Team Fortress 2 aimbots are being quietly banned by Valve
"Accounts dedicated to the disruption of TF2 have been deactivated."
Valve has seemingly purged aimbots in Team Fortress 2.
Team Fortress 2 fans – who've long complained about the prevalence of aimbots cluttering up lobbies in Valve's tentpole shooter game – are reporting "a large ban wave" after a "prominent hoster" confirmed they had been banned.
Whilst fans were careful not to get too excited given there's been no formal word from Valve, Discorder Megascatterbomb said, "The strongest evidence we have of a large banwave is the Steam charts, however the maintenance period may have simply knocked them offline temporarily".
However, since then, plenty of players have noticed an improvement and even newly-created bot accounts are reportedly getting insta-banned.
Interestingly, it seems developer Valve itself is banning people, not its Valve Anti-Cheat software.
"Our team noticed your accounts were involved in majorly disruptive activity in Team Fortress 2. Accounts dedicated to the disruption of TF2 have been deactivated, and accounts used for other purposes have been locked or banned."
"I just had a bot-free game, entirely, was 30 minutes and not a single bot joined or tried to join, it was wonderful," said one happy player.
Team Fortress 2 beat its own concurrent user record last summer, clocking up 258,997 players.
Whilst that may not sound impressive given the PUBG: Battlegrounds' record-breaking peak currently sits at a hefty 3.2m players, it's important to note that even though TF2 is widely considered one of the greatest shooters of all time, it's just about to turn 17 years old.
The spike is likely attributable to Valve's all-new time-limited Team Fortress 2 summer event that introduced several new maps, taunts, effects, war paints, and more.