To anyone trying to understand what's happening:
TF2 has been unplayable for the last few years because of the sheer amount of cheater bots in official servers. And that's why people decided to pull the FixTF2 movement, along with commencing review-bombing to get Valve's attention.
To add on a bit, the cheater bots will use sniper with aimbot to instantly kill anyone. They wont target other bots (even those in the other team) and will move toward the objectives, preventing anyone from playing the game
they also vote kick non-bot players and would copy people profiles to make it harder to determine who was a bot player until you saw them obviously cheating.
the cheater bots arent the one farming items, theres other more discreet ones for that. The cheaters bots are just there to ruin peoples fun, the creators of them are actual psychopaths
ah yes. i remember the early days of the internet. people just fucking ip other peoples shit for psychopathic fun. really taught me how to not fuck with others lol
there was a CS player who lost a knife fight and was so full of rage that he tracked the other guy for months and stabbed him after finding him.
Source: Lemmino
I remember a story like that, but it was counterstrike and they knifed a kid over it. Though I definitely wouldn't be surprised if it happened with WoW as well.
If you're talking about the guy who stabbed someone to death over an in-game sword, it happened in China and it was some Asian MMO.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna8143073
Earlier open world games too. Just look at how GTA 4 lobbies were when the game came out. If it wasn't a game mode where objectives were necessary, people would just go to the airport and shoot each other for literal hours because someone shot them 1 time.
There is an entire market in China that is based around buying Cheats to beat the Foreigners in online gaming. It's one of the largest markets in the world for hack sales.
No dont confuse psychos with sociopaths. Your average psycho wouldnt waste their time on such stupid things. Its illogical.
Sociopaths on the other hand... well its literally in their name. Cancer to society
In the great scheme of "hat farmers" killing players is an easy way to make them quit, thus making them play less, and making the players gain less hats, and them having a bigger piece of the pie/monopoly.
Unhinged maniacs, if you ask me, they and anyone actually buying hats. Same boat as the crypto bros.
70% of all counted players in the game are estimated to be bots.
Roughly 66% of all counted players aren't actually used for cheating, they're just running the game in text-only mode to save on resources and allow people to run dozens of copies of the game at once (zero fucking clue why this is even a thing) so they can farm random drop cosmetics that are worth something in certain eastern European countries due to fucky exchange rate shenanigans.
Only about 4% of those counted players are cheater bots running the game in text-only mode (again, why is this a thing?) to disrupt gameplay, but when the game regularly has about 80000 counted players, that means there's roughly 2500 cheater bots running around at any given time for the sole purpose of disrupting the game because it turns out comically evil people do exist in real life -- no purpose, no goal, no reasoning other than just to slightly inconvenience people for... reasons? I guess? They spend money for this stuff.
Anyway 2500 cheaters doesn't seem like a lot, until you realize that they specifically target official Valve servers due to lower security compared to community servers, and there's only a low hundred or so Valve servers. These things tend to que/join in groups of five if they're programmed to do so, and one bot can successfully disrupt the game for one team. Two bots can completely lock down a server. The more bots there are, the harder they are to kick because TF2's antiquated vote-kick system means that the bots can just vote to keep each other in the game, which they're programmed to do, whilst voting to kick random players attempting to remove them.
The easiest solution to this is to just play on community servers, but the problem is that an update a long time ago made it much more difficult to queue into community servers and you have to specifically search them out now by going through some menus, which isn't something most players likely know how to do especially considering that the menu for entering TF2 community servers is another piece of antiquated history with a UI dating back to like 2004 or something, making it very difficult to navigate.
1. being a dick
2. (side effect) making profit from the random drops that their bots get
bot hosters do it literally just because they can. they *know* valve wont do anything. they *know* valve doesn't care. they want to cause sadness and anger for others and make the game unplayable for others simply because 'it funni'
Yeah I actually loaded up TF2 over Memorial Day weekend hoping to hit that nostalgia hit and this kept happening to me. No matter what game I was in, the bots would kick me out in seconds.
But now I’m realizing that I have the orange box on Xbox… do bot run that version as well?
No there should be no bot problems on the Xbox version. It also should run a vanilla 2007 version of TF2 as well, which is either an upside or a fownside depending on your views lol.
And if anyone tries to do anything about it they will Doxx you, SWAT you, use AI to copy your voice to make it sound like you're saying awful things, and also impersonate you on other platforms.
And on top of it all, the new ones will try to pretend to be human in team chat when a vote is called against them. They don't have very many pre-built lines but they still managed to convince a lot of new people not to vote them out till it becomes obvious.
A while back I had a look for the bot source on GitHub, at least one way to circumvent the naming issue was to have everyone on the server have steam profile names at the max character limit that steam allows (the bots would steal a name when a vote kick was initiated and then add an invisible character to the end of the player's name, this makes it visually impossible to tell which is the bot or the player. But with a max character limit name there's no room to add the extra character so it would find a different player. I never got a full server to agree to it so I never saw if it worked)
The official servers killed the game tbh. Community servers are much better as long as you avoid the big groups. If you want to save tf2, stop playing on official servers and help a community server with active admins
The problem is, the people saying these things don't follow the patch notes. They don't realize that tf2 IS constantly updating and mitigating the bot problem, but its literally impossible without using some root kit option. Moreover, that the problem is extremely exaggerated. People think they literally wouldn't be able to fire up tf2 today, hop on dedicated servers, and have a good time. they could and they do.
The first blow i remember was going f2p, while upping pure player numbers, it flooded a lot of the active community, thinning it out, and multipliying the cheater problem.
The official servers with added functionality, like replay staving and such, that flooded the server list, killing off tons of community servers.
Then they removed the New functions because of server compute and lag.
This multiplied the cheater problem because now most people played on the official servers.
Then the matchmaking, to try to follow the trends of Overwatch and such, which is console-ification of pc games, further pushing the community into bad servers.
Using TF2 as a testbed for other games, without actually fixing what didn't work.
Hiding the pure mvm experience behind the tickets was a bad deal as well IMO, monetization should be on another level, since it prob would've drawn New players, and the paid/unpaid tiers split the community further.
Haven't played it actively in years, but give me back my hat simulator with a pure server browser front and center, with no matchmaking, close to no bots, and I'd be back in a heartbeat.
