A long interview with John and Marty on the whole process from conception and more....

Here, John Carmack discusses, along with Marty Stratton, executive producer of the project, exactly what the inspiration for this project is, the challenges that id faced in bringing the project from conception to reality, and its hopes to contribute to the continued success of the PC platform.

Carmack and Stratton also discuss how they expect to see the product evolve down the road -- giving a roadmap to how one of the top developers on the platform sees the market evolving over the next several months, at the very least.

Link: Gamasutra - Building Quake Live: Carmack Speaks

A bit of a status update from id on the 24 hours after taking the beta live and open....

It's been 24 hours since opening QUAKE LIVE and we wanted to provide a quick update on the hot topics. First, we really appreciate the positive feedback from everyone that's making it through, but also understand the frustration of waiting in line.

Link: 24 - QUAKE LIVE Forums

Here's an awesome interview with the folks behind Quake Live, lots of gory details about the infrastructure involved....  Gotta love details like this:

Marty disclosed that what little services were running on the id network during the QuakeLive closed beta consumed at least half of their total bandwidth.

and..

To make sure players have the most optimal ping times, they are working with multiple game service providers such as Hypernia to have servers in the United States, Europe, and Australia for this public beta launch. Timothee Besset, a programmer on the QuakeLive team, is responsible for the backend code that dynamically launches game servers. He has set up the backend to look at different load patterns that will spin up individual game instances on the servers depending on whether a game is needed in a specific location.

Some tidbits about mod support or lack thereof...

Although id Software has no plans to allow user-made modifications to be incorporated into QuakeLive, they have gone out of their way to hire one of the most successful Quake III mod authors to help them with their project. id revealed to QuakeUnity that Kevin 'arQon' Blenkinsopp, author of the popular mod Challenge ProMode Arena (CPMA), has been hired as a contractor on QuakeLive.

..and cheating!  IMO this killed Q3A multiplayer for me at least.  Nothing worse than logging into a server only to get gibbed instantly at every spawn.

The QuakeLive team works with them on a weekly making sure that their work is up to the task, not kicking players than shouldn't be kicked and such. He mentioned that QuakeLive's statistical analysis system will aid them in determining if an individual is using some type of cheat, although he didn't we to go into detail on how they handle it.

Link: QuakeUnity.com - Uniting The QUAKE Universe

...but really, why would you want to! :evilgrin:

Like its not already blocked via most places evil net-nanny software already, but here's a bit of detail on how to put the shackles on....

Your Internet connection is full of software ports, virtual strands isolated for specific communications. Email access, FTP, instant messaging, and other Internet activities default to a certain port. Web traffic uses port 80, but Quake Live requires port 5222 even though it lives in a web browser; just block this port to leave other Internet services unaffected.

Link: Block Quake Live to Boost Office Productivity - Business Center - PC World

No details at this point, but the main site http://quakelive.com/ says "coming at you live 02.24.09 open beta"...

... let the fragging begin!