If Team Fortress 2‘s last update cut the fingers off the game’s unruly bots, then Valve have adopted it up by reducing out their tongues. This week’s replace for the venerable hat-blaster has doubled down on muting suspicious accounts, eradicating voice chat from gamers who’ve had their textual content privileges eliminated. But whereas which may maintain the troublesome bots at bay, it appears some unfortunate new gamers have been left and not using a voice within the teamwork-heavy shooter.
This week’s replace comes as one thing of a renewed push to make TF2’s lobbies a bit much less depressing, even when Valve haven’t precisely communicated as a lot. Last month, the scant handful of Valve employees maintaining the violent hat collector ticking pushed an replace to crack down on TF2’s racist bot problem by stopping “certain new accounts” from utilizing the game’s textual content field.
In the patch notes for yesterday’s update, Valve are actually doubling down on that motion (cheers, PCGamesN). On high of being blocked from textual content communication, those self same suspicious accounts have now been locked out of utilizing TF2’s voice chat. In hindsight, it’s type of wild that wasn’t already the case – what’s to cease a muted participant from selecting up a microphone – however truthful play for getting round to it.
Unfortunately, like this mute additionally extends to TF2’s voice instructions – in-game character barks for issues like taunts, therapeutic requests, calling out spies and such. With little to distinguish a respectable new account from a possible nuisance, gamers like Redditor Cool_Doggy have discovered that free-to-play TF2 accounts can now not even say a easy “thanks”. Later feedback in that thread counsel this was to cease bot accounts from flooding each the chatbox and your headphones with noise, even when Valve put these sounds there for good cause.
While it’s good that steps are being taken in opposition to unruly robots, it’s a blunt strategy that’s coming on the expense of recent gamers – people who’ve seemingly now discovered themselves utterly unable to speak with their group. It looks like restrictions are lifted as soon as an account goes Premium (attained by shopping for one thing from the in-game retailer), however in the meanwhile, newcomers could must get used to taking part in Team Fortress 2 with out the teamwork.
At least, till Valve can discover a extra nuanced resolution to their robotic drawback.
