature in ql which is easier way to find games based on matchmaking. Every sucessful game today have ability to join game with only one button. This is main reason why i still play agaist bots. Waiting in empty server for someone to join in and then play only one game and then wait again is not what i consider to be fun.

There's nothing to stop you from simply going back to Q3.

It open's source, if people are that bothered they could have implemented wanted features themselves.

Before QL came into existence Q3 was dead.

The only thing that annoys me is how little has been done. I expected so much from id software because it''s fucking id software! It made me realise how awesome the community was back in the day, with hindsight I would have donated or at least went out of my way to thank the developers for doing such an awesome job.

Yes, no players is what stops me.

If people wanted to play it, they would be playing it. That's the point.

Dota 2 has 700k+ concurrent players. Guess how many you'd have to go through to get them to play wc3 Dota. My bet? More than a hundred, at the very least, and that's with a personal suggestion.

That works only when they think different than you I guess...

id never really 'got' Quake from what I remember (I could be wrong). I'm pretty sure none of the main people in the company were even any good at the game. They didn't understand the difference between Quake and other FPS games. It's not too surprising that quite a few of the things that eventually made Quake stand out from the other games started out as bugs. Quake is due part to chance and randomness and part to the Quake community as much as it is to id.

Now i remember why you are in my ignore list

Your ignore list does not seem to work ;P

I agree that id fucked this up very badly, but I don't think that vq3 gameplay was the problem. I don't know why any newbie wouldn't enjoy it the gameplay if he was playing other newbies on new maps. It was either

* the payment system (could've handled it a little smarter with free freezetag maybe), and it general a more transaction based approach would be better. Also, Hats!

* the lack of new maps (we should have a standard new maps rotation, not rotating new and old maps around. By know, nobody should be playing ztn, dm6 or aerowalk)

* no actual ladder matchmaking - newbies don't know shit about QLranks, and 4 ranking tiers is a joke for one of the hardest games of all time. Clan / team matchmaking would be great

* no advanced social features & automated tournaments for points (would work perfectly with microtransactions)

* not having this when it mattered - if QL was great when it was released from public beta and getting all the exposure, it would have retained much more players

* no advertisment

In the nutshell - Zenimax/Bethseda should throw some money on the project.

Since the inception of QL, they've done enough work that they could've covered this without more money, but just by doing this first if only they realized it was more important.

With the current model QL is better than ever, all maps free on pro spawned and 80 procent of games is on pro spawned now. Gametypes like freezetag and domination are actually played now.

Sure it can improve lots but for me its very enjoyable at the moment.

noone forces you to pay?

you pay for additional features, not the game itself. lol, u dump?

ESR is full of Drama Queens.

This game begs for new engine...You say whatever you want, but until id transfers QL to new engine, it will never be popular.

that would be the most retarded thing ever...

new graphics and sound - ok, everything else - :(

Thats what I meant. :)

Yeah it can do with better sound, though the broken sound has almost become a 'balancing feature'. :P

Why Nemecel fais to get it? (or anything)

I just want to congratulate id for an awesome QUAKECON. Not only did some of the top pro gamers have to beg for donations to be able to attend the tourney, but id was also able to cover a WHOLE 10 (TEN) of the duel matches live. Two of these 10 matches were under 12 mins in duration.

Great job id. You really understand the game you miraculously shitted out 15 years ago.

Actually, please just sell the franchise before you completely kill it. You are getting your ass kicked by shitty MOBA games. It's pathetic.

more like maddog
OpieOP

It's also people's shit taste and stupidity to play MOBAs.

I watched basically everything aside from the last bit of the first day of duel.

... Was it really only ten matches, in total? I'm not doubting you, of course. I guess that just seems way less than I thought it was.

=(

That being said, 10 streamed duels is kind of shockingly small, honestly. I wonder how many 10 is in comparison to an average week of faceit or 125fps?

It was 10 at the time I posted. Then they had the bronze and final to make 12. 10 total if you don't count the >12min matches.

Ahh, I get your meaning.

Man, still wish it could have been more, though. =( I mean, sure, there will probably be demos, but half the fun of watching lan duel tournaments is watching them with the community! You know what I mean? Chatting in the chat, posting in the mega threads, bitching about the music, watching the duels as a community...

I blame the CTF tournament. I don't know of the rest of the world, but, NA CTF is dead unless there's a lan coming up. Which means it's just dead. Again. And just like before QC.

How much you figure they'd sell it for? Because I've long thought it could be interesting if the community got together and did a public fund to buy it... they can't be asking for hardly anything. Lord knows the community would do a much better job with the game than id has.

Idk. It would be cool if Elon Musk played Quake and just bought it and let some Quake people run it. But he plays some shitty war fps. Maybe there is a multimillionaire or billionaire among us? Having a huge group buy it would be a difficult move maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe we all buy it and then give control over to Cooller or something :).

I don't think it would be worth too much. Usually when you do a rough evaluation of a company (or product I guess), you take their profit from 1 year and times it by ten IIRC. And Carmack said Quake was just barely worth it so I would think it would be quite affordable.

BUT the costly part would be to modernize it and run the tourneys and all that to bring it back stronger than ever.

Depends on how much time the community was willing to donate. Feels like the community is willing to donate a lot to this game.

Usually when you do a rough evaluation of a company (or product I guess), you take their profit from 1 year and times it by ten IIRC.

It doesn't sound like it could work in the video game industry. At least not with studios too small to maintain a fairly constant amount of releases per year. The production cycle is just too long.

free to play just doesnt work for this type of game ...
f2p just works for games where you can level up your character, they feed you at first with easy achievments, and after you played some time ... you have to do so much repetetive "work" to level up your character, that you want to pay to get shortcuts ...
but in ql there are no levels ...
ql should be a 20 euro game, which you can buy somewhere for once, and people from the community can make servers for it ...
they have to keep up attention for this game by organizing LANs, not necessarily with big prize money, but a US tournament and EU tournament each year and one World Tournament with the best from each and some wildcards from other continents ...

Exactly. Ever since games were able to be broadcasted id needed to realize this and set up small regional (online or lan) tourneys around the world, culminating in a world champion event somewhere fun like Vegas, or Paris, NYC, etc (fuck texas). The top players from the regional tourneys would have their tickets paid for.

Id should be the ones building the leagues and running the tourneys. Get people into the game and get them watching the game. The you have a dedicated audience, a strong player base and a fan base which can be monetized.