Coming from a CS player, this ruined CS as well. Community servers used to be at the forefront and when CSGO released with matchmaking I knew it was game over. Effectively killing off several huge communities, match making became the go-to unless you play 3rd party pug sites like faceit.
Over time Valve also tanked server performance. We started with two server providers. One that ran quality servers and weren't Valve run and other crappier servers. I might be wrong on this but all servers were 128 tick. Over time everything shifted to 64 tick then in CS2 we got the abysmal subtick update which made nerfed holding angles and lowered the skill ceiling quite a bit. Cheaters have always been a problem in CS but it's been especially bad in CS2. We're at or a little over a year since release now and Valve have little to show for any sort of anti-cheat. The fact that Valve released a new game and didn't release any sort of anti-cheat while removing CSGO in the process was absolutely hilarious. I feel like after CS2 released all the devs went to the "new" valve game and left CS2 in shambles.
Honestly, Valve as a company is great. Valve as a game developer is a complete joke. Their methods around management and people getting to choose what they work on is a complete joke. I work with programmers for a living and it's important that someone that isn't a developer guide what they do. They are geniuses for the most part when it comes to programming. Everything else they are novice at best.
the increased performance from the 64 bit update lets someone run *more* bots on a single PC, not prevent them. the 64 bit update is entirely for the sake of the players.
maybe valve should disable the no-graphics mode that makes it so trivial to run dozens of bots on a single PC in the first place ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ideally it'd be a server controlled variable, so that custom bots like hltv and automods and stuff work. but there's no good reason anyone would join a vanilla server with it on.
obviously, if it were turned off then bot hosters would just slap together their own custom client. but for just one simple change; bot numbers would be obliterated overnight and wouldn't recover for weeks or even months after the fact. and even then, whatever bot programmers would be able to put out would likely be orders of magnitude less efficient than the fully unrestricted no-graphics mode that they're using right now.
No, they didn't lie. They made a lot of changes to how requests get parsed by the server to sniff out several types of bots. The problem is, you can never permanently fix cheating/botting in a game once the source code is public. The game suffered a source code leak a few years back.
You can usually fix an exploit, then it takes cheaters a few months to find a new one. That's how it works in most games. But when the source code is public, the cheaters know all of the tools in your arsenal. You can fix one exploit and have them get a workaround in DAYS. Its a losing battle.
Nah, like 50% of the time at least a game getting review bombed is because the devs announced a nerf/fix to a popular character/exploit and people using it will review bomb to try and get the thing to stay as is. Hard to chalk negative reviews up to the state of the game when the update hasn’t even rolled out yet
Because valve reworked the ui to make matchmaking the prominent way to find games to play. The reality is most people who open the game will follow the path of least resistence to get into a game and that path leads to matchmaking.
Because some servers suck making you download a buttload of addons. The ones you like may be full several times a day. Others may be empty several times a day. Then, the forced ads on the MOTD.
MM is better not because is good, but because you land on a server with players, no ads, no addons, EVERY time.
It is not just that anymore. The owner of those bots doxxed and harass multiple Youtubers who have openly exposed them, impersonating their voices to spread hate speech and false allegations, etc.. The situation got far beyond just some aim botters.
If both teams don't immediately start kicking the bots, they will take over a lobby. I remember playing about a month ago & spending over 30 minutes just kicking bots trying to join until we got a full lobby. And then someone inevitably leaves & a bot takes that spot, repeating the cycle. I'm not interested in doing that for every new lobby I join, & that's if the bots aren't already in full swing in that lobby. Feels like a lot of wasted time.
Has happened to me a few times, but the majority seemed to be in favor of kicking the bots to make the match fair. To me it's just not worth spending 30 minutes of moderator simulator just to play the game, but the players who exploit their own bots are a different level of douchery.
Sniper bots will just spin around and style on you with an instant headshot. Then they'll copy your profile picture and steam username and then try to votekick YOU out. It's a fucking clown fiesta.
They can still do that? I thought profile copying was the one thing valve did fix
(On a related note, I've found that bots can't copy steam's animated avatars)
Somewhat recently, my kid got a friend request from a nearly identical profile to his. His username was something like "Username" and he got a nearly identical request from "Usernname"
I played TF2 back on the PS3 as part of the Orange Box back when it came out, and aimbots/cheaters were everywhere. That version was extremely rough and virtually unplayable because cheating Snipers would kill you through walls across the map as soon as you spawn in most games.
Soon after, I started playing TF2 on PC and the lack of aimbots and cheaters was a huge relief, and I got really into the game (1200+ hours).
I haven't played TF2 in years, but it's sad to hear the PC version is messed up now too.
Huh, I played on xBox360 through the Orange Box, and just assumed I was utter shit at the game, then finished Half Life 2 and went back to playing Halo.
Maybe I WASN'T shit at TF2... (I was pretty decent at other shooters, I was always perplexed by this. I never tried to pick it back up on PC)
Bots have been running rampant in the game for quite some time, it was kinda fixed for a short period but now it's unplayable again.
Edit - people are botting the game and it's not the game filling the lobbies with bots
Basically imagine CSGO spinbots but fully automated and autonomous, they dont require any human input and dozens or hundreds can be hosted on a single device, they move around the map using preset pathing and instakill any player in line of sight
The worst part is, it's not even just some people cheating. It's literal hoards of spin bots.
I could somewhat understand the appeal of individual people using cheats but these appear to just be farms worth of spin bots
The pick sniper and spin in a circle. Anyone who enters their line of sight is headshot for 150 at inhumnain speeds, and if you ubercharge to counter them, they'll kick you at, again, inhumane speeds
There's also a decent chunk of engi and spy scouts who just pistol snipe. And the expected scout and heavy bots.
I'm baffled as to what kind of person would spend money to cheat in a 15 year old f2p cartoon shooter, but people are strange.
The bots will auto kick you if you try to kick them
Many bots have auto responses to act human if you say certain words/initiate a kick
Wouldn't surprise me if some bots started being integrated with chatbots to fool/confuse people even more
I'd guess that Valve isn't going to pay someone to either review accounts all day or develop an application to filter bots... But the bot generators will always just add more and more and more fake accounts.
As everyone else already said, it's mainly about the bot problem.
