The future of QL?

[CZghost]

No more Quake Live for us poor players

[Hipshot]

If you already had QL, you will get it for free though, it's new players who had to buy it.

[CZghost]

It was a bunch of time ago, my profile just does not exist anymore, which means new registrastion and which means paying...

[Martinus]

Bad luck CZghostie.

[KittenIgnition]

The price tag is like putting up a huge wall to keep new players out - it used to be that you had to pay to spawn servers, but anyone could play, so new players still came in even if they weren't going to stay. Now there will be no curious newcomers, but all the old players got the game for free, which means it will suffer a similar fate to q3: it will be even harder for new players to join thanks to there being less of them to play against, while veterans will stay and get better against one another. It's worse than q3, because it's on Steam which means you can't pirate it to avoid the price tag. There's no open arena for the law-abiding players either.

[obsidian]

If you ever had QL on your Steam account back when it was free, it stays in there as already purchased. QL has been on Steam for a while now, if you had any intention of playing it, you would probably have it by now.

It's $10 for Quake Live. To put that into perspective, if you wanted to buy Quake 3 Arena on Steam right now, it's $20!!! I'm also sure that it'll be cheaper on Steam sales. Will it affect new players? Perhaps. But the problem for new players for such an old game will always be retention. As a free game, some people will just download it, run around for a match and then never play it again. That adds nothing to the community.

On the plus side, there are now bigger map rotations, private servers (great for new players), and Steam Workshop for custom content. In the long run, I think this is overall positive. The only thing I think Bethesda could have handled better was some kind of migration of player data, and not wiping out the QL forums which had a bunch of resources written by the community, including some tutorials by cityy and myself.

[KittenIgnition]

The main problem I see is that it almost completely shuts out curious people. Sure they may not stay, but some would, and now they likely will never try it. For old players this is nothing but good news, unless you had hope for the game growing (I had a bit). But none of my friends will ever play it thanks to its now having a price tag.

[PaN61]

So does this mean if you basically played Quake Live through the standalone client / browser option, you can't play the game anymore since it's only available on Steam? Seems like a punch in the face to all those people, and unfortunately I'm one of them.

[Gustavo6046]

Bethesda sucks
Steam sucks
What else will enter the "sucks = []" Python list?

[AndyW]

Nice! Maybe no more free-play-kid-hate-spam-tsunamis !
Im happy with the switch and like the client.

@Obsidian: No chance to get the Forum content? i was thinking about to download it but the switch came that quick...
Maybe that was part of the quick-switch-plan, they try to avoid traffic...

[Gustavo6046]

What tsunamis are you talking about?

[CZghost]

Hook the websites, they should have backup somewhere

[Hipshot]

Anyone know how to convert a Q3 level into QL? I know how to change the bsp version, however when I do that I get some Lump Error.

Do I really need to recompile the level?

[Gustavo6046]

Lump Error

As I know lumps are files stored in id Software package files (like doom WADs or Quake PKGs, or Q3 PK3s in this case).
There is also an similiar thread, you should read it. Also anything else related you should ask there -- it's better for organization and attention's sake.