maybe totalbiscuit? dunno.

both.
It is in the featured games list today.

That's why advertising matters (steam).

I can see it increasing as well, when they decide to actively advertise QL and have a "free" weekend.

Soon, hopefully when they do the sales, pro subs x% off, and as you said free pro features for a weekend \o/

5k online at one time is more than quake 3 arena ever had.

inb4 source required.

Lies

At it's peak? I doubt it highly. We used to have a couple servers in the middle of fucking nowhere that would be filled with players every night..... and I mean north of 60 middle of fucking nowhere - and not in Russia.

Anonymous makes a good point.

Being north of 60 middle of fucking nowhere is a serious business. Man, talk about rough conditions. 130 miles between most outposts. Up to 170 between gas hubs. It was rough, for some. Even more so for others. And some never made it out. I wonder if the men will find them.

Leading my pack of sled hounds gave me quite an advantage, even if travelling was a bit slower than most would prefer. But, we managed, alright. There is a lot of wild game to be found when you're out there, in the wilderness, so we never wanted for food. North of 60 middle of fucking nowhere is definitely not for the faint of heart. As I said, wild game can be found, everywhere. However, you're trying to make your way through the wilderness, you are not always at the top of the food chain. You know what I mean?

Leading a pack of sled dogs is no easy task. They all have minds of their own and getting them to go through the snow can be quite a trial. Especially when you can see the path of least resistance better than they can. They all, at some point or another, sort of argue while running. They'll growl, pull at the reins, and even try to stop. But, that doesn't usually work too well when the rest of the dogs don't stop. They quickly figure out that getting dragged along face-first in fresh powder is no fun and fall back into line.

But, when you're north of 60 middle of fucking nowhere, arriving in your destination feels good. There's hot plates of food waiting for you. Lots of water to drink and nice shelter for you and those dogs that helped you get oh-so-far from home. There's Quake for the men and fun for the women, too. Sometimes, they even join in on the quake matches.

Anyway, like I say, north of 60 middle of fucking nowhere is a hard, harsh land. It takes a special breed to even prepare for such a trip, let alone actually succeed in completing it. But, when you get there, you're glad you're one of those special breeds; glad that you're surrounded by others of the same breed, cut from the same cloth.

When you finally arrive, the men are unpacking the load, the women have prepared food for you and they've laid out some of the softest, most-welcome bedding you can ever imagine. You're tired when you arrive north of 60 middle of fucking nowhere. Dog tired. More tired than Atlas after an eternity of holding up all the Earth upon his mighty shoulders.

And, when your eyes finally begin to be heavier than you ever thought possible, you remind yourself that being a Lead Dog in the best Sledge Dog pack of all time is good. Life is good. I'm tired now. I hope our master wakes us up with lots of ear scratches. We worked hard for him. The Aurora are beautiful, right now... good night

lol

Actual point was no one outside of the nearby communities bothered to play on it because there was about 1000 miles to the nearest good sized city.

I guess people who live in the cold are biased towards video games.

too much pack et loss

He was a dog the whole time 0_o

http://steamcharts.com/app/2200
q3a
all time peak 113
lol

obviously that was for the steam release, but :


https://web.archive.org/web/20000816052308/ht...com/stats/

Q3a 2527 servers, 2975 players
Gamespy all time recorded peak.

They give number of players here:
http://leeto.fi/#/countries

oi that was mine ;P

This is confusing to me, as someone that wasn't around for Quake 3 during its hey-day. How is it such a small number as an all-time high, when it is such a well-known game and has lasted for 15 years?

I wasn't around back then but I was always of the impression that, during Q3's high times back in the early 2000s, that it would have been much higher than a mere 2,975! :o

I mean, I played CS for a long, long time and even we knew about Q3 and the legendary players, its popularity(which, now, seems like it was over-hyped), etc...

How was it SO low? Fuck, CS was from the same year and, even now, despite the fact that CS:S and CS:GO exist, it STILL has this for today's high and peak:

24,666 28,775 Counter-Strike

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

2,975 is completely confusing, to me. D:

Q3 was notoriously hard to server browse back then with all the different mods and Point Releases. Gamespy caught maybe 10% of the servers.

Well, assuming I understand everything, then::

that really makes Yakumo's claim of 5k QL users > Q3 seem silly, then. And he can't say 'oh, I was only referring to people on vanilla Q3/Q3A,' either. You have to count all modes of Q3 using vanilla physics if he's going to claim 5k QL > Q3, because people are playing CA, freezetag, Dom, etc. as well as TDM, CTF and duel on steam.

edit: And before you rip my head off, Yakumo, keep in mind I'm just trying to understand how your(seemingly fantastic) claim that 5k QL > Q3 makes sense. So, if what User said is true, it IS silly. >.<

Also, how many of those 5k of PQL, out of curiousity? From what I've seen(and also believe since I've played pql, too), that's not the same thing as vanilla QL. It's like comparing VQ3 and CPM, no? :D

check for activity stats here:
http://ql.leeto.fi/#/activity

but ye... for turbo/pql is pritty much the same as before the steam release, i guess no1 is setting up turbo servers for standart players.

n1, if you hover over "Matches per gametype last 7 days" it shows the type of games that are going well. Nice to see FFA maintaining its position as a climber above the rest, and CA up at the top, but, where is the CTF one?


overall nice to see stats increase in all game modes, and hope it maintains.

lol idd, i didnt noticed there is no ctf on the graphs, strange.

That image seems so large, I had to -zoom to get it to show the crucial part on the right hand side ;)

As far as I know the gamespy stats counted everything they could identify as quake3, from the id and gamespy master servers. their data would have been scraped from all of the servers that were reporting their existence to those masters (which is most of them)

Custom compiles of Q3A may not have been doing that, id shut down their own master server even, as frankly there weren't enough people playing to warrant hosting it.

I really think people are wrong if they believe that at the point people were releasing and playing custom builds like CPMA it wasn't truly a niche game by them with drastically lower numbers than there were at Q3A's all time peak.

Hell people used to bring up warsow all the time as the big current Q3 competitor, and seem to be taken in by its flash website and everything, how many players are actually typcially online for that from their own tracker?
http://www.warsow.net/wmm_servers 21 players.
http://dpmaster.deathmask.net/?game=warsow 3 players.

Gamespy showed maybe 10% of the servers. The fact is that browsers like ASE that actually cared about showing q3 servers were having really hard time, and gamespy was totally useless.

Master server was never down, cdkey was disabled (because thats what id software did back then, they gave out their engines and games for free after a while) and later brought back when they wanted to have punkbuster.

