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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UPDATE 26/10/18: All good things must come to an end, but it seems TF2008's end came particularly quickly, as the mod's newly-approved Steam page has now been removed.

According to an email screenshot shared on the mod's Discord server, it appears Valve has U-turned on its decision to launch the mod on Steam. The reason cited is the modder did not sufficiently prove they were creating "a mod of TF2 and not just repurposing leaked code". The email did not rule out the possibility of the mod returning once the modder had sufficiently demonstrated the code used was not leaked.

It seems modder XYK had other ideas, however, as the TF2008 Discord server has now been deleted. Well, sort of - it's called "Burger" and all the previous comments have been replaced with pictures of food. XYK left the server with a deeply unpleasant parting comment, while footage saved on YouTube shows the mod community go into meltdown following the news the server was to be deleted.

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Despite being released over 10 years ago, Team Fortress 2 still boasts one of the biggest player bases on Steam. Today, the number of players peaked at 54,350 - placing the game at seventh on Steam's leaderboard of most-played games. And behind the player count, there is still a significant esports community organised by a series of leagues unaffiliated with Valve. TF2 players have run a small but passionate competitive community for several years.

Over the past few weeks, however, a darker side of the community has emerged. Several competitive players and community members have reported experiencing a culture of harassment and toxicity. The community members took to social media to reveal harrowing personal stories of racism, sexism, transphobia and sexual abuse. To make matters worse, some professional TF2 players have responded to the social media posts with insults and derogatory terms aimed at the victims. Since the reports of toxicity in the competitive scene emerged, other players have come forward with their own stories, and it seems the problem is pervasive. The affected branches of the TF2 community include the TF2 workshop, Steam comments and public matches in the game itself.

Although many of the competitive leagues have responded with statements, bans and policy changes, some have remained silent on the issue. Players have also reported the toxicity goes beyond the competitive sphere to almost all parts of the Team Fortress 2 community - so the question is, should Valve do more to discourage it?

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Valve veteran Jay Pinkerton has returned to the developer a year after he left the company.

Pinkerton left last June, following other high profile departures from Erik Wolpaw, Chet Faliszek, and DOTA 2 writer Marc Laidlaw.

Now, thanks to eagle-eyed Redditor OWLverlord (via PC Gamer), it seems Pinkerton is back on Valve's staff page, listed under the "Other Experts" category.

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Valve has stepped up its anti-cheat measures and issued almost 95,000 bans in the last week alone.

In July 2017, we reported that on 6th July Valve banned over 40K Steam accounts for cheating, making it the single largest banhammer the company had ever deployed.

Emphasis on "had", though.

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Fortnite is currently the game most associated with meme culture, but back in the day, Team Fortress 2 was responsible for some incredible viral creations of its own. One of these memes, a crustacean sensation known as the Spycrab, became a huge part of the Team Fortress 2 community and was immortalised after achieving official recognition from Valve.

The Spycrab meme first appeared 10 years ago today in July 2008, when players began to notice a mysterious glitch in the Spy model's animation. If a player crouched with the disguise kit, looked up into the sky and walked forwards, their Spy's arms would twist into a pincer formation, while their legs would buckle and appear to walk sideways. Horrifying, yet hilarious.

The first recorded sighting of a Spycrab showed a number of bemused onlookers crowding around a player adopting the Spycrab position. Inspired by the player's name, fans soon began to create posters asking other players to 'save the endangered Spycrab'. As a Spycrab cannot harm people (the player in question is looking upwards), the TF2 community agreed not to kill them in game, and this became a religiously-enforced informal rule. If enough Spycrabs gathered, members from both BLU and RED teams would come together in a peaceful 'Spycrab migration' and walk around together.

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