Falzzi we got that already, or kind of..

#kenya is a place for new maps. the skill-level is kind of low in the channel

#qwhelp , were most beginners come and ask for help.. most ppl are not that skilled but we got our random div1 player there aswell

Well, you dont have a specific channel for lowbies that are searching for duels / matches..and isn't qwhelp about asking more expirienced people for HELP, not asking lowbies for duels or stuff like that?

#qwrookie exists, no noobs there yet though

gonna pimp that channel some during the coming week.

there u have it Falzzi...
be patience as we're working to get rookies there.

rookies go irc -> #qwrookie

edit:
i edited my last post (4 or 5 posts back)

edit2:
someone stepped in to make the advertise text.

Whats with the Kenya -label? A map is a map. Its in your spastic view of things that TB3 is better than other maps. Pluss its degrading the 3rd world countries! :>

yeah, i bet kenyans feel real bad about us calling unknown (but hopefully great) quake maps "kenya maps".

Keep betting.

Anyhow, "carefully planned is half done", or something similar. Right sassa? Any effort to make QW more open to the newcomers is a good deed, and it should only be critized constructively.

Currently I feel that the QW -community is depending on two big leagues and some minor 1on1 and 2on2 -leagues. Does EQL & NQR have any timeframe or are they ran whenever the admins have time? Maybe creating again a ladder-system would be a good idea? So its possible to play official matches all the time without the need to depend on the tourneys?

And on the "unknown map" -issue. In other communities the admins of the leagues (mainly Clanbase) have always forced new maps every season. It has kept the community alive and refreshed. So I am saying that QW community is ran by the community, and its not always the best thing for the whole of scene and the life-span of the game to be done so. Sometimes some things need to be forced to keep the game evolving.

This is just my opinion of course.

I think that to a certain extent, consistency is good for a game. However, i think there are too few newbie tournaments and kenya tournaments around. The KTK tournaments are nice and maybe the best of those map could be play in a separate even-bigger-Duelmaniaish tournament later on to get more playable maps for freshies (and veterans, of course) to play. I think the old maps should stay as a competitive base though.

Ake Vader we aren't a fraction as big as the other scenes
Just so you know

If you look at the amount of teams in Clanbase, players whining on ESReality and the general "feel" of the scenes, then i must say that we are doing good in comparison. Sure Q4 gets all the money tournaments, but they aren't overwhelmed with players really.

I'm mainly talking about Q2 right now, which I originally derived from, I don't know other scenes too much. There are still more Polish players than the whole active QW scene

(wow do I feel like I'm repeating, I've said this about 5 times on this forum already)

Yes, i have always been kind of stunned at the following Q2 has when looking at server amounts etc. However, i think all the other games in the Quake series got other big game modes except DM that makes them go round too, and that stuff i couldn't care less about. Sure, it some of those players may convert to DM sometime, but it's the competitive scene that's really interesting imo.

Edit
Just check the http://www.q2scene.net forum. They have ~3000 registered users. That sounds like a lot, but not when you find out that there are only 200 users who have posted at least one post ever on the forum.

Of course the old maps should stay as a core but new maps should be introduced to the map pool also.

Stfu peppe.

Regarding promotion of qw to newbs, why not email Sujoy Roy and ask him for pimp space on the front page? He calls the shots at esreality.com right?, just checking easreality out now reveals there's 1112 users online! (one of them is ake vader (user admin) who seems to be promoting qw at esreality already gg ake!). To me this seems like a good site to conquer 8) and promote qw.

Agreed with Runamok.foe
and ziel, please we don't need your emo-thinking...

Im looking for someone to substitute me on admining the FFA league i talked about.

Like what happened with Smackdown, again I have no time to continue what i proposed. Things to do right now are very simple:
Decide what kind of stats will the league have. -> for this, there are 2 options. either interpret screenshots and work on excel formulas (already 90% done) OR "discover" the server options that enable the .txt file (actually its a xml file) containing ALL the stats of the map. - This last option is the best, but i messed around with Renzo one evening on his servers and we couldnt find the combination of server commands that enable the download of the txt file.

Thats about it. the league will be SO ez to admin, even i being away can do it. I just need someone to do this simple task of knowing exactly which server commands enable the txt file write. any1? mushis[at]gmail.com

This may be a bit old, but still relevant of course.

I'm new on the scene (as some of you may know). The only reason I have returned is because of a friend who I play STEAM based games with. I knew he had played Q2 for some while and we were both familiar with Quake 1 having bought the game when it was first released here in the UK.

