The recently leaked update has broken many hearts and rudely put us face to face with the fact that maybe something needs to be done or the long awaited death of Quake might finally become a reality.

Here's my take on the situation.

Quake is not too hard for newbies, it's just a fast paced game. Which means that you get fragged a lot, and quickly. You either like that or you don't, and many don't. But you can't change that aspect of the game or you'd have a different game. Easy to learn, hard to master. Real-time strategy games like LoL require a lot more learning in the beginning.

Back in the day there were few games competing with each other, now there are millions.
Quake has not gotten worse, the competition has gotten bigger, better and more varied.
There's no fix for this, it's just a new reality.

That doesn't mean arena shooters are a dying breed, but it's a breed that will have to content itself with a much much smaller piece of the pie. All a game like Quake can do is find a business model that allows it to survive.

Steam is a good move in that regard: more exposure, more promotion, the ability to do things that would be too hard on one's own - like VAC for example. Changing the game play however is not because then you're trying to fix what isn't broken.

Minor improvements like better matchmaking and anti-cheat are welcome sure, but they will only have a very small effect on the overall popularity of the game; they won't change the fact that more people today prefer to play games like DotA instead of arena shooters like Quake.

Feel free to disagree with the above; but maybe we should focus more on ideas for a survivable business model as opposed to arguing about minor game improvements that won't make a difference in the grand scheme of things.