Some of the other changes that are notable are the increase in size of the hitboxes. They have added 10% of more enemy to hit. They also switched shotgun back to 100 damage in TDM. Apparantly, the nerf has been changed back (or the buff has been restored, depends on how you look at it). A change that wasn't really generally asked for by the community, but might be a nice addition, albeit only if you have premium or pro, is the addition of a killbeep. As it is written in the changelog, it will make a distinctive sound when you kill an opponent.

But, the biggest change, that a lot of you where whining for, has finally been put in the website's interface: you can see what tier you are in! This can be found on the statistics page of your (or anyone's) profile.

That's it! Enjoy your update.

http://www.quakelive.com/#!news/site_news/12429

Post from: Holysh1t.net

Quake Live update 15 march 2011

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HO HO HO! *BLAM*

Maps
Double Impact and Overlord were added as Premium Content in this 5th update pack.

Overlord is huge!
Returning from Team Arena, the classic castle-marathon-castle map where haste really is a crucial item, perhaps in combination with the flight holdable which serves as a usable jetpack. Obviously a map meant for public massive slaughter (and laughter? )

On the other hand, we have Double Impact, remains to be seen if this can be played competitively since the structure of this map, at first sight, is very confusing. It'll take the players a while to find the optimal escape routes, take countermeasures for these routes and perhaps exploit one of the many sideways to move around this map. Sure looks like a fun map, made by ShadoW (Leviathan and Dreadful Place). Watch out for those tele-runs!

A 3rd Premium-only map is Tornado, targetting TDM, CA and FT. 2on2 will be boring, the map is rather stretched out and loaded with many items: mega, red/yellow/green, battlesuit and quad! So 4on4 will do the trick just fine. Tornado comes from Swelt, who also made Hektik, a well appreciated competitive map, so perhaps this is a nice followup to enrich the mappools in various leagues and tournaments.

Winter Holiday Season maps!
Hooray for the return of Silent Night, joined by Winter's Edge. These maps need little introduction: Silent Night being a monster of a terrain map, loads of ice to skate on and many items to stock up on that you will need if you ever hope to bring home the flag. Winter's Edge, a Christmas-tuned version of golden oldie The Edge, available for all to play in FFA and FT. I hope that someone is secretly building a Xmas edition of Double Edged, the ctf version we also had in Quake 4. You know, because CTF owns :p (but I doubt it'll happen *wink* idsoftware *wink*!!!)
Also, play as Santa, which is a modified Biker skin. Select it from the ingame menu, or via console: /model santa (or cg_forceenemymodel santa if you wish to kill the good man!)

Silent Night

Winter's Edge

Oh, and I like the wink to the Strogg on Winter's Edge!

"First step" updates
A few "first step" updates as I'd like to call them, updates that are just showing the tip of the iceberg of what these functionalities could mean if worked out fully (or at least more):

• Premium Duel Scoreboard: this board shows extra match data: per-weapon accuracy, damage, frags, item pickup information. Sadly this data does not reflect in the matchreports onsite afterwards, only on the ingame scoreboard. Hence why I call it a first-step as I hope these changes can get reflected onto the matchreports, and not just for duel!
• Clan profiles: click on the clantag in a playerprofile to get more info about his clan. Again a first step, as idsoftware themselves say this will evolve in a clan management section. I can only encourage this!

Other stuff includes several map updates, r_mapOverbrightCap to cap the maximum brightness of surfaces when altered by r_mapOverbrightBits, a few new awards and some other things you can read about in the full changelog.

Update
Definitely worth listing, and I didn't mention this before until I read about it on ESR, is Anhedonic pointing out there are 9 (well, 10 if you include the missing texture crosshair ) new crosshairs available to the player. Try them out using cg_drawcrosshair 11-20.

More info:

• December 14th, 2010 newspost
• Quake Live on IRC in #quakelive and #quakelive.support (Quakenet)

Post from: Holysh1t.net

QL Update: Premium Pack 5

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1. Quake Live update 15 march 2011

SyncError

Two new arenas, 20 new premium awards and our first of many advanced server options!

