Quote:Original post by Way Walker
[...]Honestly, I've heard the same complaints about Counter-Strike from Quake-era players. And, on the whole, they didn't behave much better, either.[...]

Well, it's probably just as true for Quake-era also, but I didn't have internet back then and I only knew one other person that played quake. We had quite some fun with the good ol' null modem cable =-)
It seems like every game starts out with a decent community (unless it's a big hit, highly-anticipated-by-the-masses game, such as CS:Source) and stays that way for a short while until the 100%-competitive-culture infects it.
It's all Ramero's fault for associating such poor behavior and videogames in the mind of the masses way back when he did tours for doom =-(

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It's not worth playing, and in many cases it isn't possible because opponents will leave or ban you if you're not losing (in those rare cases where opponents are findable - even in a league it can be very difficult to find opponents).

Probably for another thread, but this seems to me to be a serious problem. Any solutions?[...]

Basically, if you want to make a competitive game, run your own league because CAL, the seemingly most popular league for many games, is run by admins that don't enforce the rules(besides banning blatant cheaters, but things like everybody showing up on time are important too when you don't have all the free time in the world) and players that take advantage of that.
Also, you should have some kind of automatic opponent finder, where you register your information (team size, maps you're willing to play, whether you have your own server or not, etc) and it will make the best matches possible (taking things like regional location into account if if ping is very important, etc). Adding in a stats tracker that could be used to match teams based on skill would help when looking for scrims too. Of course the league itself should have tiers (if there are enough players) and that should be separate from the stats used to find random matches.

Alternately, you could make the game too "cutesy" to attract hardcore gamers (though they'll still come if the game allows for serious competition), such as Albatross 18. It's a bad example in many ways(many of the in-game items can only be bought will real-world currency), but I think the graphics and style help keep the game more on friendly terms.

It's actually not exactly true for the quake era. There was still the occasional bad admin, but the generally good behavior [or at least coherent insults] wasn't due to lacking anonymity. High speed internet was prohibitively expensive for children, and too unknown for most parents. The vast majority of players were ~18-22 using the college T1, not ~12-16 using dirt cheap cable modem service.