My QL Review (part 1) Since QL came out of Beta
By Raythenoob

1. Lack of communication. The only real communication can be seen in the most recent ESR thread (ask id 5 q's). Marty should have remained on as Community Manager. Not much has changed and really, after 2 years did you expect anything different? Blizzard does Q&A sessions while ID ... oh wait ya , says nothing. Remember who's in charge people, Bethesda. They are pulling all the strings. Sync and his team can promise the world but as their recent promise of a devblog shows, they are not in charge. Bethesda is trying to keep everything locked down including keeping ID Tech 5 to themselves: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-08-12-id-tech-5-only-for-bethesda-titles

2. Strongarming people to pay for Pro Accounts when one cannot start his own private server in a location of their own choice (you must instead choose from an existing list). This is a big misnomer and many people fell for it (and are continuing to fall for it). As it stands now, it's truly pointless for people to upgrade to Pro as noone is looking to join 12 clans and less than .01% actually has the need for his own private server (clan chiefs).


http://www.quakelive.com/forum/showthread.php?1594-Very-disappointed-with-Pro-service.

3. Changing pub team server sizes to 6v6. It forces, for example, the competitive CTF player to pay for pro accounts in order to lock maps to 8 players. Everyone else is stuck playing in spamfest servers. With a serious lack of players playing on premium servers people are outright quitting the game instead of upgrading.



4. Aliasing accounts on the QL Forum in a desperate attempt to mute the crowd that is displeased with the direction the game has turned to. It's pretty obvious that 9 fanboys are vastly outnumbered by 1000's of unhappy customers. I find it downright pathetic to see the devs turning to this tactic. You know whoyou are. p.s: it would have been less obvious if you actually posted under those names on the old ql forum



5. Skillmatching. It was a valiant effort but Id's team has simply continued to neglect the suggestions forum. People like rexcramer, imiol and wobbo had posted extremely useful fixes for this issue. Sadly, this will go down as one of the biggest downfalls of this game. Too bad because it had so much promise. The focus should have been on spectator slots, teamkillers, time join limits, ingame kick. They will most likely come into play over time, but time is of the essence and people are getting impatient of waiting.


the biggest tier slummer in ql history is complaining of not finding games. And apparently his 10,000 alias' accounts aren't faring much better despite the tiers he is looking to play in.

6. Deleting the old QL Forum. This is downright stupid. You could have upgraded Vbulletin and maintained content. You had 2 years to clean up the forum and could have copied the most important posts over into an archive, no instead i had to do it, and look where that got you when you turned on me. I went through the entire suggestions forum in about 1 week. You simply neglected the casual fan base and opted instead only to listen to the focus group and some select pro players. When you culled the old forum, you virtually culled 2/3 of the people who participated on it regularly.

The following screenies will further validate how people felt about your company since QL went live.



is that so...





and lastly. And this pretty much says it all.

for over a year i played, mainly in the morning and NEVER, I REPEAT, NEVER had a problem finding a game at any time of the day (even late at night). That screenie was taken an hour ago (9:00 a.m eastern time). NOT ONE SINGLE TEAM GAME UP. You can come up with every excuse in the book but as i was the 2nd most active North American player, i can tell you that this was a first for me this morning.


Part 2 with more in depth analysis coming soon.

Part 2

7. QL should have stayed beta. The following 2 screenies further validate why QL wasn't ready for release. Too many bugs and too many technical issues for any game 12 hours into release. 306 people were seen viewing the technical forum with 61 threads. 306 people! Wrap your head around that.





8. Lack of transparency. Forget communication, how about some truth? Or moreover, howabout a hint at what we'd be paying for. A full changelog, A MONTH AFTER RELEASE, has still NOT been posted. People still continue to post on the official QL Forum asking what they're getting for a pro account. What you hiding ID? To the smart paying customer it's fairly obvious that one does not get enough bang for their buck.

The following link (don't try to delete it id, i already have the entire thread screenshotted) and reply by Function9 further proves this:
http://www.quakelive.com/forum/showthread.php?325-To-those-wanting-to-play-Q3-%28CPMA%29/page4

Take a look at his 3 links.





