There is a huge Quake mapping community that has been consistently producing amazing new maps, map packs, and full mods.

    * https://www.quaddicted.com/  
    * https://www.slipseer.com/  
    * Quake Mapping Discord where all this goes down https://discord.com/invite/f5Y99aM

What's a good entry point if one wants to get started playing? Acquire Quake (1? 2?) on Steam and then server browsers just work as-is?

You use ironwail (https://github.com/andrei-drexler/ironwail), and start downloading and playing maps from the sites above :).

https://discord.com/invite/eu9B2Jv - Quake for newbies

https://discord.gg/EyPV44hpPz - Quake 1 community

I'm just looking for some text that explains how to do it, not to join a community. But thanks! :)

I still play Quake Live, and I can confirm that we are all still playing the same 5 maps.

"Almost Lost" and "Campgrounds" are brilliant works of level design art. Why bother playing any other map?!

Great game and it is still amazing to me how after all these years I am still finding new moves or nuances of the physics engine to learn and practice.

Don’t you mix up „Almost Lost” with „Lost World”? qztourney6 is kinda linear and rail heavy. And wasn’t in standard map pool too long. But I admit, I had a lot of fun playing 2v2 there!

And an even larger Doom community. I took part in NanoWADmo last month, the map making month. There are hundreds of hours of top-tier map content out there, a huge number of "megawads" (32 map packs). Anything by skillsaw is great, and no end in sight is pretty special too imo