How about you gain experience points by playing then these experience points interchangeable to unlock premium features for free? This keeps a motivation to play besides just getting better at the game itself, you know, like about every single successful f2p game. At least give a posibility to unlock the content by playing. If you want the shortcut then you pay for it. id just can't think.

what kind of premium features?
quake should always be a game on equal levels in my opinion,
if some player gains advantage, the becomes a dumb0 game for play/pay2win ... real skill much better develops on equal grounds ...

should there be a season like 4 weeks,
there you can unlock premium maps/mods after certain amount of xp points? Or what are you thinking of?

Of course it should be enterly f2p, but since that it seems it not possible, im talking about unlocking maps, skins and what not. Basically having the f2p version as it is now, then being able to unlock all the premium content slowly as you gain XP points, so there.

Yeah, I think that would be worth trying.

For video game makers, the playing field has changed recently and id need to realize this. It seems like they are still of the mentality that you have to crank out game after game, when really all you need is one really good one (maybe a few to be safe). These days MOBA games get tens of thousands of viewers every day it seems on Twitch. There are probably more people watching MOBA games every day than do CNN, or at least it's probably comparable. And it's very valuable to generate a big audience.

id is actually in a great position, because they have an awesome game already. The just need to give it a lot more attention and do something similar to what we are talking about with the worldwide tourneys etc. Get people into the game, get them watching the tourneys, get them to be fans of one of the pros and then sell them shit.

Also maybe another idea worth trying would be to have the game recognize when you kill... say 5 people in less than 10 secs... and automatically isolate it and make a vid of it that you can share on Facebook with a click of the button. Something like that maybe would generate some interest.

maybe something like that, but not quite like that.

Oh look someone fired a quad rocket into a crowd again.. for the x10000'th time is not that entertaining ;)

Yeah, it would be up to the players discretion on whether or not to share each video though. But now that you mention it, people who have no taste would probably share all of them.

But, if I were stil a teen at least, I would like it if Quake would make a 10-20 sec highlight vid of me doing something awesome and giving me the option to post it on FB.

lan server.

lan server.

Why is that people try to say that QL is dead since 2009?

And why should we care for people who see no point in paying for this game? It's still freemium on its basic level. You don't want to pay, its all right. Your life your money your priorities.

But the argument of QL being a "1999 game that was slightly refreshed" as a reason for not playing QL and not buying sub is pretty shaky imo. OFC you can't run your own lanparty in the same way as you did before. You can't mod the game like before. But you can still play in a centralized hub with all the servers, unified game content and lots of support.

Remember Q, Q2 and Q3? After being sold, these games received patches and END OF STORY BREH. No support, no updates, no nothing. If you modded the game your own plus. But that was about it.

Also all of thse servers running different versions, requirements for lengthy installs to tweak the game to run on a custom server, etc...was it really that cool?

No it wasn't IMO. We didn't have a say in this because it was 90s and we were grateful to own a disc of our beloved Quake at all. We had to make due with what we had. I know we had DEfrag, CPMA, RA, etc etc. I know how much tweaks we could do. Problem is it was all chaos and the vanilla base was still pretty much the same.

And on that "it was free after you bought it" Yeah, unless you were a llama, you still donated to pals who ran the server. Also, you didn't get any support at all in terms of frequent updates and bugfixes. No 24/7 servers (at least not many). I could go on and on.

Now you have all in custom launcher. You still can tweak configs. Still can run own customized servers, albeit not in your home. What's the deal?

I know we complained a lot in 90s, but we were teenagers...now we are grown up...are we??? Judging from some posts, some people stayed more or less immature and plain pretentious.

I love Quake. I play it since its birth and will play it in its full glory. I will support this game and help my pals in QL community. If you're not in the same boat of thought, your problem.

[...] Remember Q, Q2 and Q3? After being sold, these games received patches and END OF STORY BREH. No support, no updates, no nothing. If you modded the game your own plus. But that was about it.

Also all of thse servers running different versions, requirements for lengthy installs to tweak the game to run on a custom server, etc...was it really that cool? [...]

The thing is with Quake Live they have removed the possibility for the community to contribute or even take over and maintain the game as the community did with Q1/QW, Q2 and Q3. Sure the games may have required lengthy installs and tweaks in the beginning but have you tried installing QW or Q2 today? You're good to go in five minutes and that includes the download time of the game (based on the Shareware) itself. It wasn't ID Software who did that, it was dedicated people who loved the game and did it in their freetime in order to make the game available to more people.

The same goes for the QW version of GTV, which even today is not surpassed by anything similar in Q3 nor QL. The whole ezQuake client with all its features is completely made by dedicated hobby coders (or hobby coding professionals ofc).

Compare those possibilities for the community to QL where you can't even create and distribute your own maps if i understood things correctly. It's just mindblowingly stupid.

I know. Still, tell me how can you achieve the same with QL. I think it can't be done imo.

QL is ultimately an application.
If people were to contribute to the game, especially in extremely invasive way, there is a risk of game having various issues. Not only compatibility, but also errors in code, conflicts - you name it. Who will provide support for this? QL dev team? But why? They didn't make it.

Also, if the game is paid for continuously how come can people who contribute not get paid? if someone made a mod for QL on scale of ezquake, I bet they would ask for monetary gratification. Because Zenimax gets money from supplying that modification to paying customers.

So you would have to pay to people who add various modifications AND not be sure whether that Frankenstein of a code will work AND get flak from paying users that want the bugs ironed out.

QL team gathers suggestions and then tries to implement them if theyre viable from programming and business point of view. it is not a closed environement like older Quakes. QL is constantly evolving. A modification that works in this version might not worka fter another engine update. Then what? You ask the contributors to rewrite their work? When they're not paid, all your business model hangs on their whim. They might do it or not, or hold id ransom: "pay or we won't update our add-ons".

No, this would be a mess no one wants to go in.

The way I see it, we can petition and suggest for id to make certain changes. That is all.

I agree with you, it is probably not possible to open things up to the community to the same extent as before. In my opinion they should do it where it is viable though and maps is the prime example. Sure people mention there might be legal issues but those have to be possible to overcome, even if it would take the mapper to hand over all rights to id.

What's more important though is that the lack of the possibility for community contributions puts an even greater responsibility on id software themselves to implement what's missing. I mean ultimately they could just shut down the whole QL infrastructure if they wanted to, that's how dependant the community is of them. :)

Take into consideration that id as you know it is no more.

