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My multiplayer experience began with Quake 2 as I was a bit late getting onto the internet, and deliberately so. I simply didn't trust connecting computers together, so I did not play Quakeworld online during its heyday... and I didn't like Quake 1 at the time anyway. With Quake 2 I got familiar with normal deathmatch, then I played Rocket Arena 2 extensively. To me, there was a place for every weapon. Since dialup was the rule, and lag was always a factor, the railgun and any other hitscan weapons were hard to use at first. Rockets offered splash damage, the chaingun offered sustained firepower, and the super-shotgun was forgiving in its spread. Nobody ever whined about the grenades during the early days that I can remember. There was always somebody crying over the BFG in normal deathmatch, but people always have something they don't like. The BFG is typically disabled in RA2.
Now enter cable/dsl. People started to get 40-90 ping, and then there were us dialup users with 200+ ping. The railgun started to become a serious threat, along with the chaingun, especially in RA2 since you spawn with every weapon sans the BFG. Add to that a lot of wide-open spaces, the ability to rocket jump without losing health, and dialup users had some problems. The grenade launcher became a great friend to me as I learned how to use it to cover retreats, hit players below me, and attack around corners to avoid exposing myself to railgun hits. It was a strategic weapon. Once low pingers started to be prevalent I heard the term "luck pillz" for the first time. A lot of these low pingers would love to do 2 vs 2 matches in open rooms, immediately switch from the rocket launcher to the chaingun and attack one player at match start, which was near instant death, then finish off the other player. It was considered by a lot of us high pingers to be a very cheap tactic because it deliberately exploited the ping delay that would allow them to attack first on the server. In larger team games or 1 vs 1 matches it wasn't so much of an issue, but in 2 vs 2 matches it was a point of contention. What's funny is the same people would complain about a high-pinger using the SSG...
Now taking ping differences out of the equation, what I loved about Q2, especially during my early dialup days (before my ISP went to crap and I couldn't even move after connecting, which pushed me over to broadband finally) was that every weapon had a purpose and a place and worked well. Here's the lineup of how I remember things:
The blaster, while mostly useless, was a way to humiliate an opponent.
Shotgun was good for finishing off a weak opponent at a distance, especially in RA2.
SSG was a good all-around for DM, and a great close-range finisher in RA2.
Machinegun was an overall decent weapon. You could finish with it, it was better than the blaster, and it was common. The damage rate was steady, but not overwhelming. In a large FFA you could get a lot of frags by finishing off weakened opponents after they traded rockets.
Chaingun was devastating, but the spinup would allow for someone to normally get a rocket or SSG blast in prior to the gun being up to full-speed. With high ping it wasn't so easy to keep on target so it got used in the water a lot to great effect, where movement was restricted.
Grenade Launcher was not as commonly used by other players that I remember, nor were hand grenades, but were more situational in use and less spammy.
Rocket Launcher needs no explanation. It was one of THE go-to weapons.
Hyperblaster occupied a unique niche. It was hard for a high pinger to use, and it got the nickname of "laggerblaster" as the projectile spam would cause some high pingers with bad connections to get packet flooded and stall their movement. For the most part it was disabled in RA2 due to the lag problem. In normal DM it was surprisingly effective if you could hit with it as it fired at the same rate as the machinegun, did almost twice the damage, and penetrated armor to a degree. Q2 calculated "energy" damage by downgrading your armor a type. A blaster hitting red armor treated it like yellow, yellow armor was treated like green, and green armor was completely ignored.
The railgun doesn't need much explanation, other than when playing RA2 it was very hard for a high pinger to use and low pingers would dominate with it to the point of not using other weapons. One tactic in RA2 was to fire the railgun to goad another player into switching to it to railgun duel at a distance, and while they were switching weapons close in while switching to rockets and hit them up close.
The BFG10K was quite the controversial weapon. I'm not sure when exactly people started considering it cheap to use, but opinions on it were definitely strong one way or another. To me, it was a rare weapon that could help a player that wasn't doing well to catch up a little, especially once ping differences became severe. For some people the hatred was so vitriolic as to be irrational. There was a mod called Weapons of Destruction that made every single gun in the game overpowered in various ways, especially hand grenades. I actually had a player complain about me shooting him off a wall (there was a grappling hook) with the BFG and calling it cheap... which to me was rather absurd considering he was throwing napalm grenades that basically saturated an area with repeating explosions that was basically instant death. There was also one specific role the BFG filled that was actually quite necessary, and I'll explain that below.
Now I look at the individual strengths and weaknesses of the weapons, the movement speed in the game, the availability of ammo, armor, and items, the map layout and spawn frequency of specific weapons, and Quake 2's gameplay was really very balanced. Rockets, rails, and chaingun (LG in Quake 3) were the "big three", but they were also the least common weapons. Shotguns, machineguns, hand grenades were more common. Weapons and items tended to be spread out well, and the map design was quite good for the most part.
There's only one controversial item that I would say tended to ruin the game, and it was the power armor. Maps with power armor tended to give God Mode to one specific player that would then dominate the rest of the match. The worst place for this was Q2DM8, since the power armor, megahealth, and red armor all spawned in the same spot in rotation. About the ONLY way to kill someone tanked up on cells was to hit them with the BFG repeatedly - especially if the person ran away all the time. I got into a match where a player was dominating the map and managed to tank up myself. He'd trade railgun shots with me and always make sure he was in a place to get out of sight in a hurry. After trading a few hits in the rocket launcher room we both chaingunned each other and he ran off before I could finish him, with BOTH of us running out of bullets. I think another player got a lucky shot in on him. Well of course he went straight for the power armor again, and I managed to get the BFG and some cells before he could hog them all, and fragged him two more times, then he left the server. So the most balance-killing thing in Quake 2 was never a weapon, it was actually an item. RA2 never allowed the use of power armor.
So with all of this said, there was a lot of good design in Q2 for map balance, and that translated fairly well into Q3A. Why this is not translating properly into Champions seems to be bad decision making on the part of the designers. The whole "you just have to get gud" argument is garbage too. I've played with semi-pro Q3 players and I've seen pro Q2 players at work, I managed to beat a pro Q2 player in a match one time while I was on dialup, and yet the first time I played around with Doom 16's public beta for multiplayer I died repeatedly and never came close to the top of the scoreboard. Why? It didn't play like anything I'm used to playing. Everyone plays different games differently, and just because you might dominate at one game doesn't mean you will at another. Take a CoD player that's never touched Quake and throw them into Quakeworld or vice-versa and it'll be a self-proving point, so "getting gud" is NOT an excuse for bad map design and item placement. Anyone that thinks otherwise should take a trip over to lvlworld and talk to some of the veteran Q3 mappers - something I suspect the Champions devs probably did not do.
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