Where are all of the players at?

[Neillithan]

Hi, I'm new to this forum. I am a long time UT2004 player and have always wanted to play Quake, but one thing deters me. I can't find the players. I'm not sure whether this thread belongs in the Quake 3 or 4 forum, so I put it here instead.

The last couple of times that I installed Quake 3 and Quake 4, I upgraded to the latest patches and upgraded punkbuster, I go to the gamebrowsers and I see probably 100 servers and only a handful with maybe 1 or 2 people and then 1 populated server. That's it.

It's perplexing because I visit http://www.own-age.com and http://www.quakeunity.com to download the latest quake 3 videos and I am always finding some hardcore frags from hardcore players, yet when I join random pubs, everybody is just running around doing basic stuff like shooting at each other. I want to know where the real action is at.

Are these frag movies captured from matches that are planned in advance in IRC or Forums? I can never tell. Mostly, I just want to find another hardcore game to play because UT2004 is so dead and I'm one of the last of the semi-great players that still play and I'm running out of fish to kill.

When I visited stage6.com, I met someone who invited me to play Quake 4 and he led me to believe there was like an underground of players who are good that play the game, but that was over a year ago.

Well, thanks in advance for any feedback,
-Neil

[DooMer]

q3 isn't as popular as it used to be, especially with Quake Live on the horizon. Most of the good players play one of the competition mods such as CPMA. If you're looking to start playing, keep an eye out for the imminent release of Quake Live. It should be the perfect place to get acquainted with the game. You can see if somebody can get you a beta invite in the gd sticky thread.

[nay0k]

As already stated, download the OSP and CPMA mods to find good players, there aren't many good or even decent players in unmodded Q3 these days. Be sure to download an external server browser, the ingame browser is mostly worthless now. QTracker and MaxBrowse are both excellent and will find you plenty of servers. Using websites like esreality.com and IRC networks like QuakeNet are also good ways of finding players. And get a Quake Live beta key if you can

[iris030380]

Irc channels like TDMpickup, Q3pickup etc... I forget the exact names but ask around quakenet you'll find them. Usually get a game there every hour or so if I remember. I dunno though maybe now its a ghost town, or full of ex-UT2004 players

[d1sturb]

I thought the in-game server browser for cpma/osp was pretty good, even in Australia, i had no troubles finding a lot of good ping servers, with allot of challenge, but nothing beats an external server browser, i just use xfire, lol.