Quake: The Only Question That Matters

[spoZiK]

I just came back to the game recently after a very long hiatus. The reason for my return was that bowser randomly said that he could kick my ass in Q1 and I said no way. So, we had to settle it. Since Quake1 was some of the best enjoyment I've had in an online game, I stuck around to play some more. I've noticed some things about the state of the game that are much different now than they were in 1996-1999 or so, and I wanted to elaborate on those.

One of the biggest problems, in my opinion, is the people that are playing. No offense to you guys who are into Q1 now, some of you are stand-up people and players. Some of you are even the same people that I used to play with 10 years ago! For the most part, though, there are a lot of needlessly harsh comments, immaturity, rudeness, and lots of other things that weren't as prevalent during the height of the ClanRing days. What incentive is there to play when someone joins a server and gets called a "noob" as soon as they join? Come on, you can do better than that. Give people a chance; maybe they are rusty or relatively new to the game and/or mod that you are playing. As it is, though, people will just quit and not look back on BS like that.

Another big one is the mod division. Most of the people that remember Quake fondly enough to play it again played DM. I find Clan Arena to be an appalling slap in the face to what makes Quake a great game. I couldn't really even tell you what RuneQuake is - my impression is just a big FFA with a bunch of people with superpowers. So the thing is this: when most people that get the idea to try playing again come back, the game that they want to play only exists here and there on a couple of nights, and they might not even see it.

Quake, you know, isn't a flawless game. There are people that like Quake2 more, Quake3 more, even (gasp!) CounterStrike more. As it is, though, Quake has an extremely tough uphill battle to fight in order to retain any sense of community, and community is what is necessary for people to really get interested in any game. I'll show Quake to people here and there, obviously, because I spent several years of my life playing it virtually every day. The truth is, though, that that game that I want to play again has been all but lost.

[Baker]

I just came back to the game recently after a very long hiatus. The reason for my return was that bowser randomly said that he could kick my ass in Q1 and I said no way. So, we had to settle it. Since Quake1 was some of the best enjoyment I've had in an online game, I stuck around to play some more. I've noticed some things about the state of the game that are much different now than they were in 1996-1999 or so, and I wanted to elaborate on those.

One of the biggest problems, in my opinion, is the people that are playing. No offense to you guys who are into Q1 now, some of you are stand-up people and players. Some of you are even the same people that I used to play with 10 years ago! For the most part, though, there are a lot of needlessly harsh comments, immaturity, rudeness, and lots of other things that weren't as prevalent during the height of the ClanRing days. What incentive is there to play when someone joins a server and gets called a "noob" as soon as they join? Come on, you can do better than that. Give people a chance; maybe they are rusty or relatively new to the game and/or mod that you are playing. As it is, though, people will just quit and not look back on BS like that.

Another big one is the mod division. Most of the people that remember Quake fondly enough to play it again played DM. I find Clan Arena to be an appalling slap in the face to what makes Quake a great game. I couldn't really even tell you what RuneQuake is - my impression is just a big FFA with a bunch of people with superpowers. So the thing is this: when most people that get the idea to try playing again come back, the game that they want to play only exists here and there on a couple of nights, and they might not even see it.

Quake, you know, isn't a flawless game. There are people that like Quake2 more, Quake3 more, even (gasp!) CounterStrike more. As it is, though, Quake has an extremely tough uphill battle to fight in order to retain any sense of community, and community is what is necessary for people to really get interested in any game. I'll show Quake to people here and there, obviously, because I spent several years of my life playing it virtually every day. The truth is, though, that that game that I want to play again has been all but lost.

Excellent points. Great post.

[=peg=]

One of the biggest problems, in my opinion, is the people that are playing. No offense to you guys who are into Q1 now, some of you are stand-up people and players. Some of you are even the same people that I used to play with 10 years ago! For the most part, though, there are a lot of needlessly harsh comments, immaturity, rudeness, and lots of other things that weren't as prevalent during the height of the ClanRing days. What incentive is there to play when someone joins a server and gets called a "noob" as soon as they join? Come on, you can do better than that. Give people a chance; maybe they are rusty or relatively new to the game and/or mod that you are playing. As it is, though, people will just quit and not look back on BS like that.

Another big one is the mod division. Most of the people that remember Quake fondly enough to play it again played DM. I find Clan Arena to be an appalling slap in the face to what makes Quake a great game. I couldn't really even tell you what RuneQuake is - my impression is just a big FFA with a bunch of people with superpowers. So the thing is this: when most people that get the idea to try playing again come back, the game that they want to play only exists here and there on a couple of nights, and they might not even see it.

Quake, you know, isn't a flawless game. There are people that like Quake2 more, Quake3 more, even (gasp!) CounterStrike more. As it is, though, Quake has an extremely tough uphill battle to fight in order to retain any sense of community, and community is what is necessary for people to really get interested in any game. I'll show Quake to people here and there, obviously, because I spent several years of my life playing it virtually every day. The truth is, though, that that game that I want to play again has been all but lost.

