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Comment by whatever_dude | Hacker News Reader

One interesting aspect is that they wanted servers to be ranked, and users to be logged. That way you'd only be playing multiplayer matches against people of your own skill level...

Once QW was out and this was tried in practice, it was promptly abandoned. It just didn't work well for many reasons.

And yet, that kind of feature is pretty much mandatory in mainstream FPSs today. A game like Overwatch doesn't even have a real server browser (yet), it's only auto matching.

Another instance where John Carmack was ahead of his time.

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Do you know why it was abandoned? Just player density being too low for it to be useful?

Players were very upset that everything they did was ranked and they couldn't just play for fun without it being rated. It was a jarring change at the time. There was at least 1 unofficial effort as well that met with a similar fate.

As someone that played Quakeworld significantly for 8 years (a lot of people, me included, ignored Quake3 until popular mods like CPMA fixed it), I couldn't have imagined doing it with ranked matches, especially with how bad games like TF2 seems to have implemented that years later.

Also, some people enjoy challenges, not easy wins. I was an average Quake player but enjoyed playing high ranking players so I could learn, even though the final score was something like 20:1. Off-topic, but the main reason I gave up on computer games is that most mainstream titles today are easy to the level of stupidity and for this reason get boring in few hours max.

Hey, have you tried Xonotic? It's built on a heavily modified quake 1 engine, and plays like a cross between quake and ut. And the crylink is the coolest weapon ever. And yes, this IS that fork of Nexuiz, but it's changed so as to be unrecognizable. http://www.xonotic.org, and read the newbie intro. It helps.

No, I don't play FPS anymore. The only game I turn on from time to time is Heroes of Might and Magic III.

Ah, well. How is Might and Magic, by the way? I haven't tried it.

Wow, talk about a throwback. I remember when the blog post when the Nexuiz project was shutting down.

Hopefully this interest means we may be seeing a new Sauerbraten fork at some point

You'll barely recognize the game. A lot's changed.

Many reasons (basically what the above comments state), but at a high level, people were just not prepared/expecting that, and the (nearby) player poll wasn't that big to allow that.

The world wasn't ready.

I personally think it was the right decision. I enjoyed going to the same server over and over again through a period of years and usually seeing the same people. I learned to recognize them. Some would steamroll over me, some I could dominate, some were a nice challenge. I could pick my battles.

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