So we got the game, (I had previously FUHquake because I wanted Quake SP with OpenGL support). We played online as the server protocol seems to pretty much stayed the same and fragged each other. I got hold of All Seeing Eye and saw people were still active, so I headed my way over IRC. If it wasn't for IRC I wouldn't even be checking out this community at the moment. (Thumbs up on the KENYA btw).

As far as I see it, you will not get new players coming in, or atleast complete noobies. I didn't get into multiplayer FPS till I had a cable modem (along with RTCW). Before then all I had played online were RPGs and X-Blast (from buddies from IRC).

The only way I could see you getting new players on if;
1: You had newb servers. It took me about 1-2 years to get a grasp on FPS games/engines. You won't find a learning curve for new players. It's to steep to step straight into quake, they'd need to come from another game.

2: Although the source code is released, the game still isn't fully released. If someone could release a fully free version (using the PAK0.pak file and extention paks), then you could start distributing a free game, fully packaged. Those who own the PAK1.pak file from CD will be able to have their client with extra maps/SP. But the idea would be able to release and distribute a recognised package which everyone could download and play with online.

3: The Quake clients need to have a nice GUI. Like stated previously, with Counter-Strike all you need to do is click one link, download, create an account, click and play. This could be done with Quake, could it not? The simplier you make things, the more likely people will join, purely because people are lazy.

4: Quake was the first game engine with a console and was the first FPS with multi-player support (or so I believe). If it wasn't for Quake, the HL wouldn't of been around. I think Quake has a great stigma, one that is carried by WOLF3D and DOOM. ID are the more ethical company and they started a genre. Surely this could be used to gain support/attention. I wouldn't mind seeing media coverage over the game. The game can look pretty damn sweet. The only issue is that it doesn't sell, so that's why it needs to be free (like Enemy Terrioity).

I may not be coherent and I'm pretty tired, but hopefully you guys can see what I'm banging on about and hopefully you understand me a little better! .

A lot of good ideas and pointers going around in this thread.

First time experience - From interest to actually playing
If you think about the new player experience it should be pretty much as simple as this:

1. Go to official site which is easy to find with google etc.
2. Download installation package
3. Install + choose [x] run Quakeworld
4. A nice GUI hits you like a fresh breeze and you select Settings - configure your
- basic player settings
- basic graphical settings with the help of small box that shows you the effects of your changes and an option to "Test run" to see what fps the settings get in a test demo
- basic control settings
5. Go back to main menu and select Multiplayer -> Browse servers
- By default some serverlist should load up
6. Click / select Join

This was my experience with bf2142. The game sucks ass, but getting to play with the demo was easy.

The installation package should include out of the box:
- 24bit everything available
- nicer faithful models
- basic set of maps
- hud / crosshair / skin alternativs

Somehow implementing the waiting room chat or irc concept would be really nice. Seeing the traffic on #qwrookie atm. already gives hope, but having that in the game with easy to join servers as you chat would be the hotness.

Learning curve issues
A lot of people are banging on the learning curve drums and I don't really see it as a problem if the gameclient and getting to servers is made easy as above. QW probably works out well within the 80/20 rule (it takes 20% of total time to develop to 80% of your potential) especially if players have help from other seasoned players.

I'd say the more pressing issue is the one concerning come-and-go as you please type servers with reasonable opponents. It can be FFA, CA or even plain old Arena. I have reservations about tdm games being like this, but it might work with enough people coming and going. Now even these can be set up just fine. We only have one more obstacle - how to get only noobs and only noobs to play on certain servers?

One way to address this is to setup Beginner flagged servers in key areas. So you'd have:
qw.suomicom.com - Beginner FFA
- Beginner CA
- Beginner Arena
- Beginner Duel
etc.

And these would be the servers named in all the beginner documentation etc. to drive the right people there. This might actually be enough as long as we have enough players of this beginner / intermediate level that occupy the servers to keep them alive. I doubt too many veterans would go there to spoil the fun and if a couple do, that wouldn't totally destroy the balance.

BIG PUSH
I think that in order to get a good critical mass of new players, we need to setup things so that when word gets out on a larger scale, things are ready - otherwise we'll be like a shield with helpless noobs ricocheting back to other games :]

We have a really nice opportunity with the upcoming QuakeCon 2007 to make this big push. The question is whether or not we can do it. No doubt the biggest problem is with the installation + get to play process and I'm referring to time and resources now. Pretty much everything else can be thrown together rather quickly with enough enthusiastic people. Then we'd need the beginner servers etc - which should be ~easy.

