The Team Fortress 2 community has come together in an attempt to brute force developer Valve into fixing a bot problem that has plagued the hero shooter for years.
Disgruntled players of the near 17-year-old shooter, which remains one of the most-played games on Steam, have taken to user reviews to let their feelings be known about bots. This review campaign has caused Team Fortress 2’s recent reviews user rating to plummet to ‘mostly negative’, with pretty much all the comments complaining about bots.
“It’s time Valve does something about the bots,” reads one review from a user with over 630 hours on Team Fortress 2. “The game has been overrun with people willing to doxx, DDOS, and SWAT anyone who takes action against the problem.”
“The current state of this game is borderline unplayable,” reads another review from a user with over 950 hours. “It is CRIMINAL that Valve has done nothing against this issue, and have continued to profit off of this game.”
“Valve, you’ve got a gem of a game here that has left a mark on the internet culture for longer than I can remember,” reads another review, this time from a user with over 700 hours of game time. “We’re tired of bots running rampant across the casual matchmaking. We want you to step in, we don’t want another update, we don’t want any cosmetics, we want you to #FixTF2.”
Team Fortress 2 is one of the oldest actively supported video games on the market, and remains popular enough to place within the top 10 games on Steam based on concurrent player numbers. However, some players have said this active player count is misleading, with cheater bots filling servers instead. Idle bots, meanwhile, farm Team Fortress 2 for free item drops. Some believe Team Fortress 2 has tens of thousands of bots idling in private servers, contributing towards the impressive player count on Steam.
Frustrating the Team Fortress 2 player base further is the apparent silence from Valve over the issue. The company continues to support the game with events, the latest of which ends on June 30, tournaments, and bug fixes. In April, Valve updated Team Fortress 2 to finally add 64-bit support. But there is no fresh word on the bot problem from the company.
The community has organized an online #FIXTF2 campaign and set up a website that includes a petition with nearly 200,000 signatures. “For the past five years, Team Fortress 2 has become nearly unplayable,” the campaign website reads. “The game’s official servers have been overrun by hordes of cheating aimbots while Valve has remained steadfast in their refusal to adequately tackle the problem. This lack of developer interference has thrown the game into a state of turmoil with seemingly no end in sight.
“Despite being aware of the bot crisis, Valve has instead directed their focus towards other ventures, leaving TF2 with insufficient support in its grave time of need. From the outside, Valve appears to be more concerned with generating millions in revenue every month via in-game microtransactions, rather than maintaining a product that should work as expected.
“There’s no putting it lightly, Team Fortress 2 is in an unacceptable state, and Valve’s apathy in dealing with the issue is nothing short of appalling.”
Valve currently operates Steam, the Steam Deck handheld, various virtual reality initiatives, and on the video game front competitive shooter Counter-Strike 2, MOBA Dota 2, as well as the Half-Life, Team Fortress, and Left 4 Dead franchises. Valve is reportedly working on a brand new MOBA shooter called Deadlock, which it has yet to announce but has suffered significant leaks in recent weeks.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
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