Yes it was the right decision, the q4 hype was over, shipping a broken mp game killed it. At least quakelive joined most of the small quake3 and quake4 communities into one game.

so why did most of the q4 players leave?

Because Quakelive came out.

Most dropped the game because q4 mp sucked till id did the second/third patch. At that point most of the non super hardcore players had already left, Quakelive had nothing to do with q4 mp flop.

Yeah. I just meant the last few players left for QL. Didn't read the question properly :)

If I recall correctly the community left q4 due lack of tourneys since wsvg went bankrupt .
Then there was CPL's final tournament where they decided to go back to q3 and use CPMA. No one actually wanted cpma over osp but cpl stuck with it. Seemed like the only reason they chose cpma was because of the splash screen. So all the server owners/runners switched to cpma mod... GGL servers, speakeasy i'd assume clanbase etc etc

So the community ditched the game for lack of tourneys and also ditched osp. :(

shortly after quake zero was announced.
Everyone left q3 again for ql

Seems the community has a habit of ditching the superior product for crap.

ditch q3 for q4
return to q3
ditch q3 for ql

next.... ditch quake all together for shitty clan arena Doom.


Syncerror sill has a job.

i LOVED the switch from osp to cpma, super nice netcode.

of course this meant super op lg etc finally catching up and changing the whole strategy of the game but thats not the mods fault

I enjoyed cpma/vq3 more than osp, too. Actually being able to hit was nice but keeping 8dmg lg was a bit much. LG was balanced for the poor hit registration.

the sdk code is a big pile of shit, each frame will run the code 7 times when it does`nt have to, instead of returning out when its server or client side code only, then the snapshot tries to re-sync it

want the code to be run once per frame, you need Q43A

Q43ALive would rock hard

£100 i`ll release the source for Q43A

engine bugs are :

1> mp vehicles won`t spawn correctly after a map restart, the driver view becomes lagged
2> listen server`s can`t record netdemo`s
3> remote client`s can`t control a guided projectile from projectile`s viewpoint to full distance set in weapon def file
4> probably need to use the same define so you can actually have upto 128 players, everything in the sdk is capable, ain`t none of that integer to bits in the sdk on snapshots etc, its just plain text 16 on half on the half of the code

should had been sooner

If in that final year they could have fixed all the bugginess and made it so the most desireable competitive gameplay was part of the base game and not a mod then I think that would have been really good for it

QW has a bunch of nice packages and is fully functional, same for Q2, same for Q3 and all three of those games have enough players to find duel or FFA games, or their IRCs have people in them who want to play.

Q4 is still buggy, the servers are still fucked, not a soul is online and the IRC has 4 people in it.

Its a shame because its a really fun game, and I'd love to be able to play with some small dedicated Q4 community, but not even that exists from what I can tell

One more year could have been good for it. Like they've done for QL, a year of fixing the game up to leave it in a good state for the people sticking around

They should have done QL before Q4.

they should have added q4 physics in ql!.. Oh wait

not a reflex thread, my bad

They should have had a competitive mod with the launch of the game, that's what killed it essentially because vanilla q4 was dogshit right out of the box.

They released to soon.

No, it was too broken from start, leaving the sour and horrible taste of Quake4 .

Too little , too late .

Doesnt matter how much you fix it in the end , first impressions are so important, it sticks.

It is a shame, because it could have been a very nice game , i liked it .

I guess that's why I liked it so much. I first started playing after q4max came out and fixed everything.

there are two chapters to the story

1st chapter
id software (the villain) released a game with a sub-standard multiplayer

2nd chapter
anthonyJ (the hero/villain depends on your point of view) fixed the entire multiplayer of quake 4 but leaving the game a clusterfuck to install