When id was the small Mesquite company that rocketed into stardom in 90s it was all into helping players. That accessibility of Quake engines was planned by Carmack. He wanted people to fiddle with the game. It was part of 90s charm and that rogue-ish charm of id Software.

Now its Zenimax and they're not interested in that many changes. QL has no playerbase for Zenimax; compared to CoD or other franchises QL is small. We are entirely on the mercy of the small QL dev team that, in other hand, is at the mercy of Zenimax execs.

I'm afraid the amount of creative freedom that we had in 90s won't ever come back. Nobody's interested in it. You brought back memories of extremely customized hardcore mods with excellent capabilities...for power user/player. Most players nowadays are not power users. They can't tweak config let alone adjust network settings for game.

I think that we either pay for sub and then pressurize the dev team as paying customers or we drop the ball and go back to older Quakes. But that's the way of the dodo.

That already exists, for a number of years by now: Steam Workshop.

That's the thing: everything it's said to be impossible in QL and by its team, but when you look at other games it's clear that indeed the grass is always greener on the other side.

I think the centralized system has been quite harmful to QL, not only having positives. This game has been developed for six years by now and we still haven't seen a single major update from 1999 Q3, whereas with something like Steam Workshop this game would at least have improved textures, sprites, models and so on.

A great concrete example of why the centralized system hasn't worked great in QL for considering players' suggestions is PayPal support. "We" the community asked for paypal support for four years, which the devs replied to saying it was impossible due to id software not being a public listed company. Then "we" told them specific ways to achieve paypal support regardless of that situation, ways in which other companies do. Four years of failures, of something available in pretty much every game from start.

To end the rant, an offtopic (as usual). I find absurd that they charged $48 a year to make the game really playable, for something that's practically a copypasting job, mind you with lesser features than Q3. That was the case for four years, since last week $36. QL was among the most expensive FPS games ever, if not the very most. If you were an euro player, that paid from the start and in euro currency, then in 2010-2014 you have spent over 250 dollars in Quake Three, in an era with fantastic entirely new games at $10 total or less. Fuck.

Aye, but you talk abut a thing that was made from the ground up.

They would have to abandon the entire QL imo and make it anew to enable something akin to SW. I also don't know whether it's all copypasta. As usual, the devs know their story, we know ours. Truth lies probably in the middle.

Bear in mind that's only my educated guess; maybe it's easier to tweak QL. But I suppose if it was they would've already done it (another guess - maybe I'm giving devs too much credit).

Remember they're muppets whose strings are pulled @ zenimax. You can ask all you want, if the execs say no its no.

So they would have to make Quake 5 to fit the bill of our collective needs, that's what I think. Or add more people to the dev team so they can code more and modify more. But that needs money, and money must be received by means of subs. Which, on the other hand, wont be coming in droves because they haven't delivered what we need and want from QL. So it's a catch 22.

Slow and steady wins the race, maybe it will crack up now.

I forgot to add: Since most of the gods of code from id are gone, it would be difficult for me to fathom something as impressive as q3 was. So even if theyr edesign the game from the ground up it will still probably be idTech 3 or a derivative of it.

The only things left to be said are that:

1. It doesn't matter who's fault is, whether the QL team or the execs. In the end all of them are id software.

2. TBH I'm not critical of Zenimax. First things first, if it wasn't for them who knows if id software and QL would exist today. Secondly, Zenimax is not at fault in QL in particular, because the vast part of QL's live was not under their 'regime', and now under theirs finally it came the time when big changes to QL are going to be announced. Finally, Zenimax has been criticized precisely for not pulling the strings, giving too much liberty to id software in the doom4 project. According to reports, Doom4 was heading to be another Duke Nukem Forever, re-made many times and with lackluster results, until Zenimax decided to step up.

This is normal, Zenimax has resources. That doesn't change the fact that corporate dynamics are just what they are. Also do not mistake certain creative freedom given during time buffer in game development project for true independence, because it's standard in the industry. So it ultimately doesn't prove anything.

The point is, id works for Zenimax. They were acquisited by ZS and now they follow the publishing and timeline rules of Zenimax. Therefore, they're not an independent software developer like in 90s. They can't play like Broussard and his late team did with DNF.

Also, id was taken over by ZS in June 2009, so we have 5 years when "finally it came the time when big changes to QL are going to be announced. "

No, actually the changes that are happening are an output of creative brainstorming @ itd on how to keep QL afloat because the parent company wants to see results, not failed promises. Since the ad business model failed they announced paid membership and then streamlined it into 1 option (pro). They have to present very specific and very clear business reports on their endeavors and luckily for us, QL still holds some water.

Anyway, we'll be able to measure and judge the matter more precisely in a year or so, then we will be able to see any perspective. Right now its all speculation.

Compare those possibilities for the community to QL where you can't even create and distribute your own maps if i understood things correctly.

You can make your own maps and distribute them. You just won't be able to play them on id software's servers until they buy it.

There u go. THEY BUy iT. IF they buy it. That's the friggin point.

Remember Q, Q2 and Q3? After being sold, these games received patches and END OF STORY BREH. No support, no updates, no nothing. If you modded the game your own plus. But that was about it.

What do you mean thats about it? OSP, CPMA, defrag, endless legendary maps... the work done by community FOR FREE shits all over the work done by id paying. just lol

Can you interpret what you read? When I say END OF STORY i mean producer/developer support...unless u tell me that DeFRaG or CPMA were made by id...yeah Khaile and arQn, m00min, cgg or 4Nt1 worked for Carmack...lol
Yeah THAT WAS ABOUT IT in terms of dev support. On the contrary QL gets patches since 2009. They make engine upgrades. They provide cosntant support for paying customers. Not much nad sometimes not enough but it happens.

Buy glasses bro

About changing the engine, thats something only people that dont understand the game can say. You change the engine, you change the game.

BUT

what about improving it? In ways that DOESNT affect gameplay ofc, and also being optional. Simple example, improving lighting/textures too look more like doom3, im not much into that stuff and cant remember the term but its something like bump maps or whatever, so gfx whores and streamers can rejoice and newcomers wont instantly say "that looks like crap". I know these kind of changes are a lot of work and wont be done by 2 poeple, but it would be good for the game, while not changing the gameplay all true ql fans love.

Just add tons of particle effects to everything you do \o/

Syncerror needs to lay off the donuts and cocaine and get a fuckin clue.

The worst part about the centralisation is that when id decides to ban you there's no way to play with your mates, regardless of whether you are guilty or not.

change IP?

