I've been playing open arena for a while and trying to get some mods to work with it as well. So I went to
http://ioquake3.org/extras/models/ and downloaded some models, placed them in my baseoa folder, just the .pk3 pak as it is and everything seems to work when I fire it up. But once I connect to a server, it just resets and gives me the original Open Arena models, and if I try to go back and change it during gameplay, it doesn't show me the modded ones.
Am I doing something wrong, or is it because some of the servers are "Pure" servers? Is there anyway to get around this, or could it be a problem with the mods themselves? For example I tried
http://ioquake3.org/files/models2/q3mdl-artemis.zip and it seemed to be okay, but like I said as soon as I connect it resets.. ahh! Help!