A lot of people still had Pentium 2, many were moving to P3. Most people played on maxfps 75 because 120 was just for the rich kids. Lots of HPB's and many LPB's on ISDN, cable was rare.
The best 'bug' was floor damage which IMO added really intuitive damage options. OSP AFAIK was available pretty much almost immediately, I dunno if they started developing it in Q3Test. I remember it took me a while to move to OSP because it seemed to be more demanding on hardware than vanilla, but competition leagues started using it straight away. One of the later bugs to get patched was the increased speed / jumping physics gained by using 333FPS. A lot of people used this, especially in CTF (if their computers were quick enough) But this is like 2003ish. Also some players forced maxfps 100 to synchronize with maxpackets 100 to give much better accuracy, especially handy for CTF defenders (maxpackets used to be capped at 100)
Rocket arena was available pretty early on which is what I played back when I was a n00b. Lots of fun. IRC was a massive part of the Q3 community. I actually gained most of my spelling and grammar abilities through typing on IRC chat lol. If you take IRC away from Q3 you're taking away a massive aspect, I think most modern games lack the connected community we had back in the day. There was always some kind of drama going on. I remember 'trying out' for clans back when I was really new, because there was such an abundance of players clans had to be very picky.

I can remember the demo version and 1.17 vanilla.

I'm not sure but I think LG was not blue at first, you can still see the old version sometimes so it's probably selectable.
The movement felt different but it might be due to its link to constant fps in OSP.
I had a Celeron 333 back then, it was the slowest thing in the world. There was lots of competition in the videocard market, now it's just AMD and NVidia.

i had a pentium3 with a vodoo3 and could play with textures in the setting right before of max.... using max setting for tectures meant i would have like 25 fps or something....
I had a blast trying to win the single player over and over in increasingly difficulty, being my best at the moment in hardcore, because in nightmare i had trouble winning the duels (specially hunter, anarky and xaero)
I sometimes had a couple of friends over at home to play in lan and we dueled in dm17 over and over again and played filling with bots deadmatch dm7.
When i finally got ADSL (late 99 o even early 00), i sadly had crapy ping (100 ping in my first hop), i complained to the company but they couldnt care less and i had no other provider available. Sadly in VQ3 that meant you had to time your railguns and rockets in advance, so you were painfully handicaped. I enjoyed a couple of dm fragfest servers, but ultimately i could never hit a rail, and lg was pretty much useless to me so i moved to counter strike 1.1, given it had lag comensation and 100 ping was retty much still playable.
I kept playing single player campign every now and then until i heard of quake live in 2013 and gave multiplayer a chance again.

Floor damage wasn't a bug, it was a server setting and if I'm not totally wrong still excists in QL? Btw: LPB (Low Ping Bastards) and HPW (High Ping Wailers). Back then there never were something called an HPB ;) they were called HPW because of all their yelling (wailing) about how crappy their connections were.

Maybe you said HPW in sweden, but in the UK it was HPB. Floor damage was a bug afaik. Maybe they added the on/off switch later.

Finally getting 30ms ping after playing on dialup for years and thinking to myself 'when I get adsl i'm going to dominate EVERYONE', then realising dialup wasn't why I was shit.

I just remember how huge the 'scene' felt back then as a somewhat newcomer. All the different clan channels, the tournaments, the cpma/osp beef, GTV. In retrospect it probably wasn't that big but I guess that's how everything looks at first.

First big tournaments were played without any kind of competitive mod. Later at least 2 competing mods appeared: OSP and q3comp. At least the latter had funny problems, e.g. pausing/unpausing was disruptive as everyone was losing their velocity on unpause.

Those were definitely funny times. It was hard to get stable 125 fps and people were not doing tricks like telejump on t2, either because they did not know it is possible or did not have the fps do to it. (maybe it is doable without fps, but even if so it is definitely much harder).

Since very few people had any clue, random-ass advice started popping up. For instance when playing on dm13, if you happen to be on the bottom, change your model to bitterman/red, so that you are less visible.

Bots were often doing a backflip when jumping down from levels (well, the jump down was animated in such a way) and people would constantly ask how to do said backflip.

Many pros at the time unsurprisingly came from QuakeWorld and Quake 2. And a lot of them had pathetically bad tracking and would get easily outaimed by today's scrubs (and no, I don't believe it's just the hardware).

People could change nicks at will. Most popular were akin of "new config", "nosound", "new mice", all sort of smileys and other shit.

No matchmaking/elo system of any kind.

In those times one of the better clans at the time (stx?) released a demo of them playing a 4v4 tdm against nightmare bots. They won and wombat wrote something akin to "nightware bots got owned". Can you believe this shit, bots were a challenge.

ball mouse was the norm though.

btw, when did optical mice first appear?

yeh honestly Quake 2 kinda teachs you how to be a better player that relies on " brain " better than aim, even tho you need good aim to succeed in q2.

I kept using ball mouse ( an IBM one that i got with my pc ) untill 2009 or smth :D

Played 1.11 in 2001? as that was the default on the CD, had no idea about later versions/patches etc being a console gamer, then some guy called fuckhead (turned out to be fooki) popped up and raped us all on Tourney 4, someone said he was a 1.17 pro and that's when I kinda got with things followed the scene and realised these nerdy quakers were actually light years ahead and still are IMO.

Good times, was exciting, felt like you were part of something special.

Now everything seems so mapped out. its why I don't play much now, would rather have the good memories than ruin them.

Quake 3 and SF2 are the only truly special games for me.