You are right about the numbers being way lower when CPMA became a big thing, but there were many many mods before that, like OSP. Which you would of course know, had you actually been around then.

id have never given their game away for free. They released the source code under the GPL. That does not include any of the game assets (maps, sounds, models, graphics)

OSP was simply a q3 mod, its still quake3.exe that you run, it identifies to master servers as q3 running the OSP mod.
Cpma was actually released with its own stand alone client some years after it was only a q3 mod.

You really don't know me if you think I wasn't arround Q3 for osp, or in fact long long before.

id gave their game practically free (like removing cdkey) or just plain free like Enemy Territory. The old id would have never dared to take money for such inferior product as QL for example.

I thought we were talking about peak of Q3, why are you talking about CPMA stand alone? I also thought we were talking about Gamespy (or any of the browsers for that matter) stats, why are you talking about master servers?

I dont know you, but if you think Gamespy or any other server browser were reliable and had accurate data, you definately were not around.

Even if you have reason to believe they may be lacking, you deal with the statistics you can get hold of, not the ones you make up in your head.

I brought up CPMA because some clown was bound to bring up 3rd party builds of the Q3A source.

I believe we're talking about peak of Q3 with regards to whatever we can find was the peak if Q3 via any recorded statistics, not some personal feeling of it being in X year or whatever.

I started multiplayer FPS with the original DOOM, then DOOM2, Qtest, Quake, QuakeWorld, Q2Test, Q2 where I started UNR with Tasan which was the most successful division 1 Q2 clan in the UK before moving to Q3A (after playing around with Q3Test ofc. ;p ).

I was around.

It's not actually the all time high, as there are some lower numbers if you can find working pages from much later dates on the wayback machine.

3585 players that p3l3 found is still the highest I've seen poking around though.

I think you're an idiot if you really think 3.5k was Q3's all time high. You don't even need stats to realize this.

that's not the point, it is the information, that was collectable, unless you know of a way to get id to release all of their server logs?

Well he is providing actual info, unlike everyone else.

Plus lets not forget that back in the day we all knew CS was much bigger than Q3, night and day.

I knew CS was bigger, too. I just never knew or imagined that it could be such a small number(if that number is accurate, anyway). Like I said, I was surprised to see Yakumo's numbers up above. Then again, we were really into FPS. Even though most of us weren't playing Q3, we still knew about fatal1ty, as one example that I can recall seeing clips and such from back then. I used to come to xsreality for random CS demos when I was bored.

to help you out of your confusion...
Quake is the reason that gamespy even was made, by fans. This is wayyy before steam and even fairly well before everyone had internet and before there were any "industrial standards".

Especially due to lack of standards Q3's protocol is somewhat hard to scan for, as several versions have somewhat different settings. So pretty much the earliest version that was scannable was not the origional Q3 but a point release later.

Since Q3 was a (pretty much) multiplayer only game it's more sensible to look at the number of sales... which I have trouble finding...
I think I remember Carmack saying it was their best selling game up till then. And Q2 sold over 2 million.

yes. gamespy was my friend, in todays era, would have been awesome

Hmm. Okie dokie, thanks :D

Yeah, I remember that centralizing could be tough back then. Even in the early days of CS, league play could be a real pain in the ass. While everyone used it and had their own channels, I hated IRC. Finding scrims was even worse the setting up scheduled league matches! Something like GS would have been nice since the in-game browser was just awful =(

Stuff like that all came into existence due to the scenes spawned mostly by quake and partially as a result of CS and UT. (note that I say quake here and not specifically quake3 ;))

Quake 3 was their worst selling game actually...

I don't remember ever hearing that at all except from you now... So I would think that you're just disagreeing with me, as you always do :)

Carmack mentioned it in one of this keynotes a few years back (I'm not gonna watch 20 hours of carmack keynotes now to find that...).

But i have also just got it confirmed by someone from id... (i'd paste the quote but he is afk right now).

But it's also the most licensed engine, perhaps because it focused on good multiplayer experience.

Can those contacts tell you what games had the best ROI when you factor in the engine licensing?

Like noctis, I remember JC saying this in one of e keynotes too - probably in one of the years before D3 explaining why multiplayer was becoming less of a focus. Cba to find the direct quite though,

hmmm, strange I'll assume that I'm wrong then for once ;)
As I also don't want to listen through all of the keynotes just to re-gain knowledge about q3 sales hehe. (in general the keynotes are interresting though)

ehmmm, actually I'm saying neither.

It's fairly likely that at least 2 million people at some time played Q3. Which explains why so many people know of the game.

Meanwhile I also say that any data about "how many people were online in Q3" is inaccurate because of technological reasons and just lack of reliable data.
Most reliable tools for measuring popularity of online games were made after (perhaps as a responce to) quake 3.

Sells =/ people actively playing multiplayer at a given time. The number we care about is only the latter.

If that was the case there would be hundreds of millions of tetris players, lol.

http://youtu.be/G0YLjccRPZg

I don't believe that the GS stats were that inaccurate.

I remember it as being most players were on updated versions - admittedly with a split forming at 1.16 due to DC players and mods that didn't upgrade (insta-freeze?).

Scanning servers wasn't too difficult (although would obviously just be a snapshot at a given time), and almost all servers reported to the id master server by default, and I think most servers also reported to the gamespy master server since many example configs show using the gamespy master.

If anything, I think the numbers are high since they're counting bots, and also mods like Urban Terrror which people here wouldn't consider "q3" (unless you want to add the current UrT numbers onto the QL numbers....)

It really was/is inaccurate. Did you ever try to find specific servers on Gamespy? Even with ASE it was a pain in the ass.

And there was splits on every version within the noob/casual players. And even competitive players had to roll back on some PRs. The fact is that server browsers were not reliable at any point, so the data gathered by them is neither.

I bet Clanbase alone had over 1000 active players, and those were the tip of the iceberg when the game was at peak.

The whole thing is that you all are providing contextual info only based on your perception.

What it's way, way, way more useful is actual data, which only yakumo provided.

If it is for perception, people here overrate quake and especially quake3's sells. Doom was the really popular franchise, but quake never was as mainstream as doom. Also people forget that pc gaming was 1% of what it is today.

Well there were a lot of things going on back then...
And I'm not really sure what all the causes of problems were as tbh I was a young lad back then who didn't know anything about computing ;).
But I do know that all of those scanning programs had issues with versions and mods. And I also know that by far most people never updated their Q3. As you didn't get messages of "your q3 is out of date please download an update" like you are forced to do with all new games.

As for how many people were online exactly... well it's hard to tell. But it's likely that the numbers are somewhat inaccurate though (if you think the peak of all time was below 4k).