You've gotta change IP and MAC AFAIK.

so change it both and be happy

Game's pretty much worthless without a sub and when you get banned every time you sub it's pretty much incentive to just not play.

The MAC doesn't travel across routers.

But apart from changing your IP, if you're trying to switch your "identity" your browser is your worst enemy. Where cookies are only the tip of the iceberg. Never tried to actually look at what the quakelive site is using to fingerprint people, but here's an example for current day techniques:
http://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-on...e-to-block

Edit: where they probably don't even have to go to those lengths. The quakelive plugin itself can store persistent data any way it likes.

I have been banned, changed IP and MAC and gotten straight back on a new account.

Also not sure how much your post applies now with the standalone browser

Well, that's fine then. Where again the MAC doesn't travel across routers. It works at ethernet and not TCP/IP level. The MAC the quakelive server sees for your packets is that of the last hop between you and the server.

Edit: although, thinking about it, technically the quakelive plugin could read the local MAC address if having sufficient privileges and send it to the server with the game data, on appllication level. I wouldn't expect them to be doing that though. Still, it's a possibility.

When changing IP failed, changing MAC and IP always worked so I suspect your suggestion is correct.

Interesting. Might really be that the MAC is used to create a fingerprint of the system and that this fingerprint is transferred to and stored on the quakelive server. And if that's what you found out - changing the IP doesn't work while changing both does - we have to assume that this is the way or one of the ways how id Software tracks client systems.

On Linux systems though neither the browser nor the plugin (when it was still available for Linux) could possibly infer local MACs without root privileges. I would guess the same applies to Windows and admin rights. Saying my guess would be that, as long as you're running the game as a user that doesn't have admin rights, you might not have to change the MAC.

So if somebody feels like experimenting with these scenarios one could actually verify this fingerprinting hypothesis. First step would be though to verify what I just assumed, that a Windows user without admin rights can't gather the MAC of a local NIC.

Edit:

Forget it, have been elsewhere in my mind. The MAC can actually be gathered by any user, also on Linux. So that's then probably what they're doing. Or, on Windows, they might even rely on a fingerprint that's created by Windows itself and that is based on the MAC among possibly other things.

Either way, good to know. Thanks.

Are there many cases that you know about where legitimate players got banned because of error in judgement? I'm just curious.

Serious

abandonthread.exe

Yes, I'm one of them.

cmd

C:\windows\system32\abandonthread.exe -f -t 100

Error 1001: You're not logged in with administrative privileges.

$ abandonthread.exe
bash: abandonthread.exe: cannot execute binary file

Goddamn linux lovers... ;)

BTW,
sudo bash
shutdown -p now

this should kill this thread for good...or not...

Oh who am I kidding...

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=1M probably works better. ;)

Yeah, but they've got RAID and streamer backup...we need FIRE man, FIRE!!!!

Well, apparently the new Steam stuff is bringing about 'big gameplay changes.'

Maybe they will help with player base increasing?

That said, if it does help garner more players, I sure as shit hope it's not because they fucked some core mechanic(like strafe jumping to gain speed. remove that, and it's no longer quake 3/live! =\)

But, this is id. Who knows what will end up happening. So, in the meantime until they tell us the changes, I will be (cautiously) hoping for the best! :D

"I sure as shit hope it's not because they fucked some core mechanic like strafe jumping to gain speed. "

Stop giving them suggestions :D

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=eee_1405871207

They need to remember to FHRITP

I like all the points made here in this thread, what i wanna say is...
I've played quake 15 years + and i loved the old community driven mod era that we once had and i do miss it, but i also have to agree that it was not sustainable and was a poor way to try and keep quake really popular for years to come. When QL came out it ruined the small community i had left with Q3 and i died inside. But it warmed up on me after they adjusted weapons and hitboxes. Now with no community mods etc. The game has died, I also think that is another reason they want this game on steam, steam workshop is allowing community to makes mods skins etc. without any of those code error issues, those are dealt with before anything gets put on the workshop.

I do hope they will make it SW compatible and allow modding to go on.

Hell, they could make competitions for best QL mods. For player skins. For weapon skins. Etc. Keep the ball rolling again.

People love competitions, prizes, etc. Us quakers feel pretty much shut-out by current policies of keeping the community *out*.

We had so many talented Quake designers, coders, people who made beautiful things out of vanilla game. Where are they? We cans till bring some of them back from retirement?

Things that would have potentially never existed if all games were centralized:

-CS
-DoD
-Dota
-deFrag
-classic maps like ztn, because id software doesn't buy them so it doesn't get played
-and so on and so on

Centralization still would work if id cared for the main issues of the game, look at Dota 2 or LoL. The fact that they didn't do even the minimum work needed (embed irc, create ranked matchmaking for duel and teamgames, three fucking days of work) themselves despite the promises and didn't let us do anything is the problem.

Yeah, but since they will never do it, if it wasn't centralized at least we would get good content by the community.

Very true.

They probably get it, they just dont give a fuck. Clearly theyre paid the same regardless of quality of the work.

Save youself the nerves and stop expecting things. Nothing changed in 6 years and nothing will change after 6 more.
Just enjoy this walking corpse of a game while its still there.

Keep playing with that corpse honey

the point is that you cannot have different results by doing the same thing all the time.

We are going round in circles with this.

Centralized or decentralized, with or without microtransactions, with or without ideas stolen from other online FPSs, the game will fail unless it has an increasing playerbase.

Right now we need:

- a GOOD anticheat to combat punkasses that have made QL their testing ground for noobery, faggotry and stupidity.

-good marketing campaign to sell QL (spin it as oldschool skill-based FPS and STAY THAT WAY isntead of trying to make this game more messy by weird changes)

-more open game environment so talented modders and map makers can add content to the game therefore giving it unique flavor and allowing the community to flourish. They can make modding championships where best mods/skins/maps get included into QL.

-id getting closer to the playerbase. I know guys @ id are afraid of teens and their dumbass ideas bu seriously, some people, especially old schools within this community can contribute A LOT when listened to.

Without the above, it's a losing battle no matter how you look at it.

-ability to unlock pro features for free, similar to the MOBA games model

You mean if you play a lot... earn points towards a pro sub?
or "buy" cosmetic shit with said point?

Good idea.

That's about it.

id should be afraid, just look at the new UT and their test level Liandri:

http://i.imgur.com/mAFcKC6.png
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8Nlz7XonCs#t=92

Sync, do you see this?

You realise they're not competing with the new UT at all right?
You think you'll get a playable framerate on that on a 10 year old PC?


