Team Fortress 2 Players Are Protesting The Game’s Massive Bot Problem

Team Fortress 2 Players Are Protesting the Game’s Massive Bot Problem The FPS classic’s dedicated player community is begging Valve for answers. + byRebekah Valentine Posted May 14, 2022, 12:46 p.m. On an average day, the IGN news tips line sees a slow but steady stream of messages from folks who want to let us know about something we might report on. Maybe a handful of tips a day. But this past weekend, the line was flooded in just a few hours with over a hundred messages from a group of very frustrated folk: the Team Fortress 2 community. Why were so many of them in our inbox? According to the contents of all those messages, their game has a massive, two-year-long botting problem - and they desperately want Valve’s attention in getting it fixed.

Attack of the Bots While it’s true that all online multiplayer games struggle with botting to some degree, most of the Team Fortress 2 community members I subsequently talked to seemed to think that things got aggressively bad around two years ago, in early to mid 2020. Incidentally, this was around the same time that the Team Fortress 2 source code was leaked. There’s no specific proof that this was the cause of the botting issue, and it may just be a coincidence, but several community members pointed to that period as a tipping point all the same.

Some bots take on the names of other players in the match and then initiate votes to kick the original player, resulting in legitimate players being removed and more bots flooding in. Some legitimate players have complained that they’ve been kicked from matches simply for playing a sniper class, because fellow human players assumed they were a bot. Other players have reported running across bots that cause the server to lag significantly, or simply cause the game to crash if anyone tries to kick them. And none of this is limited to an occasional bot here or there. As Jakob Von Bugmann, a regular Team Fortress 2 player explained to me, there are “people who pay for dozens of their own bots,” flooding servers, grouping up with one another, and overwhelming human players and in-game chat.

Literally Unplayable Having never played Team Fortress 2 before, I decided to investigate the bot problem itself to see if it was really as bad as everyone described to me.

The Human Resistance These infuriating behaviors are impacting more than just a small handful of folks clinging to an old game. Team Fortress 2 is still quite popular despite its age, having broken its concurrent player record just last year and consistently averaging between 70,000 and 90,000 concurrent players every month for the last year. Granted, it’s impossible to say how much of this is inflated due to, well, bots. However, from IGN’s own experience both checking in on existing game communities online, as well as seeing multiple human players struggling alongside us in our own matches, there are clearly plenty of real people still trying (unsuccessfully) to play Team Fortress 2 every day.

Me and thousands of other players have had amazing moments in the game...completely ruined by these uncaring instant-killing nuisances. As Jakob Von Bugmann put it:

[TF2 has] been really important to a lot of people and no one wants to see it in the state that it's in. “First, I'd like to at least see Valve talk about the problem,” SquimJim told me. “Just a blog post letting us know if it's being worked on instead of total silence. At this point even just that would go a long way with the community. Serverlist101 Of course, an eventual update to their anti-cheat to prevent the bots completely would be ideal. In the meantime I've seen some people suggest adding a CAPTCHA system to the game, which would obvious be a little inconvenient for real human players, but at this point I'd take just about anything.”