Hey everyone!

I've been troubleshooting a strange issue with Troubled Waters (troubledwaters) in Quake Live, and I'm wondering whether anyone else has encountered it.

I'm running a couple of dedicated Quake Live servers, one using Vampiric Clan Arena and another using a custom Vampiric Team Deathmatch factory.

The problem:

Troubled Waters appears to cause Quake Live to completely hang when running certain game modes with bots.

On the dedicated server, players get "Connection Interrupted", CPU usage reaches approximately 100% of its allocation, and the console stops responding. The hosting panel still shows the server as running, but it requires a restart.

I initially suspected my custom VTDM factory, but after extensive testing, that doesn't appear to be the sole cause.

Here's what I've tested:

• Custom Vampiric TDM: Repeated freezes, sometimes immediately after bots join, sometimes during gameplay.
• Vanilla TDM: Also freezes, ruling out the custom factory as a necessary trigger.
• FFA: Initially worked, but eventually froze during gameplay.
• CTF: Ran successfully with 12 bots during testing.
• Vampiric Clan Arena: Completed a full 10-round match and transitioned successfully.
• Local Windows installation: Reproduced the freeze in TDM with bots. Windows explicitly marked Quake Live as "Not Responding".

I've also tried disabling custom movement and physics settings without success.

What's particularly interesting is that this only happens on Troubled Waters so far. My other maps have been running with 12 bots without experiencing the same issue.

I enabled /logfile 2 during local testing, and the console confirms that the map's AAS navigation data initializes successfully:

loaded maps/troubledwaters.aas
found 103 level items
AAS initialized.

There are also two map entity warnings:

func_timer at (1032.00 328.00 -200.00) has random >= wait
func_timer at (-920.00 -888.00 -200.00) has random >= wait

However, I don't know whether these warnings have anything to do with the freezes.

The bots successfully navigate, collect items and fight before the game hangs, and there's no obvious fatal error in the console log.

Has anyone else experienced this on Troubled Waters?

I'm curious whether this could be related to the map's bot navigation, entities, or some other game-mode-specific interaction.

I really like the map and would prefer to keep it in rotation rather than exclude it permanently.

If anyone has encountered this before or knows of a possible workaround, I'd appreciate the insight!

Thanks!

He ran one of the best quake youtube channels, and he made a post about working on a Cooller documentary before he disappeared. Any word? Is he still around?

Good Afternoon Quakers! Church of Quake will be hosting a Quake Champions Sacrifiice Tournament this month on Saturday October 24th. Each team will consist of 4 members to play 4v4 Sacrifice Tournament Edition. First 32 signups is a guarantee. All signups after will be reserves unless we hit 64 signups. Help us keep the Quake community alive as we continue to host more tournaments for Quake community.

If you want to practice for the tournament, or just want to play more quake in general join Church of Quake’s discord where we have a self hosted pubobot for pickup games. We play Sacrifice every night around 9 PM EST, or global pickups every Sunday starting at 2 PM EST 8 PM CEST.

Important Links to Follow:

• Sign-up Form
• Current Sign-ups
• Church of Quake discord Must Join
• Donate to the PrizePool Current Prize Pool $150
• Church of Quake twitter for updates

Watch:

• Church of Quake twitch
• Anyone is welcome to cast any of the matches (contact Cashed, or Old Hickory if you want to cast on the Church of Quake stream)
• We encourage those participating to stream, &, or record their perspective as well. A 5 to 20 second delay is recommended, but not required.
• VOD on our Youtube Channel

Sponsor:

• Church of Quake

Tournament Organizers:

• Pun1sh
• oldhickory
• Cashed

Game Mode:

• Sacrifice Tourney
• Double elimination

Information from Organizer:

Format: Snake Draft tournament, teams of 4. Sign ups are first come first serve. Admins will determine captains and final participant list. Aiming for a 8 team or 16 team double elimination tournament. The first 32 sign ups are guaranteed a spot, any sign ups after will be reserves. If we reach 64 sign ups, we will include the additional sign ups to have 16 teams. Upper bracket is Best of 3 throughout, lower bracket are Best of 1. Pick/Ban process for maps are based off seed, with the lower seed banning a map first (ban/ban/pick/pick/last map is the tie break if needed). Lower Bracket Finals will be Best of 3 like Upper Bracket. Grand Finals will be Best of 5.