That is gorgeous though.

Thats the problem...they are not competing and they will loose 90% base of casual players. Who today uses 10 year old pc to play games? :/ I love Quake more than anyone but the reasons people write are becoming to funny and delusional.

UT is not only probably years away, it's also going to be a top of the line triple A title for new PC's.
in comparison QL is a mobile phone game, they're not in the same market.

Who today uses 10 year old pc to play games?

thats actually hellofalot people. Might be not exactly 10 years old, but people with crappy PCs (by modern standarts) are majority.

Playing games != playing quake

I dont agree on you with this. I personally dont know anyone who plays games and has pc older than 2-3 years.

well, no facts to prove either of our points so its draw :)

every game regardless of genre is competition. Every player out there regardless of game is a potential customer.
It's the companies job to garner interest in their game and to bring potential customers to it.
The UT crew is doing a really good job at advertising their game via these dev blog vids on youtube.
More people have probably heard of UT in the last 6 months than have heard of quake live in 6 years.

To a new potential customer, the casual gamer, graphics matter.
They can't continue to only appeal to the hardcore gamer. They/we're the smallest niche aspect of gaming communities. If you limit the appeal of your game... you limit your customer base... which limits your profit...
which limits funding for development... which keeps the game stagnant and non-progressive... which in turn loses you your community...And......................

That's how we wind up with the king of fps failing... with a dev team of 2 people who don't work on the project full time... because of no funding.... so there's no development... so people leave... so now i only have the same 20-30 people to play with instead of the 1000's that were around in 2009.

3 FFA servers per server location (3 in nyc, 3 in VA ect ect) all 16 man servers.... all full.. It was hard to find a game because you couldn't fund a slot to even jump on server because they were all so packed.
It was like this for every game type. Even ctf was packed.

So what happened?

A series of bad decisions which have lead us up to where we are right now.

I think "id" or their parent company do in fact get it, but it's just they don't care about the franchise. It's not a case of ignorance, but rather just apathy.

Maybe. Or maybe they both don't get it and don't care.

No, they do get. I remember having a relatively lengthy conversation with SyncError, and how the client should be is not lost on him. The problem is that they lack sufficient backing from the higher-ups to justify the kind of resources which would allow Sync to gather a team to create a modern client -- and quite frankly, from Sync's position, it's difficult for him to justify such expenditure to the said higher-ups, especially when you consider the state of the community. The IP is essentially stuck in an abyss, too well known to justify selling, far to obscure to be worth buying.

I've never heard that, thanks for the info. But one thing will still irk me forever. Why couldn't they make the 5% effort 80% of the effect kind of changes? Matchmaking, big integrated irc channels and maybe automated basic tournaments for achievements and a couple of free pro subscriptions. Maps are great, but I realize they're more work.
They could have done that with less effort than they invested into other things (albeit different people). Or they could get it, if they refuse to take community work, from a contracted fan / resume-building kid doing an internship or minimum-paid work.

Even one guy at id was trying to build a matchmaking system after work alone. It definitely isn't much work. I get how they might not want to invest into rebuilding the client, but seeing the potential esports games have nowadays, they should at least do whatever to make these minimum changes.

You'd think they might have learned this lesson after Quake 4. You don't release an unfinished product. At this point, they might know QL is not finished, but they don't seem to understand the very core of what would make it finished, because if they did they would have done it.

You are massively, massively overestimating what 5% effort would achieve towards those suggestions.

Why do you think so?

Ladder matchmaking isn't a lot of code. That alone would have done so much work if id released it before beta, or if they surprisingly did it before steam.
Chat channels maybe need a more of UI redesign, but meanwhile automated tournaments are quite simple. None of this is really a lot of work as far as I understand it.

There are no lobby rooms, because ID got this awesome idea of getting the T-rating for their hardcore fps game. The rooms would therefore require moderators, which is a problem.

Not a problem for LoL.

The same reasoning/excuse was said about so many features, but then you compare QL to other games of similar or even lesser rating and somehow QL is the only one with this so called teen rating problem.

We all know its not a valid reason, but I guess its a good enough alibi to save themselves the effort of trying.

Similar kind of alibism to this:
http://www.esreality.com/post/2617281/re-quak...pid2617275

good matchmaking is very hard to do.

For duel, it just can't be. Find nearest elo within X time that is an okayish experience, that's it.
For teamgames, it might be difficult if you start from zero, but there's a lot of algorithms for xbox live games or League or whatever esle. Just copying them within reason would make a viable system.

Players would whine as they do with all matchmaking systems, and maybe it would actually be imperfect without a lot of tinkering, but it would be okayish, and much, much better than just what we have now.

I'm not sure there's any studies on this, but if there were, I'm 99% sure that click 1 button to find reasonable-ish match would be vastly superior to 5-step into find oponent of not-two-tiers-higher skill by waiting around in a server kind of a thing (edit: in regards to getting people to play games). It's just that easy to click "Play" in LoL, SC2 or Dota 2.

Is there any reason why it would be horrible and not usable without a lot of work?

You clearly have no expirience of delivering finished product of good quality. It is not that simple as you think. Main problem is that it require alot of actual testing and reiterating. Which in turn requires significant resources which in turn they do not want to spend.

Yet one guy wanted to do it in his spare time.

Replying to the edited part:

Let people beta test it, lazily edit it once per week after a week of testing, whatever. What I said about duel or hundreds of generic games having matchmaking work is good, I bet their devs didn't whine about it being sooo hard.

What kind of gameplay changes require less testing, and I'm not even talking about steam. It's about scrappiness and understanding how badly it's needed versus big company mindset. There's no excuse for blindness, either way.

Couldn't they implement a chess like ELO based system? Chess.com has no problems with ELO matchmaking. I guess with any matchmaking system, how successful it is will depend on the size of the player base.

All the matchmaking systems are viariations on it. For duel, even the simplest would work. And I see no reason why a simple system wouldn't work for teamgames, either.

TrueSkill is the only thing that really works for team games.

AFAIK Dota 2 and LoL use non-TrueSkill. I'm sure there are many other games using non-TrueSkill Elo variations, it's not like it's magic.

And matchmaking in dota 2 sucks most of the times because it allows parties with big skill variance to join thus it usually becomes pretty one sided because it is much harder to find appropriate party to put it against so it places like 4+1 vs 2+2+1 usually it will result in 4 man party stomp.

It's good. The thing is, it's extremely hard to balance in dota because you can't be sure what kind of hero the people will play. This wouldn't be a problem for quake anyway, so whatever.

