A lot of crappy Left 4 Dead servers lurk out in the wilderness, waiting for the l4d lobby system to deliver succulent players into their slavering maws.

In other words, too many of them cause bad lag and/or allow tank spawns way too fucking early.  So I ponied up for a Left 4 Dead server with my brother helping to admin it when I’m asleep or too drunk to be at the wheel of a game server.  The configuration process took a few hours scattered between this morning and last night, and not a little bit of digging.

The important thing to remember about setting up a Left 4 Dead server for versus is that versus isn’t a switch you hit.  What differentiates a versus server from a campaign server is a handful of options: setting the versus maps into rotation instead of the campaign maps (make sure that “vs” is in the mapname somewhere); setting the default map to a versus map (something that the server owner will have to do); and changing the server.cfg to allow players to play as zombies.

Not that big of a deal for the most part, but nobody really documented the process very well.

Happy Holidays to everyone!