9. coming soon

I'm kinda forced to ask you mr. Ray
What are the Pro's of quakelive?

It's not a review of ql, just a review of ql since it went live out of beta. Meaning, how people have responded to the update and my personal thoughts of that update and how i personally interpret other people's views. The pros of the update, syncerror is finally responding to people on ESR?

Edit: it's definetely not CTF4

raythenoob wrote:

It's not a review of ql, just a review of ql since it went live out of beta. Meaning, how people have responded to the update and my personal thoughts of that update and how i personally interpret other people's views. The pros of the update, syncerror is finally responding to people on ESR?

Edit: it's definetely not CTF4

Old CTF4>>>>>all

CTF is completely destroyed now. 6v6 is not right, and as Ray says, it seems like no one plays.

Bwahahhahaha. I loved this post. All 3 of my accounts have been banned from their forums for the most stupid shit. At first it was spamming about how bad QL is, which is understandable. But then they banned me for regular spam (xtruder wasn't banned though?), then CROSS-POSTING about my tournament, and finally the reason they said is "not appropriate anywhere, ever". What the fuck does that even mean? I haven't even posted anything in like 5 days!

Quake Live is the shittiest version of Quake there is, and everyone who has been around long enough can see that. I hope this post gets seen Ray, because it would sure make a lot of people quit QL and come back to Q3. With your anti-QL and my pro-Q3, we could make history again!

really off topic
i just noticed trajan is playing ql again

QL has the most potential to be the best Quake (even FPS). ID is just not using its potential, and is instead destroying the game.

It also could have been the best if it was an actual, download-able PC game instead of a shitty browser-based game. Better connections, LAN support, and so much more. But noooooooo...

tool wrote:

It also could have been the best if it was an actual, download-able PC game instead of a shitty browser-based game. Better connections, LAN support, and so much more. But noooooooo...

The browser part is just a gimmick; it really has no effect, positive or negative, on the game. Since it is plug-in, it uses the same languages and technologies as Quake 3 (mostly C and OpenGL). Any problems with QL's connections are caused by the QL servers, and their implementation of "unlagged." The only problem with the browser aspect is the additional overhead of having a browser open, which would really only affect people with crappy computers, such as ones from 1999.

So i just played 5 or 6 games of ql. Just to see what's new. I played about 4 ctf games, including courtyard and ofcourse i was rusty as hell. First of all, and i'm surprised noone commented on this, but there was a definite change in physics, i was easily able to jump much higher on vortex (from middle center jumppad to flagpost) and easily overshot myself onto the platform from the waterarea in ironworks. Besides those changes, the same uneven games and the same people stacking teams. I found 2 ctf games in those 2 hours i was playing and before i switched to CA, none. I tried playing one CTF4 to help mevil and the 6v6 was absolutely dreadful. Not to mention the guy camping at rail was just picking us off one by one and i could only muster to get rail once. Simply put, the new CTF4 is terrible, just terrible. It's not even fun anymore in the slightest.

Overall i was pleased to have retired from this game as i saw nothing worth sticking around for.

For the record, i've never been anti-ql, it may come off that way, but i just speak my mind. I've said plenty of positive things as well, just people harp on the negatives, especially the fanboys who label anyone who has anything remotely negative to say about the game as a hater, when in reality, people like myself and others who frequented the suggestions forum (the old good one) before they culled it, spoke their mind about what they liked and didn't like and were ID's best beta testers. Sadly, ID never felt it necessary to read our posts and thus missed out on many bug reports/glitches and moreover detailed reports on cheaters/statpadders which resulted (in some areas) in more of the same (x3).

Now adays there's 2 camps, and i don't want to pit myself in the middle of that. I just stopped caring as the people who truly shape this game (the focus group) are the only ones whose words don't come on deaf ears. When the new blood on the new ql forum figure that out, they too will turn bitter knowing that all the work, time and energy they put into their own efforts was wasted time, time they will never get back.

