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.