Team Fortress 2 got another substantial update on July 7, less than a month after Valve’s most recent attempt to 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.

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A boisterous fan campaign seems to have had its intended effect of bringing 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:

Several fixes to address exploits and stability issuesAdded a game server setting, “net_chan_limit_msec”, which allows server operators to limit amount of processing time the game server can spend on processing packets for each client per tick. Clients that send packets causing server CPU processing time to exceed configured number of milliseconds will be kicked from the game server.Added a game server setting, “net_chan_stats_dump” which, when enabled, will dump statistics of each network channel when that network channel is closed. Statistics include messages, bandwidth, and CPU processing time breakdown.Added a game server setting, “tf_fall_damage_disablespread”, to disable random fall damage (default: 0)Fixed not being able to adjust the offset for a cosmetic item’s Unusual effectFixed some players seeing [unknown] for their player nameFixed broken transparency on cosmeticsFixed lag compensation when melee-ing teammatesFixed not being able to hit a player’s hitbox if it extends outside the player’s bounding box during an animationFixed jiggle bones rendering in the loadout and item previewsFixed the Iron Bomber’s projectile collision size not matching other projectile collision sizesFixed ConVar buttons flickering after being clicked to toggle the valueFixed The Shortstop shove showing as self-inflicted damageFixed Mini-Sentry guns not triggering damage alerts in the HUDFixed net_disconnect_reason affecting disconnect messages on the clientFixed Medi Gun charges expiring too early if a server forces add_uber_timeFixed network edicts being used for server-side-only entitiesUpdated mat_picmip to allow values below -1Updated/Added some tournament medalsUpdated the localization filesUpdated Mann vs. MachineFixed not being able to kick SpectatorsFixed bots not displaying the correct namesFixed the loading screen backgrounds on Valve serversFixed Übercharge charge rate and duration upgrade not working for the VaccinatorUpdated Arena modeFixed players being able to late-join the gameFixed players on team Unassigned being able to kill other players