The q3 scene was just too scattered with people being on all different versions and different mods etc.

In 1999 there were articles about it selling 50,000 copies, and 1 million had been manufactured.

"Quake and its four sequels, Quake II, Quake III Arena, Quake 4, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars have sold over 4 million copies combined" from wikipedia but no actual source for that information given.

I believe gamespy's figures were probably the most accurate until it died and ASE became popular, as gamespy would have been scanning all of the servers that they pulled from id's master server, and iirc there were some alternate masters as well. But gamespy was certainly busy in Q3's glory years when the numbers would have been highest.

have all the archives of Gamespy gone since before a certain date, as I don't seem to be able to get prior to 2000. Is this when it was released? wasn't there another online server browser, that was widely used for comparable stats?

.

To actually go somewhat minorly further, gamespy just wasn't quite perfect as it's number of players for CS (which is a subset of Half-Life players) is 7436 in the same time that quake had 2975.
So basically Q3 had around 0.4 times as many players as CS.

If you'd do 0.4 * 28,775... you'd actually be well above 10k. (11510)

I saw a higher peak for q3

this one for e.g. APR 14 2009 https://web.archive.org/web/20090414140256/ht....com/stats

Quake 3: Arena
2361 servers, 3585 players

Isn't this only gamespy data? or is this collected via id server logs?

I saw a higher one over 4900, but the server is overloaded atm :)

Steam stats for q3 doesn't matter, QL before release shows 1-3 players.
http://www.steamcharts.com/app/282440#7d

well I added myself, and converted someone else to download it and play also, for todays peak of 6,154 :) But it seemed a little laggy. Server demand maybe?

Actually found it quite refreshing to play after a break from QL.

Although "Attack and defend" was missing some flags, people going "where's the flags, how do I defend the flag if there isn't one" ;)

But overall the actual gameplay was better, "in this mode", as it had fewer ammo boxes and less collectable weapons, and it was actually quite good fun, and would go back to it. So + to QL for that mode from me.

FFA was still over ammo boxed, but playable.

You cannot even possibly know it because most of Q3A was played on LANs.

If they were at a LAN then they weren't playing online were they.

My statement was "5k online at one time is more than quake 3 arena ever had."

You really really think LAN's happened that often though? lol.

Counting only internet numbers from all multiplayer gameplay is a metric as silly as counting players wearing only red shirts.

LAN's didn't "happen", there weren't good internet in many places, so playing on a local network was the usual thing all people did - at school/university/home/work/internet cafes. I don't know for sure but from my perspective it wouldn't be surprising if at some point even in Moscow alone the number of people playing Q3 LAN multiplayer at the same time reached 5K+ or even more.

This thread was about the number of total players online peak.

A metric that counts when you're dealing with a centrally managed online game.

Potentially thousands of people playing high percentages of pirated copies of a game they play offline only doesn't mean anything hugely useful for considering the future of an online service. And it's also only going to ever be a figure people are just making up severely twisted by their personal bias.

This thread was about popularity - how many people play the game.

You couldn't have possibly brought up comparison with Q3A to consider "the future of an online service", simply because it wasn't a centrally managed online game and any Q3A metric is useless for that purpose.

What I'm saying is that with game like Q3A, the peak of player numbers as counted by some particular online service like gamespot is useless to judge popularity, because most players are invisible to any statistics collection service. QuakeLive has NOT exceeded the peak amount of active Q3A players.

Again, if you insist that this was not about popularity in the first place and you brought up Q3A (NOT an online service) to judge "the future of an online service" and insist on comparing accurate (due to centralized stats) total number of players to some partial statistics that doesn't see most of the players, or if you still insist that number of internet players in the times when many gamers had no internet at all, and many others had just dial-up unsuitable for gaming, is somehow a revelant and useful comparison to modern day, then you must agree that it's extra dumb to do all of those things.

bah I didn't mean to plus this lol lo l lo lo lo lo l olo

How many people do you think were playing at lan at a time? Hundreds, thousands? llolo lo ol ol ol ol o lololol

Well you could hook up two computers at home and play vs friends.

probably the most uneducated cross eyed mongoloid comment you have ever made....and you have made some doozies u mule....

in the drug world a mule is someone who carries drugs....
in their anus.

What would he be carrying...
in his anus?

Funny, because I proved it
http://www.esreality.com/post/2662028/#pid2661869

proved what? that you're a mule? I guess so.

you expect much from ql mod? :DDDDDD

you only need look at ql to understanding type of people working on such game :(

https://web.archive.org/web/20011204214644/ht...com/stats/

https://web.archive.org/web/20021204211606/ht...com/stats/

proved what?

Those stats are:

Dec 4th 2001
2858 servers, 5235 players

Dec 4th 2002
3053 servers, 5876 players

3053 servers

ql has what? less than 50?

If you are talking about physical servers, yes. I count 31 different locations and although some have several physical servers, the total probably doesn't reach 50. It should be noted, however, that each of them host numerous "game servers", which is what should be compared with the figure of 3053 you refer to.

Dear IP ending in 201, aka raythenoob:

Back in the day there was no such a thing as server locations. If you compare apples with apples, which is servers themselves, QL has thousands of servers as well.

yes that is a difference, the other point is the numbers of players, but who knows how many actual players there are now, or were.

Awesome you found some higher stats, we did try but the highs p3l3 found were still lower than that.

QL is still winning with a peak of
6154 right now though.

http://steamcharts.com/app/282440

do those q3 charts take into consideration all the different point releases at the time?
gamespy didn't track all q3 servers.

The client just had filters to list current version. I don't remember them auto updating the filters tbh, I just remember editing them myself.
All the versions still reported to the same master servers though.


I don't think anyone is likely to be able to truthfully answer your question unless they can find a GameSpy page that shows a break down, or unless they were involved in writing the code for the stats pages.

I just remember tons of servers not showing on gamespy but showing on all seeing eye.

that's the one I was thinking of :)

"all seeing eye"

gamespy was terrible compared to ASE
i completely forgot how bad it was until you mentioned it

bloated garbage.. like most apps

nice bullshit

Prove it wrong.

why would I do that? you make a claim, bring proof.
you linked to the wrong post where you said "I proved it", and no you didn't prove anything, those shitty gamespy stats are meaningless, rofl

you're saying 5k on QL is more than Q3 ever had. LOL
you really need to get some perspective.

you're either:
- genuinely retarded
- believing your own delusions about QL
- trolling

I can't tell, take your pick

like wormed said, don't even need stats for this, it's obvious we're talking at least tens of thousands

No, you're failing to read.
Though at least you're the first to spot the link accident.

