The main fact is that the amount of active players and their active longevity in a particular activity is directly proportional to the community size of that activity. What I'm trying to say is that in quakeworld, as long as we stay small we shouldn't expect our player base to grow beyond seasonal fluctuations. What we should expect, however, is for old players to cycle out and new players to come in, as long as there is fun and competition to be had. Another fact is that some people will just lurk around forever. I'm not going to name any names, but some people (like myself) have OCD or hoarder syndrome or whatever, and just can't say "no"

But the "quake is dead" phenomenon exists and it is worth talking about. Let's share our feelings brothers and sisters.

I've had a double dose taste of this phenomenon recently. I have been running small-scale duel tournament for a while that have been quite successful, and for the longest time I wanted to go back to the roots and do a "TB3" tournament. So I did, and some of you may have heard about "Old school tournament" (I'll write a summary about that later) and I think it had a potential to be a great tourney. But, most of the top seeds disappeared, either due to not wanting to play anymore, or just being unable to due to hardware problems or real life commitments. So it became a disaster. LocKtar and Bulat have yet to play their grand finals, and I hope they do as it would still be cool to see, but the champion simply will not have the amount of satisfaction as he would if all the seeds were there. But I just let the whole tournament slide after some point, and I'm just going to let it sit there and let the players decide its fate. As I mentioned before, this is a seasonal variation, as now we see ownage #2 gearing up and the activity seems to be swelling back. The second dose was personal, in the last half year since I got back from the last dreamhack, I have literally played Quake one day per thirty. I'm still looking forward to watching the div1 demos, and following the scene, and I'm also hoping to run an old school invitational, with only the top 16 seeds from the last one that just weren't able to duke it out. We'll see how that goes.

So the take home message is: shit happens. Now and then something will not go your way. But there is no point in playing the victim, claiming it was "the last straw", etc., or any other exaggerations. If you don't want to play quake, then don't play quake. But what's the point of announcing that you are going to delete it from your hard drive? It's only a couple megs anyway. So let it sit there, because eventually you will double click on that helmet face and hear the familiar sounds and gibs, and it will be all right again