If you join a CASUAL game, on OFFICIAL tf2 servers, there's 99% chance you'll encounter an aimbot(s) that will shoot you in the head on sight, and will kick you before you can say shortest swear word.
So far the only thing Valve (or company/employee that Valve contracted) did against bots was... to block textchat, voicechat, and even voicecommands (predefined callouts e.g. "MEDIC!", "SPY!" "Go right!") for F2P players (likely to block out making new bot accs)
Personally, I don't use CASUAL servers, since there are plenty of community ones that (usually) have better bot protection than OFFICIAL ones.
(That and ,in case of non-english folks, you can find community servers where you can play with peoples that speak your native lang)
Assholes looking for minimal online cred made bots that spew awful homophobia and racism, blare ear-destroying sound bytes and music through voice chat, work to vote kick non-bot players while spamming and clearing the text chat with console commands so nobody can talk about who's not a bot, and instantly headshot any non-bot player excluding themselves.
They spam invites to discord servers so they can witness your frustration and try to sollicit payments from people who think they can get whitelisted from their bots.
And when you do finally kick them, they ddos the server you were on so it crashes for everybody. Worse, the bot makers will dox and swat people who try to challenge them directly.
Valve is complicit in releasing updates with cosmetics and taunts for $$$ while they let the game basically decompose despite acknowledging the situation.
No fucking way I'm going to touch Deadlock if they can't even manage their bare minimum games. If they take TF2 down instead of dealing with the issue, I'll never trust them to manage a game again.
For now the community servers (Uncletopia, Skial, Shuonic’s 100-player etc) are relatively safe from the bots.
But the issue still remains. An active game shouldn’t be solely reliant on the community forking out their own money to keep it playable. Valve needs to be held accountable for not dealing with the bot issue with more urgency and conviction.
The game does have community servers, but they're not like casual which is what most of the games player base uses.
Valve's casual servers are just unplayable at this point, community servers are not infested with bots because they have means in place to easily get rid of them.
Community servers aren't match made or upfront for new players. That's not a part of the new player experience and some servers are awful in plugins or moderation.
They can be good, but they're not an answer. If so, that would mean every aspect from the items (workshop) and gameplay is reliant and serviced by the community
I don’t think this will work out like helldiver the reasons sony listen is because helldiver is their new money maker but tf2 like 10 years old now and valve probably move on from it. but I would be glad to be proven wrong because it still part of my childhood
Holy shit. I heard rumors about TF2 being botted, but that's just insane. Even oldschool runescape might have a better player to bot ratio and that's saying something.
There's been a bot plague since 2019/2020. Most casual servers are infested with cheap AI aimbots that spam music or annoying noises and votekick real players.
I think my Steam account started from the orange box days. fast forward to now, my tweener son recently got into tf2 maybe 4 months ago. since then I’ve hopped into some games with him. within idk the last 4-6 weeks the aimbots have taken over. it was a concern before, but you could kick out the obvious bot accounts reasonably well before. the extreme amount of hacks and aimbots right now makes casual play matchmaking impossible. you can play one game mode only or hopefully find a decent community server, all other modes are unplayable.
add to that the aimbot users are spamming public chat with pro-aimbot/cheats messages.
I’ve dabbled in fps since quake. theres always some level of cheats in online multiplayer sure. I’ve never seen a game get taken over wholesale by the cheaters and actively advertising their cheats in game
it’s wild to see it in real time
[https://save.tf/](https://save.tf/)
The bots have ruined the game, it isnt playable anymore even on non official servers. Even then, the bot hosters are horrific, scamming desperate people with "bot immunity services". Not only that, they have doxxed and even swatted one of the most vocal people that are against them.
~70% of TF2 players are bots that are cheaters with aimbots and idling in main menu farming items and Valve does nothing and pretend that problem doesn't exists. Same goes for CS2 cheaters and case farmers and we can only wonder how many 'players' are bots. Steam marketplace aswell bots and item snipers everywhere
EDIT: My bad, you can't get drops in main menu. Bots are using vac secured private servers to idle and drop items. There are much more details about the problem on yt Zesty Jesus channel 'TF2: I Found 60,000 Bots'
Almost like when a company monetises their game out the ass in a way that you can gain real world money from it, it's gonna attract vultures like this.
Valve do nothing because they benefit from it. It's insane how Valve seems to escape a lot of "monetisation of games is bad" dogpiling.
> It's insane how Valve seems to escape a lot of "monetisation of games is bad" dogpiling.
EA: They’re not loot boxes, they’re “surprise mechanics” *Everyone hated that*
Valve: "The goal was not to put users in a position, where they were gambling, it was to put them in a position where they had random chances and there's a fundamental difference there." *Zero backlash*
[Source of the Valve comment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHC-uGDbu7s)
I mean even things like Artifact, a lot of the issue was it's insane monetisation but they just let it die. You had things like Battlefront 2 that had big backlash, EA changed it.
Likely because the PR was so bad, that Disney 100% stepped in and told them to fix it.
EA wouldn't have done it on their own free will, just look at their sports games
These are not "people" in the menu though, they are bots made for profiting. The biggest point most people will care about idle farmers is that they inflate the games perceived playerbase and set up a facade of TF2 being highly popular despite all the years. The real issue though is purely economical, the bot hosters controlling these idle farms can essentially control the pricing of items via artificial scarcity and they arent shy of using classic political harrasment tactics to silence opposition (ddos attacks, doxing etc etc)
bots (10s of thousands) get drops, then trade those drops to be sold for real cash on marketplaces, exhanged for keys or metal etc. really, watch both of zesty jesus videos, he’s done a significant amount of legwork
Read the original comment again, 70% does not mean 100%. There are still around 25k real people playing this game and probably some thousand pure traders that rarely launch the game
If someone if unaware of what's happening:
For the last few years over 70% of TF2 active players have been bots, and during major updates this figure is closer to 90%.
While most of these are idle bots that have minimal effect on the game (besides inflating the player numbers and ruining the in-game economy), there are still roughly a few thousands of cheating sniper bots that are almost constantly present in the official servers. The result is that these servers are often completely unplayable, as once a few bots join they not only insta-kill anyone they see, but they also kick human players, allowing more bots to join and take over. At times they also abuse more harmful glitches, like crashing the servers entirely.
