People should have to pay to make silly modded servers, not to play real quake.
The elites are always a minority even in quake and targeting them just doesn't make any sense.
On top of that, premium has basically been cut out and there's no option to upgrade or even a discount (There used to be one at least). Usually if you cut all the benefits of your subscribers, you compensate by rewarding them with something.
And then there's the never ending issues with the infrastructure, the lack of new features. The game is basically dying once again.
At least we got a few improvements over the time such as better widescreen support, standalone, steam, server spawning. Still, it's been 5 years : /
Im not even sure what can be done to save the game anymore.
- A new quake would probably help but I assume it would also remove the social features.
- Changing their business model to something that most successful F2P games used could be done but it seems so late now that it would probably not change much. The development time to implement something like that would be way over what they can currently handle I would say.
- Fixing their latest mistakes could helps but it certainly won't bring back any of the newcomers. It would at least prevent further drops.
... The competitions is slowly arriving, which might be good for us the users. Although I am not really a fan of the CPMA physic..
... Sorry about my little rant, I feel oppressed :(