Do you actually have some data to show no other system works properly?

Can't prove a negative. Can only give counterexamples, which I did.

Yeah, I was only wondering why Yakumo was saying that. (You may not have noticed but it was a reply to his post)

They need to split it by map to get it really good.. My ztn elo compared to t4 would be a massive difference.

Check which maps you wanna play, you only get matched up vs people on those maps. Obviously, you couldn't split into 50 maps, you should ahve standard X maps.

If you play only ztn and then start t4, your skill will get better at t4 slowly as you lose rank, but that's okay. In LoL or Dota if you play an unfamiliar role, you take a hit in ranking too. It's okay.

You would have to leave the option to join any server, because otherwise it would be unfair for tox, forcing him to play evenly skilled opponents.

Not a problem, this conversation was a while ago, so I can't remember the specifics, but my that was the general impression left on me. Feel free to contact him on irc to verify if you want B>

Again, I think it's an issue of resources, afaik they are a two man team, including SyncError, and I'm not sure if either of them is a programmer in that capacity, although I could be completely wrong there as well :D

All you say is good, and well, but from a business perspective it's effectively money down the drain. The people who own the franchise have no considerations for the community because they have no such obligations, in fact, from their perspective they are already doing a great deal by simply continuing to host QuakeLive, hire staff to deal with the community, and provide an annual platform for it to be showcased. Moreso, can you think of a game that came out in 1999 that continues have developer support of any kind?

I think, for id, Quake3 was an exercise in creative expression, they had no goal, desire, to make a long-standing "e-Sport," and were more interested in making something fun, and enjoyable, quite similar to nintendo... I don't think they created SSBM with the intention of it becoming a "hardcore" competitive game, even though there was a vocal community suggesting A, B, and C, for the next iteration, for the actual developers that was never the point.

They did their thing, and moved on. I think they expected the community to do the same.

Your points are important, but they're not countering my main point. As long as they're keeping QL online, or especially doing the work to release it on steam or rewrite a bunch of it to make a standalone client, they're doing it for subscriptions. The game would be so much better for them if it could capture players so much more easily with these simple, easily implemented things.

And we're talking about a game that was the first to become an esport, and is sort of around in a scene when esports are blowing up. Having the bare minimum to make the game not autistic compared to modern games has to be an easier sell than rereleasing the game on steam with irrelevant changes, or supporting it without hope of it becoming bigger. That is, if you understand what not being autistic means for LoL, Dota 2 and Starcraft 2, which is why I think they don't.

Edit: I have to add that steam is sort of alleviating the problem of chat channels a lot. So we have that going for us, at least.

I agree, and would say it's a common scenario that you see in the many industries where the (usually large, and in our case Bethesda/Zenimax) company would like to keep its property (Quake) propped sheerly for the sake of keeping the IP alive, instead of killing it outright, and devaluing their initial investment (of id software), part and parcel of which was the Quake IP.

From a business perspective, when you do have this franchise that has such history attached to it, it is safer to run it at a designed, controlled, loss, then to outright kill your investment. Why? It may be worth something later, maybe it will help the milieu of your company, maybe it can help the prestige of your company, more importantly, because of the brand recognition you can always change it into something it isn't (imagine Quake, meets CoD console only game) and do it with less marketing. That it's recognized means it is worth something, and it's something that Bethesda/Zenimax can keep in their back pockets for now.

It might be a case of "what they get".

SyncError and Sponge are both very capable game developers/designers. (Although in my eyes they need a course in synchronous systems and should think more in problems related to the discrete nature of FPS (aka frames are discrete, packets are discrete, snapshots are discrete).)
They can create a very fun game. Which can be seen in the mods they made.

The problem however is imho that quake doesn't need more fun mods!! Hell there are so many they even added a "search field" in their mods dropdown box when you hit custimize......
The core gameplay of quake is awesome and will remain to be awesome till the end of days.

It's probably the case that the more mods you make the less fun every mod actually becomes as more and more people will become "expert" in one mod and stop playing the other mods. Which then reduces the numbers of players in each mod... which then in turn makes it really hard for new players to meet other new players.

nice point of view.

If you could provide an example of something they can do, but have not, that's within whatever, and I'd go out on a limb here say non-existent, budget please. I didn't mean to question the abilities of SyncError, or Sponge, and I'm sure they are capable... at whatever they do, I just don't know in what capacity they are involved with the project. Programming? Networking? Art?

With respect to mods, I'm not really sure I understand your point, mainly because there is a philosophical question to ask about what it means to make utterances like original, core, true with respect to any iteration of Quake. Or I should add, what that means to you. I could only answer to say, the core gameplay mechanics for me involve things like air-control, fast weapon-switch, etc... -- but you may disagree with that altogether.

ow ye I'm not entirely clear on the mods... what I mean with the mods is that they've added stuff like "1 flag ctf", "Race" and "Domination (I kinda forgot that their named as gametypes in QL).
It is all well implemented, and the gameplay in it is also fun.
But it takes a LOT of effort to make something like that and if I were to guess it takes up at least half of their non-existent budget.
And what it ends up doing (atm because there is little new blood in QL) is split the community more and more such that there are only limited servers to choose from.

While they should (imo) really be focussing on some extra stuff around the game, rather than the game itself.
A simple thing like a leaderboard (which they actually HAD running for a while) is such a valuable addition.
Or a clan page on which you can have a group chat with your clan.... Or a "play button" that automatically puts you (or your clan) against a decent opponent in a chosen gametype (which they also HAD running).
Or even just have a default gametype (like FFA) which every first time player gets introduced to before hand and can then join the fight without anything other than a "play" button.

The game itself is awesome! But to actually play it with friends.... that's like a nightmare.

edit: where the reason for it being a nightmare is that it's very unclear (for new players) how to manage their friendslist and what the options are... .There are so many buttons when you're just on the first screen of quakelive that it gives a lot of people a headache just to pick an option.

I agree that they need stuff around the game.

The "Play" button didn't work well, that's why they removed it. Anyway, they need real matchmaking.

I agree on the group chat (chat channels in general are better, but at least we're getting something on steam) and a default gametype. I could maybe see something like Freeze tag, or one of the other mods ( I don't know them). As I've been saying, maybe having a single default gametype benefited Dota 2, LoL, CS, and many other games, a lot.

I'd say that a major reason for matchmaking and that single mod would have to do with not even how many more people would play it, but for the simple psychological factor of just how easy it is to press that button again, instead of a 5-step process to get a game.