QL's peak went up to over 6k

And the comment was about peak players online at one time.

QL's peak went up to over 6k

for ONE day only...

i know you're getting paid to talk positively about ql by either bethesda or id, but 1 day does not make a successful game. It's now below 2000. Stop with the propaganda yakumo, we can see right through it.

Peak is peak, didn't specify a time frame.

I don't get paid or told anything to say, or not to say about anything thanks. You must have missed quite a lot of rage against loadouts if nothing else.

But I'm not failing to read.
We ARE talking about peak, yes.

You claim that 5k(now 6k, whatever) peak is more than Q3 ever had.

That is ridiculously untrue, period.

Won't waste more time on this. :/

I'm interested in stats not supposition.

Good. Stick to worthless stats, and keep thinking there has never been more than 5k players online at the same time in Q3. Hilarious.

I'll stick to common sense and experience with player numbers across several online games over the years, thank you very much.

Bet you've never played anything else but Quake, that'd at least sort of explain the narrow viewpoint and cluelessness.

It's funny how you're attempting to rip on me by suggesting I'm a quake fanboy that plays nothing else.
While at the same time being insulting when I'm just interested in gathering some statistics on the subject, I've not said anything to put anyone or anything down, quite the contrary I've been supportive of people finding some higher stats for q3.

You're the one acting like some obsessed one game only fanboy.

did anyone notice the server browser being abysmally slow? Seems like the master server can't handle it.

It's the same for many people, yes

This is why this time around they decided not to really advertise the game at the very start, learning from their 2009/2010 mistake. In those releases there were just way too many players for the infrastructure to handle, so the game was unplayable and there were queues to play, which made literally millions of people not play a single match. That's the biggest mistake in QL's history.

So be glad the game is only slow, lol.

I remember it took like a minute to refresh server browser in 2010. It was horrible

Edit: Just opened QL and it's just as bad if not worse. Imagine that is someone's first impression of the game. Starting the game and getting stuck on a loading screen. It's like the game is still in alpha. Surely they'll just uninstall that shit

Fucking id software, lol.

Guess you never heard of DayZ? People worship that game and it's more buggy than, well, ANYTHING.

Nether, RUST, Infestation Survivor Stories (The War Z) etc etc

BROKEN GAMES, all, filled with bugs etc, if anyone thinks that QL has the worst developers then they probably don't even play other games or care about anything else around in the industry ROFL...

Problem is Quake3 already is made ;>

Nether is done, it had many people giving feedbacks, contributing, very active players coming back to see improvements...!

ISS was DONE, restarted, renamed, DONE again, still a bug fest, it's shit!

DayZ? Fair enough, but cu you in 20 years!

Rust restarted.

No trust me, there are WORST devs out there. I won't even tell you to TRY Nether for instance, only if you are rich and can throw away some spare cash, then see the nightmare haha, unbelievable.

I thought the bugs and creative hackers were the main attraction.

5 years to get the name 'quake live' to the masses. Top job.

The only way i see Quakelive being profitable is by making new "voice announcers" and new HD models. Also be able to change the map design for example dm6 and intel-dm6. How about different skins for weapons ?

New cosmetic implementation and changes to payment model will certainly get people to open their wallets. There is LOTS of untapped potential in QL and i just hope that zenimax was smart enough to hire good market analysts.

This site has more detailed graphs
http://steamdb.info/app/282440/graphs/

game is so fucking slow ;_;

Honestly they should've added skins and stuff before Steam Launch, might actually have made some money.

Though dunno if people care enough when you're gonna be red/blue and look as bad as they do anyway.

Hopefully if they do make a new QL they realise the CS:GO system is best, I quite like what they did with the team rotation servers as well, improves the game experience a lot.

I think they know and would have liked to but lacked the man power. Story of QL's life.

Hopefully with the influx of new players and more subscriptions, they can then afford to invest more money into the game..

One can only wish :(

QL infrastructure is in some serious pain ; (

featured on steam

is QL down or is it only accessible from steam platform?

"failed to load user data" here :/

This.

I saw this when i was on the QL steam community page and this just sums up that 5K+ Quake Players

too many players without a clue how to play

4800 of the players will only play this weekend

Certainly many more than that will give up. Unless you meant that the stats on Steam will drop to 200 concurrent players starting Monday?

not sure if I can say this but a little birdie told me that there's been more than 100k new signups... also, you can go look at the awards page and do a before/after to see how many 'new accounts' have been made. So hopefully these new accounts will slowlyyyyyyy start playing and increase that number.

LOL.

Why would you not be able to give us info on new player counts?
I don't think the new players will stick around for very long at the moment.

Between telling them they need to use T to type in all chat, telling them Q brings out RL by default; and consistently being told 'Connection Interrupted' because the server isn't used to handling 20 people at once leads me to believe they aren't having a very user friendly initiation into the game.

On top of that they are getting horribly, horribly raped. Raped so hard you can sit in front of them and ask them if they feel their sensitivity is OK while they are LG'ing you and still kill them afterwards.

you can sit in front of them and ask them if they feel their sensitivity is OK while they are LG'ing you and still kill them afterwards.

Fish in a barrel, but hopefully some will spawn...

It's not even so much the 'shooting fish in a barrel' but more like you can tell they have no fucking idea what they are doing.

Why isn't there an indicator for the hotkey for specific weapons when someone picks a loadout?
ie: above each weapon put the default bind for it.
Or a small message to 'Press ESC to change your loadout' between rounds? I'm really enjoying playing all these game modes but I'm already WAY WAY over the voice. Why not put a pop-up:

"Press ESC to change Loadout or click HERE to see weapon binds"

Just something so the noobs with W+M1 held down know they have more options than spamming...HMG? which is what it defaults to?

I'm all for more people playing and I'm willing to help and talk about the game...but it's frustrating for me to have to explain to someone how to change weapons or edit their loadout. I want the new people to have a good time and I'm willing to help...but I won't be surprised in the least if the majority of them play for a few hours and then piss off forever.

probably because they expect more noobs to use the 'weapon toggle' bind option.

What really counts though is subscriptions, not registrations.

it's because of totalbiscuit

QL is being ddosed by diabz.

http://ql.leeto.fi/#/activity

[20:22] <@sponge> Kryt: those stats should be very accurate

interesting

Sheiiit

Ah, finally out in the open.

From 750 (lol so little) to the sky.

like i said in diabz thread:

lol nice stats, so much ffa games...

loadouts helps to enjoy ffa games for casual quake player. tottalb was correct it seems.

