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This is a copy of a letter I sent to ID and Activision a few months ago. These companies are loosing players in droves and the companies don't even care. Check out the PB forums and see the comments from all the irate players:

What happened to the Quake (2/3) Series?

This is basically an open letter to id Software and how little importance they place in their products. They are loosing players in drovers and their reputation is going down the toilet.

But first a little intro.

I began playing Quake 2 in 95 when some friends at work were having a DM/CTF LAN party. Needles to say I was hooked. I went out and bought the game and downloaded Map after Map. I Became pretty good and eventually became one of the best Q2 CTF players around .

The Q2 CTF MOD was, at the time one of the most innovative MOD's around and pretty much dictated what a Capture the flag Mod should be like. I enjoyed playing on the old YYZ CTF servers and testing new maps from some of the most awesome mappers at the time (Hafhead and gizm0 to name a few). Everyone was into the games, teamplay was amazing and cheaters were nonexistent because Id was on top of various hacks (wallhacking excluded).

Eventually, my scores started to go down and I was ending up at the middle of the pack at the end of rounds. I began spectating people and noticed that people were gibbing enemies from the side and from behind them and discovered the world of bots.

What is a bot?

Some n00bs may get confused by the definition.

There are two types of bots. 1) Used as an AI opponent on various servers to fill empty spaces on servers. These AI players have incredible aim. These bots are good if you want to practice aiming on the run. On Half-Life Servers you can tell bots by their ping. (They all have a ping of 5)

2) Players use the bot components noted in #1 and integrates the auto aim features into their character and play on servers with the auto-aim components. I'm not going to post any of the bot links but they are out there. The people who started using the bots to enhance their own playing experience were mostly pretty stupid. They usually configured their bots to cover auto aiming in a filed of vision of 180 degrees or more around them. What this means is that if a player with a bot is looking forward and they hit fire, the bot will hit anything 180 degrees or more around them without turning. Secondly, they will usually just (if playing a CTF map) shoot and kill people and not work on any of the team objectives.

One more thing to note is one other problem with Quake 2 was that Q2 Servers were susceptible to IP Ping Floods and could take down a given server.

ID Software has a practice of Stopping builds and not releasing any further upgrades or practices. Not long after this, I started to loose interest in this game.

This was about time that the Q3 Arena Demos started to Circulate around. I began playing this game and reading the advanced press from various sources.

When I learned that CTF would loose all the cool components that made Q2 CTF a classic, it was time for me to find a new on-line game to play.

I wasn't drawn to this game very much. Sure there were some cool things about it but I wouldn't buy it ($59.99 was the price I believe) when Q3 Arena came out.

I chose to buy Half-Life and still play it to this day. It's an amazing game and Awesome Mods are still coming out to this day.

In my opinion, if a company can't take what made a given game famous and remove some or all components in a multiplayer game in the next release of a game, the company looses face in the gaming community. No One Lives Forever 2 is a good example of this. No One Lives Forever 2 was initially released without a DM or CTF mod (DM were later added with the first Service Pack after MANY irate customer complaints) the MODs that made NOLF1 a classic (running over people with snowmobiles rock!!!).

Bought Q3 Gold

I was at a Wal-Mart one day and noted Quake 3: Gold for $19.99 and bought it for the heck of it. I was interested in seeing what became of the game and was looking at what it took to map CTF maps. I've been looking into getting into mapping and wanted to do some research into what is needed to create Maps. I soon learned this was a kettle of workms that I probably should not have opened. Install a pain on XP Long story short, Quake 3: Gold has to be installed in a specific manner (it has to be a complete install) on the primary partition, in the default 'suggested' path (XP Pro) (this information was found on the Planequake forums ).

I soon found out that this install was to be the source of some of the issues I've been receiving.

I also use The All Seeing Eye to connect to games and because Q3 wouldn't work in the manner I wanted to install the game in, ASE wouldn't work.

PlanetQuake, Fileplanet other quake related files

Ok, when I played Quake2, planetquake.com was the place to go for all information, patches, maps, etc. I went back to this site and went to the Quake 3 section and began researching what would be needed to update my installation. The planetquake site was slow (I'm on a Cable Modem) to load and took a good 2 minutes to load a page. When I found a given page on maps or mapping, the links that were available were outdated or didn't work. There was no definitive 'manual' on how to find different mods or what programs are needed to map and which files were the most up to date. The links they provided (when they worked...which was about 10% of the time) were anything but helpful. I found four different mapping programs, none of which I've gotten to work correctly yet.

Planetquake has gotten lazy in their old age.

I found the Q3 MODS and patches on fileplanet but due to the new structure of the site (wait in line?!?!?...LAME!!!) I would have had to wait 4-5 days just to download a few files. I searched all over the net for the files I needed on other sites and was able to finish the download in a day.

Once I got some semblance of a Q3 install completed, I connected to a Q3 Server through ASE.

I remembered in the Q3 Install and patch that a program called Punkbuster which is a program that would detect cheaters and bot users. I thought 'cool' Id is doing something about bots and cheaters!'

Punkbuster a nightmare to upgrade

When installing and upgrading Punkbuster to current Standards I was not able to either through the game or using the command line update util. I found out that the problem with the PB (again on XP Pro in Non-Domain mode patched to current standards) is two fold:

1) The Quake Final Patch Release does not install a couple of key files for some reason or another (I found this out on the Planetquake forums ).

2) XP has a default behavior in that all system directories are 'read-only' and cannot be changed no matter what you try (Group Policies, ACLS, command line attributes, removing simple file sharing, etc.). In the case of Quake 3: Gold on XP, the default install dir is 'Program files' directory. Punkbuster needs to convert a couple of HTML files to binary and since the Read-Only Attributes are pushed from the Root Level of the primary partition, PB can't make the conversion.

