Team Fortress 2 players have been having a hard time enjoying the game lately. Team Fortress 2 has been under assault by bots, which can typically ruin a PvP game in terms of fairness. But these bots are particularly problematic, as they've been spewing hateful homophobic and racist comments in chat.
Developer Valve, who has stopped producing major content updates to TF2 for some time now, has had to step in to try and mitigate the wave of bots. However, its actions are only partially controlling the issue, and are also having a negative impact on innocent players.
While this issue has been going on for months, Valve recently released a Team Fortress 2 update on June 16 to address the problem. Valve has taken action by blocking 'certain' new accounts from using the game's text chat system in official matchmaking game modes, in an effort to keep bots from flooding the chat.
Unfortunately, this has had the unwanted effect of blocking some legitimate new players from communicating adequately with their teams. And to make matters worse, the bots have simply adapted to Valve's efforts. Bots that aren't able to use the chat are finding ways to spam racist and negative messages anyway, by rapidly changing their team names to spell out hateful sentences on-screen.
Valve has noted that it's continuing to work on controlling this issue, so the situation may improve, hopefully in the near future. Until then, players can turn off team name change notifications in their settings, but even that is only partially addressing the issue, as some bots go so far as to use the in-game voice chat to spam vile messages.
All of this is coming during June, an LGBT+ pride month, and while Black Lives Matter protests are continuing throughout the world. Other games and developers have taken steps to crack down on racist comments being made in and around their games, and it's up to Valve to match those efforts. The developer also received criticism, as Valve didn't openly support the Black Lives Matter movement at first, so it has a lot of work to do to make its playerbase happy right now.
Team Fortress 2 is available now for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.
Source: Team Fortress 2, Reddit