Some Big News & an Update
11:00PM 02/19/2009

First, we want to thank everyone who has been playing, testing, providing feedback, inviting…
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Some Big News & an Update
Feb 19, 2009
First, we want to thank everyone who has been playing, testing, providing feedback, inviting friends and hopefully enjoying the QUAKE LIVE closed beta. We've grown considerably over the past 6 months and are now excited to announce that we're opening QUAKE LIVE to the general public as an open beta the evening of Tuesday, February 24th. On Monday morning (U.S. central time) we'll be taking beta.quakelive.com down for about 36 hours and then opening to the public at www.quakelive.com on Tuesday evening.

Coordinated with the open beta will be a stats wipe and pruning of player accounts, however we want to make it as easy as possible for all of you to transition over. On Monday, we will be deleting the player accounts of people that have not played in the last 28 days. If you have played within the past 28 days, you will lose your stats, but will NOT lose your player name, custom settings, profile information, etc.. When the site opens again on Feb. 24th, you will be able to use your current email address and password to login as usual. If you have friends that haven't played recently, but will want to maintain their account, let them know that they should play a game between now an Sunday. After Tuesday, we do not expect to ever completely wipe QUAKE LIVE player stats again.

We're going to post some additional information in the Developer Notes about the opening of the game, what it means to leave the 'beta' tag on the site during this time, and discuss some features and functionality that we're planning for the next couple of months that we know you'll be interested in. This is a very exciting time for the project and we hope that all of you, who have contributed your time and feedback, share in that excitement. We hope all of you continue to be active contributors to the game as we work to make it better for months and years to come.

Now to tonight's update.
--We've pretty significantly changed the beginning of the training/skill placement match that you'll normally only see after creating your account. In order to get some good testing on this, we're requiring that everyone re-play that match. It should only take you about 10 minutes, and the update tonight is large, so the game will be downloading while you play anyway.

--Further fixed the lightning gun being too loud when spectating / Firing sound loops. This was already fixed in the last update for cg_drawgun 1 and 2, but is now also fixed for anyone using cg_drawgun 0.

--The rocket launcher splash damage has been increased very slightly since the last update lowered it. Thanks for the feedback - hopefully we've found a happy middle between where it was originally and where we put it in the last update.

--Changes to balance (nerf) the Scout rune. It now has an accelerated armor decay rate (double the rate) and decays to 50 armor instead of the normal 100.

--Fixed a profile page / Leaderboard frag count mis-match

--Fixed the join friend icon in IE

--Fixed and improved the team shuffle (available through the in-game callvote menu).

--Fixed Quad Damage rocket splash damage not doing 4x damage (it was doing 1x).

--cl_pitchspeed and cl_yawspeed are now range limited between 0 - 1000

--Map change - Proving Grounds (qztourney2) - weapon clipped the bridge and changed the megahealth respawn time to 2 minutes.

--Map change - House of Decay (qztourney9) - replaced the central yellow armor with a grenade launcher

--Map change - Temple of Retribution (qzdm7) - In team deathmatch we swapped the locations of the raigun and the dungeon shotgun.

--Map change - Base Siege (qzteam1) - replaced the green armors with yellow armors.

--Fixed several crashes that had come in through the automated crash reports.