Valve have finally taken a stand on the Bunnyhopping issue, though once again in their own way.
Eric Johnson was reported to have visited the #hlds on gamesnet last week to answer questions and stated on the issue of bunnyhopping that Valve intends to remove BH with the next client patch. To my knowledge no further information were given how Valve will achieve this, but apparently Erik said it would have no effect on concjumping. It’s unsure though if the intended fix will have any effect on related movement techniques like gliding and strafejumping.
Of course once more I wonder why we have to learn such things from an IRC log instead of Valve releasing an official note on things they intend to change with a future client patch. PR has never been Valve’s strong side and this is just another incident proving that Valve don’t realize that running the largest gaming platform on the net does also require a bit more mutual information exchange between them and the different communities.
PFL has already decided to ban BH, and I’m sure some other leagues are considering to follow this example as well, but maybe shying away from the disagreements and discussions preceding and following such a decision. But now Valve has provided at least something similar to an official standpoint declaring BH as the exploit it is and therefore as an unfair (and kind of ’against the rules’) movement technique. Still I’d wish Valve would say so in a real statement instead of just declaring it on IRC. With that leagues have the proper argument to go ahead and ban a technique which will be (hopefully ultimately) removed in the near future anyway.
This decision by Valve will have a number of consequences and implications for the TFC community (don’t know about the other MOD’s, I’m sure it will have some impact on CS as well). So why the heck does Valve always shy away from making such statements officially in the first place? They will receive their fair share of hate-mail anyway. It would make a lot of discussions much easier if it was a little clearer which elements of the game were intended or at least accepted by Valve (like cjumping which was not intended, but finally accepted) and which are not.
So BH will be removed in the next client patch.
Now we know Valve for bundling their patches on bugfixes with new content (maps or new features). Maps and new features usually require playtests. Depending on those features a lot of playtests (I just remember how long it took until the 1.1.0.0 patch was finished). While Valve releases smaller server patches once in a while to address bugs which can be fixed server side, client patches are rather rare.
Why does it has to be that way all the time? While I understand that Valve is hesitant to release more patches than necessary (because each patch means to change a working program which could as well introduce new bugs and errors) I don’t quite see why we should have to wait for bug fixes which are ready to be applied until Valve is finished testing their new toys for us (nothing against new features, though).
So why not take the decision of removing BH as an opportunity to release a small patch containing only bug fixes! No new maps, no fancy new features, just a few megabytes of new code to bring the game up to date. I’m sure once the new content is ready to ship there will be enough new bugs which require fixing to wrap up the package. The list on the TFC Reform Project is long enough, I strongly doubt Valve will run out bugs to fix any time soon 
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