I've been playing this game since the early beta over a year ago, and have been a hardcore Quake fan ever since the first Quake. I've played most of the time with the Bethesda launcher, so the time showing on my Steam account is only a small portion of the time played.

I thought that Quake Champions would be the revival that Quake (and arena FPS in general) desperately needed, but alas the decisions that Bethesda/developers are taking and their immoral behavior to paying customers is a warning sign that this game won't last very long.

Positive
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- The addition of champions to this game adds more depth and makes this game more relevant to the younger generation of gamers who are playing games like Fortnight, and Overwatch. Some will hate it as it's not "pure Quake", but I think it works very well!

- The movement of the different champions incorporates all previous Quake movements, including Quake 3 VQ3, Quake 3 CPMA, Quake 4, and more. If you are a fan of any previous Quake, you will find champions that move how you are used to.

- It's Quake - this alone attracted me to this game, and allowed me to play for this long with all the issues and bugs and downtime.


Negative
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- The developers have been breaking the game more and more with each update starting last November. They broke the netcode for many players (the figure was showing 20% of players affected by the 104 disconnect on Reddit), subsequently fixed it again in a following patch, and then broke it again in the patch following. This issue is well known, but players receive absolutely NO support from Bethesda, even though they paid to be a part of the early access. Most players with this issue have just quit playing altogether.

- The developers have been adding more content in each update: COSMETIC content. Things that you can purchase on the store for real money. This is where their focus has been. They haven't added any more tutorial modes in over a year (we only have 1 tutorial that teaches new players nothing), they now have one LESS game mode than they did a year ago, and now they have removed the ability to choose the mode you want to play.... which leads to my next point:

- Playlists. I'm not sure who at Bethesda have decided that restricting player choices and forcing them into game modes they don't want to play is a good idea... but the feedback has been quite unanimous against this. Players were expecting Bethesda to revert the game to it's previous state (minus playlists) with last week's update, but instead of doing that, they added:

- A paywall to change your name in the store that costs $15. Fine... I don't care about that. but they went and justified this by citing "high request volume" for this, which is a COMPLETE lie, whereas they ignore all other feedback about things that are actually ruining the player experience, such as playlists.

- The game's performance gets progressively worse with each update. Look on Youtube and the forums: player sync issues, being shot behind walls and by invisible players (not talking about Nyx), random disconnects, playing versus broken bots who either get stuck in walls or shoot you with 100% accuracy.

- Dwindling playerbase that is getting more toxic with time. 3 weeks ago there were 17,000+ players at peak. Now there are 3000+ players at peak. From my view, this is because every time someone posts a topic complaining about game breaking issues, there is a certain set of fanboys that will insult and throw crap at them and tell them to "GIT GUD". These players don't understand that just because the game works for them, doesn't mean it's ok that it doesn't work for many others.

- Bethesda's dishonesty and behavior: Bethesda included Redshell in the game. While I disagree that this is a dangerous spyware, the way they handled this showed their colors again. They didn't apologize. They just said that next time they will tell players when they add it again. Other than this, executives have lied in the past, saying that "The Champions Pack will not be sold for less than $30", which it has been... and they ignore all player complaints and feedback. They don't care. Their only goal is to release more cosmetic items in a game that just doesn't work, and keeps getting more broken with each update.

- Oh and talking about player count, I could more easily get a game with 7 other humans back when this game had a player count of 300 players, than I can today with 3000+ players. I get to play with broken bots now, and the queue time hasn't dropped at all - it's only gotten longer.



Don't get me wrong... I want Quake Champions to succeed and grow to the heights that Quake 3 achieved. I want this because I love Quake, and Quake Champions is a game that has a lot of potential.

But the developers behave in unethical ways and treat their customers like garbage - and the game keeps getting worse and more broken with each update.

I've been super patient, hoping for many months that things will change, but they haven't, and this last update with a blatant lie was just a big slap to the face of everyone who has been supporting this game till now.

I've bought the Champions pack and bought extra items in the store to support them, but at this stage I cannot recommend anyone pay a single dollar into this cash grab - Bethesda don't allow custom servers or any freedom that is to be expected with a Quake game, so it's pretty clear that they will just turn off the servers as soon as they stop seeing money from the cosmetic items in the store.

You can verify everything I've said by browsing Youtube, the Bethesda forums, the Steam forums, and... trying it yourself.

Note that any negative comments will be the usual: "GIT GUD", or "you are just an idiot - it had less players before", etc. None of these fanboys actually address the points I'm making. So take all of this into account when deciding if this will be worth your time, and most importantly, worth your money.