To all you naysayers:
Clown, fuct, emu - Don't hate the player, hate the game? Doh.
BeAViS - Yeah, tournies can be a pain to pull off for the reasons you cited.
Clement - I hear ya; abush!
Basically, you guys are 100% correct. Trying to help out an online community is often thankless, difficult, and unappreciated. The worst is when you're actively attacked for trying to contribute to the community. But hey, I know I am preaching to the choir with this.
For me, personally, I have the advantage that I take delight in criticism and enjoy online arguments. I also do not typically seek validation from others so lack of appreciation is not a huge demotivator. Most often, the projects I undertake are done for my own convenience and it so happens that it benefits others as a side effect.
For example, uberPAK/uberSERVER. Why did I spend many MANY hours going through all the official AQMD maps to "fix" them, contact whatever authors I could to find missing sounds and textures, to make sure they were all packaged correctly, etc.? The answer is twofold: I was tired of having my own maps scattered around with broken directory structures and taking up space from redundant texture usage, and I was tired of servers lacking some of the more fun maps and being unable to autodownload the maps from the server. I knew server ops were lazy and so if I could make one large package of pre-made maps, they would be more apt to just unload them all onto their servers and call it a day. Sure, they might not change the map rotation at all, but at least the option would then EXIST in case some day they decided to try some new maps out for the hell of it.
AQ:ETE. There was no other AQ2 variant that was suited to matchplay. AQ:TNG wasn't even the glimmer in a programmer's eye when AQ:ETE came into existence. No, seriously, I think ETE predated TNG by like 3 years or so. And I still like ETE's matchmode abilities better. Since I was more involved in competitive ladder play and clans back in the day, it was in my best interest to help out ETE and help steer development as best I could. This involved feedback from matches, what would help running/refereeing the matches, and trying to get the word out to other server ops and communities to spur adoption of ETE. I think the two things that stifled ETE adoption outside of North America was distrust of the 'yank' in other communities and the fact that you couldn't spam (in my mind) retarded WAV files in-game. Who knows; perhaps if ETE supported that early on, TNG would never have been created. But ETE served its purpose well for the time it was in full swing. I've no regrets.
AQ2 variant dev network. Yeah, I bet no one's heard of this. It was an informal mailing list I kind of ran. Basically, I tried to find out every hack, cheat, and exploit for AQ2 and share it with other active AQ2 developers at the time. The thinking was that the more AQ2 variants that were able to block against, say, the "infinite weapon server crash" exploit, the better EVERYONE's online experience would be. And the less damage one jackass could do. Kind of a behind the scenes thing, it was successful in what I aimed to accomplish.
There's probably some more stuff I've done if I sit around and think about it. But you get the general gist of it. Not many people said 'thanks for making our AQ2 lives easier'. Many people actively attacked my efforts. But hey, it takes all kinds. In retail, for every 2 compliments, I think there are 9 complaints. Not necessarily because retail stores suck, but people are more apt to complain than they are to compliment. So the compliments carry more weight. Same with this online stuff. Sure, maybe you only get 1 thank you per 50 fuck offs, but it's more meaningful than the fuck offs.
I honestly don't have much time for this stuff anymore. But I do what I can.
I've put out feelers to the AQMD blokes to see if their logins are still working. I've put out feelers to the remaining ATeam to see if they would endorse a new AQ2 package at AQ2World. I've put out feelers to see if any of the AQ:Guild content is still floating out there in cyberspace.
I don't know the blokes involved with the model replacement site y'all linked earlier. I know WizardExt from the mapping site that was linked. I can email him sometime. But hey, if any of y'all know those blokes and chat with them, see if they are still around and interested in updating their stuff a bit with new content (provided I can wrangle some new content up). Or point them to this thread and my ramblings and see if they are interested. Most of my 'contacts' are in different circles from where the community now lies. For some of that kind of stuff, you have to help yourselves because I can't help you contact some of these people.
Anyway, there's my semi-daily rambling. Perhaps my next post will be of some other fun topic!
but also, at least for me, because school picked up).
. I am sure things will happen, but i will also give all time so u CAN make things happen.... 
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