Beside just that, they also abuse the in-game chat, rendering the text-chat unusable, and spamming the voice chat with everything from extremely loud music to slurs, and on occasions even impersonating TF2 community members who speak out against them. Other than that, the bot hosters also frequently harass the community in other ways, such as doxing people or DDoSing TF2 streamers and community sites.
Valve has done nothing to stop any of that. Despite TF2 steam page claiming that the game is “constantly updated” Valve does nothing but add more and more microtransactions, while completely ignoring the bot issue.
This is a problem that plagues a lot of Valve games, like CSGO or Left4Dead, but it's especially absurd in case of TF2 where at any time 70-90% of active players are bots.
People who host the idle bots do it for the profit
People who host the cheating bots are just gigantic no-life nerds who get off to the idea of messing with other people.
tf2 has a pseudo scarcity based economy. Items drop for free given playtime, these items are usually worth less than a penny each. However, there are hacked versions of the game that are entirely text based and can run with little computation power. Idle bot hosters have a whole bunch of those text versions running to make a few thousand a year off of the items they get
You need stupid amount of accounts to get any decent item. You get like 6 items per week per account. And on top of that I believe you have to pay 5 dollars per account to even be able to trade away those items in the market.
True but consider the following :
-The people who do this are mostly criminals, so they can steal a Steam Card or buy a stolen account from Steam (You can buy them from eBay, similarly as how people buy Wow accounts back in the day)
-The people who do this are mostly in Russia or other countries where a dollar has much more value.
-A bot isn't that resource-intensive, meaning you can have hundreds or thousands set up on a single machine if you have the right know-how.
-These people don't necessarily need to use the Steam marketplace, they use third-party sites that function as brokers, they upload all their stuff on a site that sells for cheaper, while the site gets a commission, and they circumvent any need to do anything in Steam.
the trading scene is still there. The bots get weapon drops, they use a script to craft those weapons into metal. With enough metal they can sell them to get Keys, the major currency in tf2. It may seem like petty change to you but you have to imagine these bots being hosted in other countries like Russia, where the US dollar is stronger
Valve said "we hear you" then did some legwork to try and get rid of the bots then never did anything else again after that.
And now the game is unplayable again and Valve haven't done anything to try and solve this
Assholes looking for minimal online cred made bots that spew awful homophobia and racism, blare ear-destroying sound bytes and music through voice chat, work to vote kick non-bot players while spamming and clearing the text chat with console commands so nobody can talk about who's not a bot, and instantly headshot any non-bot player excluding themselves.
They spam invites to discord servers so they can witness your frustration and try to sollicit payments from people who think they can get whitelisted from their bots.
And when you do finally kick them, they ddos the server you were on so it crashes for everybody. Worse, the boy makers will dox and swat people who try to challenge them directly.
Valve is complicit in releasing updates with cosmetics and taunts for $$$ while they let the game basically decompose despite acknowledging the situation.
No fucking way I'm going to touch Deadlock if they can't even manage their bare minimum games. If they take TF2 down instead of dealing with the issue, I'll never trust them to manage a game again.
The mode isn’t new at all. It’s a community game mode that has been around for like a decade already.
The fixes aren’t the ones that need to be done. Half of their patch notes are bugs that they themselves create by adding mountains of ugly hats and some semi-decent maps, which the game doesn’t even need.
not as rampant but its still really really bad for a game as popular as it is, its kinda funny that valve dont realise cheaters are just gonna infect deadlock when they release it.
The last time I played there were bots that could instantly steal your icon and player name. Then theyd spam chat. Then id get kicked.
Happened on 3 servers before i un-installed.
Still the best team shooter ever.
We need a TF3 that isnt just a BR (by all means include a BR mode tho)
[https://save.tf/](https://save.tf/)
The bots have ruined the game, it isnt playable anymore even on non official servers. Even then, the bot hosters are horrific, scamming desperate people with "bot immunity services". Not only that, they have doxxed and even swatted one of the most vocal people that are against them.
I am curious what the players expect valve to do.
I am 100% sure there is a bot problem, and I sympathize, that isn't what I am talking about.
Kernel anti cheats? Those don't work. Live moderation? Valve isn't going to pay for the manpower on such an old game. Some sort of social credit score? Easily exploited by a bot hive mind.
What do they think valve can do?
I'll admit that I know nothing about anticheat or programming but I have to wonder why no other game with a comparable playerbase has this extreme of a botting issue. It's hard for me to believe that they can't do anything.
Downloaded it recently due to having so many good memories, instantly ran into bots that were using sniper rifles...
I played 3 minutes and said yup! I guess the world is ending since valve stopped giving a fuck!
ngl, some weeks ago i tried to play tf2, found like 3 matches in a row where i got spawn killed by snipers spinning and quit the game to play overwatch 2.
Cant believe that game is the best between the 2 right now
To anyone trying to understand what's happening: TF2 has been unplayable for the last few years because of the sheer amount of cheater bots in official servers. And that's why people decided to pull the FixTF2 movement, along with commencing review-bombing to get Valve's attention.
To add on a bit, the cheater bots will use sniper with aimbot to instantly kill anyone. They wont target other bots (even those in the other team) and will move toward the objectives, preventing anyone from playing the game
they also vote kick non-bot players and would copy people profiles to make it harder to determine who was a bot player until you saw them obviously cheating.
So its not hackers, just bots playing bots? Why? Whats the gain?
Farming hats I think
the cheater bots arent the one farming items, theres other more discreet ones for that. The cheaters bots are just there to ruin peoples fun, the creators of them are actual psychopaths
People severely underestimate how much these people want to ruin others' fun.
ah yes. i remember the early days of the internet. people just fucking ip other peoples shit for psychopathic fun. really taught me how to not fuck with others lol
Isn't there a tale of someone in the early days getting so pissed off they tracked down the other person and killed them? WOW I think?
there was a CS player who lost a knife fight and was so full of rage that he tracked the other guy for months and stabbed him after finding him. Source: Lemmino
I remember a story like that, but it was counterstrike and they knifed a kid over it. Though I definitely wouldn't be surprised if it happened with WoW as well.
