[Update #2]: Valve has just unleashed the second round of Team Fortress 2 fixes and improvements. 

[Update]: Team Fortress 2's June 2022 update seems to have solved the bot and cheater epidemic!

If you haven't played Team Fortress 2 over the past few years, that's probably for the best as the once-great FPS has been completely infested by bots and cheaters. They endlessly spam voice lines, annihilate everything in front of them thanks to aimbots, adopt player names to make kicking them harder, and swarm servers in such numbers that actually trying to remove all of them is a Sisyphean task.

In an effort to get Valve to finally do something about this, the Team Fortress 2 community recently staged a peaceful protest. Given how hard it is to get even a single word out of Valve I figured they would stick to the usual routine and not say anything at all, but much to my surprise, Valve actually responded with some good news!

“TF2 community, we hear you!,” reads the brief comment. “We love this game and know you do, too. We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things.”

While I don't expect anything to change in the near future given that this is a complex problem to solve, the good news is that Valve is finally on the case. So with a bit of luck, in a few months we'll not only be able to play Team Fortress 2 in peace, but we could also see a rise in player numbers as those that were driven away due to bots might just return to see what's going on.

Whatever the case may be, here's to hoping Valve's fix ends up being a good one because Team Fortress 2 really does deserve better than this.