I brought up questions in the Quake.World discord channel and got some answers. I will be posting them here in case they could be interesting to others. Big thanks to BLooD_DoG and andeh.

Can someone elaborate on why having a weaker starting weapon is better? I understand you and your teammate(s) having to choose between an RL or RA for example, and coordinating your item pickups; it's definitely some extra strategy, but I can't see this being so much more sophisticated. It's almost like a money system in CS, or choosing characters that complement each other in some team games.

Plus I don't think the MG in Q3/QL is that much stronger as starting weapon. Or does it become that way only on high level games because of the aim levels?

What am I missing here?

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andeh: Don't be fooled by what you can do with the boomstick though. It's briefly mentioned in the VOD from the finals yesterday how annoying you can be with the boomstick. While you cannot take a full on fight and win it, you can slowly poke away on your enemy and force him to go for armors which opens up the rest of the map for you and gives you an opportunity to grab a better weapon. I don't think there's any right or wrong, but through 24 years of quakeworld, people have figured out how to use the boomstick really well, whether it's in duel or in 4on4. A very regular team-call in 4on4 is to "flood" someone if you know that one of your enemies have a good stack of weapons and that he's very low, and then your team floods him by dying over and over only to kill him and get rid of his weapon, and that's all done with the boomstick. It may cost you 5-10 frags but in the end it's worth killing that weapon.

BLooD_DoG: A major thing in 4on4 (less in 2on2 or 1on1, because weapons are always available) is learning how to be useful to your team when you respawn with just a weak shotgun. What to focus on, where to go, etc... It's a skill that takes a crapload of time to master, and it wouldn't be as relevant if the starting weapon were more powerful.

andeh: After 4on4 high level games, we actually even look at boomstick accuracy. If you have above 50% accuracy with the boomstick, you've done a pretty good job being annoying with the boomstick and having a 50%+ accuracy in a 20 minute game amounts to a load of damage done only with the boomstick when weapons are scarce.

I don't think the MG is necessarily overpowered, but I do think that the boomstick in QW is harder to use than the MG in q3 for example. But everything works differently so you can't really compare the two if you ask me.

BLooD_DoG: That's very true, a few critical shotgun fights can make a big difference, so in that sense it's not a "weak" weapon. My point though is there is a lot of stuff besides aim % itself that are developed because of the shotgun's "weakness".

It's interesting to hear all this, but it seems like most of this is known now after years and years of play. How deeply was it understood at the time of, let's say, the launch of Q2 or even Q3? I guess considering that time period, it would have seemed different right? Did a good amount of the insight we have now exist at that point in time, enough to discern not only the differences, but the skill disparity that is often spoken of?

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andeh: There's a couple of answers to that. First of all you have to remember that back in those days the connections were worse and there was no client-side hitscan. That changed a lot of things with the introduction of client side hitscan and how that worked for both the Lightning Gun and the Boomstick.

People were good back then too but in a different way than they are now. Naturally most players are better now than back in those days due to pure experience.

BLooD_DoG: tough question... I think by 1999 when Q3 was launched, QW was quite popular with "competitive" matches, but the strategy and teamwork definitely developed a lot in the next 20 years. There was the famous Clan 9 vs Death Row match where I recall DR was surprised by clan 9 coordinating SG flooding and gaining control, so strategies were somewhat primitive. Also there wasn't a whole lot of competitive fps clan gaming at the time at all besides QW, so it's tough to say if this was "understood" back then when there wasn't really anything to compare to until sequels and other fps games came out.

andeh: It's very different to try and hit someone with your boomstick on 200 ping without hitscan, or on 200 ping with a lightning gun than it is today when we have what we call "antilag" or rather client-side hitscan, just like any other modern game. It was a huge topic because some people wanted to keep it the old way and having to adjust to your ping, while others thought it would only make sense that if you actually hit your enemy, you hit your enemy, hence client-side hit detection. The strategies as a whole were quite similar though, albeit today's players are way more experienced and make better calls than people would do back then.

damn i always forget to take hardware/connections into account

How does the backpack mechanic influence the game (if it does)?

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andeh: Your ammo that you're carrying is always dropped. However, the weapon currently equipped when you die is the weapon that you drop. So people would create scripts to always swap back to the boomstick after firing a weapon in order to prevent dropping a beautiful RL or LG to the enemy team if you die. This became such a regular thing that even the clients themselves (like EzQuake) implemented the feature as well. So essentially after you fire a gun, you swap back to the boomstick automatically. This doesn't necessarily make you safe from dropping packs though, and it becomes even harder if your ping is higher. If you lose a fight of LG vs LG, you're likely to still be firing the lightning gun when you die, and after firing a rocket there's still a "global cooldown" or a slight delay before you're allowed to swap your currently equipped weapon back to your boomstick so dropping RL packs (rocket launcher backpacks) is still extremely common and a HUGE thing to keep track of in 4on4.

