Most of this is too late but here we go:
Ditch Ranked Servers
The stats site no longer works so the appeal of measuring and comparing your epenis on ranked servers is now gone.
Evenbalance have dropped support for ET:QW so punkbuster, which is required on ranked servers, is now obsolete and afaik causing lots of problems.
Community Patch/Mod
People aren’t just going to drop ranked servers, the server admins are mainly to blame for this imo, they much rather see their own servers populated rather than the game as a whole, this was shown during the last discussion when hardly any server admin dared make the switch as they were scared they would lose players.
Something that replaces the notion of ranked servers with something that does pretty much the same without any of the tight restrictions could be good for the game.
The first thing this mod would do is replace the ranked server filter with a “vanilla/classic mode” filter, this filter shows servers running the almost the same server config as a ranked server, only with punkbuster removed.
The mod would also include ETQW Pro, again having it’s own filter. Included with the mod would be server configs from all major tourneys.
Other mods could also be included, I don’t think anyone is going to update the other ones out there.
I don’t know if these mods can be added as a gametype or not, I’m not sure how you would seperate them within the same mod.
Packaged with the mod would be every major custom map, decided by the community, this would eliminate the multiple restart problems, removing one of the barriers that people have with custom content in ET:QW. I don’t know if it possible to ‘patch’ a mod in same way the base game can be but if so then updates and new maps could be ‘patched’ rather than client having to re-download the entire mod again.
This patch/mod would also be good opportunity to fix some exploits which I believe the QWTA mod already has like the icarus/door exploit.