What he doesn't highlight at first is that yesterday's update also involved a needed back-end update regarding the Quake Live database, which no doubt should affect website performance, especially concerning profile requesting and statistics.

But let's see what Quake Live has in stock for us this month:

As always, I look upon an update from a competitive point of view. Not saying that some changes aren't appreciated, but some things are just silly, such as the 20 new Premium Awards, the Awards to recognize past events like QuakeCon 2008, IEM5, and others. Fun but not actually making Quake Live a richer game.

One of the points of my focus are the 2 added maps, originating from Rocket Arena 3! Both are targeting the Small CA category so I doubt any will be used in a regular 4v4 CA competition, but maybe they will in 2v2 or even 1v1. Both maps feature the classic set of weaponry: shotgun, grenades, rockets, lightning, rail and plasma.

Evolution Evolution is a wide open map. Regular Quake gothic look, a rather isolated back hallway that leads to the teleporter exiting up high, which serves more as an escape route to catch a quick breath from the massive amount of action in the open area, than actually being a fast way to reach the upper platform. After all, it's Clan Arena so rocketjumps are the default means of transport. Don't think there are any 'good' spawns on it Immediate action guaranteed! (Created by Till Merker, also responsible for Thunderstruck and Theatre of Pain.)

Three Story Very nice looking castle map. The improved step-height from earlier update will increase the smoothness with which you can climb the huge stairway. Not sure whether this map is better or not than Evolution as it's a different approach. While still small, the design is less prone to randomly missed spam because of the separate areas. Accessibility is dangerous: jumps all around to get everywhere but this is Quake, boys and girls, the moment you lift off, you're 99% dead meat! (Created by Mike Burbidge, author of Japanese Castles.)

As in Content Update 3, also several map updates have been applied. Read up on them in the full changelog. But something fresh I really want to point out is the fact that Pro users can now spawn rune maps without runes! That means some CTF maps now can be looked upon for being part of the competition pool, while with runes they could not. Awesome! This will of course require some tactical adjustments opposed to when runes are active.

Speaking of these new advanced server launch features, idsoftware announced more to come, but started with the following: toggle power-ups, runes, damage through floors, ramp jumping, change gravity, weapon switch speed and the quad damage factor! Some rather silly, some can make the game more challenging!

Last thing to point out, for new players, is the removal of the Crash Training Match, which assessed your initial skill level. Now you will have a probation time before skill matching gets active. This could mean that you may end up on servers that own your ass or where you in turn do the butt whooping!

Other minor changes, web updates and such in the full news item.

More info:

• November 16, 2010 newspost
• Quake Live on IRC in #quakelive and #quakelive.support (Quakenet)

Post from: Holysh1t.net

QL Update: Premium Pack 4

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1. Quake Live update 15 march 2011

Alias system
The alias system is something a lot of us were waiting for for a long time. If you haven't heard of the alias system or you don't know what it is, you might find it interesting to continue reading: an alias system allow you to create a chain of commands and use it in various ways. An very simple example is /alias aDropFlag "say_team I'm dropping the flag; dropflag" You can now bind aDropFlag to a button and use it as if it was a command: /bind p aDropFlag will now tell your team you are dropping the flag while dropping it at the same time. What is useful now is that you can write your own toggles by creating 2 aliases of the same name but putting + (pushing the button) and - (releasing the button) in front of the alias name.

cg_DrawCrosshairTeamHealth
You are now able to see someone's health by putting your crosshair over them, so you won't have to look at the team overlay anymore. This only works for teammembers that are in your line of sight. Another handy cvar is cg_drawFriend 1 which allows you to see your teammates' friend icons anywhere on the map, even through the walls.

All the mapnames changed
Id Software changed all the mapnames to the real name of the map. For example, "qzdm6" is now simply called "campgrounds". I know this will help a lot of newbies to vote for maps and remember mapnames.

Teamsize
All servers now have a voteable teamsize. Every server has a fixed client size: 16 players can connect to the server anytime, but depending on teamsize, only a few can play. This will allow people to play maps more suitable for a smaller teamsize while specs can jump in straight away if another player drops.

Clans
It is now possible to register clans and use a unique clantag that can't be used by people who are not added to the roster. The option to start clans is only available for Premium or Pro subscribers though, Standard members can still join 1 clan while Premium or Pro subscribers can join more than 1.

