Earlier this week, I posted a
questionnaire about your opinion on Quake Champions. The questionnaire was distributed on esr, reddit, discord, and facebook. As I'm typing this, 252 responses have been collected. The raw
results will keep updating as new data comes in, but I felt there was enough to do a review.
This category was about learning a bit more about the population who plays QC. As expected, most players consider themselves veterans of the series, and about the half of the participants play QC regularly.
It's safe to say, this community cares about Quake. We have people who do not play QC (40%) who still care enough to fill the form. Only a very small minority (4%) no longer has time to play, so there's a big chunk of the community to win back, and it's interesting to see if the devs will succeed or not.
A big red flag is that more than half of the people are experiencing technical issues which hinder their experience with the game. This is not surprising, and to be fair, it's the 'easiest part to fix'. We need to have patience but I think they will eventually get there.
A second interesting group is those who play Quake Live instead of Quake Champions. They are about 25% of the total participants, and to me they represent the biggest dissidents. There can be many reasons why, but as suggested by the question coming earlier, two thirds of those not playing don't like Quake Champions. Hopefully, continuing with the next categories, we can get an insight of why that's the case.
As you know, QC has changed duel quite radically. This part of the questionnaire was about seeing how well received those changes were.
One argument here is that - due to technical issues and missing features - the current game is not representative of what duel should be. To exemplify, the changes in hitbox and a potential tweak of LG could affect how the game is played considerably. I disagree though, as technicalities aside, the foundation of the mode is there, and I believe we are in the position to judge the ruleset.
First and foremost, quite a minority believe Duel in QC is deep enough to be a worthy successor of this popular mode. The arguments of the "Champion's meta" being a valid replacement for what duel has lost is not convincing. The majority does not like the 3 champions limit and would like a timelimit mode instead. It would be interesting to see how changing this would affect the number of people who say duel is fun to play.
About the specifics of rounds, I was personally surprised on the half-half split on the blowout frustration, as I think it's something that rounds achieve nicely.
This section was about how well received champions are. The results are quite positive and need little commentary. One thing to note is, participants were asked to reply to these questions disregarding any balance issue (discussed below).
(last option: They should not be differentiated, just provide aa different skin)
I think it's fair to say that most people like the introduction of different movement systems and special abilities. Different hitbox sizes and the stack caps are a bit less well received but still quite positive.
Overall, this is probably a very positive sign for the foundation of the game. People like champions and see potential value in them.
This section was about going a little bit into the specific of balance. While balance has been discussed for ages in Quake, mostly discussing weapons, here I wanted to touch only on those aspects that relate to the novelty brought by Quake Champions.
Unsurprisingly, people are not happy with the current state of balance. I suspect this is the kind of question that would get a low score even when a game has a fairly ok balance, but that seems too much to be just salty bias.
People would like to map control to play a bigger role, and I suspect a big factor of that is how easy it currently is to re-stack your character. Positioning is another area where people would like to see it matter more. This will heavily influenced as lg and hitboxes get fixed, so hopefully we will no longer see Anarky rushing through narrow corridors against rockets taking almost no damage.
It's interesting to note that the majority of people are in favor of the simplified timing for major items, as well as how the close quarter combat is being influenced by new jumping abilities.
This is probably the less elaborate part of this questionnaire. I felt there was enough meat on the fire with duel, champions and balance, and did not want to overburden.
I think we mostly agree that sacrifice is fun to play and a mess to spectate. Devs know it. Let's see what they can figure out.
TL;DR
- People care about Quake Champions. Technical problems are affecting too many people.
- People are not happy with the current duel. They would like to see the 3 frag limit removed in favor of a timelimit, and map control and positioning to be more important than they are right now.
- Disregarding balance issues, people are positive about the introduction of champions, and their differentiation using movement, abilities, stack and hitbox.
- Balance is a mess.
- Sacrifice is possibly fun to play but crap to spectate.