Team Fortress 2, it's fair to say, is getting on a bit. The 14-year-old game remains incredibly popular on Steam, but over the past year it's hit the headlines for the wrong reasons, with bot problems that show no sign of disappearing. (Although we got to witness players conga-ing their way past the bots, at least.)

In any case, it seems the community has finally taken it upon themselves to give Team Fortress 2 a refresh, as a group of modders called Amper Software has started recreating the game in Garry's Mod spiritual successor s&box. The reason for this: they wondered what Team Fortress 2 would look like in Valve's newest engine, Source 2.

"Ever since Source 2 was first mentioned publicly as an engine that Valve was working on, a lot of people in the Team Fortress 2 community have started asking the question: if Valve ever ports TF2 to Source 2, what would it look like? How different gameplay would be? And would TF2 even feel the same?," the team explained in a blog post. "...s&box, the spiritual successor of Garry's Mod made on the Source 2 engine, has been released as part of a dev preview to a group of community members, including ourselves. It, pretty much, like Garry's Mod itself, allows you to build whatever you want using the toolset that it provides. So we've decided to not lose that chance."

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It's no secret that Team Fortress 2 has a bit of a bot problem, but the game also has a community that really enjoys mid-match shenanigans - and the two combined today in one of the funniest posts about TF2 bots I've seen so far.

Reddit user 2Noel posted footage of an Attack/Defend match in which Blu team was pitted against a bunch of bots - normally not great news for those wanting to keep their heads on their shoulders. Yet the team decided to try a different tactic to just charging into battle, instead choosing to conga their way out of spawn and onto the control points. And surprisingly, it worked. Stay tuned for the satisfying bot slaughter at the end of the match:

The question you're probably asking right now is: why didn't the bots shoot the Blu team members? The answer, it seems, is that the bots are programmed to avoid shooting players who are using taunts and emotes. If you look closely at the video, you'll notice that players not engaged in the conga line (such as poor old atomdotdat) are instantly sniped by the bots, while the dancers remain unharmed.

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Valve's 2007 shooter Team Fortress 2 just broke its all-time concurrent players count.

According to Steam's official stats, the multiplayer FPS hit a peak of 151,253 concurrent players on Steam on Friday night.

The previous high was 147,360 concurrent players in December. At the time of this article's publication, Team Fortress 2 had 141,741 concurrent players on Steam.

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Another week, another set of attention-grabbing headlines in video games. Join Eurogamer news editor Tom Phillips, Eurogamer reporter Emma Kent and me in the video below as we run through the news that matters. Bong!

We start with the PlayStation 5's first big update, which comes five months after the console came out. This update finally lets you move games to USB storage - a feature the PS5 really should have had at launch. We chat about why this improvement is so important, but also discuss the state of the console itself as it approaches half a year out in the wild. Is the PS5 where it needs to be? Is it already playing catch-up in terms of features with Microsoft's Xbox Series X? And what do we want next from PS5?

Elsewhere, we chat about Nintendo's latest indie showcase (there's a lot of Fez talk, sorry!), before moving on to the ever-eventful world of Cyberpunk 2077. (Emma's report on what could be DLC for that game is well worth a read.) Can CD Projekt turn Cyberpunk around? The company has vowed to stick with it, at least.

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It's been nearly a year since the bot situation in Team Fortress 2 escalated to a point where Valve had to get involved, but despite those efforts to curb the infestation, the problem has not gone away. Along with bots using game-ruining hacks, bots in casual servers are continuing to use racist usernames and spam voice chat with loud noises. There are now reports that bots are increasingly being used to advertise bots and bot immunity - and disturbingly, that some claim to offer links to child sexual abuse images.

Eurogamer has seen screenshots of bots using Team Fortress 2's chat function to advertise links to ecommerce platforms such as Shoppy, where bot hosters have found ways to monetise their disruptive efforts. Along with offering the option to rent bots, stores are offering the option to purchase "bot immunity" to allow the player to be ignored by that particular brand of bots. It's basically a virtual protection racket.

This seems to have been an issue for the past few months, as posts about bot immunity first appeared three months ago, but reports of these adverts are continue to pop up on Reddit.

