Team Fortress 2 fans push Valve into releasing another beefy update
Goodbye Iron Bomber, hello updated localization files!
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Team Fortress 2 got anothersubstantial updateon July 7, less than a month after Valve’smost recent attemptto address the game’s bot problem. The patch consists of bug fixes alongside some new server settings, listed in full at the bottom of this article.
The more granular server options are certainly nice. The processing time limiter in particular seems like it could help with malicious users. Otherwise, a large amount of bug fixes is always welcome, and it seems to be helping community morale to see Valve take a more active role in the game again. The nearly 800-comment thread for the update is mostly positive, even if there are a few jokes about how minute some of the tweaks are.
Team Fortress 2 is one of Steam’s top ten games by concurrents; its daily peak when I checked was over 130,000. For years, the game’s been in somewhat of a maintenance mode, with few new content updates, and at the same time there was an uptick in malicious bots joining servers and griefing players with machine-perfect aim. It’s not clear why this problem developed in TF2 of all games, but anecdotally, I can confirm it has been a big annoyance, even if it doesn’t exactly render the game unplayable.
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.May 26, 2022
A boisterous fan campaign seems to have had its intended effect ofbringing Valve’s attention back on TF2, with the company directly acknowledging those efforts and putting out more substantial updates than anything we’ve seen in recent years. It remains to be seen how sustained this newfound support will be, and whether it will adequately address the game’s problems and satisfy its enthusiastic community.
Here are the full patch notes:
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister’s copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he’s not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch.
Amazon’s Mass Effect TV show now in ‘active development’ from the writer of F9: The Fast Saga (the one where a car goes to space)
Take-Two CEO says Grand Theft Auto 6 is on track for ‘fall’ next year, GTA 5 has sold over 205 million, and ‘PC will be more and more a part of [our] business going forward’
New class action lawsuit alleges Intel knew its CPUs were crashing even before they went on sale
