So i recently came across an issue which is not so obvious to everyone, and thought to share it here.
I created a Firstperson project, created my own gamemode, but basically used ThirdPerson blueprints with it. This worked until a crash, and afterwards no matter what pawn, controller, gamestate, instance etc i used, the player pawn was not spawning, instead always the spectator pawn spawned.
This was resolved with using a fresh copy of a FirstPerson gamemode blueprint.
I had a similar “problem”, this questions/answer helped me a lot.
Perhaps someone find this thread with the same problem. When calling “Event handle Starting New Player” in a child Game Mode, no pawns are spawned. Just buggy spectator. You can call the parent of “Event handle Starting New Player” (Parent: Handle Starting New Player" named in editor) than it works fine. Needed hours to find why no pawns are spawned anymore.
Hope it helps someone.