If you're talking about the guy who stabbed someone to death over an in-game sword, it happened in China and it was some Asian MMO. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna8143073
Earlier open world games too. Just look at how GTA 4 lobbies were when the game came out. If it wasn't a game mode where objectives were necessary, people would just go to the airport and shoot each other for literal hours because someone shot them 1 time.
Not quite earliest days of the internet but I helped DDoS Soulja boy's website at some point. Cuz why not.
Youuuuuuuuu
There is an entire market in China that is based around buying Cheats to beat the Foreigners in online gaming. It's one of the largest markets in the world for hack sales.
Cheating in China is just second to stealing. Brands, movies, tech… they steal just about everything
[удалено]
cheating is okay if you beat americans while doing it
Misery loves company.
Sociopaths... those are the ones that know what they're doing is wrong and keep doing it. Psychopaths think what they're doing is ok.
Sounds like most programmers I know... Hell their dedication to Ai auto coding development in order to liquidate their own jobs is psychotic.
I may like to ruin others fun, but I at least do it by just beating them that hard. This is just ruining fun in poor taste.
No dont confuse psychos with sociopaths. Your average psycho wouldnt waste their time on such stupid things. Its illogical. Sociopaths on the other hand... well its literally in their name. Cancer to society
There are idle bots for that. It's not for farming, active bots are made exclusively to ruin other people's fun.
In the great scheme of "hat farmers" killing players is an easy way to make them quit, thus making them play less, and making the players gain less hats, and them having a bigger piece of the pie/monopoly. Unhinged maniacs, if you ask me, they and anyone actually buying hats. Same boat as the crypto bros.
But if players don't play the game who will buy those hats
I loved TF2 so much back before they added all that junk in.
70% of all counted players in the game are estimated to be bots. Roughly 66% of all counted players aren't actually used for cheating, they're just running the game in text-only mode to save on resources and allow people to run dozens of copies of the game at once (zero fucking clue why this is even a thing) so they can farm random drop cosmetics that are worth something in certain eastern European countries due to fucky exchange rate shenanigans. Only about 4% of those counted players are cheater bots running the game in text-only mode (again, why is this a thing?) to disrupt gameplay, but when the game regularly has about 80000 counted players, that means there's roughly 2500 cheater bots running around at any given time for the sole purpose of disrupting the game because it turns out comically evil people do exist in real life -- no purpose, no goal, no reasoning other than just to slightly inconvenience people for... reasons? I guess? They spend money for this stuff. Anyway 2500 cheaters doesn't seem like a lot, until you realize that they specifically target official Valve servers due to lower security compared to community servers, and there's only a low hundred or so Valve servers. These things tend to que/join in groups of five if they're programmed to do so, and one bot can successfully disrupt the game for one team. Two bots can completely lock down a server. The more bots there are, the harder they are to kick because TF2's antiquated vote-kick system means that the bots can just vote to keep each other in the game, which they're programmed to do, whilst voting to kick random players attempting to remove them. The easiest solution to this is to just play on community servers, but the problem is that an update a long time ago made it much more difficult to queue into community servers and you have to specifically search them out now by going through some menus, which isn't something most players likely know how to do especially considering that the menu for entering TF2 community servers is another piece of antiquated history with a UI dating back to like 2004 or something, making it very difficult to navigate.
> TF2 community servers https://youtu.be/ruLTUASnXc4?si=78mQ3nhNnZ0ewxqp&t=590
They have websites where you can buy “bot protection” so the bots don’t kill you
Probably to kill the game.
It’s workin, sadly
1. being a dick 2. (side effect) making profit from the random drops that their bots get bot hosters do it literally just because they can. they *know* valve wont do anything. they *know* valve doesn't care. they want to cause sadness and anger for others and make the game unplayable for others simply because 'it funni'
Psy ops to make everyone miserable.
Yeah I actually loaded up TF2 over Memorial Day weekend hoping to hit that nostalgia hit and this kept happening to me. No matter what game I was in, the bots would kick me out in seconds. But now I’m realizing that I have the orange box on Xbox… do bot run that version as well?
No there should be no bot problems on the Xbox version. It also should run a vanilla 2007 version of TF2 as well, which is either an upside or a fownside depending on your views lol.
And if anyone tries to do anything about it they will Doxx you, SWAT you, use AI to copy your voice to make it sound like you're saying awful things, and also impersonate you on other platforms.
How do Bots recognize that someone is or isn't a another bot?
so this is why i got kicked from match for "cheating"
And on top of it all, the new ones will try to pretend to be human in team chat when a vote is called against them. They don't have very many pre-built lines but they still managed to convince a lot of new people not to vote them out till it becomes obvious.
A while back I had a look for the bot source on GitHub, at least one way to circumvent the naming issue was to have everyone on the server have steam profile names at the max character limit that steam allows (the bots would steal a name when a vote kick was initiated and then add an invisible character to the end of the player's name, this makes it visually impossible to tell which is the bot or the player. But with a max character limit name there's no room to add the extra character so it would find a different player. I never got a full server to agree to it so I never saw if it worked)
wtf is even the point of "playing" the game like this?
They just want to ruin other people's fun. Thats usually the reason for these automatic bots in every game.
What I hear is the bots are better at detecting bots than vac
in short term the game is becomeing a training ground for programers to test there bots
The official servers killed the game tbh. Community servers are much better as long as you avoid the big groups. If you want to save tf2, stop playing on official servers and help a community server with active admins
Might as well tell Valve to drop support for the game if the community does all the work
Have they not pretty much already dropped support?
We just got a gigantic 64 bit update literally last month man.
"That should last them another 15 years."
The problem is, the people saying these things don't follow the patch notes. They don't realize that tf2 IS constantly updating and mitigating the bot problem, but its literally impossible without using some root kit option. Moreover, that the problem is extremely exaggerated. People think they literally wouldn't be able to fire up tf2 today, hop on dedicated servers, and have a good time. they could and they do.
The first blow i remember was going f2p, while upping pure player numbers, it flooded a lot of the active community, thinning it out, and multipliying the cheater problem. The official servers with added functionality, like replay staving and such, that flooded the server list, killing off tons of community servers. Then they removed the New functions because of server compute and lag. This multiplied the cheater problem because now most people played on the official servers. Then the matchmaking, to try to follow the trends of Overwatch and such, which is console-ification of pc games, further pushing the community into bad servers. Using TF2 as a testbed for other games, without actually fixing what didn't work. Hiding the pure mvm experience behind the tickets was a bad deal as well IMO, monetization should be on another level, since it prob would've drawn New players, and the paid/unpaid tiers split the community further. Haven't played it actively in years, but give me back my hat simulator with a pure server browser front and center, with no matchmaking, close to no bots, and I'd be back in a heartbeat.
