I recently started playing around with a public arena server, which I wanted to behave as much as possible as a etf2l server, i.e. pure, no crits, no damagespread, etc. So I took the etf2l.cfg as a base and customized settings for Arena public.

Doing this I ran into a very strange problem. The server would suddenly start kicking all players or move them into the spectator slot.

I commented out settings in the cfg (divide&conquer) until I found the culprit, if you use these two together, a vanilla arena server (no plugins) starts acting oddly:


tf_arena_use_queue 0
mp_stalemate_timelimit 0

The first one isn’t in etf2l.cfg and is supposed to disable the Arena sitout. The second one is in etf2l.cfg and I’m not sure if it’s supposed to do anything, since mp_stalemate itself is already disabled.

Anyway, use this combination on an Arena server and all players will be kicked once the round starts…