Fans call it ‘a good start’
Valve released a new update for Team Fortress 2 Tuesday, nearly a month after a fan campaign orchestrated by the game’s player base brought several debilitating exploits and glitches to the developer’s attention.
In May, Team Fortress 2 fans took to Reddit, Twitter, and Valve’s headquarters to start a “Save TF2” campaign” to urge Valve to act on the increasing number of bots that have plagued the game in recent years. “Not the fun kind [of bots] from Mann VS Machine,” wrote Reddit user diamondDNF. “Aimbots that insta-kill players, spam slurs and copyrighted music in chat, and vote kick all the human players once a lobby has more bots than humans.”
In response, Valve tweeted from the Team Fortress 2 Twitter account for the first time in over two years to announce that improvements were on the way.
TF2 community, we hear you! We love this game and know you do, too. We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things.
The update addresses several exploits used to harass players, including eliminating the ability to enter cheat codes in the game’s developer console on secure servers, removing the ability to change names midgame, and improving the game’s vote system, as well as other quality of life adjustments. General consensus among TF2 players is that Valve’s latest update is “a good start,” addressing some longstanding bugs, but not enough to solve all of the game’s issues.
“These are some great quality of life changes, especially the double vote kick and not being able to change names during a match,” wrote Reddit user dilbert_gaming. “No more worrying about who is the real player and who is the bot that stole their name.”
Only time will tell if these changes will stem the problem of bots in Team Fortress 2, but the fact that Valve has seen fit to actively address the still-popular 15-year-old game is an encouraging sign.
The list of changes from Valve’s patch notes can be read below.
A weekly roundup of the best things from Polygon
Please check your email to find a confirmation email, and follow the steps to confirm your humanity.
Please check your email to find a confirmation email, and follow the steps to confirm your humanity.