[Update]: Valve has just unleashed the second round of Team Fortress 2 fixes and improvements. 

After a recent and surprisingly effective protest, Valve announced that they are working on a solution for the endless plague of bots and cheaters that have come to infest every inch of Team Fortress 2. Given the complexity of the task at hand I figured it would most likely take Valve a couple of months to sort everything out, if not longer, but in a refreshing twist the Team Fortress 2 team has managed to get everything done in under a single month!

Thanks to the freshly unleashed update a variety of exploits have now been patched out, including a particularly silly one where players could use sv_cheats even on secure servers. The update has also made it so players can't just rapidly change their names during a match in order to avoid getting kicked, and most importantly, greatly improved the Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) system's ability to sniff out bots and cheaters.

All of this was apparently so effective that Team Fortress 2 lost around 30,000 'players' immediately after the patch went up! Best of all, with the cheaters gone actual players have started flooding back in and Team Fortress 2 is now enjoying a bit of a renaissance. So if you ever wanted to give Team Fortress 2 a try, or simply dive back in for a bit of a nostalgia trip, this would be the perfect time to do so!

Have fun smacking people over the head with a fish, and if you're interested in the specifics behind the update, you can find everything you need to know over at Steam.