I totally agree with your post.. i do play CAx every now and then but only if the European servers are empty.. i am not a great fan of the mod but that's mainly cause most servers run dm3 24/7 (me hates dm3 )

Come to play in europe! sure you'll probably have 130 ping or so but at least over here we play dm (and usually nothing but dm). More importantly.. there is no trashtalking!
130 ping may seem unplayable but it really is not.. ORL is an east coast USA based player who often plays on this side of the pond and does a very good job at it too!

flanders.quake1.net:26000 = cr-mod dm (dmm3 aka weaponstay)
bigfoot.quake1.net:26000 (euroquake) = runequakemod but setup to normal dm (ticrate .015)
euroquake can also do runes, rocket arena and cr-mod style matchmode (allbeit slightly buggy).

anyways.. just saying you may find that the way we play quake in europe is closer to what u remember quake to be!

[foq]

no. graphics of stock quake are terrible and my friends are too computer illiterate to fix it up. besides, way too much drama.

[PapaSmurf]

I totally agree with your post.. i do play CAx every now and then but only if the European servers are empty.. i am not a great fan of the mod but that's mainly cause most servers run dm3 24/7 (me hates dm3 )

Come to play in europe! sure you'll probably have 130 ping or so but at least over here we play dm (and usually nothing but dm). More importantly.. there is no trashtalking!
130 ping may seem unplayable but it really is not.. ORL is an east coast USA based player who often plays on this side of the pond and does a very good job at it too!

flanders.quake1.net:26000 = cr-mod dm (dmm3 aka weaponstay)
bigfoot.quake1.net:26000 (euroquake) = runequakemod but setup to normal dm (ticrate .015)
euroquake can also do runes, rocket arena and cr-mod style matchmode (allbeit slightly buggy).

anyways.. just saying you may find that the way we play quake in europe is closer to what u remember quake to be!

Yah, I play over there sometimes even, and i'm over here in california. I ping about 200 to the european servers.

I really think we need to get a solid FFA only server working here in the US. I think it needs to be weaponstay.

I like the idea of the runequake mod because you can make so many adjustments, and with its weaponstay you can still get ammo from a weapon you already have every 30 seconds.

You can also adjsut the Quad timer to be something other than 1 minute if that is desireable (I think 2 minutes might be good, but i'm perfectly happy with 1 minute).

I don't like runequake's MegaHealth spawn time of 1 minute rather than 20 seconds after the picked up mega runs out on the player (I find it odd that every implementation runequake did was to make it a more level playing field between veteran players and new players, except with megahealth, it is now possible to horde nearly all megaheatlhs on a map, wheras this was impossible beforehand).

I like NewDM's implementation of buffing the SSG and SNG, though I think more thought might be put into changing these two weapons.

I do not like NewDM's changes to ammo and armor.

I think the server should have a solid map rotation with the ability to vote-maps. I do not want it to go to some of the rather bad DM maps (almost all of episode 3, and I hate, hate, hate e1m7 and e1m.

Other than vote-map, I don't think any other thing should be voteable, eg, runes or hook if using the runequake mod.

I think the server would work well being located on the east coast, then some of our european friends will have a decent ping (~100) to the server. Note: I would also ping 100 to an east coast server.

The maxspeed should be default (320), and the ticrate I think would work well at 0.025.

The server needs a good name, personally I like kitty1.quakeone.com, but that's because kitty1.stanford.edu was the most popular west coast ffa server back in the day. It would be odd to have kitty1 on the east coast, so paying homage to an original popular east coast ffa server would do just as well. I don't know the names of any oldschool east coast servers, I think erols was one, but that was most certainly CTF, not sure if they had DM ports.

Well, that's just my two cents...for now.

[Canadian*Sniper]

More importantly.. there is no trashtalking!

There is SO trashtalking! It's just instead of messages like "you suck" or "screw you", you get messages like "" and ""

[Polarite]

I really think we need to get a solid FFA only server working here in the US. I think it needs to be weaponstay.

I think the server would work well being located on the east coast, then some of our european friends will have a decent ping (~100) to the server. Note: I would also ping 100 to an east coast server.
The maxspeed should be default (320), and the ticrate I think would work well at 0.025.

The server needs a good name, personally I like kitty1.quakeone.com, but that's because kitty1.stanford.edu was the most popular west coast ffa server back in the day.

Well, that's just my two cents...for now.

I totally agree with that , a good FFA east cost server so europeans can have ping 90-110 that would be great.
Only map vote should be available , for the rest nothing to vote on.
Simple pure FFA server.

kitty1 was a great server , good old days!!