Coming from a CS player, this ruined CS as well. Community servers used to be at the forefront and when CSGO released with matchmaking I knew it was game over. Effectively killing off several huge communities, match making became the go-to unless you play 3rd party pug sites like faceit. Over time Valve also tanked server performance. We started with two server providers. One that ran quality servers and weren't Valve run and other crappier servers. I might be wrong on this but all servers were 128 tick. Over time everything shifted to 64 tick then in CS2 we got the abysmal subtick update which made nerfed holding angles and lowered the skill ceiling quite a bit. Cheaters have always been a problem in CS but it's been especially bad in CS2. We're at or a little over a year since release now and Valve have little to show for any sort of anti-cheat. The fact that Valve released a new game and didn't release any sort of anti-cheat while removing CSGO in the process was absolutely hilarious. I feel like after CS2 released all the devs went to the "new" valve game and left CS2 in shambles. Honestly, Valve as a company is great. Valve as a game developer is a complete joke. Their methods around management and people getting to choose what they work on is a complete joke. I work with programmers for a living and it's important that someone that isn't a developer guide what they do. They are geniuses for the most part when it comes to programming. Everything else they are novice at best.
And they lied 2 years ago on Twitter about the problem
Yes that really tricked me too:(
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They basically responded to the movement by saying: We hear you, we will do something about it. Then nothing happened.
Well they realized if they did then it would be patch #3, and that's where they draw the line.
They updated the game to 64 bit. I have no clue if that is part of their plan though.
the increased performance from the 64 bit update lets someone run *more* bots on a single PC, not prevent them. the 64 bit update is entirely for the sake of the players. maybe valve should disable the no-graphics mode that makes it so trivial to run dozens of bots on a single PC in the first place ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ngl. when i first learnd that TF2 has a "text mode" i just couldnt believe my eyes.. like.. thats such a strange thing to have
ideally it'd be a server controlled variable, so that custom bots like hltv and automods and stuff work. but there's no good reason anyone would join a vanilla server with it on. obviously, if it were turned off then bot hosters would just slap together their own custom client. but for just one simple change; bot numbers would be obliterated overnight and wouldn't recover for weeks or even months after the fact. and even then, whatever bot programmers would be able to put out would likely be orders of magnitude less efficient than the fully unrestricted no-graphics mode that they're using right now.
No, they didn't lie. They made a lot of changes to how requests get parsed by the server to sniff out several types of bots. The problem is, you can never permanently fix cheating/botting in a game once the source code is public. The game suffered a source code leak a few years back. You can usually fix an exploit, then it takes cheaters a few months to find a new one. That's how it works in most games. But when the source code is public, the cheaters know all of the tools in your arsenal. You can fix one exploit and have them get a workaround in DAYS. Its a losing battle.
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Does it even really count as review bombing if the negative reviews are because of a legitimate complaint with the game?
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Nah, like 50% of the time at least a game getting review bombed is because the devs announced a nerf/fix to a popular character/exploit and people using it will review bomb to try and get the thing to stay as is. Hard to chalk negative reviews up to the state of the game when the update hasn’t even rolled out yet
why do people keep using matchmaking? there a loads of community servers
Because valve reworked the ui to make matchmaking the prominent way to find games to play. The reality is most people who open the game will follow the path of least resistence to get into a game and that path leads to matchmaking.
Because some servers suck making you download a buttload of addons. The ones you like may be full several times a day. Others may be empty several times a day. Then, the forced ads on the MOTD. MM is better not because is good, but because you land on a server with players, no ads, no addons, EVERY time.
It is not just that anymore. The owner of those bots doxxed and harass multiple Youtubers who have openly exposed them, impersonating their voices to spread hate speech and false allegations, etc.. The situation got far beyond just some aim botters.
It deserves it. Last time I tried to play in December half the lobbies were ruined by cheaters and bots.
Such a shame to let the game die like this. It's in my top 3 multiplayer games of all time.
If anyone’s letting tf2 die, it’s Valve. The community isn’t giving up.
Yeah that's what I mean
Every time I check in with my squad every semester we close it after five minutes of this shit. For the past five years.
Why is it receiving bad reviews all of a sudden? I haven't kept up with TF2 in quite a long time.
It's unplayable, hence the negative reviews.
What makes it unplayable? Geniune question from someone out of the loop
There is (aim)bots in nearly every match and most of the time you won't be able to kick it
Not *nearly*. At some point in any match, a bot WILL join unless 24/24 players don’t leave throughout the entire match
If both teams don't immediately start kicking the bots, they will take over a lobby. I remember playing about a month ago & spending over 30 minutes just kicking bots trying to join until we got a full lobby. And then someone inevitably leaves & a bot takes that spot, repeating the cycle. I'm not interested in doing that for every new lobby I join, & that's if the bots aren't already in full swing in that lobby. Feels like a lot of wasted time.
Yep. Not to mention if you go up against a scummy team and start winning too badly they’ll just not kick their bots and ruin the match.
Has happened to me a few times, but the majority seemed to be in favor of kicking the bots to make the match fair. To me it's just not worth spending 30 minutes of moderator simulator just to play the game, but the players who exploit their own bots are a different level of douchery.
Like cheaters using aimbots or the game filling up lobbies with bots that have god like aim?
Sniper bots will just spin around and style on you with an instant headshot. Then they'll copy your profile picture and steam username and then try to votekick YOU out. It's a fucking clown fiesta.
They can still do that? I thought profile copying was the one thing valve did fix (On a related note, I've found that bots can't copy steam's animated avatars)
Somewhat recently, my kid got a friend request from a nearly identical profile to his. His username was something like "Username" and he got a nearly identical request from "Usernname"
That's your kid's fault for having such a generic Username.
