Hi, I was just looking for some servers where I can play with beginners/average players. All the servers I enter are full of advanced players, which, becomes frustrating pretty quick, as I am definitely not at their level. They kill me fairly quick and easy, and I don't get the chance to enjoy an online play.
Could anyone recommend some servers where I can play with beginner/average players?
Thanks guys

To paraphrase Keeting "'Twas always thus, and always thus will be."

Quake 3, as I'm sure you are aware, has been around for over 16 years now (it will soon be an adult, and achieve drinking age in the UK ).

However, even when I started playing (all of those 16 years ago), it was mayhem and murder for us poor n00bs. Add to that, many Euros had adsl, whereas the UK was lagging far behind in infrastructure, such that European players had better ping on UK servers than most UK players.

As you will have realised by now, ping is king in Quake.
A few other settings matter quite a lot too; FPS, rate and snaps being among the top.

I doubt you will find any servers that don't have (at times at least) good players on them. The secret is to find a server where people make allowances for you being new, and aren't too harsh with you. You also will really need to accept that being called 'n00b' will be part of your Quake experience, irrespective of how nice most people are, most of the time.

I know the gulf in skills between new and experienced players appears massive. That's because it is.
It takes time and a sense of humour. Enjoy the small victories, and don't dwell on the bad times/games.

You may take some comfort (or perhaps increase your horror), when I tell you; the best of the players are long gone, and the best today are but a shadow of what once was.

About your configuration.
Much has been written, much of it good, and sadly the majority long since lost as sites have dropped off the internet over the last 6 or so years.

Some fair resources still live on;
www.quake3world.com
http://www.joz3d.net/html/q3console.html


A poor configuration will play badly, so here are some guidelines;

Your configuration is located in .../quake3/baseq3/q3config.cfg
It is a plain text file that may be edited using notepad. Don't use Wordpad or any document editor, always use a pure text editor.
First thing to do, is make a copy of it to another directory like .../quake3/old_config/
Always remember that Quake 3 will read and write to that file every time you start/stop the game, and any time you make changes to configuration in your console.


There are a few settings that will help immediately, assuming you have a modern PC and reasonable graphics card;

seta rate "25000"
seta com_maxfps "120"
seta cl_maxpackets "40" // you may want to go as high as 60
seta snaps "30" // servers using 30 instead of the default 20 are much smoother. You need this to take advantage of that when it's available
seta cg_drawFPS "1" // this displays your fps in the top right corner of your screen in game
seta cg_drawTimer "1" // this draws the elapsed game time in the top right corner of your screen, just below the fps


Do not think for one moment that a higher fps (Frames Per Second) will help you, unless you can achieve a perfectly constant 333. Anything lower or higher will otherwise not work as well as 120.
This is a fact of the way the C code handles floating point calculations in the original Q3 engine.

Some people will

Find each of these in your q3config.cfg file, make the changes, and then write protect the file.
(file attribute Read Only)

You can make changes to setting during the game using your console, but remember that if you have correctly protected your q3config.cfg those changes won't be saved.

So it's a good idea to make a copy of your altered q3config.cfg file as well.