[=peg=]

I like the idea of the runequake mod because you can make so many adjustments, and with its weaponstay you can still get ammo from a weapon you already have every 30 seconds.

You can also adjsut the Quad timer to be something other than 1 minute if that is desireable (I think 2 minutes might be good, but i'm perfectly happy with 1 minute).

I don't like runequake's MegaHealth spawn time of 1 minute rather than 20 seconds after the picked up mega runs out on the player (I find it odd that every implementation runequake did was to make it a more level playing field between veteran players and new players, except with megahealth, it is now possible to horde nearly all megaheatlhs on a map, wheras this was impossible beforehand).

most settings for the runequake mod can be configured in autoexec.cfg but the more detailed stuff is set in settings.qc (this requires a recompile of the mod source)
to get the runequake mod setup exactly how you like it, do some thorough investigation/preparation and then compile the mod source.

[Paradi$e]

I just came back to the game recently after a very long hiatus. The reason for my return was that bowser randomly said that he could kick my ass in Q1 and I said no way. So, we had to settle it. Since Quake1 was some of the best enjoyment I've had in an online game, I stuck around to play some more. I've noticed some things about the state of the game that are much different now than they were in 1996-1999 or so, and I wanted to elaborate on those.

One of the biggest problems, in my opinion, is the people that are playing. No offense to you guys who are into Q1 now, some of you are stand-up people and players. Some of you are even the same people that I used to play with 10 years ago! For the most part, though, there are a lot of needlessly harsh comments, immaturity, rudeness, and lots of other things that weren't as prevalent during the height of the ClanRing days. What incentive is there to play when someone joins a server and gets called a "noob" as soon as they join? Come on, you can do better than that. Give people a chance; maybe they are rusty or relatively new to the game and/or mod that you are playing. As it is, though, people will just quit and not look back on BS like that.

Another big one is the mod division. Most of the people that remember Quake fondly enough to play it again played DM. I find Clan Arena to be an appalling slap in the face to what makes Quake a great game. I couldn't really even tell you what RuneQuake is - my impression is just a big FFA with a bunch of people with superpowers. So the thing is this: when most people that get the idea to try playing again come back, the game that they want to play only exists here and there on a couple of nights, and they might not even see it.

Quake, you know, isn't a flawless game. There are people that like Quake2 more, Quake3 more, even (gasp!) CounterStrike more. As it is, though, Quake has an extremely tough uphill battle to fight in order to retain any sense of community, and community is what is necessary for people to really get interested in any game. I'll show Quake to people here and there, obviously, because I spent several years of my life playing it virtually every day. The truth is, though, that that game that I want to play again has been all but lost.

Welcome to evolution.

Nothing is lost, you have quake.shmack.net:26002, it is extremely flexible, you can vote to play RuneQuake, classic DM clan-ring, Practice Mode, and Rocket Arena. Everything within each mod is votable. Just take your friends and play on that server.

There is nothing wrong with mods, they offer variety for different types of tastes, stimulate interests and prolong the life span of the game.

[joao93]

Don't go to shmack, it's always RuneQuake!!!

[PapaSmurf]

the current mod setup on the default shmack server is not evolution, it is de-evolution.

[Baker]

the current mod setup on the default shmack server is not evolution, it is de-evolution.

You know, you *really* should have this mod PRIOR to the addition of gas grenades and free hook (it used to have lithium hook = there are 2 and you must find one).

Gas grenades really cheapened the game; I refuse to use them because I feel that using bad features will make you a worse player.

When it had lithium hook as the norm and didn't have gas grenades, it was seriously just a more raw and potent form of DM that capitalized on the best of Quake.

But in 2002, the Widomaker server sucked Shmack dry by appealing to normal skilled with free hook and gas grenades. The lower tier, rather than get pounded, left Shmack and most of them permanent played only at Widomaker.

Well, strong players don't have anything to play on an empty server so they left too eventually.

When Widomaker died in 2005, the Shmack server had already added both free hook and gas grenades in attempt to appeal to more players.

Admittedly, what you see today is more catered to fun and less towards the Quake fundamentals. I preferred the old style because it was tough.

Maybe again someday ...

[Baker]

Add:

But the real problem, you have to a certain size population base to support hardcore tastes.

You always have to have a couple of servers that cater to new players.

New players eventually grow in skill and then get varied interests. So really the trick is growing the player base, which in turn will support greater diversity on the high end.

[QuadRaptor]

That makes me wonder, whatever happened to the people who ran quake.argon.org?

That was always my favorite "Artifact" RuneQuake server - it was the place I hung out at for a long time, and I have yet to find another player who remembers that server like I do.

[Baker]

That server was run Roderick Schertler, who created Artifact-RJS.

I think at some point, I think he moved and transferred the mod and the server to Slot Zero. The mod and server had identical settings and features as argon, until the Widomaker server's popularity really started to drain players, which is when the settings and features were changed.