To ID: Lies, Deception, Ommitting truths, protecting people abusing the rules/system, biased opinions, etc. These are all things i personally won't tolerate from a business entity. It may help you get 250k/month (first month at least) but people WILL REMEMBER THOSE ACTS and they will also remember the people who were ignored; people like imiol, rexcramer, wobbo, kiittenignition, killtron to name a few (a very few as there are many others). It's sad that you chose to work against most of us, instead of with us. I suppose it came down to some inflated egos who couldn't stand that some of us had better ideas and sugestions and put more time and energy into finding ways to correct the system than those at the top.

To Yakumo: you may be revered for your CVAR list from 2006 but you did nothing to engage people on the forums and it took a volunteer moderator tag for you and a few others at that same position to start helping others in the tech forum. Things that me, lochdog, xtruder, roxolana had done for the previous year. So you go ahead and pat yourself on the back big boy, a job well done i'm sure. YOu and others who asskissed your way to that position have done a marvelous job at it, but as a few cached google searches will show (for anyone interested) you and others who vyed for the job are not immune to that same criticism. You may think you got one up on me, but in reality you probably cost ID at least 1000 subscribers as word of mouth is a deadly weapon, and you sir were the trigger that fired that weapon when you chose to spread rumors about me in the ql.tv irc channels along with a few others.

To Incubus and Av8r: you guys may try to fool people into thinking you're reformed players and you may have some naive friends at the top who never witnessed your acts ingame. But for those of us who played against and with you on the NA servers, we will also remember you for your racist comments/binds and your teamstacking (taken to the xtreme as you did (and still do) it every single game. I know you're proud of yourselves and i know some people at the top will protect you till the day you die, but you won't get any respct from the commoner and you will come to see, in time, that will come back to haunt you, whether it be through a broken business venture or a broken friendship as more people come to view you for what you really are. Karma is a bitch and the both of you have it coming to ya.

To Q_Adrian, Gragor, Digitalhunter and a few other abusers/cheaters; consider yourselves lucky. I have a mountain of evidence against you that is pages deep on my now extinct forum. But moreover, you're lucky ID is letting you roam free on the pub servers in hopes people will get fed up and upgrade to premium. I can't wait till that tactic fails when some rich punk upgrades to pro and goes apewild. IF anything ID has that coming to them as they have miserably failed to follow through on their own promises and set of rules THEY THEMSELVES LAID OUT.

Post this everywhere.

I will post part 3 soon which will include a decent chunk devoted to the mappers who were screwed over by id in this latest update.

10. the screenshot below says it all

Nice thread ray, I had a good read.

Why do you care enough to post all of this when you're "retired"? Just wondering.

#rush. wrote:

Why do you care enough to post all of this when you're "retired"? Just wondering.

to inform people they are pissing money away from upgrading to pro. + lol at the fanboys on the ql forum who are askign people to put in "just 2$ month" when they don't apparently realize that id has already made about 1/4 million dollars from this past month alone. (3500 pro accounts, 3000 premium accounts), That means over a course of a year they'll rake in 3,000,000$ or 300,000 per dev (for 10 devs). Ya i don't feel sorry for id and i'm not falling for the boohoo stories that they're a company and deserve to get paid. They're laughing all the way to the bank.

raythenoob wrote:

#rush. wrote:

Why do you care enough to post all of this when you're "retired"? Just wondering.

to inform people they are pissing money away from upgrading to pro. + lol at the fanboys on the ql forum who are askign people to put in "just 2$ month" when they don't apparently realize that id has already made about 1/4 million dollars from this past month alone. (3500 pro accounts, 3000 premium accounts), That means over a course of a year they'll rake in 3,000,000$ or 300,000 per dev (for 10 devs). Ya i don't feel sorry for id and i'm not falling for the boohoo stories that they're a company and deserve to get paid. They're laughing all the way to the bank.

I agree with most of your points but some numbers are wrong. You multiplied $250,000 by 12 months, but the $250,000 is because you must pay for a full year at a time. So that means it would be only $25,000 per dev, except they must have been paid the past 2 years even though the game itself wasn't generating much if any money. It's not like the money goes to the devs, they are owned by a parent company. The dev salary isn't directly related.

gpig wrote:

raythenoob wrote:

#rush. wrote:

Why do you care enough to post all of this when you're "retired"? Just wondering.

to inform people they are pissing money away from upgrading to pro. + lol at the fanboys on the ql forum who are askign people to put in "just 2$ month" when they don't apparently realize that id has already made about 1/4 million dollars from this past month alone. (3500 pro accounts, 3000 premium accounts), That means over a course of a year they'll rake in 3,000,000$ or 300,000 per dev (for 10 devs). Ya i don't feel sorry for id and i'm not falling for the boohoo stories that they're a company and deserve to get paid. They're laughing all the way to the bank.

