For what it's worth I'm in Hawaii and for the same reason I just put up my own server. Do a search for 'Yogurtland' in the server browser. Pretty much a vanilla server with ns2stats enabled.
Just to chime in, I have this same problem on openSuse 13.1 (KDE desktop)
From steam my screen darkens a little then brightens back up with no error message. From the command line I get
./ns2_linux32: error while loading shared libraries…