First topic message reminder :My QL Review (part 1) Since QL came out of BetaBy 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.