New Cheats out that render Punkbuster Useless

I'm not going to go in depth about this but there are a couple of serious issues with some cheats out in the wild that PB can't handle at the moment. One issue seems to be addressed. The other is a bot that is undetectable by PB and is being used more and more on Q3 servers.

Players are furious that this issue isn't being addressed (myself included) by ID.

Read the Punkbuster Forums . Just about every single post is a rant about when/how is ID/Punkbuster will be addressing the current hacking issues and how ticked they are on how this issue isn't being addressed. (Side note: as of approx 27.Jan.2003 Punkbuster's forums have been removed and this site is taking the brunt of the PB issues.

I played on some of ThreeWave's CTF Servers (A killer MOD by the way)the other day and played against bot users. Some of these players are so stupid they turned their bot settings to 180 degrees or more and all players on my team wereable to spot this immediately.

Before I wrote this article I played a Vanilla CTF Game on a Q3 Server and there were a couple of players who were killing players in midair with weapons with the littlest fire power or hitting people in midair (from long distances) so they fell and cratered.

Needless to say, the team that I was on were trying and were winning in caps for a while (but not gibs) slowly left the server after many of the players on my team left (we started with 8 and when I left there were 3 versus 7 on the other team).

What's going on ID?!?!?

You're loosing players that used to be hardcore Q2/Q3 players in droves and they probably won't buy any more of your games due to the lack of attention you're giving to the cheaters and hackers.

Also, as a result of my experiences, I have since turned my mapping interests to the Half-Life Mod 'Day of Defeat' and the new James Bond Game '007: NightFire'.

I tell you one thing, I'll never buy another ID product again.

Software is easy to fix, reputations are next to impossible to fix. Get with the program ID!!!

Dolemite

Wasn't "improved networking code" one of the main selling points of Q3? I seem to remember Carmack saying that ping would matter less. I guess he changed his mind somewhere along the line... because Q3 is almost always won by the lpb.

In Q1 matador I found that 250 was pretty playable as long as the local lpb's didn't have quad lightning + res rune. I was consistently ranked in the top ten Q1 matador players at the CLQ, on a 56k; I didn't get much better when I moved to a cable modem, except that now people called me an LPB bot instead of just a bot. No one bothered to consider the idea that strategy might be more important than ping.

PL was the real killer; a 75 ping with a 15% pl was worse than a 250/0 pl. In Q1.

In Q3 I can't play with a ping over 90; i get hit with rockets and then hear them fire, or I'll get hit with a rail shot and then see the doors I was hiding behind open. Not to mention the fact that people with low pings move 50% faster and strafe (or jump) circles around 100 ping "hpb's" in Q3.

Sigh... I guess it doesn't matter, in the grand scheme of things, but I sure miss the old Q1 days.

As a co-owner and server admin for digitaladdiction.net (ya, the site looks ugly. I'm working on it), I am openly wondering how they will look upon game servers. Will our site (and game servers) require 'Adults only' signs? Will we have to regulate who connects to our game servers? Christ, we have the #1 rated CounterStrike server, along with a couple q2 servers, and I would not look forward to doing 'Age verifications' in order to let people play. As you can tell by our Addicted Users Page (which is hidden right now - I'm working on it), we *do* have a few players who are under the age of 18 (hell, a good 40% of our players are under 18), and I would not look forward to telling them to play elsewhere...........

Counter-Strike: Half a million active players can't be wrong!

You want playability? Replayability? Play Counter-Strike. 465,271active players can't be wrong.

We thought long and hard about CD Key issues before we decided to go with them. With a game like Quake3: Arena where multiplayer is an essential focus of the game--protecting against unlicensed use is a necessity.

I'd like to address some of your points directly tho.

1. The authentication code only denies when we are sure you aren't using a valid key. If the authentication server can't be reached, we allow the player on. We only deny when we're sure you're not legit. This may allow some unlicensed people to play, but overall the idea is to only annoy (and mostly deny) people who didn't buy the game.

2. Stolen keys can be a problem. However, we have a pretty long key string and the chances of guessing (generating) one are several billions to one. The biggest concern I have is people ripping open boxes in stores and writing down keys (it happened with Half Life). I think there's a return policy for that. Activision would have more information about that.

3. Yes, it can be viewed you are mostly at the whim of the producer. It is our game and you license it, not purchase it from us. You get unlimited play when you spend that one time purchase fee.

In regards to LAN play, no keys are used when playing on a local LAN, so you can spawn LAN games with your friends.

CD Key systems are a necessary evil. I'd wish we could go without one, but in the era of digital copying and licensing, it's one of the best solutions out there right now.

Honestly, I think key based solutions for network specific software (The keys in Q3 are only used in multiplayer) is probably the way the future is heading.

DIVX is an interesting comparison. The problem with DIVX is that it would track much more general information that we can with CDKeys. DIVX would tell them not only that you watch movies, but what movies, when and how many times. With CDKeys, all we know is that you bought our game and play it sometimes.

As for privacy issues, sites like the CLQ, http://www.theclq.com, do much more tracking than CDKeys do. They poll all the servers everywhere and keep track of players and generate stats. We don't have any ability to attached a CDKey to player name (the name is not sent with the authorization request).

I will agree that the privacy issues with unique identifier (key) based systems can be a little scary. We'll do our best to make sure that our system is used for what its intended for--to stop people from stealing our game.

According to CLQ, who tracks every public Quake II server on the Internet (of which there are 11,007), there are currently 927,962 other psychopaths besides me fragging on the Internet with Q2. Granted, some are probably the same person with two or three names, but that would still add up to a hell of a lot more than 50,000. -=> Clan KOI=-