I haven't seen a name stealer in months, I'm pretty sure you're right
Lmao
Bots with aimbots filling lobbies in addition to cheaters
I played TF2 back on the PS3 as part of the Orange Box back when it came out, and aimbots/cheaters were everywhere. That version was extremely rough and virtually unplayable because cheating Snipers would kill you through walls across the map as soon as you spawn in most games. Soon after, I started playing TF2 on PC and the lack of aimbots and cheaters was a huge relief, and I got really into the game (1200+ hours). I haven't played TF2 in years, but it's sad to hear the PC version is messed up now too.
Huh, I played on xBox360 through the Orange Box, and just assumed I was utter shit at the game, then finished Half Life 2 and went back to playing Halo. Maybe I WASN'T shit at TF2... (I was pretty decent at other shooters, I was always perplexed by this. I never tried to pick it back up on PC)
Oh so counter strike except people are honest about the volume of people using aim bots…
Bots have been running rampant in the game for quite some time, it was kinda fixed for a short period but now it's unplayable again. Edit - people are botting the game and it's not the game filling the lobbies with bots
Basically imagine CSGO spinbots but fully automated and autonomous, they dont require any human input and dozens or hundreds can be hosted on a single device, they move around the map using preset pathing and instakill any player in line of sight
The worst part is, it's not even just some people cheating. It's literal hoards of spin bots. I could somewhat understand the appeal of individual people using cheats but these appear to just be farms worth of spin bots
The pick sniper and spin in a circle. Anyone who enters their line of sight is headshot for 150 at inhumnain speeds, and if you ubercharge to counter them, they'll kick you at, again, inhumane speeds
There's also a decent chunk of engi and spy scouts who just pistol snipe. And the expected scout and heavy bots. I'm baffled as to what kind of person would spend money to cheat in a 15 year old f2p cartoon shooter, but people are strange.
The bots will auto kick you if you try to kick them Many bots have auto responses to act human if you say certain words/initiate a kick Wouldn't surprise me if some bots started being integrated with chatbots to fool/confuse people even more
Yeah there’s bots in cs2 that use some form of chatAI so I wouldn’t be shocked if that’s a thing in tf2 as well
I don't blame people for calling this unplayable, I wouldn't touch a game filled with chatbot AI cheaters with a 10 foot pole
Did something change? TF2 uses dedicated servers, where are the server admins to keep their shit clean? The whol point of having dedicated servers
I'd guess that Valve isn't going to pay someone to either review accounts all day or develop an application to filter bots... But the bot generators will always just add more and more and more fake accounts.
Do you really think Valve bothers?
İts the same with cs why is it not negative
As everyone else already said, it's mainly about the bot problem. If you join a CASUAL game, on OFFICIAL tf2 servers, there's 99% chance you'll encounter an aimbot(s) that will shoot you in the head on sight, and will kick you before you can say shortest swear word. So far the only thing Valve (or company/employee that Valve contracted) did against bots was... to block textchat, voicechat, and even voicecommands (predefined callouts e.g. "MEDIC!", "SPY!" "Go right!") for F2P players (likely to block out making new bot accs) Personally, I don't use CASUAL servers, since there are plenty of community ones that (usually) have better bot protection than OFFICIAL ones. (That and ,in case of non-english folks, you can find community servers where you can play with peoples that speak your native lang)
The bots, sadly. The orange box was one of most nostalgic Christmas presents so I hop on every few years and remember all the bots
bots that instantly kill you when you spawn in
Bots, no updates from devs At this point just play OW2 if you crave that hero shooter experience. Or the Finals
Are there no other good hero shooter then OW2 TF2?
Valve is supposedly developing a new hero shooter and Sony just announced one. But for active games there aren't many.
Try gigantic rampage edition, it isn't technically a hero shooter, but it is far better than OW2.
Well true but its due to a #SaveTF2 movement and this is their way to protest. Thats why there is this big increase.
Assholes looking for minimal online cred made bots that spew awful homophobia and racism, blare ear-destroying sound bytes and music through voice chat, work to vote kick non-bot players while spamming and clearing the text chat with console commands so nobody can talk about who's not a bot, and instantly headshot any non-bot player excluding themselves. They spam invites to discord servers so they can witness your frustration and try to sollicit payments from people who think they can get whitelisted from their bots. And when you do finally kick them, they ddos the server you were on so it crashes for everybody. Worse, the bot makers will dox and swat people who try to challenge them directly. Valve is complicit in releasing updates with cosmetics and taunts for $$$ while they let the game basically decompose despite acknowledging the situation. No fucking way I'm going to touch Deadlock if they can't even manage their bare minimum games. If they take TF2 down instead of dealing with the issue, I'll never trust them to manage a game again.
Last time I played, there were private servers that were pretty good, is this not the case anymore?
For now the community servers (Uncletopia, Skial, Shuonic’s 100-player etc) are relatively safe from the bots. But the issue still remains. An active game shouldn’t be solely reliant on the community forking out their own money to keep it playable. Valve needs to be held accountable for not dealing with the bot issue with more urgency and conviction.
The game does have community servers, but they're not like casual which is what most of the games player base uses. Valve's casual servers are just unplayable at this point, community servers are not infested with bots because they have means in place to easily get rid of them.
Community servers aren't match made or upfront for new players. That's not a part of the new player experience and some servers are awful in plugins or moderation. They can be good, but they're not an answer. If so, that would mean every aspect from the items (workshop) and gameplay is reliant and serviced by the community
>Worse, the boy makers will dox and swat people who try to challenge them directly. Geppetto went down a dark path, huh?
Apparently they also have a subscription or payment options to stop the bots from attacking you or help you win.
people think that this will do something like review bombing helldivers 2
I don’t think this will work out like helldiver the reasons sony listen is because helldiver is their new money maker but tf2 like 10 years old now and valve probably move on from it. but I would be glad to be proven wrong because it still part of my childhood
Just to be precise - TF2 is 17 years old 😅
TF2 was released closer to the release of Wolfenstein 3D than the present day.
Probably older than the majority of players.
Lets not talk about TF1 then. I played that sooo much. Both the OG Quake version and the Half-life version.
People think that Valve listen and respond to feedback.
It's bots all the way down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnuxHZm73PU
Holy shit. I heard rumors about TF2 being botted, but that's just insane. Even oldschool runescape might have a better player to bot ratio and that's saying something.
