To be honest I have got some of my friends to play Murnatan and also some people I played Tremulous with in 2009 but the crashing was such a problem, I haven't played in a couple weeks so maybe its fixed by now but it's definitely something that must be prioritised. The crashing kind of drew them away from playing the game because it annoyed them.

While I do agree with the community aspect of having a server list.  Lets be frank, the community is toxic.  This goes for pretty much any competitive online game.  The reason people play games is to challenge themselves; making friends is optional.  Every single competitive game out there has a matchmaking such as League of Legends, Overwatch, CS GO, etc.  It's pretty much required to have a real competitive community.  Even Tremulous with the success it had never really got to the point of tournaments with cash prizes.

The game is what it is, and I do enjoy having private servers to get to know people.  But do not dismiss the idea of ranked matchmaking so easily.  I'm not a top tier player nor do I think I ever could be, but seeing major names battle it out in any sort of tremulousque game would be the dream for me.  With a game like Tremulous where base building, strategy, and twitch gameplay all come together I can only imagine what kind of matches big name teams like c9, faze clan or optic gaming could put together.  With big plays of base moves, pushes, forward bases, end game scenarios, competitive murnitan/tremulous could be even more entertaining to watch than cs:go or lol.  As unlikely as it could be, I think this game has the potential to go so far beyond just a serverlist with ample players in it.

Tbh, my hope is rotacak and co. get bought out by a big name publisher.  They get rich and we get a polished tremulous style game with actual venture level funding.

EDIT:  To address the reason we are struggling right now is that lack of player population is a cascading self perpetuating effect.  No players in the game results in people downloading and joining a game only to realize that there a no players to play with and quitting the game, when they might have enjoyed the game if there were people to play with, causing there to be even less players and so on.  Personally I've tried to get on multiple times the past few days and there was literally no one to play with.  I don't know how this could be addressed other than bots.

c++ is easy UE4 no

Quake Champions is being criticised for not having dedicated servers and a serverlist because that's what formed Quake - communities, servers you'd join and see the people you met before, get to know them, have fun, etc. a "Play" button was never a good idea and isn't going to be.

Also, most people nowdays don't go searching for servers, since most modern games have a matchmaking system. They just wanna click "Play" and have a game to play. Murnatan kinda needs one if it ever hopes to reach a larger audience, but all the other stuff already mentioned should take a much higher priority.