🚀 go-pugleaf

"Joe Momma" <joe@mommadillo.com> wrote in message
news:0pdj00p299vqchjuoe1utsh18idmgr0f3m@4ax.com...
> On Sat, 17 Jan 2004 08:24:59 GMT, "Matthew Vaughan"
> <matt-no-spam-109@NOSPAM.hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >It's called getting good at the game.
>
> Not where I come from.  Looking for holes to exploit may not be
> exactly cheating, but it's certainly not honorable and there's ZERO
> "skill" involved, unless you consider downloading a file to be a
> skill.

Whatever. If you mean adding aimbots and seeing through walls, I totally
agree with you. But if you mean learning things like bunnyhopping and
rocketjumping (let alone perfecting your aim and reflexes, learning tricky
jumps, and knowing the maps - and how other players tend to behave on them -
like the back of your hand), I can't imagine what you're whining about.

> >The lack of challenge has to do with too few good players getting online
and
> >playing.
>
> Good players don't bother playing when some software-assisted newbie
> can run rings around them.  Why do you think there are so few Quake/QW
> servers left, anyway?  Answer: who wants to waste a server on a bunch
> of cheating lowlifes?

 The few dozen times I've played in the last six months, I have run into
only one player that was even accused of cheating, and even he I wasn't sure
was actually cheating, though I have entertained the notion that he might be
(I played against him in person a years ago during a LAN tournament, and he
was good then; at the time we were about even, depending on how in practice
I was. He seems to have been playing steadily every since, which I certainly
have not, so I'd only expect him to be better now.) He is not the first
player I've encountered that was dramatically better than me without needing
to cheat, so I'm not assuming that he does, even though everyone else seems
to think so.

I haven't perceived cheating in QW now as being a significantly bigger
problem than it was 4-5 years ago. People have ALWAYS whined about the
players that are better than them "cheating". I was regularly accused of
cheating (which I have NEVER done, not even just to "try it out") because
some people couldn't imagine that a player with a 28.8 modem and 350 ping
could move faster than them, aim better than them, react quickly, anticipate
their movements, and generally kick their asses. They would say things like
"you are on cable modem and disguising your ping, I know it". I really
didn't konw what to say to them. (I WISHED I had a cable modem then!)

The fragmentation of the Quake community started as soon as Quake 2 came out
(which was a totally different game than Quake, guaranteeing that about 1/2
of Quake players would NOT simply move on to the next game), and got worse
after Tribes, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Half-Life/Couterstrike came
out (and, more recently, BF1942, Halo, and numerous other games - or just
going back to real life because online gaming was losing its appeal). Go
look around at the various Quake webistes from Quake's heyday (the perhaps
1/4 of them that still exist, that is) - almost none of them have been
modified since about 1999, and even then they'd only update it to say things
like "wow, I haven't updated this site in 2 years. I'm still alive. Bye!";
virtually all those that are still active are now general gaming or
technology sites, not even remotely Quake specific (Shacknews or Bluesnews,
for instance). The disapperance of the Quake games from retail stores has
made things even worse. (Try to buy a copy of Quake for the PC; if you don't
already own it, you'll have to pirate it since it's no longer for sale; even
Quake 2 is getting difficult to find.) Ironically, I think making Quake open
source made the problem worse, since both id and GT Interactive (or whoever
had responsibility for selling it) became completely uninterested in having
anything to do with the game. And it became difficult to figure out what the
"latest and greatest" Quake version was - the official versions stagnated
years ago, and now there is a plethora of versions from different people,
all with different features and bugs (disappointingly, they still have a
suprising number of the bugs from the old id versions of the games, and few
truly useful new features). Which to choose? Where to even start looking?

Then there's the lack of a clear choice in which game to move onto. As I
said above, Quake 2 should logically have been that choice, but wasn't.
Neither was Quake 3, which also wasn't a clear choice for Quake 2 players to
move to (splintering the "Quake" community into *3* parts - great move,
id!). Counterstrike is great for a certain type of gaming that is very
different from Quakel UT has tried to be for more Quake-type gaming, but
just ends up being an aim/reflex fest highly dependent on framerate and ping
time, due to nearly all the weapons being so overpowered if aimed precisely
for headshots, and CTF is wholly dependent on the translocator. Some people
love this, thus the overpopularity of the incredibly dull "instaGib" mod,
but it's uninteresting to me after a few minutes, showing that even in
trying to ape Quake's "high-speed, action-packed" netplay, Epic missed the
point entirely.

OK, this is becoming rambling, but the reduction of QW players and servers
has nothing whatsoever to do with a supposed cheating epidemic, in my
opinion. Even if it did, these cheats aren't exactly new. Quake was made
open source years ago, and virtually all the cheats already existed long
before that even happened (some from deciphering demo formats, which are
related to networking formats, some from an even earlier version of Quake
for a particular 3D chip that was leaked very early on, and some just from
sheer cleverness on the part of hackers in deciphering the network stream
etc.).

My only question is why the SUDDEN drop in QW servers in just a few weeks
time? I have  never seen such a sudden drop in servers. Or is it just that
GameSpy is suddenly reporting a much lower proportion of the total servers
our there? (Could it have stopped polling a popular master server list?)
What alternatives to GameSpy are there on the PC for finding game servers?
(I always like Scott Kevill's Macintosh game browser a lot better than
GameSpy, but I don't use a Mac any more.)