Miscellaneous Knowledge

I run several Left 4 Dead servers which I play on regularly, these are all public servers with unrestricted access. Unlike previous Valve games, Left 4 Dead includes a built in vote kick system, which is sensible since due to the server sizes, it’s unlikely you will have an admin player playing, hence the voting system is used for removing any troublemakers.

However, it is frequently abused, players will randomly votekick another player without warning because they want a friend to come on, without even asking. In many cases, they’ve even votekicked me, the owner and admin.

While they soon realise this is a huge mistake on their behalf (as they become permanently banned from all my servers), it is somewhat annoying to have your gameplay interruped by a votekick.

Thankfully, due to the power of SourceMod, someone has written a plugin that obeys the admin immunity system built into sourcemod – normally used to prevent lower-level admins from abusing higher-level admins. By default, all players have an immunity of 0, as a “Full Admin” I have given myself an immunity of 100. Hence, when anyone tries to votekick me, the vote instantly fails. Not only this, it shows me who it is, for all votes.

By default, the plugin only grants full admins veto ability and displays who is votekicking who. I recommend you edit the /left4dead/cfg/sourcemod/sm_plugin_votemanager2.cfg file as follows; (if it does not exist, create it)

l4d_vote_kick_immunity 1
l4d_vote_log 1

This will turn on the admin immunity system and also log all votekick attempts to the SourceMod log.

Players beware, never kick the admin.