The entire community hates it. Why make timing more difficult than it allready is? When even pro's think it's a pain in the ***, how do u think the average gamer considers it? The Q4MAX mod team has refused to change it for some reason... Can u PLZ make the MP counter tikk up or atleast make it optional in your next patch?

-Frustrated Quake fans.

yeah, please give us the option to have the timer counting up, that would be great.

Yes this is VERY annoying. I speak on behalf of alot of gamers here in South Africa, and on international gaming forums who are extremely annoyed by this. If you do choose to time items, a negative timer makes it very hard to time. Now the reason why the choice isnt available by Q4max is very simple, yet mostly illogical. arQon, coder for the Q4max team says, that during a Team DM if a player reads out an item time to a team mate ("Red Armour at 25"), it will cause confusion for players with different timer settings. Now I hardly think that this is a good enough reason to anoy and hamper so many Quake 4 players.

Someone (namely prufrock) on a forum thread on ESreality.com that I made about this topic, made a very good suggestion about how to keep all parties happy. The idea was, that if a player in a Team DM was to read an armour time out to a fellow team mate he could put a flag in front of the time e.g. "Red Armour at %25" (most players use the timing script, so a simple change to this configuration file, *.cfg* would ensure compatibilty). The easiest way to do this, would to have a different flag for which way your counter goes. For example, % for timer counting up, $ for timer counting down. Now when a client's PC sees this in Team DM, it can either keep the time that the team mate sends if the timers are both the same, or flip it around if they aren't (simple maths, 60 - 25 = 35, i.e. flipped around).

I hope this will be changed, it's a very simple problem to fix, yet it means so much to the people that play the game.

I find it staggering the amount of time that has been wasted arguing over this.

IMO it makes no difference whether it goes up or down, you can still work out whatever you need to know.

Why waste our (developers) time implementing the logic, the extra cvar, option in the gui, writing the documentation, when ultimately it makes no difference at all.

If the worst thing about Q4 / q4max is whether it counts up/down, then we should be happy.

I've seen arQon arguing very strongly against this, and I really dont think that it'll get implemented in q4max no matter how much you whine, so I suggest just getting used to it... and also stop wasting developer time going over and over the argument.

so is it more annoying when that little thing is facing left or right?  

cusTom3: I think both ways are annoying, I want it to go up damnit!

you heard him, raven, the entire community wants this, either you make the little goofy dancing guy go up or i want my money back

Errrmmmm..... Quake 4 World, or X-Battle(I don't remember) HAS THE TIMER!

My personal opinion:

Stop item camping and item shopping

If this causes it to be difficult to item shop then God's favor be upon Raven. This kind of rediculous item shopping is what ruined the concept of the quad and pretty much every power up.