What do you guyz think?

what was it like b4 the last 7 days, like for the last 1-2 year or so? b4 and during all the changes?

http://ql.leeto.fi/#/countries

quite a few potential players to reach out to ^^ with steam launch, hope it keeps maintaining the increase, but we shall see.

If someone doesn't know what quake is about TB may sound correct :)

FFA is god awful with loadouts I think, the team rotation servers are the most fun with the new gameplay IMO.

The moment that QL finally gets some attention again it decides to rather go back to being dead.

Story of QL. :D

ql chat system has exploded here, anyone else?

The whole thing has become a mess, not only chat.

i didn't expect ql infrastructure was so under fed.

ps. inb4 que system getting backonline ;)

/me misses the early q3 days pre 1.30 release and OSP days when all of us had skill and the nobodies went on to other games... like counterstrike or pong

It's so sad it's funny.

Many players, me included, have rambled on QL forums and privately about QL having to go mainstream (like steam) for YEARS. Yeah, years. We told that to the devs, asked them to do so, told them to do it while the game was still in its full swing. QL had more servers, more players and less stupid ideas implemented back then. If it went online on Steam in 2009-10 it would be prolly a blast.

And now, after 5 years, after QL dropping almost to a total flatline, we get Steam. Hooray.
Developers of this game are so clueless it's simply awful. I spent several years giving them benefit of the doubt, supporting their game anyway - but I found out that noone listens to the community and these people are so zonked out they can't even support the game as it is, not to mention expanding it.

I bet the devs will get a raise after their report to the suits showing an increase from 2000 to 5000 players. Yeah. That they could get an increase to million after going steam early will be carefully omitted.

Also that increase is misleading. People will go in, make accounts, get massacred and go out. Word-of-mouth around campfire now is that QL is an unforgiving shooter with mental veterans who can make you, like, dead in a matter of seconds. Many noobs are afraid to even play it not to mention stay around.

But noo, hooray, we have an increase to 5000. Let's clap. What a big success.

Also that increase is misleading. People will go in, make accounts, get massacred and go out. Word-of-mouth around campfire now is that QL is an unforgiving shooter with mental veterans who can make you, like, dead in a matter of seconds. Many noobs are afraid to even play it not to mention stay around.

Do you actually play the game? Have you seen totalbusquit's video or others' on steam? It looks nothing like my early ql games and even one obvious tier slummer can't destroy a match with loadouts. Reminds me more of my early classroom q2 games when everyone was a complete noob and had a total blast.

Yeah, I actually play the game.I got my info from like 20 different people who are newbs recently registered or already quitting. I asked them ingame.

I also tend to observe the matches. Yeah, EVERY proficient FFA player simply destroys EVERY match with noobs. I too had some noobs in my CTF, TDM or FFA matches. How they got to T4 is a strange shit indeed. They get destroyed quickly.

Games on the same skill level are a totally different bag of potatoes.

You know, actual matchmaking would never work. We have to keep the system of four tiers, because ELO matchmaking would destroy the game. Ask sponge @ quakenet for details.

I bet youre right. Still how these noobs get to T4 is a mystery to me. IMO the leveling is too tight. Tier 3 should be broader and Tier 4 smaller...but I'ma fraid this won't help a lot.

Yeah, EVERY proficient FFA player simply destroys EVERY match with noobs

And why exactly is this a problem? i was sure the better player should win the match.


yet another burst of you being a dumbass. shit got beyond point of being funny.

Why don't you shut up? I saw your picture and your posts. You're basically a clueless nerd that tries to bore people into coma by endless clueless replies.
You don't even have anything of substance to say here. What next? Another wall of text with semi-witty replies?
I love trolling you, you're so thick in the head it's like beating a dead horse. With a 6-foot long stop sign.

you got me interested: what picture? i'd like to see it aswell, just to lol even more at your ignorance.

and i just wanted to point out another solid example of lack of logic behind your posts.

Im sorry, i'm a baker. Not a backer. Are you a spineless liar? You got me interested.
Tell me about logic mr useless. I admire your crusade. Being a laughingstock, being trolled and not even realizing it must be a very difficult experience for you.

I tried to keep a straight face and try to lure you into another semi-serious debacle but I cant :) I havent realized you're so dumb to fall for it.

Also, you seem to suck at QL. And you're a newbie. It explains a lot. Did it hurt when you failed? Or is there a course in Fail that you attended :D

http://www.qlranks.com/duel/player/lolzy

one could wonder whos sucking at QL, but fuck it, its just a game.

whats more interesting is the fact you try to act cool and pretend you troll here. isnt it the type of behaviour i was supposed to show last time we had an argument? the kind of behaviour that lead to you calling me a kid?


sorry to inform you mate, but you're not a conversation partner for me. all you can do is spread lies, and trying to hide them behind mask of a clown/backing away from argument.

Hehe, youre a BACKER!

You're really clueless aren't you. I baited you since the first moment you tried to attack me in our last conversation. I got you into a such an inflated, serious discussion I was almost sure you would explode from within. Was fun TBH. Even now you try to make some kind of informed and serious statements, shit knows about what. If you haven't noticed, this thread is not about me. That you have issue with me does not concern me in the slightest because I see you to be a complete tool. You don't get sarcasm, irony, and you don't even know when you're made fun of. That is sad.

Also, I don't play duel so your argument is invalid. But hey, grab every shit you can find because if you try to smear someone, you need everything bro, EVERYTHING! You got me. I am powerless. Penetrate now.

I don't know who you're trying to inform here, because I dont care. For your information: If you just shut up like I told you instead of posting some oh-so-important crap that doesnt make sense in regards to this topic, you wouldn't have to have any conversation at all. So if you think that i'm not a conversation partner for you, why do you still desperately try to answer me? :D

You don't make much sense do you. You're a spineless liar and a backer! A BACKER I TELL YOU!!!!!!

im desperate in my replies? its you who constantly edits, deletes and double posts. i could ask: y u hef to be mad bro?

also you're no decent in any gametype, duel is just the one that shows it the most, as theres noone to carry you.

Yes, no one to carry me. Hehe. You make me simply cry :)
Yeah, I play since 1996, T4 CTF/FFA/FT with occasional TDM. Youre right, no one can carry me. You want to get bitchslapped for that, or what?

BTW you told me i'm not a partner for conversation yet you still reply to a spineless liar. How's that? Your standards must be very low indeed.

As a side note: You have failed to provide any contradicting arguments to the TOPIC here along with soild sources. Who's the mouth-flapping desperate liar here?

Where do I cosntantly edit, delet and doublepost? If you use "constantly" you should prove that. Show me in how many threads and where do I edit, delete and doublepost . With sources for that. And also if you can count please provide me with statistics percentage of this.

