It's time for the latest chapter in Valve's ongoing battle with Team Fortress 2 bots: this week sees a new update that should, in theory, make bot behaviour slightly less annoying.
As detailed on the Team Fortress 2 updates page, TF2 was patched on Tuesday with a number of measures that should limit what bots get up to when in-game. There's now a tool to control how many times players can change their name in a match, for instance, and for public matchmaking it seems this has been set to zero – thus preventing bots from frequently changing their names or mimicking real players.
The update also introduces a grace period at the start of matches to prevent players immediately calling votes, which should put the brakes on bots that are trying to deliberately clog up the vote-kick system. Similarly, players joining an in-progress game will face a cooldown before they can call a vote. Kick votes will also "end early and automatically pass if the vote target leaves the match during the vote".