I agree with most of your points but some numbers are wrong. You multiplied $250,000 by 12 months, but the $250,000 is because you must pay for a full year at a time. So that means it would be only $25,000 per dev, except they must have been paid the past 2 years even though the game itself wasn't generating much if any money. It's not like the money goes to the devs, they are owned by a parent company. The dev salary isn't directly related.

i multipled 250k by 12 thinking 6500 (3500 pro,3000 prem) NEW accounts would purchase a yearly plan. Even if that number is halfed from this month forward, they're still going to make an additional 11x125k onto that 1/4 million they've made (and most, mind you, without the europeans paying as of yet). They're making money hand over fist, yet the real contributors (the map makers, etc) aren't getting a damm penny while they were the ones who made it possible for id to add new maps to ql.

It's pretty funny though, tuesday's update that is, that people were all gungho about while the only meaningful thing they did was chnge 6v6 to 5v5, but had they never changed it to 6v6, that update was nothing but a changelog full of bugfixes. Remember what they said, one new map / month. We're at one month now...

Plus they still haven't advertised ql anywhere. They still don't have an official tech support representive in the ql forum. They are still uber slow in response time at quakelive@support.com and they still haven't added a full changelog from the last update.

I talked to phant about if he got compensated for Battleforged. He said iD just asked him to use his map and he said okay. He didn't care about the money.

I still don't see where the 11x125k is coming from. How many more Americans are going to buy QL besides the ones that did? The other people at this point will have already heard how bad it is. When Europe gets it that would only double or triple the playerbase, which would be a grand total of ~$750,000 . I'll believe the $3,000,000 number when it happens.

Edit: If they triple their premium and pro current playerbase by August 2011, isn't that only $750,000 for the entire year from August 2010 to August 2011?

99% of all statistics used in an argument are made up on the spot.

Including that one.

#rush. wrote:

blah blah blah, i love id, i kiss their ass. i would gladly give 10 million dollars for them to father my children, blah blah blah.

aren 't you supposed to be banned fanboy? oh and those numbers are not made up. They garnered about 450 pro accounts and 300 premium accounts after just 1 day of introducing those new upgrades.




People like you make me sick. I'm not going to stand around and pretend the devs have done a great job at communicating, listening to their fans, making their fans feel appreciated, keeping to their promises, etc. All those fanboys like yourself who go around saying otherwise have had your heads in your asses for the past 2 years. So little of what they said they were going to do, they've done. Id is not Id of old, the Id that made a game for their fans, NO, they are now creating a game for the demographic that they believe will garner them the largest payday. That's the truth. The QL fans wanted blood gore/CPM/Threewave maps/Grappling hook, etc (sure there's deviations of each, but that was the majority), that and other things is what the QUAKE FANS wanted.

Can you seriously call QL a quake game? This is nothing like Q1 or Q2, the true genre of Quake. That was the reason i came to QL, to experience Q1/Q2 all over again online, with others. I don't even know what this game is. They made it a kiddy game. Even taking out characters in the game that show cleavage or body hair. Give me a freaking break. You don't see the developers of fear catering in to the pressures of that to remove all blood and gore. No they've stuck with their product despite any negative press (and it got a lot, when the game was released as the so called "bloodiest game ever made" at the time. No instead they are trying to make a halo clone. Ofcourse quake fans are upset. They see Id as a sellout now.

You want people to pay for a product, but noone is going to pay for something they aren't happy with, even if it was 1 cent/month. The stupid arguments made on the officla forum that it's "JUST 2 DOLLARS" and the insults that come along with that "ARE YOU THAT POOR?", etc are retarded to say it mildly. Money isn't the issue. Which is exactly why some people don't buy ramen noodles, not because it's expensive but because they don't like the product (doesn't taste good to them).

