Team Fortress 2's Latest Update Has Community Optimistic, But Isn't a Magic Fix for Botting Problems

ign.com:

After a series of community protests about the bot-ridden state of Team Fortress 2, Valve has released a new update for the game that has some tentatively hopeful change is coming, even if the patch itself is not a magical fix-all solution.

The update, which was pushed yesterday, includes a number of bugs and exploit fixes, most of which actually have nothing to do with botting. For instance, there's a fix to issues with animations on enemies that only appear during Halloween events and a fix for a years-old bug that occasionally showed placeholder names for players on kill cams and stat screens.

Many of these issues have been around for years and were mostly annoying, but not game-breaking. So their fixes, while welcome, are not exactly profound bot-fighting changes.

But there are a few changes in the update that has the Team Fortress 2 community cautiously optimistic. The biggest change is to the vote system: previously, Team Fortress 2 only allowed one vote to kick a player take place at a time, which made removing multiple bots from matches tedious and time-consuming, especially as they were quickly replaced with more. The new update allows both teams to have a vote running simultaneously, as well as a global vote to kick a player on top of that.

Valve has also removed the ability to change names during a matchmaking game, a feature that bots were exploiting by changing their names to be identical to those of players in the match, often causing inadvertent kicks of real players instead of the bots.

Though small fixes, the Team Fortress 2 community is responding well to the fixes, many of which are to bugs that have persisted for years. But it's not enough to permanently solve the botting problem. While one Reddit thread