What is Competitive L4D2?

What is Competitive L4D2?

What people mean when they talk about "Competitive L4D2" is a modification of the main-game (Server-sided) to provide a more challenging (and in some cases, more fair) experience in the Versus matchmode.
These changes come in various ways, namely:

• Nerfed Survivor Weapons (Limits of Maximum amount of a certain Weapon carried, Weapon Damage/Range Modifications)
• Nerfed Survivor maximum shoves.
• Removal of Survivor Items/Weapons (Pipebombs, Molotovs, Bilebombs, Healthkits, Defibs, Adrenaline, Tier 2 Weapons)
• Static Shotgun Spread (Bullet Spread is no longer random)
• Survivors can shoot while on Ladders.
• Decreased Infected Spawn Timers.
• Removal of Infected Slowdown (Bullets no longer slow down the Special Infected)
• Tanks on every Map (Every player gets to play a Tank, instead of Random selection).
• Tanks can not pass their Tank to another player, they have 2 full controls, after that it becomes A.I.
• Witches on every Map.
• General Bug/Exploit Fixes.
• Map Changes (Added props, different routing through the map, Maximum distance points)
• "Godframe" Control, this decreases the amount of time Survivors are invincible to taking damage, Tank Hittables and Witches will always ignore Godframes and instantly down the Survivor.
• Modification of Water Slowdown, it will no longer affect Survivors if a Tank is spawned.
• Modified Scoring System (I will come back to this later as it needs an in-depth explanation)
• Both Teams find items on the same location, as well as have the Tank/Witch spawn at the same location.
• Ready-up System: All players have to ready-up before the games goes live.
• Pause System: Players are able to pause by typing !pause.

These modifications come in forms of "configs" and there are quite a few different ones, they all differentiate from each other and not everything listed will be exactly the same in each config and might either have different settings or be completely removed/vanilla.

Competitive Servers generally are ran privately, meaning that they're linked to their respective Steam Groups and either do not allow or limit "vanilla" gameplay. (Vanilla meaning that a config is not loaded, plain normal Left 4 Dead 2). These servers typically will not be found when searching for a "Best Available Dedicated" server in the lobby.
You can find and use them by using "Steam Group Servers" in-game or if you save their IPs (listed on their Group) and connect to them manually or with the Steam Server Browser. Another thing to note is that Competitive Servers perform better, as they all run on 100 Tickrate while normal Servers run on 30 Tickrate, meaning everything is much smoother and everything just feels much more responsive to your actions.

Even now, Left 4 Dead 2 still has Tournaments that run on these Competitive Servers and configs, the prize money ranges anywhere between $0~5000 which is an amazing feat, considering everything is organized and setup by the community and there's no sponsors involved whatsoever.

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On this Github alone there's several matchmodes available which all differ in gameplay, scoring mechanics, and map changes. These changes are based off either the public's opinion, the matchmode developer's own vision/experience or by a handpicked group of individuals. Usually it's a combination of all three.

The currently available matchmodes are:

• Promod Elite
• Equilibrium
• Zonemod
• Nextmod
• Apex

You can read more about each individual config in their respective wiki pages.