Look at reddit.com/r/arenaFPS. Now look at esreality.com. Read some comments. Get a feel for them. Live there for a year. Done? Good.
The Problem
There’s been an ArenaFPS revival movement of late, spearheaded by a growing demand on Reddit and other high-overlap communities. Anywhere a lot of gamers come together, there was this crying-out for a new arena game to retake the glory of UT2004 and Quake 3 Arena. With loadout-based military shooters dominating the market for around 7 years, it’s been difficult to get a word in edgewise. Thanks to open discussion, you’ll notice that the demand was recognized and a few projects popped up to fill the niche.
Reflex (Early Access)
You’ll also notice, on ESR, that the introduction of any new game is greeted with a tantrum about it not being “high enough skill ceiling like Quake”. Even Reflex, a deliberate clone of Quake 3 CPMA (a skill-ceiling riser for an already high skill game), is getting shot down in pre-alpha as unacceptable for some inane, imaginary reasons. It’s exhausting, because ESR is actually just 3 players from each country, all circlejerking about their personal favorite games – a diverse selection that includes everything from QuakeWorld to Quake 3 modded to also be QuakeWorld. And therein lies the problem. ESR does not create or drive demand, but the users are being given significant influence and respect by new developers for acting like spoiled children. The process is giving the devs of these new games serious two-face syndrome, trying to please both the old and new and not realizing that the two are incompatible.
Mutual air rox by Rikoll and LocKtar in the #Refragged QW tournament
Here’s the thing with Quake players: They grew up on Quake. As far as a lot of them are concerned, Quake is the only good FPS because it’s the only FPS they’re good at. Even when it was painfully difficult to play and everyone outmatched them in the beginning, they were resilient because they had nowhere else to go. There was a time when you either played Quake or you played Starcraft. If you wanted to be good at either, you had to train, there were no free passes. Old players today yearn for that niche market, monopoly and all, to return, as if it was good for games to force players to trudge through a nigh impossible game for weeks just to begin to enjoy it. And now, 20 years later, the repercussions of that market can be felt. Quake is now a game only for those who have stuck with it since inception. There is no market, because you can’t sell a game with a “skill cliff” when a segment of your target market has had 15 years to train and optimize the metagame. There’s nowhere for the game to go. Of course, this is the root of ESR’s aversion to new things. When they pull a /v/ and say “this game is objectively inferior to Quake because I can feel how low the skill ceiling is”, they’re actually saying “this game doesn’t feel exactly like Quake and I’ve lost my ability to develop metagame on my own”. This, precisely, is why developers need to disregard ESR’s collective thoughts on new arena shooters completely, and try to actively go against the grain. The best thing devs can do for their game is break the Quake/UT mold as thoroughly and as unpredictably as possible. Disregard ESR’s response unless they have advice that’s specific and technical.
Why?
Because ESR’s attitude towards games is aristocratic. It comes pre-packaged with a disdain for novices, and as a result, contempt for the most important potential customers. It betrays an intense insecurity about their own skills and intelligence, and they are not the people who should be making decisions about a commercial product. After all, 90% of the games they play today are freeware. They’re cheap bastards, and even if they decide to try one of these new games, they’ll probably get frustrated with it and go back to their freeware anyway. Instead, let’s focus on building something new. There are a lot of people who grew up playing arena FPS casually and wish they could get back to it. They never min/maxed the games, maybe just enjoyed some casual CTF over beers on Saturday night. Let’s try to get them back online. Let’s look at the kids who are just getting old enough to wish for something deeper than Call of Duty on their Xbox – how do we make AFPS approachable without dumbing it down? How do we put more mice and fewer gamepads in the hands of budding enthusiasts? The answer, I assure you, is not remaking decades-old games to please a very loud minority. 
As the genre develops, I’ll be waiting patiently. The more abstract and original games are still a ways down the pipe. Right now Toxikk and Reflex are available on Steam Early Access. Nex, Telos and #REKT are shaping up to be very distinct additions to the genre. Hovering in early-development fog of war are 2GD’s Reborn and CliffyB’s BlueStreak. Epic’s UT sequel is shaping up to be exactly what you’d expect. The future is looking bright.
Update: Holy shitcakes! I just followed the referrer info to the ESR thread. I’m not an ESR user (this article was mainly about /r/ArenaFPS) so I didn’t see it earlier. It’s astounding to me that people are up in arms over this. It can’t be my notoriety that made it worth talking about (I have none), so I must have touched on a point of contention among users. I’ll make it easy for you guys:
I’m over it. I got disinterested in vidya when I started my internship this summer; further proof that I’m exactly the kind of filthy casual who’s ruining gaming. See you in 2 months when I’m looking for some reckless escapism!