Im waiting for something on-topic from you.

i doubt there were tiers back in 96. another lie. and its kinda sad you play for so many years, and you're still not able to be at least 1200 elo in duel.

also i dont have to prove anything, as you were the first to make some kind of assumption, when you started to talk about my looks, to which you have already admited was a lie.

are you able to write one sentence without making a fool out of yourself mate?

What lie? You can't apaprently read what is written. Im' T4 in these gametypes in QL.
If I don't play duel (save for some times where my friends wanted me to play with them - I really dislike that gametype) I will have very low ELO. Nothing to be ashamed of.

Yeah, if you call somebody a liar and call him names (to quote your posts - I'ma dumbass who doesnt know what he writes) in regards to the info he posts, you have to prove your point. Otherwise it's a meaningless empty conversation. I too can say that I "listen to voice of community". Blah, everyone can say that.

We have a funny case here: You call me out, and when confronted about facts you make a dodge and say that you don't have to prove anything.

This is called: Making a fool out of yourself.

so after all, you're implying players were divided into tiers back in quake 1? ok broski, good to know, another show of your ignorance, and shady nature.

also nope about the duel part. if you play as long as you say and on decent level, which i doubt tbh, raw combat skills of yours would be sufficent to get more than 1200 elo.

you were supposed to show me the picture which lead you to conclusion im a nerd. your move. provide the link, so i can lol at you even more, then we can go further with me explaining why you're such a liar trash in my eyes.

Hahaha yeah. Holy shit. This is simply unbelievable.
You have delusions and make stories. Jesus, it's almost too much :D

Im waiting for the proof of your accusations with regards to teh original topic. You try to derail the thread but you won't get any points for it here.
So where are the source-based facts for me being a liar? I'm waiting for them. Or will you say that you don't have to prove anything to me? :D

Still waiting...

Yeah, I play since 1996, T4 CTF/FFA/FT with occasional TDM

i make stories?

i didnt make any accusations regarding the topic, i just asked why better player winning is bad to which you anwsered with:

Why don't you shut up? I saw your picture and your posts. You're basically a clueless nerd that tries to bore people into coma by endless clueless replies.

so maybe you will say something related to the topic and finally show me my own pic ?

i make stories?

Pretty much.
Go see my qlranks regarding these, see what tier I'm in. It's easily available. And yeah, I play since late 1996. Now what?

If you're so good in quoting, let me remind you of a part of your answer that you carefully omitted:

yet another burst of you being a dumbass. shit got beyond point of being funny.

You still havent proved to me why I am a dumbass because of what I posted. And why it is "another burst".You didn't even show any contradicting argument apart from insulting me. In your very first answer. Without any arguments to back it up.

You appear to have massive problems with understanding and interpreting written text. You imply some shit that isn't even there. A simple proof:

you're implying players were divided into tiers back in quake 1

Where did you get that gem from is anyone's guess. You interpret facts like you wish, adding your own wild flavor to them and twisting them into a frankensteinish mess.

I admit, I baited you some and pulled your leg with pictures, semi-serious answers (in that last thread I wasnt sure whether to laugh at your ignorance and obliviousness of being led on a leash into an argument that only shows you have no facts to back it up). You fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. I even told you that idiots usually want to have the last word so I will let you have it...and you fell for it by posting last, meaningless but last reply. So you had the LAST LAUGH and YOU WON. The irony of this is just priceless.

Since you're constantly failing to provide arguments, and write only to write something and have the last word, you're making a fool of yourself. Quite a lot of ppl follow this conversation and have a blast at your completely detached answers. Re-read what is written and try to focus on the topic at hand.

As to my original post, your answer wasn't even on topic. You don't understand anything about the dynamics of this game's community, like how tier slummers cause immense dropouts in newbie population. It was a problem in 2010-11, it is back again now, more than ever.

Next time when you end your answer with "being a dumbass" remember that you will get slapped.

shady nature

This goes into my collection of binds. Always wanted to be a shady character.

Repeing scrubs on FFA is easier than ever.
Grim Dungeons is the easiest one. Red armor, unlimited ammo, shitload of hp, quad, position.
50:0 kek

Thats the idea. But hey, some people are clueless :)

50:0 demo please

Are demos recorded automaticly?
QL prism had nice tool to check that stuff.

http://www.quakelive.com/r/profile/matches/Pa...fd90/ffa/1

cg_autoaction "1" // all games recorded

2 records all games and takes a screenshot of the final scoreboard too.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/876747/Gr...3_08.dm_90

I agree, I just did a 50 to 5 on grim dungeons. 50 to 0 was easily within reach if I had gave a damn.

This is definitely vs. scrubs though.

Lirik said Quake Live was his new warmup game and that Quake was still awesome.
Lirik has about 20k viewers daily.
/thread

Also he's a faggot o/

what on Earth is a Lirik?

Murrican kido playin DayZs all day long.
Nothing special except he has huge viewerbase.

a Link would be the main character in Zelda!
Which is one of the best game-franchises in the history of gaming.

well, yeah...

there should be a new Zelda character called Kerning.

Maybe id will finally realize that Quake is still profitable enough to get more people and servers working on it.

To see the big picture:

Steam Stats per game:
http://steamstatshistory.appspot.com/list

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/


GAMESPY Yearly and Monthly
USE "Monthly sliders" to see rise and fall of game releases.
July 2005:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050728145022/ht...com/stats/

ET for example

This doesn't include "current titles" hosted in Origin for EA Sports for PC and Consoles. Will look for those.

new peak 6000
25% = 1500 T4 players

Actually, no. The 25% (more like 22,5% btw) is for a stabilized community. The large majority of these 6154 (current peak) are new players and new players start in T3.

I've been seeing lots of new accounts tonight in FFAs, 40 minutes time played, etc.

Steam adds and TotalBiscuit are probably bringing new blood.

I like that fact that the exit button on QL is well hidden :)

There's an exit button ?

once your in, that's it, your sucked in :)

It's under the cog wheel in the top right when you're at the browser area. I believe it's right above Filters.

current:
4,851

total:
6,159

Yeah. This evening I talked to 15 newbies on team gametypes (the pub servers) to get their opinions.

Fact is, the game is much more populated. Fact is, that the matches might be erratic or funny because of more players. Fact is, lots of clueless noobs runa round like chickens with their heads cut off. So that part about Fau's comment (the one about having a blast) is true. But the newbs get raped hard. That is the last fact and probably the one that will hurt the game the most.

