Having played not a single quake live game, this was a very interesting read for me. The casts were also quite insightful as far as I watched them. It seems that quake live is facing similar difficulties as Xonotic at the moment - with being a game available for free that is not a trivial, 5-minutes-fun-in-the-coffee-break one. I can imagine that it is very hard to get into quake live competitive gaming if you have no real quake comparable experience, just as it is in Xonotic - the existing competitive player base has reached a skill level that makes it utterly unrealistic for newcomers to compete with them.
Unlike the author, I'm highly sceptical that a re-run of the event with more promotion of a quake duel competition and a bigger prize pool will actually help do the trick - after all it will once again attract more old-school veterans fighting for the first price, dropping lots of newbies frustrated and fragged off the ladder on their way. To repeat the phenomenon which happened there - I mean newbies starting to discover, to learn the game mechanics by exploration - you'll have to re-run beginners tournaments with people that have not played quake before (at least not competitively). I believe THAT would be a way to actually educate new players and to stirr interest for the game in them, recruiting potential new members of the player base. I think this would probably also apply to Xonotic.
With the Xonotic player base being as small as it is, it seems not like the way to go to separate it into skill tiers. But from my own experience on public servers, a game of low skilled players can easily be ruined by a single medium skilled veteran, causing the server to be deserted pretty quickly. Probably one of the biggest problems of Xonotic is to grant newbies a platform to discover the gameplay mechanics and to develop their skills without getting immediately dominated heavily.