What are the things we need for this big push?
1. QuakeCon 2007 is a good igniter
2. Posting articles and forum topics around the gaming communities with links to:
- Direct download installer
- The official site (qw.nu?)
- A nice and small movie - DDE2 is too big and long, maybe kyu one would be more suitable
- IRC info
- YOUTUBE, if someone can get a qwmovie looking even decent on youtube, that would be MONEY! The inclination to follow a link to yt compared to downloading x hundred megs of avi are not even comparable. Some movies are already there (ie. The Boss) which don't look so great in youtube and are not really good for ppl not familiar with the game. Kyu one is actually quite ok for this purpose, if I remember correctly.

3. Leadership + plan + contributors
- There are a lot of good ideas and great feedback spread across this forum and others, but there is no big plan and we don't have a leader for this project - which to me, having had officer training, means that shit simply won't get done

nQuake will take care of the installation process.

I don't agree with you on the hud thing. How many new games have customizable hud items?

Crosshairs/skins will have to have some nice client support so you can browse them easy ingame.

What I meant by the HUD alternatives was giving the player a choice of couple of different HUD layouts (configs). Even old qw had this and many games have somewhat customizable HUDs. I'm not talking about everything you can do with ezquake's hud_ stuff. Just a couple of good alternatives would be nice as players coming from different games are used to different things. Once they become more familiar with the game, they can tweak the HUDs themselves or download new ones from the forums / gfx -site.

old qw had different hud layouts? how? sbar on/off, weapons/ammo on left/right side?

I think that he was talking about mqwcl and fuh.

P.S. Every game based on quake series engine have customizable hud, just use the console

i'm not really understanding how the hud should be customizable

it's not hud items (health numbers armor icons etc) and it's not hud configs (hud_*). so what is it?

i would think its a good idea to have dedicated servers that are skill-labeled, for example "rookie server", "low skill", "med skill", "high skill" etc etc, so that newcomers doesnt get scared away by getting killed over and over again by skilled players. and hopefully ppl would respect the label of the servers and play on their own levels.

thats what Im afraid of, it will never work

well, maybe not everyone, but most ppl, i guess, wanna meet ppl they get a fair match against.

I think the establishment of the #rookie channel on irc where people of similiar skill can get games is a great start. It does need the likes of Sassa and others to monitor it and ensure that higher skill players move on. Which seems to be working quite well in my opinion at the moment. Well done to the lads for their efforts there.
Most players of beginner/lower skill can meet there and organise a game against a similiar skilled player.
Once you do that you play on a server that suits ping wise for both players.
You can see the results in the ignition (Rookier) tournament have had some very even games.

Also I guess its important that all new comers to the game are pointed in the right direction in order to get started.
The onus is on all current high skill players that if they want the game to survive that they help out new players and not just destroy their morale for their own benefits. Its in everyones interest to help the lower skill/new players in order to increase the players base. So let me win when I am playing okay

I assume that you were joking a bit at least?

I've played against many players from #qwrookie even though I'm no rookie at all. Mostly we've played End, Aerowalk and Ztndm3. I've always played to the best of my abilities ending up with some pretty rape like scores. But I have always tried to teach new basics after every round and point out the player's good attributes, be it aim or cs.

It's nice to play against ppl at your own level, but the truth is that you don't learn much from them and you could actually be learning to play "wrong" in a sense, just because you're winning against another rookie. Getting bitch slapped by far better and experienced players gives you a good understanding of what the game can be like and you can also get very valuable advice.

I am by no means a real dueler as many who know me would readily point out, but I do feel that I am experienced and interested enough to give newer players sound advice on basics. For example playing End dmm4 changes quite a bit once you realize the most common problem: flying into the lava. So I try to teach players to strafe and turn their mouse as soon as they are hit so that they are headed for lava. Once they learn this very basic use of aircontrol, they will soon discover a whole new aspect of End and qw on a whole. Also other basic things like being unpredictable coming from spawns, not jumping straight to the platform, but swerving and etiquette - don't stay at high spawn long and simply spam platform - are really valuable to a new player. These things you cannot (mostly) learn from other rookies and as mentioned earlier, you can easily be misinformed by other rookies who think they know.

Also playing games like these gives you a real interface with new players besides IRC and you are able to guide them on all other aspects of qw while actually playing.