Lots of QL pals who are vets just like me feel that the game is full of cannon fodder. Also, many pubs are even worse than before because in team gametypes you have several knobheads in your team (or enemy team) who can't even strafejump not to mention fire decently. So the thing that decides about the match is which team has more veteran Quakers aboard. Because the rest simply doesnt matter.

it might be that fabled "intake of new blood". But whereas in older Quakes we had ppl who joined and actively asked for tips/knowledge about the game and tried to do their best we have anonymous bunch of noobs who jump in, run around with a loadout guns of their choice, die valiantly, rinse, repeat.

The guys I talked to were pretty much lost - they told me that this game is too chaotic and too fast for them. Also the skill gap was a killer for them. No one wants to be smacked around and in QL smacking around might mean literal nuke to your face if the skill gap is wide enough. So basically like 4 of them said they want to pursue their QL career because the game got them interested and is "unique". Rest didnt have any opinion or thought that they will quit eventually (A quote: "This game is no big deal to me").

To summarize: There's a slight possibility that the QL playerbase will increase, but COME ON. 6000 players for a multiplayer FPS thats around for 5 years is not a good number if that FPS is the Quake.

I really do hope the numbers will increase and noobs will stay. The noobs that want to learn, that is.

ehm the 6000 is concurrently not total... And with that it's inside the top40 of most games played online. That's pretty good for a game that's 15 years old which has been slightly polished.

The only problem is that chances are low that these players will remain within quake as they indicate that it's too chaotic and fast for them.

They needed to be separated from vets, like pretty much everyone said before the launch. At least they could have put up servers marked for newbies and blocked all tier 3 and aboves.

As a veteran, you can't find a populated ctf server or ffa server that is not filled with newbs. As a newb you cannot find a server where there is not any vets.

I don't know wth id was thinking. But that's nothing new

Maybe you're right. I have expectations that run too high. I am simply afraid to draw conclusions at this point. Its good that there's an increase and may it go even further up. I hope it will. I got info from totally random guys ingame and that info, albeit useful, is coming from a simply too small of a group to consider it a decisive output that can be used to draw solid conclusions. But it definitely shows one side of the coin.

I also got info from 3 guys who discovered the QL only because it's on Steam and all 3 are hardcore Quake 2 players. They were like LOL man you heard of QL? I saw it on Steam...no shit, youre in it since 2009? Dayum, never heard of it before!

And that's the unexpected input of players the QL might receive. It's not like all vets knew about QL when it came around. I discovered it totally by an accident (In 2009 when I was so bored of life and stuff that I got my dusty copy of Q3A and started trawling the web to see how old Quake community websites are holding up. And voila Quake Live...)

There have been so many mistakes in QL that it's mind-boggling.

I was talking to a 45yo guy on my steam friend list some weeks ago. Was talking about quakelive and if he knows it. He was like "wow , thats awesome, i loved quake3" He even told me that he was playing in a clan back then. He installed the game immediatly and was realy nostalgic about it.
I think thats quite unexpected, seeing as the open beta started like 5 years ago.

Thats the idea man, maybe, just maybe, we will get something good out of that Steam release.

Im doing my very best to make sure these steam nobodies never come back to my treasured game of quake and get back on their cs:source servers playing zombie mod and camping crates...

You are not the hero Quake Live needs, schizm, but the one Quake Live deserves.

Does this include all slummers, or only the ones who aren't in .403?

still mad cuz they didn't make you forum mod 6 years ago?

what is your take on the whole steam launch and the increasing number of new players?

[+] for cat

[+] for Eddy Wally

camping crates

A fun fact: I see a lot of noobs - steam noobs - jumping on crates scattered on some maps and STAY THERE shooting everything, oblivious to the fact that they're in broad daylight, visible to everyone.

So no dice man, we have people camping crates in QL too...

Loled

please email me the names of the players in QL you see standing on a crate like an idiot

I will gladly lurk and stalk them right off the servers back to counterstrike land


email: tierslummer1989@gmail.com




cheers!

I will gather the corpses...I mean subjects for you.

these discussions are hilarious. so much effort on both sides of the "debate." who honestly cares, other than id Software? those who are decrying the "updates" are only making this pile of shit more exposed. .. which, given that it's a pile of shit, I guess it cancels out in the end anyway, so whatever. enjoy your "debate."

I just wanted to say, though, KiNG3, aren't you that cheating scumbag?

tyryl, how mad are you about the new ffa changes on a scale from 1 to everyone is a warping hacking faggot?

steam naabs got raped , so no more 5k peaks

or the weekend is over

ONE TIME OFFER FOR SLUM LORDS

==================================

Have you ever dreamt of slumming like it's 90s? Streams of noobs coming into the server, brainless, clueless, aiming like 3-yr old monkey with Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome?

Have you ever dreamt of getting better stats and cheap wins quickly over nobodies who will worship you as a god and die humbly?

If so, this offer is for you.

You say no way?

Just a few weeks ago, you had only 2000 players to choose from, 98% of which were veterans like you who would kick your ass or give you a hard time. Sounds sad, doesn't it. You had no other option but to play like a man, no cheap shots, giving all you've got to the game.

But now we have 6154 players aboard. That means 4154 VICTIMS FOR YOUR LG or other weapon of your choice.

Join now the Quake Live Noob Farming Contest! Farm like in Arizona, baby. Go in, get frags, get out. Your ego grows with each win, each frag. You get insane accuracy with Gauntlet. You can run like an idiot with BFG and get cheap kills and no one will kickban you or call you a noob for using Faggot Gun. You can camp Quad and hog it 100% of time and let the noobs Feel Your Wrath (TM). You can now feel young again!

THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT. At least until that 4,154 decide to bail out.

==================================

best krd, dmg, acc, and win but get -11 elo lol

When will the stubborn Vets realize TDM is the besterest mode, with loadouts it became cool.

.

LOLAZOOOO!

Sooner or later it will be 1500-2000 of us again, trying to understand what all these changes were for.

it's also not weekend which is quite a significant difference in most other games as well.
To really see a trend you'll need to wait a few weeks. But after then I'm pretty sure that most will have left again.

It's almost down by half since sunday. Not good numbers by anyone's standards.

It's hard (veterens mixed with newbs), there's no gore (eye candy, wow factor, scary vibes etc), theres no reason for people to want to get good at it (no promoted tourneys, prizes, streams).

And, at least for me, the game won't load unless I manually log in.

The forums don't load. etc etc

deleting your autologin data doesn't let you then save a working login?

Well sunday there were 2.1million people ingame today only 1.6 million. that's also a 25% drop.
It's hard to really tell for us if it's due to quake or simply due to time... Although it's hard for me to imagine anyone liking the current QL.

Then Sync will have to put QL on uPlay to get another temporary peak...

does anyone really use that, other than the obligatory 1 time to unlock your farcry3 or whatever?