BLooD_DoG: And that means that NOT firing an LG or RL when you think you will die can be an extremely important decision, because you don't want to drop your pack and have an enemy pick it up. In 4on4 weapons are very difficult to come by so pack management is as important as anything else.

or deciding it's worth taking that chance and firing anyway knowing you will drop a pack, because you have a teammate closeby, or whatever

andeh: Yes, what BD said, sometimes if you're low it might not even be worth to try to get a hit in because you'll drop a weapon for the enemy team. Then you might just fire your boomstick and nothing else since you expect to die anyway.

BLooD_DoG: and if you know there's a pack somewhere and you don't need it, do you still pick it up, or try to commiunicate to your team where it is so they can pick it up, etc?
also sometimes keeping track of which pack has important ammo is almost as important as the actual weapon in the pack, like on DM3 a pack with lots of cells can be super important

andeh: One of the biggest rookie mistakes in 4on4 is to keep fighting even if you're about to die and then drop a pack that your enemy can protect for one of his teammates to come pick up.

BLooD_DoG: and sometimes you want to kill a teammate because they have ammo that you need, or because they have an RL with very weak stack and you have high stack with no weapon
sometimes you'll even kill yourself on purpose so teammate nearby can take your pack
all of this requires very quick thinking and strong communication and can often be the difference between winning or losing

andeh: That's another aspect to the ever-complicated strategies of QW.

An example: you manage to get a red armor. You're on 200/100 but you have no weapon at all. A teammate of yours spawned on the Rocket Launcher on dm3 but he has no health or armor to speak of, but he managed to survive with it. The most logical thing to do is to actually let your 200/100 guy teamkill you while you wield the weapon, so that he gets the RL and can actually make it worth. There are so many small tricks like that in QW that are second nature to us but that might seem super weird to players from other games. Just the thought of intentionally teamkilling your teammate may sound weird, but weapon management is so extremely important in 4on4 that you need to do it.

Things are however different in duels. First off, in duel, weapons don't despawn so packs are a little less important. But with that being said, you should always remember where a pack has been dropped as you can, by picking that pack up at a later time, surprise your enemy with a weapon when he expects you to only have a boomstick. This actually happened in the finals yesterday between LocKtar and Lordlame where LocKtar forgot about a lightning gun pack that eventually led to his death.

BLooD_DoG: yes and some people disable their weapon scripts in 1on1/2on2 to take advantage of that, because those modes have weaponstay on so dropping a weapon isn't as critical
there are pros/cons though

andeh: I don't think LocKtar uses the weapon scripts at all actually. And in many ways it can favor you in duels. It essentially creates "another weapon spawn" if you intentionally drop a pack for your next attack.
It's of course very different in 4on4 where that would not be very smart.

BLooD_DoG: i have cl_weaponpreselect 4 (i think) which enables weaponscript only for 4on4, not other modes, precisely of that purpose
but sometimes it comes back to bite you in the ass when enemy picks up a pack that you dropped

Does teamkilling affect the overall score?

yes, -1 (same as killing yourself)

i reckon that can put you in strange situations in close games

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BLooD_DoG: there are times when there's like a minute left and the score is tight, you question whether you should teamkill your friend to take their weapon
usually the answer is yes, but sometimes it's tricky
depends on how well you think you can defend, status of all your other teammates and enemies, etc.

TDM is too stupid you know, we absolutely need an objective based mode like CTF although noone plays it or was watching demos of ctf matches when this still possible in QW, Q2, Q3A ...

that being said ... QW TDM is not really that great for playing when you are starved and can only run around with boomstick and often get spawnraped ... of course you can declare that as higher version of teamplay, but when why bother playing quake, why not go play counterstrike, if fun and individual skill is not the objective ...
higher versions of quake still have quad runs and there are still mechanics of denying weapons or powerups, and its still fun to play

If I may interpose: A world without quake ctf and runes is a shameful world for all.

there is a ctf tourney starting soon.

CTF 2on2 Draft Tournament

"We can now proudly present the first CTF 2on2 tournament since 2001. Hopefully a fun and good way to get some action going again. Please see CTF discord for more info.

https://discord.gg/DV9AeVEr (edited)
YOU'VE BEEN INVITED TO JOIN A SERVER
QuakeWorld CTF"