Profanity Filter Testing Domain 
buttsex and butthurt
Nowhere in the article does the author answer the main point people in ESR and other deathmatch fps communities crave. They want the games to play to the genre’s STRENGTHS. Not keep chipping away at it’s weaknesses which are irrelevant for the people who have an urge for deathmatch games. If the games have a niche at all, it won’t be filled by a game from a different genre.
I suppose arguing against the idiots and defeating everyone else via straw man is easier though. Sure, those that want an exact replica of Quake 3 are wrong. You got that right.
Oh wait, Dota 2 is the second largest game out there, perfectly identical to Dota. Oops. I suppose you have no point at all. At least good clickbait in the article name.
This attitude applies the other arena FPS you are looking forward to as well. If a player had never played an arena FPS and jumped into the current ut4 build the majority would get destroyed. The skill ceiling is quite high, however not really close to what quake has to offer – but enough that there is still the massive up hill battle for someone who has never played. And this is what the existing ut players want.
Quake and ut players will claim that this is ok, match making will solve that particular issue. The bigger problem is match making needs some sort of player base to begin with. Out of the batch of upcoming games the Epic title is really the only one that has a chance to get off the ground in a meaningful way.
This general attitude exists in most games. COD players feel superior to BF players (and vice versa) for whatever reasons they think mean something. SC hates on SC2 because it is dumbed down. When q2/q3 were released they were looked down on by large portions of the quake community at the time for the same reason q3 looks down on mobas.
You are so wrong it almost hurts (I wonder did you had your ass handed to you in Quake?). What if those Quakers are right?
– Did you ever see a pro Quake player try any other fps game? Because you should! It doesn’t matter if they try Cod, BF or whatever, they are good in any fps because the mechanical and dodging skills required to be good in Quake is much higher than any other FPS, the game is so fast (enemies are easily moving with 600ups and above), and let’s not forget the strategic aspect of the game (timing, positioning, etc)…so the skill ceiling is simply unmatched.
– Did you ever play against any good Quake players? I can tell you that you wouldn’t even frag them, not even once (for sure). Quake is not played for decades by people because it was the only FPS around, like chess wasn’t played for hundreds of years because there were no other games around, but because both are good games.
-Quake is not popular because it needs so much dedication (years of hard practice until you will have your first win/positive experience), so the new generation will never stay with the game long enough to see its beauty, let alone fully understand its depth (but to by fair, I admit I don’t see why should they, when they can just jump into some stupid moba game and have fun with their friends there)
Quake is the mother of FPS games, period. It’s a good and old game which had its prime all right, but you should still respect its small community much more imho.
The article is damn right.
Quake is a great game, but the skill cliff plus the tierslumming are quake`s end.
ESR is just a circus, pro players only visit it when they need money.
The average ESR user is an unskilled noob, that barely plays quake and uses ESR to pretend that he is somehow decent at fps.
Nowadays ESR is just a playground for …
noobs talking like they are pro,
admins not being able to control banned/probated users,
zhu`s sick videos,
morons making threads about whatever came to their mind on the toilet,
retards compensating their time overflow by commentating everything with boring jokes,
cheaters seeking for attention,
jamerio`s inferiority complex causing racist posts,
jamerio pretending he is black and from poland calling himself dizzle
and
cmss awaiting a punch into the face.
Quake is great but doomed to fail on a large scale and ESR sucks big time. Welcome to 2015 wmo 1.1a users.
Quake is the only good FPS. Your opinion is shit.
You’re welcome.
To a Quaker, any other shooter is like what training wheels on a bicycle are to a cyclist, waste of skill and unsatisfactory competition. It’s really quite simple as that. What makes ESR the shitheap of opinions that it is, is this very same condescending freedom of expression that is being practiced in this article by you as well. You do realize you’re being condescending about ESR being condescending, don’t you? ESR doesn’t pressure you into not making statements like this which gives you freedom of speech (unless you’re Hitsu- grade stupid) and so does what the hell ever domain this is apparently. Somebody makes a stupid comment, you’re free to make an even stupider reply, but just because you’re right in your own little world doesn’t make you impervious criticism or a little bit of troll and fun. That’s how censorship free bulletin boards do, deal with it you big wuss.
I can’t parse the phrase “condescending freedom of expression”, nor figure out what part of my post was condescending, or understand where freedom of expression works into all this. You seem upset about something but I genuinely can’t figure out what any of your sentences mean. (Except the first one, that one is how I know you’re really from ESR.)