Valve Fixed A 17-Year-Old Team Fortress 2 Bug Involving Pants

Team Fortress 2 launched back in 2007 and since then Valve has continued to update the class-based FPS, though not always as frequently as fans might want. And during all those updates over nearly two decades, a bug involving Blu Team Scout’s pants being the wrong color was never fixed. That changed yesterday.

On October 24, with no fanfare, Valve pushed out a relatively small update for its free-to-play shooter Team Fortress 2. The small patch fixed and tweaked various bugs and mistakes, as you would expect, but buried in the patch notes is one fix that caught the attention of Team Fortress 2's most dedicated fans.

Without any context that might just seem like yet one more tiny bug fixed by Valve, but this has actually been a problem in TF2 since its release. And although fans have pointed it out in the past, it was never addressed. Blu Scout’s pants, for the last 17 years, have been brown, which is incorrect. His pants should be grey, just like all the other classes on the Blu Team. Brown pants are intended for Red Team members. Yet, this mistake has persisted for nearly two decades, despite the evidence.

And then, out of nowhere, Valve fixed it. Now Blu Scout’s pants are grey, which is nice, although it also means a bunch of community-created cosmetics for that character look ugly because they were designed with brown pants.

Why now, after 17 years, did Valve fix this long-known TF2 bug? We don’t know, and because Valve famously doesn’t explain many of their decisions or plans, your guess is as good as mine.

However, I have a theory about this change. Last year, around this same time, Valve fixed a very old bug in Half-Life involving a monster’s animation. I think as the year wraps up, Valve might let devs tinker as the holidays approach, and perhaps that’s why this patch has suddenly appeared. Maybe someone got a bit of free time and used it to hop into TF2 and correct this mistake?

Or perhaps Valve just likes trolling fans? Maybe both! Anyway, Scout’s pants are finally the correct color and we can all sleep easy knowing that the world is a better place.