Team Fortress 2 Bug Fixed 10 Years Later

Whether you know it or not, if you've played Team Fortress 2, you've probably had to deal with this particularly nasty glitch—after all, it's been part of the game since its 2007 launch.

A few weeks ago, YouTuber Nicknine and Reddit user Sigsev discovered a bug that knocked Team Fortress 2's hitboxes (the system that determines where a character is vulernable to attack) out of whack. Basically, if a Team Fortress 2 player starts the game as a Scout, Heavy, or Sniper character and then switches to one of the game's six other classes (something that can happen fairly often), then the Team Fortress 2 server gets confused about which set of hitboxes the character is using. As a result, what the player sees and what the server and the player's opponents see is different, leading to situations where shots that shouldn't land do, which can result in some pretty cheap deaths.

Even worse, Nicknine and Sigsev think that the bug has gone unaddressed for almost 10 years—until now, that is. Buried in Team Fortress 2's latest patch notes is a fix for "an animation bug that would cause the client and server hitboxes to become out of sync," which should end the problem permanently. On Reddit, Sigsev notes that the solution was "basically a 1-line code fix," but admits that "knowing which one line of code is missing, and where, is the difficult part."

Team Fortress 2 is the sequel to one of the original character-based multiplayer shooters, and continues to receive praise for its bright and colorful art design and deep, engaging gameplay. As in Overwatch, Team Fortress 2 players can choose between different characters, each of whom has his or her own strengths and weaknesses and plays a different role during combat. Unlike Overwatch, Team Fortress 2 doesn't cost anything to download, making it one of the best free-to-play games on the market.