Don't you think that it's stupid if you implement a good idea... Then notice that it's bugged in some way and that you therefor decide to remove the functionality rather than fix the bug?

Rather than fixing the matchmaking and re-enabling the play button.... we instead got 1 flag ctf, race, domination, freezetag... And those gametypes take a lot of effort to make (and they are made quite good). While I can just google a matchmaking system. (ok there might be some legal issues with just copying it but hey those things can be sorted out before you copy it.)

Yes. Not understanding specifically what is incredibly important in this landscape (easy to see with 1 look at LoL or any other modern game) and not doing at least the minimum implementation that would have the biggest effect is exactly the problem with QL.

My posts above are in fact arguing for the very same idea. Scrappiness and understanding what is needed has to win against the big company mindset.

It's not per se easy to see... The quake community has been kinda spoiled with being able to choose everything and even modify a lot through cfg options. And we're not really willing to give that up (we don't need to either) while other games have a lot fewer options.
Ofcourse this has a lot of upsides as well, but the downside is that QL is insanely hard to get into while one of the upsides is the almost complete 1on1 relation between skill and score...
QL has an ultra high overall skill, lack of matchmaking, lack of new players and complete disrespect towards other games (cod / cs / lol / bf). Combined that means that you end up with a game that almost nobody will enjoy their start in.

Maybe they should rotate the mods like they do the maps (but have a core that stay the same.)

I suggested something like that (minus the "stable core" aspect) a long time ago but they don't want to push things too far. I still think it would be preferable.

I think that 'forcing any rotation' onto players is a bad decision. Because what you're doing is basically ttaking away freedom that's there atm. Which is a very negative user experience.
But you can enforce a default gametype and perhaps allow users to "gain levels such that more gametypes open" (would actually pwn for new users, and it would also reduce cheaters if you let duel be one of the later modes to be opened and note that playing duel is seriously fucked up difficult :p).

Yeah you're probably right it is a pretty negative experience saying you can't play x mode when you want to play it.

Dual is hard to master something I'll never manage but if your playing someone of similar ability it's the best mode in my eyes. Why would you want to take it away from noobs.

Another idea is advanced matchmaking. One where you can add what game modes you would like to play and what percentage of times you want to play.

[player one]
50% Duel
25% Freeze Tag
25% FFA

[player two]
75% Defrag vq3
15% Random game mode
10% Red Rover

[player three]
100% TDM

Also it would have to have the ability to override it say if you have 10mins and want a quick duel.

And it could put you into a game were someone had quit. In the same vain it could make quitters play together more, this is an idea I got from chess.com. I think they are going to implement it when they go to their new site design.

I don't really mean to "take anything away" from noobs.
But it's actually fun if you can "gain options in time". In LoL I understand that you first have to reach some level (or something) before you're allowed to play any ranked game.
So when people actually get there they feel like they have achieved something. And are happy :p

Furthermore in QL duel it's kinda the case that if your nmy does only 1 thing better than you (and knows how to take advantage of that) games will easily go to 20 - 0. So if you're new into the game I'd say that the best gaming experience would be in FFA.
So why not temporarily force people to do that? And then in order unlock CA, CTF, TDM, DUEL and then after a while unlock all of the other modes as a pack. (where you're not forced to play any CA match to unlock CTF... just have it in that order).

The advanced matchmaking idea is also good.... But let's start with a good general matchmaking ;)
(btw matchmaking in duel is ultra difficult for people who are just starting... you don't want their first game to be a rape.... yet because of how favorable it can be... chances are very large that, if you start out QL with a duel, it will be the case regardless of any other factor.)

I completely agree about FFA being the best mode for noobs and its a blast to play.

I can certainly see something along those lines working well if there was content that would teach players about the modes and game strats and such like. Fueling the noobs fire for the game. But what would you do about all the diluting modes like RR, DOM, INSTA, etc. When you have unlocked them all, is it the case of the best modes win?

Maybe steam will bring the player-base that can sustain them.

Well unlocking modes doesn't mean you have to play them... just let the players decide which mode they like... It'll come to some equilibrium on it's own.
If a mod never gets played then so be it... if instagib gets 90pc of all users then host more instagib cups... You don't have to control it, just give them freedom after having a good introduction to the game.

Atm they have "all freedom from the start" and they get lost in it and choose wrong modes to start in... Starting in duel is like: "ye ok dunno wtf that was but I don't get this game -> uninstall".

First things first, the rotation of maps is the reason why the game wasn't shut down last year, as posted by sponge.

This means we have to account for two sides, when talking about mods and everything else:
a) Players' satisfaction with the game. Of course restrictions aren't much enjoyable in general, though in some cases they are. In QL some people complained about map rotations and lack of callvote, but at the same time lots of other players welcomed them as it meant that we got to play more maps than dm6 all day and there's way more premium servers activity than ever, which is really good for us.
b) The company's side of things. If there's something to be gained with those restrictions then it might as well be a good idea to enforce them. Plus lets face it, in QL in particular what drives sells is restrictions, due that here there's practically no new significant content or features, or dlc (paying for a premium that's actually a premium), etc.

With all that said, is there anything to be achieved with a mod rotation, or by any form of enforcement or encouragement to play other mods currently available in QL, in the state it is today? I don't think so, both for players and for the company, so it just shouldn't be done. Players will not welcome the change, the company won't make money.

I'd like to see mod related changes in the said sense only in the case QL is re-released. A good opportunity would be when it gets to steam, but if id software denies QL will be called "2.0" then maybe it won't be. Still:
1) Having a 'main mod'. In CoDs it's team deathmatch, in LoL it's 5v5 on summoner's rift, in QL it should be 4v4+ CA (yep, sadly). The way to implement this is quite simple actually: in those games by far mostly used way to join a server is using automatic matchmaking, by following a very easy to navigate menu, so no manually looking for servers. In those games the first option are the said mods.gametypes, which are the focus of the development. It's rumored that there will be auto matchmaking in QL's steam release.
2) Encouraging to play a new mod, if it's worth it in both ends of the spectrum and if it is really new. A good example would be defrag, with hundreds and hundreds of maps (dlc?), or proper ra3 with all the arenas and the arena system itself included, or something new rpg-based like q2's kots (addicting), etc. etc..

I'm a big advocate for map rotation, I like playing more than the core maps and it works quite well. I spat out the idea of mod rotation but after reading here I agree I think it would be detrimental to everyone's cause. I do think something should be done, whether that's a match making idea or organisational game features, etc.

