Text chat

General public text chat, involving both RED and BLU players

“

Got anything funny to say about that, funny man? Click to listen — The Soldier

”

The text chat, also simply known as chat, is a communication feature available only in PC versions of Team Fortress 2. It is displayed in the middle left side of the HUD.

There are 3 types of chats: public, team, and party chat. Public chat (default key: Y) is the general chat which shows messages sent by all players of any team and spectators. It also shows notifications of players receiving items, the status of duels, server messages in community servers, etc. Players can send a message only to their team in the team chat (default key: U), messages sent in the team chat are displayed with a team-coloured "(TEAM)" tag. Team chat also displays the voice commands from teammates, prefixed by "(Voice)" in team colour. Messages sent by spectating players are prefixed with "*SPEC*" and their names appear white, while messages sent by dead players are prefixed by "*DEAD*".

The party chat (default key: P) is a special chat, which can be accessed by pressing the Chat button on the upper left side of the main menu. It shows messages sent only by and for party members and party status. Messages sent here are displayed in the tab that opens when pressing said button, but also in the public chat as green text. Messages also play a specific audio cue.

Players can also send messages via the console with the commands say (for public chat), say_team (for team chat), and say_party (for party chat).

Specific players can be muted in the PC version via the main menu by clicking the "Mute players" button near the bottom of the screen.

As of June 16, 2020 Patch, in order to use the public chat in Valve official servers, a player must have a premium account and a non-limited user account on Steam. Players can still use the party chat without restrictions and this restriction does not affect community servers.

Chat filter and restrictions

The user can filter certain entries in the chat by accessing the "Filters" tab in the public chat. The options are the following:

• Joins/Leaves
• Name Changes
• Public Chat (disables messages sent only for all teams)
• Server Messages
• Team Changes
• Achievement Announce

After sending 2 or 3 messages in a row, players must wait 5 seconds to send more messages. The maximum length of a chat message is 127 characters, and any double quotation marks (") is converted to a single apostrophe instead (').

Several slurs and inappropriate words are filtered by the Steam Text Filtering, which can be accessed through the Advanced options; said dialog also allows players to disable public chat altogether.

Update history

April 1, 2008 Patch

• Fixed bad characters in the chat string when achievements are announced in languages other than English

August 13, 2009 Patch

• In-game chat dialog now supports full Unicode characters

December 7, 2009 Patch

• Fixed banned clients being able to spamming^(sic) a server with the "joined" chat text

December 18, 2009 Patch

• Added a new chat message when players craft an item

February 3, 2010 Patch

• Fixed the "tf_teamtalk" server convar not controlling text chat between living/dead teammates

August 30, 2011 Patch #1

• Item found notifications now correctly show up in chat

October 13, 2011 Patch

• Strange weapon ranking notifications no longer appear as a toast popup on screen; they are still present in the chat window

March 22, 2012 Patch

• Fixed a bug that would cause chat-text strange weapon rank up notifications to sometimes display player names as "unknown"

May 10, 2012 Patch

• Added ability for plugin authors to add custom colors in chat messages. Use either:
  • \x07 followed by a hex code in RRGGBB format
  • \x08 followed by a hex code with alpha in RRGGBBAA format

May 17, 2013 Patch #1

• Fixed a chat exploit that would cause other clients to timeout from dedicated servers

October 1, 2014 Patch

• When you mute a player, the mute settings now apply to text chat as well as voice chat. If you want the previous behavior, change convar cl_mute_all_comms to 0.

July 28, 2016 Patch

• Fixed getting a black screen if the chat window was open when the match stats were being shown

November 10, 2016 Patch #1

• Replaced convar tf_teamtalk with tf_gravetalk
  • When enabled, living players can receive text and voice chat from dead players
  • When disabled, living players cannot hear the dead, regardless of team
  • Removes the odd behavior of tf_teamtalk wherein living players were exclusively unable to hear dead players on the other team
  • Defaults to on, except in Competitive matches

October 20, 2017 Patch (Jungle Inferno Update)

• Added a global party chat system that allows party members to chat with each other from anywhere in the game
  • Party chat is printed in the in-game chat interface when in a game
  • Added ConCommand "say_party" (default bind 'p') that allows for party members in a game to chat with other party members using the in-game chat interface (similar to how "say_team" works for chatting amongst your team) and with members not in a game

June 16, 2020 Patch

• Restricted certain new accounts from using chat in official matchmaking modes
  • Work is ongoing to mitigate the use of new and free accounts for abusive purposes
• Added "Enable text chat" and "Enable voice chat" options to the top of the Advanced Options dialog to disable in-game text and voice chat

June 24, 2020 Patch

• Added rate limit checks for in-game text chat

October 1, 2020 Patch

• Added support for Steam Text Filtering for persona names and chat. This is enabled by default.
  • You can update your settings in the Adv. Options dialog
  • You can also update your settings by opting into the Steam Lab

June 22, 2021 Patch

• Removed the disconnect reason from the message when players leave the server

June 21, 2022 Patch

• Fixed an exploit related to clearing the in-game text chat

August 31, 2023 Patch

• Fixed SourceTV not recording in-game chat for Mann vs. Machine defenders

Bugs

• On certain resolutions, party chat shrinks every time a player opens and closes it.
• If a message consisting of the maximum amount of spaces is sent, the next few chat message will appear in full white, rather than in the team colour.

Gallery

• 

  An unused ellipsis bubble was going to be used to indicate typing, similar to the one used in Left 4 Dead.