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It's almost surprising these measures hadn't already been introduced, but Valve has finally addressed complaints about a swarm of bots invading Team Fortress 2 matches. No, not the ones in Mann versus Machine - racist, hacking, horrible bots.

As highlighted in a report by Kotaku, bots had been flooding servers by spamming the chat with racial and homophobic slurs, and also deploying game-breaking hacks. Players on the TF2 subreddit and Steam forums made dozens of posts to highlight the problem, and in the absence of an official response from Valve, some had even created a "TF2 hacker police" subreddit to document the bots and target them in-game.

Hopefully the vigilante bot squad is no longer needed, however, as Valve has introduced a number of changes aimed to tackle the problem. The patch notes for yesterday's update explain that restrictions will be placed on "certain new accounts" to prevent them using chat in official matchmaking modes, which should make it harder for bots to cause problems before they can be banned. "Work is ongoing" to find further solutions to prevent new and free accounts being used for abusive purposes, but in the meantime, players can now disable text chat and voice chat, and further detail has been added to the Report Player dialog "so players can make informed decisions about who they're reporting".

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Valve has added a tribute to Rick May, the voice of the Soldier, inside Team Fortress 2.

May, who was also the voice actor behind Star Fox's Peppy and his iconic "Do a barrel roll" line in Star Fox 64, passed away aged 79 earlier in April after contracting coronavirus. In February of this year May suffered a stroke and entered a nursing home.

Valve's understated patch notes for its Team Fortress 2 update stated: "Added a tribute to Rick May, voice of the Soldier." But players have found this tribute is fairly extensive, with the main menu given over to Soldier, and memorial statues in the maps. Additionally, players have reported that players near these statues will hear various Soldier lines.

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Half-Life is back, and that's all anyone is talking about. But spare a thought for that other old Valve game, Team Fortress 2.

A cursory glance at the Team Fortress 2 community reveals it's resigned to defeat after a recent report confirmed Valve has pretty much downed tools on the team-based shooter.

In the video below, Valve News Network reports on an interview with veteran Valve employee Greg Coomer, who said "hardly anyone" is working on Team Fortress 2. According to Coomer, Valve is "just going to try and not shut it down or anything". Here's the quote:

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Valve, alongside its business partner in China, Perfect World, has given us an update on the progress of Steam China today, after both companies had been silent on the topic for over a year.

Eurogamer attended the brief presentation, given by Perfect World CEO Dr. Robert H. Xiao in Shanghai, where a small number of local and international press were told the companies were "one more step closer" to launching Steam China, which will be separate from the international version of Steam. A handful of launch games were revealed, including Dota 2 and Dota Underlords. There were no actual launch dates or broader windows mentioned for Steam China itself, mind, nor a look at how that storefront may shape up or any details on its features, barring the fact it'll support VR, multiplayer games, interesting games with "innovative, creative ideas," and "single-player games with abundant storylines". As far as we could tell, none of the non-Chinese launch games had official approval just yet, either.

In Xiao's words, "the Steam China project is undergoing solidly and smoothly" - but what is it, exactly? As it stands, Steam is actually widely available for Chinese players already. As of right now we've tested and confirmed it's possible to buy, download and play games through the Steam store in China as usual, with no issues - and no need for a VPN. Community features, such as discussion forums, are unavailable, but otherwise the platform as it stands still acts as a huge loophole in the Chinese government's strict regulation of games. Where it might take many months of admin and applications for a game to get through the approval process - if it gets through at all - or many revisions to a game's content to ensure it meets the various Chinese standards, that same game can already be bought and played in China, unfiltered, unregistered and unchanged, on regular old Steam.

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UPDATE 7.58pm: As the shadow of hatmageddon continues to loom over Team Fortress 2's trading economy, Valve has taken early steps to prevent players from securing more rare head adornments using the game's current loot box glitch.

In a bid to stop further Unusuals from flooding the market, Valve has now (as detailed by TF2 reddit mod wickedplayer494) disabled the display of Team Fortress 2 inventories on the Steam Community, preventing trades and listings on the Community Market. Player items can, however, still be used in-game.

Valve has yet to issue an official statement on the glitch - or indeed what, if anything, it plans to do to restore order to the TF2 trading economy - but at least the community will be impeccably attired while the whole thing sinks into the mud.

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