September 27, 2016 - TF2 Team

An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:

Matchmaking

Players can now form rematches at the end of a Casual match At the end of a Casual match, players will have 30 seconds to opt-in to a rematch If at least 6 players from BLU and 6 players from RED have chosen to rematch, then a rematch will begin A rematch will use the same teams, map and server

Players can now re-queue into Casual Matchmaking during the end of a match Players who decline a rematch or simply don't vote in the rematch voting period will automatically be re-queued

Updated the way XP is earned in Casual matches Players will now be awarded more XP based on their team's performance at the end of a match XP is no longer lost for leaving a Casual match early A breakdown of XP sources is now shown when your XP bar fills up

Casual matches now more strongly prefer to distribute players to teams based on experience, in order to better avoid creating one-sided matches

Casual matches are now more likely to start with fewer than 24 players in lower population game-modes or regions, wherein the wait time for a full match would become excessive The current minimum allowable match size in such situations is twelve players The matchmaker will still attempt to place late-joiners into these matches as they become available

Competitive matches no longer terminate when any player abandons the match Bots will now fill in for players who have abandoned, or temporarily disconnected from, Competitive matches Matches that finish at an advantage or disadvantage (e.g. 6v5 or 5v6, not counting any bots) will now result in larger or smaller skill rating adjustments for disadvantaged wins or disadvantaged losses, respectively Competitive matches that lose more than one player per team will keep the current behavior of ending the match Players who abandon Competitive matches still receive a large skill rating penalty and Competitive matchmaking cooldown, regardless of whether a bot was allowed to take their place

Greatly improved the reliability of client ping estimates when placing users into matchmaking servers The game client now periodically checks in with the matchmaking server network to estimate ping to each region, and feeds the information back to the matchmaking system This should greatly reduce cases of players being placed in regions to which they have poor ping, even when said regions are geographically nearby

The scoreboard now shows the connection status for missing and connecting players