Sad state.

[Dreadnaught]

While it's nice to see servers, it sucks to see that they are *ALL* heavily modded. Custom maps are nice every now and then but good god the mod scene is awful.

[Tec]

1. there are many servers that aren't really modded.
2. We have some of the greatest modders, and content creators ever. this was one of the mp games that were the fore-fathers of fps community content creation. your just not looking for the really good ones. there is so many that I understand it may be hard to find ones that are more 'proffessional' like
3. If I remember correctly you can FTP now right? I think the more populated modded servers can actually download at a somewhat decent speed at this rate.

Bonus: I run one of those soft modded servers that only use plugins.. every now and then I will attach one or 2 of **my** maps but they don't get put into the rotation too often

just look for This server : its my "Caliden" server with rankings. unreal://45.59.162.13:7777

[nAnXiety]

I started on UT99 dreamcast. Love Unreal.

[Jeremy]

UT4EVER!

Yeah people really mod their servers, I like vanilla gameplay too or at 110% game speed per the standard on a lot of servers, but I hate waiting for the servers to take a long time to load. It's a bit better these days with broadband though. Just stand up, get a drink while it downloads, and come back and join the next game. If you can find vanilla servers, jump in! I would be down for some scheduled matches to play with people, but UT is doing OK for a 20+ year old game.

[Chillidoge]

I found the "Gibblets" or w/e they're called servers had a minimum of mods applied and it seemed mostly for mm/leaderboard stuff as well as ACE protection and map voting.

Yeah they do have a ton of custom maps, but that's expected for a 20+ year old game. At least the maps for Gibblets servers were tiny downloads that went super fast with the community patch applied.

I'm not affiliated with them or anything they're just the servers I found were the easiest to get into with some mates.