Chat tokens
Quake Live now supports chat tokens! Everyone knows how handy these are. You can now tell your teammates your health, armor and ammo status by binding it to a button: bind p "say Health #h - Armor #a - Weapon #w;"

• #h - Current health value
• #a - Current armor value
• #w - Current weapon & ammo count
• ## - To print the character '#'

Minor changes

• Crosshairs now respect aspect ratio
• Battlesuit takes splash damage! (but it's still reduced by 75%)
• You can autocomplete demonames if you start the line with /demo
• Quad has been reduced from 4x damage to 3x damage
• There is a 'find' command (case-sensitive) to search the console history

Post from: Holysh1t.net

Quake Live update roundup Jan-Nov 10

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1. Quake Live update 15 march 2011

So let's go over the worth-mentioning things in the October update:

Maps:

Finnegan's (CTF) Old-school but awesome addition to Quake Live which can be immediately added to the competitive map pool if I had anything to say about it. Medium-Big map with loads of heavy base items (ra-mh) and strong focus on power-up play (each base has a regen, and haste in the middle). If you need to remember anything from this update, imo this is it :p	Gothic Rage (Duel) 3 Stories high, teleport surprises, no rail! Up close and personal or prediction spam, your choice!
Solid (2vs2 TDM) Simple, industrial looking map, no rail, could perhaps be used for duel as well as it's not that big. Originally made by swelt for CPMA.	Window Pain (Small CA) Coming from RA3, this is a super tiny map that gets even smaller if someone opens the windows in between both areas.

Some other minor changes were made to several maps, check them out in the news post.

Game play:

• Chat tokens! Not immediately those I'd expected like #l (player's current location) or #i (location of the item near to you, which is very handy for available-binds), but it's a start!
• Quad goes from 4x to 3x
• Step height increased from 18 to 22. This doesn't mean you can jump higher, just means it's simpler to walk up on stairs that have higher steps or avoid bumping into edges that to the eye seem like a reachable place without jumping.
• Chain Jumping: to get a bit of extra acceleration when bumping/jumping on a step and jumping again or in combination with exiting a teleporter and immediately jumping again for instant acceleration. Here's a video of someone demonstrating some chain jumps.
  

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgA_Q0VlkiE

Additional stuff in the news post.

Enjoy Finnegan's!

More info:

• October 26th, 2010 newspost
• Quake Live on IRC in #quakelive and #quakelive.support (Quakenet)

Post from: Holysh1t.net

QL update: Finnegan’s and other stuff!

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1. Quake Live update 15 march 2011

New content and improved skill matching!

Those are the two main topics of September 28th's update.

Added maps
One Duel map and three Clan Arena maps are now part of the premium content.

Fatal Instinct, a castle themed, foggy map, originally being the Tier 5 "Veteran" end-boss map against Uriel in the Single Player campaign of Quake 3, is a small size, square map with not too many weapons (SG, RL, PG), health and armor (1 YA) and allows for really fast paced 1on1 - or small team size - combat.

Aside from this oldskool map, 3 small sized Duel/Clan Arena maps were added to the Premium pool, 2 of which emerge from Rocket Arena: Somewhat Damaged and Thunderstruck. Also released for Quake Live is Devilish, a very nicely gothic-looking Duel map which also lends itself for small size team games in CA or TDM. Devilish originally comes from Justin Ingels who came out 5th in the Noghost Mapping competition last year.

Somewhat Damaged

Thunderstruck

Devilish

A 2nd leaf of this update is the skill matching system. It has been updated with new algorithms and is supposed to offer a far better representation of your skill. These changes of course also affect the match making and enhancements have been applied to the servers as well to categorise them in a new 3 Tier system. Low holds 25%, Mid holds the bigger 50% chunk and High holds the top 25%. There is a sanctuary tier for the entry level players to prevent regular skilled players of scaring them away from Quake Live

Exactly which updates and enhancements were made, are detailed in the developer blog post on the Quake Live forum.

Apart from these 2 main factors, more game/site/map changes and updates are detailed in the changelog.