They have made a joke of skillmatching (i don't care if it existed in q3 or not, it's terrible), they have shown almost no interest in cracking down on ingame violators and they have terrible support. (try contacting syncerror or someone from id sometime and see what happens, cuz i can guarantee you those 6500 that signed up so far, are not coming on the ql forums to the tech forum because hey're getting responses). You'd be a fool to think otherwise. No they are posting on the ql forum because id has one person(ordus) in charge of quakelive@support.com.

You trying to get a job at id like matefeedkill, yakumo and incubus? Keep kissing their asses, i keep it real, if you don't like it, turn off your speakers.


http://www.quakelive.com/forum/showthread.php?183-good-luck-id....imean-beth-thats-right-u-guys-sold-out-sorry-(&highlight=premium


http://www.quakelive.com/forum/showthread.php?2357-cheating-rampant-in-high-tier-ca/page7

and this kids, is why QL Fails. Id does not care about cheating and isn't trying to stop it. That site that sold him that 25$ hack is stll up. Where's the cease and desist letter? OH wait, if they get rid of cheaters then less people will upgrade to premium to get away from those cheaters...

gpig wrote:

I still don't see where the 11x125k is coming from. How many more Americans are going to buy QL besides the ones that did? The other people at this point will have already heard how bad it is. When Europe gets it that would only double or triple the playerbase, which would be a grand total of ~$750,000 . I'll believe the $3,000,000 number when it happens.

Edit: If they triple their premium and pro current playerbase by August 2011, isn't that only $750,000 for the entire year from August 2010 to August 2011?

That's assuming the devs lied and won't attempt to advertise quake live to the masses. Considering the peak when ql went to open beta, we'd have to assume that a lot of those same people will come back to see what's changed with a major announcement. But with 2 years of planning, i'm starting to doubt we'll see ql advertised at all. Personally, i think they released ql earlier than originally intended as marketing a product is a byproduct of the release.

And to explain the numbers again, 125k is 1/2 of this past first month's numbers, which is the tally i believe they'll bring in per month by new paying members (eg. 1750 pro/1500 premium subscribers, not at all unreasonable to think could happen. Especially when QL's total population is at around 60k and the last 3 forum polls indicated that 2/3rds of that population has or is intending to upgrade. So that's about 40,000 total (of which 18% have signed up already (about 6500)).

http://www.quakelive.com/forum/showthread.php?2445-Will-you-subscribe-after-playing-FreezeTag-this-weekend (44%)
http://www.quakelive.com/forum/showthread.php?759-Do-you-have-a-premium-pro-subscription (68%)
http://www.quakelive.com/forum/showthread.php?241-So-who-has-subscribed (62%)

44+68+62= 174 / 3 = 58% or about 2/3 rds (66%)

So 11 months x 2500 (pro/premium accounts or 50 new prem/pro accnts per day) would add up to about 26,500 people + the 6500 that already signed up. That's about 33,000, or 7k short of the estimated 2/3rds of the community that said they have upgraded or are going to upgrade.

Now after the first year is up, numbers could drop drastically or increase, most of that will depend on how much advertising is done, so far as mentioned they've done 0 outside the pro blogosphere. (their priority at the moment, eg, ESReality.com, liefje, etc). IF they can maintain that 30+k each year then QL will be succesful, if they can't it's obviously only going to go one way, to failure.

The reason i believe QL has already failed is simple. They have lost about 20k people since the 1 year anniversary and if looking at the bigger picture, they weren't able to convert any of last year's post beta live announcement figures. They've only been losing people, and it's not due to a bad game, it's due to the 10 factors i listed in my opening argument (lack of communication, deceit, broken promises, unpolished gameplay, bugs, etc etc). Their lack of updates from marc-august cost them 20k (about 88k people attained the 1 year anniversary award). They simply have the wrong person in charge of community building as it's apparent they have no clue how to keep people interested and excited for this game. Anyone who has been around for a year will attest to that. The occasional bugfix is not keeping people around. History has shown that already.



It's amazing how desperate they are.

raythenoob wrote:

. I can't wait till that tactic fails when some rich punk upgrades to pro and goes apewild.

HAHA AND SO IT HAS BEGUN.