Quake Live is dead, long live "???"
Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2014 2:14 pm
So, last year or so they abadoned Linux and Mac users entirely and if you dig a bit deeper there you will find that Id-software themselves aren't putting much effort into the whole Quake3/Quake Live thing anymore, because it doesn't pay off at all for them financially and even causes slight losses. Abadoning a considerable portion of well-paying subscribers is obviously only the beginning of an end.
So, what should you migrate to?
The choice doesn't seem that easy if you look around online. After fighting against critical bugs in (bare) ioquake3 and the overall lack of reasonable advancements in the codebase (like default settings still being geared towards 56k modems and Pentium 3 processors ..) I even considered running quakeworld instead, just because it felt like no one really has jumped of the dying horse yet and that this has 'survived' probably for good reasons and almost 20 years. Quakeworld seemed to be at least some 'thing' that people would still actively participate in. But to no avail, same problems, ezquake had bugs bugs bugs (with linux), and what I didn't even think of: no real 3D sound (!), comparably poor weapon balance and gameplay, yadda yadda. OpenArena .. I want to spare you the story.
Just what can you use nowadays? To me it seems that modern gaming has largely degenerated through joystick style console gaming and no-skill/no-requirement mechanics. To me, more than ever there seems to be a need for something like Quake3 - instant, fast and high precision skilled combat. I still remember 10 years ago, shortly before Quake Live came out, everything would just grow and improve. OSP + Clans + competition. Then Quake Live took it one step further and since then it only stagnated, the community was drowned, the Internet changed and what not ...
Oh btw... I am running OpenArena now with OSP on my own server (the only OSP server...), which seemed the most reasonable (and currently least buggy) choice. Mainly because for the user it is free like Quake Live and you just have to run it straight out of a ZIP file. But there are CPM model incompatibilities and I had to pull in proprietary sound files and the green Tankjr in to make it bearable. Shit ... I have been messing with quake3 source code even before I really could program and also made maps as a teenager. I could easily turn this all into another Quake Live, just fork OpenArena and spent a week with setting up servers and such. It is a joke really if you think about it, how little effort and money you would have to spent. You would only need to rent 1-2 dedicated servers and you could open hundreds of q3 servers and deal with thousands of simultaneous connections easily. Which is about as much as the load that Quake Live has. It is not 1999 anymore, I rent dedicated servers for 30 euros a month that could do the job. The only thing you really need to "pay" for (in the sense of working on it) is providing support, fixing minor bugs, improving the code. But those are community aspects, it is not something a company needs to be hired for or something you necessarily can just obtain for money. But whatever ... I have set up stuff before only to have no one use it because I don't understand people and therefore I don't understand marketing at all. I wouldn't do this until someone came along and took charge of making it public efficiently.
So, what should you migrate to?
The choice doesn't seem that easy if you look around online. After fighting against critical bugs in (bare) ioquake3 and the overall lack of reasonable advancements in the codebase (like default settings still being geared towards 56k modems and Pentium 3 processors ..) I even considered running quakeworld instead, just because it felt like no one really has jumped of the dying horse yet and that this has 'survived' probably for good reasons and almost 20 years. Quakeworld seemed to be at least some 'thing' that people would still actively participate in. But to no avail, same problems, ezquake had bugs bugs bugs (with linux), and what I didn't even think of: no real 3D sound (!), comparably poor weapon balance and gameplay, yadda yadda. OpenArena .. I want to spare you the story.
Just what can you use nowadays? To me it seems that modern gaming has largely degenerated through joystick style console gaming and no-skill/no-requirement mechanics. To me, more than ever there seems to be a need for something like Quake3 - instant, fast and high precision skilled combat. I still remember 10 years ago, shortly before Quake Live came out, everything would just grow and improve. OSP + Clans + competition. Then Quake Live took it one step further and since then it only stagnated, the community was drowned, the Internet changed and what not ...
Oh btw... I am running OpenArena now with OSP on my own server (the only OSP server...), which seemed the most reasonable (and currently least buggy) choice. Mainly because for the user it is free like Quake Live and you just have to run it straight out of a ZIP file. But there are CPM model incompatibilities and I had to pull in proprietary sound files and the green Tankjr in to make it bearable. Shit ... I have been messing with quake3 source code even before I really could program and also made maps as a teenager. I could easily turn this all into another Quake Live, just fork OpenArena and spent a week with setting up servers and such. It is a joke really if you think about it, how little effort and money you would have to spent. You would only need to rent 1-2 dedicated servers and you could open hundreds of q3 servers and deal with thousands of simultaneous connections easily. Which is about as much as the load that Quake Live has. It is not 1999 anymore, I rent dedicated servers for 30 euros a month that could do the job. The only thing you really need to "pay" for (in the sense of working on it) is providing support, fixing minor bugs, improving the code. But those are community aspects, it is not something a company needs to be hired for or something you necessarily can just obtain for money. But whatever ... I have set up stuff before only to have no one use it because I don't understand people and therefore I don't understand marketing at all. I wouldn't do this until someone came along and took charge of making it public efficiently.