More info:

• September 28th, 2010 update news bulletin
• Skill ranking and match making info
• Quake Live on IRC in #quakelive and #quakelive.support (Quakenet)

Post from: Holysh1t.net

QL update: new content and skillmatching checkup!

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1. Quake Live update 15 march 2011

What does this mean for you, the player?
Lots of things, because now you can choose to play as you were, free of charge, on everything you had so far, or subscribe to a Premium or Pro account and get more out of this amazing game!

Standard

Everything you had before during the beta:

• the regular map pool,
• the regular game modes (ffa, duel, ctf, tdm, ca, insta),
• the models,
• practice against bots (note: also on the Premium maps!
• Statistics for the last 28 days
• Join up to 1 clan
• Forum customer support

Premium

The Premium is all of the above and of course some new features:

• Full customer support
• Access new maps online (note: as said, standard players can load these premium maps when playing against bots)
• Freeze Tag game mode
• Regular content updates
• Join or create a clan (up to 5)
• Statistics for 6 months
• No pre-game advertisements
• And some minor things like extra awards and bypass a site queue

Pro

The Pro account is all of the above with some minor differences:

• Join or create up to 10 clans
• Statistics are kept for 1 year

And 2 important features:

• Start your own server!
• Invite up to 3 Standard level players to join your server with the premium content

Now what do these fancy feature cost?
Not that much:

• the Premium account costs $1.99 per month (note: billed annualy!) for the things mentioned above!
• the Pro account costs $3.99 per month (also billed annualy!) for the above + having access to spawning your own servers!

Cool stuff, and not too costly for new and revived content from during the Quake 3 era! And with more things to come, a Premium account sure looks the best bet, unless you want to be able to spawn servers.

However, this post is not a promotional message to urge you all to buy the game, but perhaps you can be entertained by some guides to why you would consider buying a Premium or Pro subscription.
(These are a set of movies, made by gnnr to show what the subscriptions are all about)

1. Quake Live Buyers Guide - Website changes:
    
   

   www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctR66JRvljQ

2. Quake Live Buyers Guide - New maps (part 1)
    
   

   www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhdIEthGQhk

3. Quake Live Buyers Guide - New maps (part 2) + Freezetag overview
    
   

   www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CBCXKwLkwI

1. And for those who can't afford Quake Live, here's a tip on how to get a subscription for free!
    
   

   www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKtrmmIUv1k

More info:

• Official announcement
• Premium and pro overview
• #quakelive on Quakenet IRC

Post from: Holysh1t.net

Quake Live: 1 week out of beta!

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1. Quake Live update 15 march 2011

Lightning gun goes 777
This is an update that was highly anticipated by old schoolers. Where as the previous setup was 765, the new lightning has an equal damage ratio over it's entire beam. It's good to know that the lightning gun now deals the same damage at any range! (777 or 765 means the ammount of damage dealt by the LG from close range to long range)

cg_impactSparks
Impact sparks look just like the sparks when a body is gibbed. Everytime you hit a person 1 spark will be shown coming from the enemies' body. It might look useless, but every signal that tells you you made a hit is welcome.

cg_speedometer
This handy meter shows how fast you are travelling in the 3D environment expressed in UPS (Units per second). This is very useful to know when you are able to make a certain jump. The B2R (Bridge to Rail) jump in QZDM6 (Campgrounds) requires a minimum ammount of speed to get from the bridge to the railgun. This helps you to decide wether you should try for a jump and plaster your face into the wall or wether you hold back and try some other route.

togglechathistory
This command is used to show the chatbox constantly rather than holding down the button bound to +chat. Useful if you are in a firefight and still would like to see what your teammates said before it fades out without the need of holding down yet another button.

cg_waterWarp
This cvar was created for QL on the first of September. What it does is fairly simple: when you submerge into water there is a slight distortion of your sight. This cvar removes that distortion as some people were affected by it and got desorientated.

cg_deadBodyDarken
This cvar will color dead bodies so you won't mistake a dead body for a live one anymore. cg_deadBodyColor controls the color the body turns into after being fragged.

cg_zoomSensitivity
I still often see people asking for help with a zoom sensitivity script, but this cvar cancels the need to create a complicated script. combined with cg_zoomFov a very powerful cvar!