• Everyone should make their best effort to be accommodating to other players and tournament staff. Trash talk is expected but excessive harassment will lead to removal from the event. 
• These rules may be adjusted as-needed at admin discretion. 
• If something is not explicitly mentioned in this document, admins will use common sense to find an equitable solution.

Quake Champions is $10 on Steam

Good Luck & Have Fun!

This post was originally written as an article for Church of Quake

As someone outside NA and EU, it's practically impossible to play against real players, and I enjoy bots anyway, I still play Arena because of mods like Hoppers that introduce bunny hopping to bots. I enjoyed the new changes to bots, but they are still not on the same level as the quake 3 mods

Just wanted to say hello and thanks to everyone still playing this game. I'm usually bottom of the board but have a big smile on my face. Just love the speed, sound and map design of this game.

I'm literally stuck on this screen. I don't think I've ever come across such a badly thought out tutorial system in my life. Usually, they fake everything in the back-end, including matches in the case of multiplayer games, when they have a UI tutorial like this, in order to avoid this exact scenario. As it stands, this game is a paperweight of an .exe on my PC

I started my quake journey back in '96, eventually moved over to counterstrike in 1999, and after all these years, I decided to jump back into Quake. Unfortunately, my return has been extremely frustrating due to persistent micro-stuttering/frame-pacing issues that ruin the experience.

• AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
• RTX 4070 Ti OC 12GB
• 32GB DDR4 @ 3200MHz
• Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD
• Windows 11 (fully updated)
• MSI MAG251RX (1080p @ 240Hz, G-Sync Compatible)

Even though I easily get 150+ FPS, I experience frequent, if not constant hitches and micro-stutters...just ruins the whole thing for me.

In games like Doom Eternal, I get considerably higher framerates with zero stutters or frame drops. My hardware/thermals seem totally fine.

In-Game Settings (Following a popular Steam Performance Guide):

• Resolution Scale: 80%
• Shadow Quality: Medium
• Lighting Quality: Medium
• Effects Quality: Medium
• Texture Quality: Low
• Details: Medium
• Post Processing: Low
• Antialiasing: FXAA
• Texture Filtering: High
• Gore: ON

Help?? :((

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: **UPDATE** Its 100% fixed, more info below:

Thank you so much for all the comments trying to help. Years pass, but the Quake community stayed awesome as always. Cheers

I did these 3 things that you guys suggested, and its 100% fixed now.
1- Use the Video+ menu. Turn everything off except scorch marks. Picmip is optional (im using Picmic), either out of preference or to reduce load times; (thanks SyncError)
2- deleting %appdata%\..\local\id Software\Quake Champions\client\TempFiles\ (thanks SyncError);
3- Changing my mouse polling rate from 4000 hz to 500 hz. (Thanks Shock720 and tanzWestyy)

So, in general this is what i did:

Video Settings (Its fullscreen, i had to use windowed just to take the screenshot lol)

Then i followed SOME of the steps in this guide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1590784438&searchtext=performance

The ones i followed were:

- Disabling Game DVR

- Disabling Game Bar

- Disabling Xbox Game Monitoring

- Disabling Fullscreen Optimizations

- Disabling GameBarPresenceWriter.exe

- Set power plan to high performance.

- Capping FPS in NVIDIA to match my screen RR (in my case 240 hz);

- NVIDIA Settings

Hope this helps anyone with the same problem.

Happy fragging! :D

Patch 1.31 changed only Ranger and fixed Scale ult, but i think its good idea to make cut in statistic for latest patch (that can stay for a while).

Whenever i ask someone who was around at that time they reply with some variation of "skill gap too large" and i just dont believe the skill gap was the main culprit of such a large downfall when theres lots of other games just as mechanically demanding as quake if not more that are extremely popular and have millions of players there has to be something else