Hi all. A Lot of changes have been implemented in quakelive recently. There are many discussions whether it good or bad changes. I think that gameplay changes are bad and it won’t attract new players to the game cause new player gonna die as quickly in FFA as they did before.

I just want to you my thoughts with you on the “Real changes” that Qlive needs.

What are the current problems with Qlive?
1. Bad ranking and matchmaking system
2. Lack of tutorials for newcomers

Did last update change any of this?

NO! Trying to make the game easier to play is not a good strategy. Blizzard did it to StarCraft:BroodWar (SC:BW) and who the fuck likes StarCraft 2 now. Right, no one.

So, what can we do to make quake more fun to play for oldschools and new players?

Have you read 2 problems quakelive has now as I wrote above? We should implement easy matchmaking and decent rating systems. Not this 4 tiers shit we have now. As a high tier CA player its hard to find a decent match without 1600 elo guys who knows really nothing on how to play CA. No positioning, 31lg and spamming rockets/nades everywhere – really no fun having 3 teammates like this. Same regarding duel mode. I mean I have sometimes “green games” with someone like Claws waiting to play. Like WTF? Its 1600 elo vs 2200 elo. Nice “green match”. Well its okay when you are at least above 1500 elo so you can aim/position/time. But imagine how newcomers feel the game. They join “green” or “yellow” match and end it like 0-45. Noone wants to play a game like this when you just get annihilated over and over.

So how can we solve this without changing gameplay?
I truly believe that a ladder system StarCraft: BroodWar players was using is the best one. Why? Cause SC:BW is like quake but RTS. SC:BW is also a damn hard game to play and hard to start cause oldschools will just rape you in every game. But it had a damn good ladder system. Check it out:
http://iccup.com/starcraft/sc_rating_system.html
This system perfectly works on 1x1 mode, teambased modes, country and clans ranking.

So the year is divided into seasons – like 3 month is 1 season. Everyone starts on 1000 rating (D rank) and climbing the ladder up to A+ or Ultimate rank. When season ends all points are reset and you start from D rank again. This thing helps you to track your progress from season to season – you see that you ended with 3455 points (C-) last season and now you have like 3800 points in the middle on the season. THIS THING REALLY WORKS. I mean ELO is a nice thing but who the fuck cares on ELO? But you will care on every win/lose with that ladder system.

At the end of the season you can make some tourney with TOP3 players of TOP6 countries or smth like this. Just check the the iccup site to see how well you can track Clans/countries/teammodes.

Just spawn servers like (D/D+/C- ztn/dm6/sini join) – and add a pregame window. So the player1(d+) can see the player2(c-) joins the server:
P1: ready?
P2: gogo
QUAKELIVE: The game is starting…
5…
4..
……Profit!

I believe its pretty easy to do. Add ladder (with limited maps) and non-ladder servers, allow players to spawn server, make chat channels and pre-game window. This will add competition to game, allow low skill players play vs about the same level (+/-) and high tier players to play vs about the same level of players.

PLEASE MAKE SUCH A LADDER SYSTEM TO QUAKELIVE NOT THIS 6 DMG LG CHANGE – IT WONT WORK.

Secondly, please make a good matchmaking system as well. Something like I wrote above.

Okay. Tutorials.

Even Q3 had a better tutorial that qlive has. Just make a tutorial maps for newcomers where they can practice strafe, aim, RJ, some quake tricks. It could be just a few defrag/ffa maps with announcer saying all the staff new players need to know about quake. Plus add just a new cfgs they can chose from. Let them know that can bind weapons on any key, some useful tips on sens, accel etc. I mean that’s not a lot of work – just do it. Once new player knows all this staff, killed some bots (make them less stupid) he can try to play some ladder games – but like D rank vs D rank, not D vs B+. I am sure he is gonna love this game cause its great.

Chat and channels

I am not even going to explain why you have to add it. Just do it.

P.S.: Bethesda please don’t kill Quake.