What types of servers does NS2 use?

[COWZYOV]

To me, it looks like it has both "official" and "community hosted" servers; am I mistaken?

Also, how much of an impact/change from vanilla gameplay do I need to worry about when joining a community server? Is it as bad as Counter Strike 1.6? Is there any way to filter out non-vanilla servers? Are there even any active vanilla servers? When am I going to run out of question marks???

[Vitdom]

Yes, earlier the server names were marked with yellow color if they were modded, but I don't know if that exists anymore. Click on a server and you will be able to see their number of mods and a detailed list.

It has had official servers but I believe these were limited by a rent period which has expired now and the number of available community servers of high quality hasn't warranted a new rental period from the developers. To be honest the performance of the official servers weren't exceptional either.

No it's nowhere near CS 1.6 modding, but the most popular mods are NS2+ and other server- and player-experience oriented mods, like mapvoting at the end of each round etc and also balance mods which very successfully balances gameplay based on the latest round statistics.

Vanilla servers are abundant but it is more important to look out for servers with good performance, and most of the time the most popular servers today have good performance. Players earlier tend to ignore server performance more and play anyway on servers with bad performance, claiming NS2 ran awful.