cg_hitBeep
This replaces the old hitBeep based on the ammount of damage dealt. A very popular setting is cg_hitBeep 3, which makes low damage have a low pitched beep, while high damage playing a high pitched beep.

cg_crosshairHitStyle
A great addition to Quake LIVE along with cg_hitBeep. This works the same way as cg_hitBeep, only this time the hit is translated through the color of your crosshair. Perfect if you are playing without sound, you can see if a hit registered or not. There are 7 styles defined within this cvar. This cvar is customizable by cg_crosshairHitColor and cg_crosshairHitTime, which sets the period of time the crosshair stays colored from the hit.

cg_screenDamage
If you are one of those person who is suprised when they notice how low their health was and didn't know why, then this cvar is for you. This shows the how much damage you are taking at any time. The value of this cvar is the color the damage is shown in. There are some sub-cvars that control the color if you are taking damage from yourself or from teammates (TDM): cg_screenDamage_Self and cg_screenDamage_Team

To find out new cvars, actions or commands, keep an eye out on the weekly updates!
These are usually posted in the Quake Live Developer Blog forum!

Post from: Holysh1t.net

Quake Live update roundup Aug-Dec 09

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"Quarantaine" is a medium sized Clan Arena map suitable for 2 to 10 players, but there have been made special tweaks when playing this map as Team Death Match as well, so it will be interesting to see how this turns out for both gametypes.

"Quarantine," another totally new arena created by resident designer Yan 'Method' Ostretsov - author of our week two CTF arena 'Siberia' as well as other popular CA maps 'Trinity' and 'Asylum'.

All in all, I think idsoftware did a good job in adding one or more maps to the standard mappools for each gametype, and I'm certainly hoping that more additions will follow swiftly. It's good to see that not only did they bring back old content like Courtyard Conundrum (q3w2 - qzctf10), but also new maps like Siberia (qzctf8) and both CA maps Trinity (qzca2) and Quarantaine (qzca3). And good to mention is that Blood Run (ztntourney1) has been reintroduced to the Arena, as the first non-idsoftware map, meaning that custom content is a real option in the future.

You can find more information and a few screenshots of the maps here.

Stay updated by following Quakelive on twitter.

Post from: Holysh1t.net

Map 6 of 6: Quarantaine

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From Quake Live Map Preview
For week 5 we bring you "Courtyard Conundrum," another classic CTF arena from the earliest days of Threewave and our friends "Casey" and "Zoid." Like Bloodlust, Courtyard Conundrum was originally created and released in 2000 as part of a 3-pack of CTF maps for the original QUAKE III Arena. This arena has been a long-time favorite, and is a welcomed addition to the QUAKE LIVE CTF arena rotation. Courtyard Conundrum provides a nice combination of larger open bases and tighter connecting areas, and is most often played with 8-12 players.

We've almost reached the end of this 6 map run, but stay tuned next week as we debut a totally new map for Clan Arena. !

So its another old map but it will be new to many of the participants of the beta. That point aside, there has only been one fresh map for Quake Live so far and it looks like the next new map will be a fresh and original and is aimed at Clan Arena. Id were always going to have the problem of Players accepting new maps versus old community favorites. Having a mixture of both is in a way a good strategy to appeal to new players by having maps that have been balanced and tested for years and Id appeal to old players with new and fresh challenges. Now I see that they have taken in q3w2 , I'll be having candlelight vigils until I hear news of Q3WCP9 - Spider Crossings, Q3WCP15 - Indusrtrial Revolution, Q3WCP5 - Shining Forces and I'm not so much a fan of Japanese Castles. The point I'm making is that for all the seasoned Quake players out there, they may expect that all the great maps are coming back in and people might be let down. I expect to see posts on the Quake Live forums: "You brought back Map X but what about Map Y, more people liked Map Y, Why wont you bring back Map Y!" Hopefully there are a lot more maps on the way.

Stay updated by following Quakelive on twitter.

*PS: The Mega now has its little ledge, which will make High defense interesting

Post from: Holysh1t.net

Map 5 of 6: Courtyard Conundrum

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