How to lock a Left 4 Dead 2 server via a steamgroup

One of the most frequently asked questions when it comes to administrating Left 4 Dead 2 game servers is how to lock it! By default if you start a Left 4 Dead 2 server up, you’ll find magically people joining the L4D2 server and choosing their campaign. Which kind of defeats the object if you are renting a server for you and your mates, and you want to run it by your rules.

BTW- it’s also quite useful to lock the Left 4 Dead 2 gameserver if you are like me as a gamer- entirely intolerant and incredibly angry of anyone on Left 4 Dead that rambos it by themselves, running off like a noob.

Anyway, back to the Tutorial..

There are two ways of locking a Left 4 Dead 2 server.

NB whatever you do – don’t try and use sv_password – it will break the server horribly

In this tutorial we’re going to tell you how to lock the server if you have your own STEAM group.

Create your STEAM group

Of course, if you already have a group with your friends in, you can use that.

Otherwise, if you aren’t already, fire up and login to STEAM.

Once that has launched

• Click on the community button, which will open a new window.
• You should see a tab for ‘groups’ – click on this.
• This should open a new option – create new group.
• Fill out the details – this is your group, you choose
• IMPORTANT – at this stage you’ll get the ID of your steam group. Make a very careful note of it as you’ll need it in a bit
• Finally invite all your mates to join the STEAM group.

Setting the Left 4 Dead server to be exclusive to this STEAM group

Here goes the config bit.

• Firstly, log into your INX control panel
• Bring up the File Editor
• Edit server.cfg.
• You should see the following lines:

//sv_steamgroup 00000000
// sv_steamgroup_exclusive 1

For the no techy savvy, a couple of things.

Firstly, you made a note of your STEAM group ID earlier. You should remove 00000000 and replace it with your STEAM group ID. This tells the server- ‘Only let people who are in this STEAM group use my server’.

Secondly the // means in server talk ‘ignore this’. So to make those two lines, you need to delete the two trailing slashes (these //). So if your STEAM group ID happened to be 123456789, your game server config should look like this now:

sv_steamgroup 123456789
sv_steamgroup_exclusive 1

NB- remember to remove the // – it won’t work without them!

Once done, save the config.

• Restart the server – as soon as you’ve made these changes restart the server

Now, as long as you did this all right, you should have stopped anyone else but your mates in your STEAM group from joining your server.

Still stuck? Still doesn’t work?

• For any comments or suggestions- or have we missed something? Please leave a comment below
• You get it but you’d like to know more? Please visit our game server forum – there’s a specific Left 4 Dead 2 section
• Need help fast? For official support, please visit our support desk.