Look where the Premium/Pro model has gotten Quake. Its population has been steadily declining for the past several years. Splitting the community further and further apart is only going to hurt the game as a whole.

You don't get paying customers by denying free-to-play players of gameplay features like maps. You're only driving players away by that business model. You get paying customers by providing aesthetic and non-essential features like hats in TF2 or Skins in League of Legends. There's a reason why both of these two games are exponentially more successful than Quake. This is why League of Legends is both the most played game in the world and one of the most lucrative.

The people who pay for Quake currently are either going to renew their subscription or cancel. The number of people who pay is only going stay the same or go down unless you get free players to subscribe. Denying standard players of things like 10 year old maps is not going to cause people to subscribe.

The reasoning of free players is "why should I pay $24 a year just to play a map like Bloodrun that's been around forever? I'm not saying that's right reasoning or wrong reasoning, that's just how it is. When you push free players like that, they're not going to cave in and subscribe. They're going to keep playing or quit. If you want proof, look at the forums and see how many players are quitting because of the patch.

Quake can be sucessful with just a free-to-play model. League of Legends is free to play and has 32 million players. TF2 became F2P and guess what, revenue from TF2 doubled shortly after.

I hear no players who applaud this patch, only those who hate it.

The bottom line is, in order to sustain itself grow, iD needs to respect and listen to its playerbase.

Blizzard and Riot Games have the most amazing support for SC2, WoW, and League of Legends. Mods actually go on the forums and listen to player complaints, bans, suggestions, and advice. Which is something Id doesn't do. These companies actually listen to their players and make the most amazing games because the customer is #1 in their books. And that's the thing. You're not making the game for yourself, you make it for the millions and millions of players out there willing to try out your game.

We're demanding features because in the end, we all play this game. We all want it to succeed and grow. But ignoring the playerbase is just going to drive both free and paying players away.