Comment by orbital-decay

That's a problem of every commercial competitive game. Endless tweaking and new content kills most games, they never reach their potential skill ceiling. Sometimes it comes out good, but that's more of an exception.

Quake 3 was kind of like Latin of the PvP world (together with SC:BW, CS 1.6 and maybe Tribes 2), its great quality was that it was abandoned and frozen while also being extensible. This let the community decide what they like best (for example CPMA didn't take off despite being great on paper, because it was breaking a lot of VQ3 depth by being too fast for the maps it was played on), and let the players truly master the game over more than two decades. I recently played some VQ3 with agent and had zero hope of keeping up despite being in the top few dozen of players a bit over a decade ago. He's still playing and still keeps his chess-grandmaster sense of the game (and trash talk).