In April, casual matchmaking in Team Fortress 2 fell victim to a "lagbot" invasion, resulting in a sudden and ugly spike in disconnections and server crashes. Shortly after the issue came to light, Valve released an update that seemed to fix the problem, and for a while it did.

As Kotaku reported last week, a new type of bot had appeared on the TF2 scene, causing a new type of headache: spambots, which were flooding in-game chat with everything from general trolling to outright racism. The situation was so serious that some players set up a "TF2hackerpolice" subreddit to track and report bot activity.

It is hoped that the new update will put a stop to, or at least slow down, the latest round of this nasty bot. According to the patch notes, the update places chat restrictions on "certain new accounts" in the official matchmaking mode and adds an option to disable in-game text and voice chat in the "Advanced Options" menu. The player report dialog will also be more detailed, "allowing players to make informed decisions about who to report."

It's too early to say with certainty how effective this update will be in quelling the noise, and it's only a matter of time before someone figures out a slightly different way to annoy and anger players with bots. as Kotaku notes, it's not just a simple bot attack There's more: bot makers and those who try to stop them are clashing outside the game.

Nonetheless, it is encouraging that Valve is actually taking steps to address this issue. The full update patch notes are as follows: