I was playing last night and saw acouple people with brightskins... yet I never downloaded this 'mod'.  Hmm.

Still has not broken #17 in MP stats on  Gamespy.  Even the game engine this was suppose to replace, Q3A is still in #10 spot.

This isn't really a good engine for fast paced multi though. This isn't 'quake 4, new engine zomg', it's Q4 'here we farmed out the single player and the multi is q3 with a graphically demanding engine that has realistic shadows'

Anyway. Wish they'd say something. Like when is the sdk coming out. Needs more grapple.

It's ravens fault.  When new blood come into the FPS genre the first thing they play is FFA.
The simple fact is even on a low detailed config with shadows/bumps/ off etc the game still runs crap.  Therefore, players find it hard to aim get pissed off and don't bother.

I released some FPS friendly maps for doom 3 and someone has also done this for Quake 4 and the differences are enourmous.  By tweaking a few of the lights on the levels huge performance gains can be had, but Raven don't want to do that for some mysterious rea$on.

If they choose NOT do this, should they include an cautodownload feature in the patch they'll probably find that these new FPS maps are what everyone is going to be playing.
It's simply too intensive and I have a 3.4 AMD 6800 gt, 1024 ram that should be more than enough to play FFA/TDM/CTF in 8 player etc, but its not, aso what chance does the average consumer have, on yesterdays technology such as a 9800 pro.

The reason why the servers are empty is because Raven did a bad job on the Multiplayer part.

The game does not at all run stable in terms of framerate. The framedrops in certain maps are rediculous.
People with High-end pc's are just capable of playing it (not smooth) but the casual gamer with a med-end pc will not be to satisfied about how it runs in MP.

I think this is the biggest problem, people just don't wanna play with bad framerates, and not everybody has big high-end pc's.

Another reason could be the lack of some good official maps. It feels like they rushed the MP of this game. Ofcourse there are some good maps in it, but its way to less. The game should have been released with about 10 DM, 10 1v1 and 5 CTF maps or something like that. They should have at least tried to get some of the singleplayer theme's in the MP, and thats where u can clearly see that this game is hurried.

BTW these days u cannot release an hardcore FPS shooter without the implementation of brightskins etc. Ofcourse somebody will make them once more but common dudes how blind are the developers these days.

Anyway I really like the game, if the fps would be stable and there would be some good maps this one is a topper.
I will play it anyway, because its quake and it plays like quake.

I don't think its just totally FPS.  When Quake 3 came out I was working with about 25 FPS.  Yes I think maps are a part of it too, some of the remakes are worthless and a waste of time.  
The thing that irritates me the most is how limited I am with my cfg compared to Q3 and I hope all of these concerns are fixed in the next patch.  Or at least a good portion of them.

RAVEN LISTEN TO WHAT WE ARE SAYING!!

Overall I like Quake4 MP and enjoy it very much, physics/gameplay seems perfect..just everything else seems poor.  Performance and extras particulally.