DevPick Feb 24-27: FFA Mayhem

[sponge]

This week's DevPick is not very complicated at all: 24 player Free For All action on two of QUAKE LIVE's biggest Premium arenas: Overkill and Black Cathedral. Players start with all weapons and some armor to bulken up those who have newly spawned a bit, but all pickups on the map are still available. Blow off some steam this Friday and the upcoming weekend by running straight on into a crowd of 23 other players with a Rocket Launcher. Mayhem is a pretty good way to describe the action on these matches.

On another note, today, February 24, also marks three years since QUAKE LIVE was first made available to the public. Long before I joined id, you could've found me playing public CTF matches those first days, reliving my glory days as a 12 year old playing Quake III Arena for the first time. To have gone from playing to contributing and leaving my mark on a game with the history of Quake has truly an amazing experience. From the rest of us here at the QUAKE LIVE headquarters in sunny Richardson, TX, we're glad to have had everyone around for these past 1,095 days, and are looking forward to many more! Have a great weekend!

[Panic]

Happy anniversary quakelive!

[Goser]

Quake ftw!

[Atheism]

I like it. But the mod would be better titled: "Lightning Gun Practice".

[muckyman]

Awesome...make it perma

[TMS]

Happy Anniversary! It's been fun!

[Vig1lante]

Ah the good times, I miss the old days back when I was 9 years old and would put up Quake 3 and put up the fraglimit to 100 and play with like tons of bots in maps like Bouncy Map or Longest Yard. The Glory Days of many Quake i guess. And Then when Quake Live showed up, I've been playing other people online, I can even remember the Pure Adreneline that's been going on to my mind whenever i lose or win a FFA day and I was 15 back in the day. Now i'm turning 18 and I look back at my early Quake days, I always had a Good/Bad Time on Quake Live

[KiLotr]

would be an even better anniversary if you had an update getting rid of cheaters... just saying.

[FlashSoul]

Interesting. Took me a while to figure out I had all weapons on spawn >.>

would be an even better anniversary if you had an update getting rid of cheaters... just saying.

Can't be done... just saying.

[Venova]

GET A QUAKE LIVE CLIENT ON STEAM, WE COULD POTENTIALLY GET TONS AND TONS OF NEW PLAYERS! Who won't totally suck because they play somewhat fastish games like tf2, and who maybe never heard of QL or found quakelive.com (no advertising) but remember or played q3a or unreal. Also alot of people refused to play QL simply because it's different, simply because you connect to games through the browser (which is so vastly superior to any server browser experience in any other game ever); a client for QL (still technically a browser, similar to QLPrism, but official, locked up, customized specifically for QL) may end those baseless criticisms. And Premium could be offered through a Steam purchasable method, so people can just buy premium on steam. I think much of this could be handled fairly cheaply/quickly/easily by the small QL team or maybe with help from a handful of other id staffers/programmers. Even if it didn't work, it would be far less investment than the initial full QL has been, and could have a new opportunity for success where ingame ads failed. It IS possible, it just would take some work and ingenuity, I'm sure Steam would allow it even if it was a little out of the ordinary, id is a big developer, and it could be a testbed for Steam to offer other browser based games. Another option could be the Mac App Store, with a Mac QL standalone client (again, just a dedicated slimmed down browser that just loads quakelive.com and the forums and maybe has a few extra features like demo and screenshot management/organization or auto uploading of those things somewhere), free of course, and the user could buy premium or pro through that method as well. I suppose in the case of both of these potentialities, per-subscription revenue would be a bit less due to Steam or Apple taking their cut for distributing the client (which would include all the game data up front so the user feels like their getting something), but I think that, if done correctly, would be vastly offset by potential increased revenues. And even if there weren't a ton of new paying players, it would mean more people trying the game, at least then more servers would be populated again, and id's money on server hosting wouldn't be going to waste.

Sorry for the rantish post, I've posted this all over the suggestions page, but I felt like saying it here as well.

[Mockup of QL Steam promotion]: http://postimage.org/image/nizc2vpu5/
This would be such a beautiful thing to really see.