Not 100% with 4v4 CA, I find at times it can be a bit like American football, ie not much actual playing, especially for noobs. Maybe if they put a lot of effort into it could become worthy of being QL's main mod.

Christ on a bike I would love to see defrag implemented, it complements the fighting aspect of the game really well. And its so much fun, I used to play a lot and coming home every night to new maps to explore was like opening new presents. My personal favourite maps were ones that weren't well made, not polished. The only reason I don't play it anymore is its a ball ache to get it running and I'm too old/not enough time to faff around getting shit working.

lol on ppl thinking that quake can come back when there are giants like lol, dota2, tf2 and cs:go

you should take a look outside the quake scene to find out that everything has changed a lot dramastically

Plus I am 100% sure that even with a release of a new quake series there wont be much of a comeback at all

just stop crying and play your game while you can or live life eventually

tf2?

So many people here seem to miss the point. I just want to repeat myself: so tell me why would anyone hook into alpha-like looking game, not finished at all. With alpha stage of graphic design, model design, weapons design, not features at all, and very very very unusable client wich is totally useless. The only feature it has is server browser (wich is the shittiest I've seen comparing to lastly released multiplayer productions). This is the problem. No one will pay for or actually even play an alpha game wich ql is right now. It just isn't up there with current standards. At all. Indie developers nowdays manage to release more complete products wich is ridiculous considering how big the market is and how many people are just waiting like those hyens to get their hands filled with money on a great fast fps shooter. No one is delivering tho, and even talking about ID in this case makes me laugh, cause okay, quake was cool 15-10 years ago. Now it's just another ancient game that not a single newcomer will play cause THEY SIMPLE HAVE BETTER CHOICES ANYWHERE THEY LOOK AT IN THE INTERNET. ANYWHERE.
Unless you play ql for 3 years to get into the stage when you can actually enjoy it, you can't play it without being forced to.
I'm just impressed that there is not a single real big company (I mean those bright ones like a fucking valve or blizzard or anything in those lines) that would get into fast fps market. I realise that they have their own statistics and stuff of how many people needs a new game like this but still to me it seems like money is laying on the ground and no one seems to even look at it. Cause let's be hones: reflex and all these shitty alphas are nothing more than quake and never will be games with 2014 standards inside. ID has literally the perfect gameplay, yet they still can't frame it properly.

Maybe what's wrong is mainly your impression that there is a lot of money to be made in this niche.

Nope. There is a lot of people who see this (2gd for example) and try to actually do something, but they aren't Blizzard.

Pretty sure 2gd does it because he loves the genre, and it could be a nice profit for a small company.

But that is far far from what any of the companies you listed count as 'a lot of money'

Considering FPS games is one of the biggest genres across console gaming, the somewhat recent success of TF2 and that FPS on the PC used to be the trendy thing (albeit a long time ago), maybe a current PC FPS can work out.

Of course no one in his right mind would make an AAA title of that genre for that platform, but if the team is small enough then it might be worth the shot.

I see no reason why you can't combine console and pc... Heck it should even be easy to make them connect to the same servers.

So why not release a competitive FPS on the console and have it as a free download for the PC?

PC's are still much more powerfull than the consoles are so you don't even have to optimise much of your code...

PC players have wrecked on any games that were dumb enough to have this. Not viable.

I don't think there ever was any game which had this though?
Do you know some?

FF XI is one, but I was speaking of games more competitive in nature. There were a few I think, but I don't remember and I didn't play them. Just vaguely remember reading about that. There definitely were playests that proved this was unfeasible, I remember reading an article.

I obviously haven't read that... and I don't know any game that truelly was crossplatform (in a way that servers would allow clients in from both PC and from console)

--- edit:
I'm not a world leading expert on which games allow for what. I guess you're right, but I don't know about them nor why they would've failed ;)
I think a game like serious sam for instance would pwn cross-platform.

https://www.google.lt/search?q=pc+players+des...yQOZzoHwDg

Linking google so that you see it wasn't just fake news on one site. That's the article I read, not that you'd need any proof that mouse & keyboard > controller, unless you include autoaim which just isn't fun.


FF XI shares the same servers. I can't be absolutely sure about those cross-platform FPS or action games though, I may be remembering just articles that were rumoured or announced to be cross-platform. I think Shadowrun was one though.

Well that's 1 rumoured game which has never been released. No wonder I haven't heard of it :D

Anyway my point isn't that it's unfair to have a pc vs console. It's that theres (probably) a market for competitive fps on the console. And we know theres one (although fairly small) on the PC.
Since we can couple the servers quite easily... then if you'd put a decent match fixing there in order to match up players of equal skill... theres no reason why the game would have to fail.

Also you would gain a lot of potential viewers if the playerbase is larger ;)

There's Halo and CoD, both are huge.

I don't see PC vs Console competition as fair, it's like playing with players who are mentally unable to time items, or have partial aimbot for hitscan weapons but suck with rocket launcher, also aren't able to strafe. Even if you go 50-50 in good matchmaking, it's not a fair game, players would bitch about being matched up with the other platform players.

ye but both aren't connecting to the same server. Tbh I would even doubt that console versions can connect to eachother's servers.

Anyway I get this feeling you think I'm sugesting to port QL to a console... I'm not that stupid.

I don't :D Though there was Q3A for Xbox arcade I think. Quite unsuccessful though.

Yeah, CoD games are wholy separated for their platforms. It's funny, but they're unhappy about differences between Console versions, and they do suck for competition.

Halo is Xbox exclusive meanwhile.

1. Should be really difficult to code and beta test for a small-ish team. Also patching would be a nightmare.
2. Gameplay is made taking into account the inputs, devices to be used when playing. That is the reason why FPS' are so slow nowadays, as they are made to be played with a gamepad.

A great example example of where what you want actually worked -technologically-wise- was Q3 for the dreamcast :P. They can connect to 1.16 servers, play with a mouse and keyboard (the DC gamepad is beyond awful for FPS games) and there's a broadband adapter too (now really, really expensive, but I want one).

1) I'm not that "into console programming" so I don't really know how much work there is to port something from a console to a pc. But I would imagine that the other way around is much more difficult.

2) yes, so you would want to design a game that plays well on the console and allow pc players to also play it.

Anyway it would be something to take into account when developing a "new competitive fps game". Because there are so many console gamers out there....

so mad I can smell your pasty white gullett starting to cook lolool