Syncerror and his Sponge minion, probably.

ONONONO OH OH QuakeLive on UPLAY! Alltime peak of 2000!

cant wait until the old school community gets blamed for the numbers dropping

Forums still down after a week? lol

Answer: yes!

They're intentionally down to spare the load.
The 404 was very temporary.
It's been

"The QUAKE LIVE forums are offline in order to reduce the overload on our infrastructure. We are working to restore site responsiveness and will enable the forums at that time."

For ages.

Do you think the amount of players is inhibited by problems with infrastructure - that is, more players than the observed peak cannot register and connect due to the downsized infrastructure?

The infrastructure's never been downsized, only expanded.

*not including when some host locations have been culled/swapped around.

It wasn't?
I wonder why do they have problems with it due to the new new players, then.
And if it is expanded, it should accomodate way more players than in 2009. It apparently doesn't.
If forums are shut down it means that the server overload is significant.

Take note that I don't talk about remote server locations.

It does accommodate more players than in 2009. Seen any queueing pages ?

I brought up the server locations as if I didn't, some smartass was bound to.

Hehe.
No I didn't see the pages so my view is based strictly on limited observation. If you have access to better statistics/data, I'll take your word for what you say.

Back then sucked in comparison, I don't know how many concurrent players they were dealing with, but they'd had to have a queue system for people to wait to get through to the server browser at all.

Later they moved their DB to SSD and have made some small and some large improvements over the years to improve things in general let alone at peak times, and they won't have launched on Steam without doing what they could with their resources to take the load as best as they could, no product wants to end up going down over a launch.

all i know is the game feels like complete shit and it started at steam release.

There are some individual server load issues sometimes at peak times atm, especially on .de

(points at Frankfurt)

i live in NY lol
you don't know what its like state side.
its a bunch a bullshiiiit

Peak numbers of today are half of what they were Monday a week ago (2500 vs 5000). Guess hype is already gone and most people haven't stuck around. Loadouts and no matchmaking will do that.

could also be you and people like you who won't play anyone in your own tier.
You only play the noobiest of noobs. It's sad.

How do you play ffa games in your own tier? There are always noobs playing ffa in every server.

i know that lol. he leaves if anyone remotely good comes on the server... then goes to play more t1's.

you have to convince everyone to kick everyone because they're in the wrong tier.
If you can do that, consider a career in sales.

it seems like post steam update so far its averaging 2k- 2.5k a day

what were the numbers before? 1k'ish?

more like 150-300 a day lol.

On the link they posted before, the peak (not average) was 750 players.

i dont understand why people are hating on steam then, if the peak player count increased from 750 to 5000, thats over 6x the amount of players. i guess people want quake live to stay as the "small elitist cool kids club"

The "small elitist cool kids club" is what kept quake alive all these years.

"alive" is too broad of a term, more like "on life support"

I was happy when quake used to be in this life-support state. Had the best mod, awesome features, ESWCs and Dreamhacks...

Of course, that all sounds silly nowadays, when quakelive grows and thrives.

so you're correlating Quake having a significant eSports spotlight at past ESWCs and Dreamhacks with.. being on life support?

there were a lot of historical factors involved in making this possible. the small playerbase only held it back.

which is somewhat strange because I remember being in a queue with over 30.000 other people....................
Either the queue counter was crap, or the game failed at so many other aspects of scalability.

yea man. i remember waiting... and waiting... and waiting.

Actually I was more lucky... I was in the focus team at that time and logging into that was fast and easy :)

well whatever happened then doesn't get factored into the steam stats which are the only ones we have access too for QL.

Well if you assume that QL / ID didn't just lie to us about the queue size then we also have some idea of the stats about the first few days right?

I'm actually quite sure that ID has stats about the early days as well as they themselves said that they tracked pretty much everything. (Even which frag was made in what circumstances)
Ofcourse this tracking backfired immensely and they disabled all of the cool features rather than addapt to the demand and fix the problems with the infrastructure.
But the question would remain if this was (in the long term) justified or not.

errm, what about these: http://ql.leeto.fi/#/ ? The "Saved matches over time" graph goes back all the way to the beginning of 2014.

Doesn't quite reach back to when the queues were there though, in February 2009.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/02/25/qu...d-queuing/

http://ql.leeto.fi/#/activity is closer to what we were discussing, but Weird was wondering about 2009/20010 ish

All these outages and server issues are surely making most of the new players they tried to attract with steam to go and never come back.

lol at this

20:27] <poopdish> thanks Sponge, I know doing this stuff is a thankless task, but i need to make one quaint observation.......
[20:27] <poopdish> its 2014 and I'm using IRC to complain about a video game forum outage like some sort of Dial-up Savage.
[20:27] <poopdish> where did my life go wrong ?

amazing :)

archives of qlranks.com by http://web.archive.org/
sep 2013 - 442k players
aug 2014 (before steam) - 631k
oct 2014 - 843k
so steam gave around 200k players
http://ql.leeto.fi/#/countries names also 811k players
my calculations may be too wrong.

That's the total amount of accounts that has ever played a QL match, that was tracked by qlranks.

So,
1) In this business model total accounts doesn't matter really. What does is current activity and people currently paying for stuff.
2) coolleranks didn't start at the very beginning and not all accounts have played matches, due to network issues (queues to play and slow interface) and whatnot. I remember that using QL's in-game awards, there were around 4 million accounts or something, but who cares if only 1,000 play.

hi
i´ve been playing q3 since late 2000
im 100x100 sure the number of players at the time was A LOT higher than 5000
i dont care if its lan, or online, game was top popular with cs just rising
it was featured as top game in every magazine
it was used as benchmark system
it was the WOW thing
everyone with a new computer would test how would quake 3 look like, and how many fps could you get
doing fast calcultation, a big city of some of lets say 4 million people
would have like 20 cyberplaces (lan places?), everyone was playing quake 3, i´ve been on those places, 20 people playing q3 non stop (half the players there)
now multiply that with 20, its 400 lan players
plus people playing on the internet, lets say 300 more players
plus people playing on private lans, lets say 100 more
its 700 per big city
multiply for 100 big cities = 70000
and i would plus another 30000 playing on the internet from distant places
100000, and im sure that numbe its to little
it only lasted till 2001, but for a year and a half im sure q3 was the biggest mutiplayer competitive plataform (besides starcraft)
just watch how many people went to babbages cpl!

there's also more than one point release that people play on.

i played in 1.30 and there were at least a thousand. not including 1.16, 1.17. 1.31 and 1.32 which was always more populated.... plus all the mods.