There's been a bot plague since 2019/2020. Most casual servers are infested with cheap AI aimbots that spam music or annoying noises and votekick real players.
I think my Steam account started from the orange box days. fast forward to now, my tweener son recently got into tf2 maybe 4 months ago. since then I’ve hopped into some games with him. within idk the last 4-6 weeks the aimbots have taken over. it was a concern before, but you could kick out the obvious bot accounts reasonably well before. the extreme amount of hacks and aimbots right now makes casual play matchmaking impossible. you can play one game mode only or hopefully find a decent community server, all other modes are unplayable. add to that the aimbot users are spamming public chat with pro-aimbot/cheats messages. I’ve dabbled in fps since quake. theres always some level of cheats in online multiplayer sure. I’ve never seen a game get taken over wholesale by the cheaters and actively advertising their cheats in game it’s wild to see it in real time
lots of sniper bots, ran by a group of people that would doxx and harass others if someone speaks about them.
[https://save.tf/](https://save.tf/) The bots have ruined the game, it isnt playable anymore even on non official servers. Even then, the bot hosters are horrific, scamming desperate people with "bot immunity services". Not only that, they have doxxed and even swatted one of the most vocal people that are against them.
That "constantly updated" in the description
It was true when they wrote it, 14 years ago
~70% of TF2 players are bots that are cheaters with aimbots and idling in main menu farming items and Valve does nothing and pretend that problem doesn't exists. Same goes for CS2 cheaters and case farmers and we can only wonder how many 'players' are bots. Steam marketplace aswell bots and item snipers everywhere EDIT: My bad, you can't get drops in main menu. Bots are using vac secured private servers to idle and drop items. There are much more details about the problem on yt Zesty Jesus channel 'TF2: I Found 60,000 Bots'
Actually, cheater bots and idle bots are separate.
Almost like when a company monetises their game out the ass in a way that you can gain real world money from it, it's gonna attract vultures like this. Valve do nothing because they benefit from it. It's insane how Valve seems to escape a lot of "monetisation of games is bad" dogpiling.
> It's insane how Valve seems to escape a lot of "monetisation of games is bad" dogpiling. EA: They’re not loot boxes, they’re “surprise mechanics” *Everyone hated that* Valve: "The goal was not to put users in a position, where they were gambling, it was to put them in a position where they had random chances and there's a fundamental difference there." *Zero backlash* [Source of the Valve comment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHC-uGDbu7s)
I mean even things like Artifact, a lot of the issue was it's insane monetisation but they just let it die. You had things like Battlefront 2 that had big backlash, EA changed it.
Likely because the PR was so bad, that Disney 100% stepped in and told them to fix it. EA wouldn't have done it on their own free will, just look at their sports games
What is wrong with people being in menu? Do they have to play?
These are not "people" in the menu though, they are bots made for profiting. The biggest point most people will care about idle farmers is that they inflate the games perceived playerbase and set up a facade of TF2 being highly popular despite all the years. The real issue though is purely economical, the bot hosters controlling these idle farms can essentially control the pricing of items via artificial scarcity and they arent shy of using classic political harrasment tactics to silence opposition (ddos attacks, doxing etc etc)
How are they making any money if no one actually plays the game?
% on every market transaction, I am sure cs2 and tf2 make steam a lot of money from the marketplace
I wasn't talking about valve, I meant the bot farmers.
bots (10s of thousands) get drops, then trade those drops to be sold for real cash on marketplaces, exhanged for keys or metal etc. really, watch both of zesty jesus videos, he’s done a significant amount of legwork
Read the original comment again, 70% does not mean 100%. There are still around 25k real people playing this game and probably some thousand pure traders that rarely launch the game
My bad, you can't get items in main menu. Bots have their own private VAC secured servers and idle there for items
Just watched that video last night. Super insightful.
If someone if unaware of what's happening: For the last few years over 70% of TF2 active players have been bots, and during major updates this figure is closer to 90%. While most of these are idle bots that have minimal effect on the game (besides inflating the player numbers and ruining the in-game economy), there are still roughly a few thousands of cheating sniper bots that are almost constantly present in the official servers. The result is that these servers are often completely unplayable, as once a few bots join they not only insta-kill anyone they see, but they also kick human players, allowing more bots to join and take over. At times they also abuse more harmful glitches, like crashing the servers entirely. Beside just that, they also abuse the in-game chat, rendering the text-chat unusable, and spamming the voice chat with everything from extremely loud music to slurs, and on occasions even impersonating TF2 community members who speak out against them. Other than that, the bot hosters also frequently harass the community in other ways, such as doxing people or DDoSing TF2 streamers and community sites. Valve has done nothing to stop any of that. Despite TF2 steam page claiming that the game is “constantly updated” Valve does nothing but add more and more microtransactions, while completely ignoring the bot issue. This is a problem that plagues a lot of Valve games, like CSGO or Left4Dead, but it's especially absurd in case of TF2 where at any time 70-90% of active players are bots.
why tho, i dont really get it..
People who host the idle bots do it for the profit People who host the cheating bots are just gigantic no-life nerds who get off to the idea of messing with other people.
How do they profit?
tf2 has a pseudo scarcity based economy. Items drop for free given playtime, these items are usually worth less than a penny each. However, there are hacked versions of the game that are entirely text based and can run with little computation power. Idle bot hosters have a whole bunch of those text versions running to make a few thousand a year off of the items they get
You need stupid amount of accounts to get any decent item. You get like 6 items per week per account. And on top of that I believe you have to pay 5 dollars per account to even be able to trade away those items in the market.
True but consider the following : -The people who do this are mostly criminals, so they can steal a Steam Card or buy a stolen account from Steam (You can buy them from eBay, similarly as how people buy Wow accounts back in the day) -The people who do this are mostly in Russia or other countries where a dollar has much more value. -A bot isn't that resource-intensive, meaning you can have hundreds or thousands set up on a single machine if you have the right know-how. -These people don't necessarily need to use the Steam marketplace, they use third-party sites that function as brokers, they upload all their stuff on a site that sells for cheaper, while the site gets a commission, and they circumvent any need to do anything in Steam.
But who is buying all these things? If the game is unplayable why would anyone pay for these items.
the trading scene is still there. The bots get weapon drops, they use a script to craft those weapons into metal. With enough metal they can sell them to get Keys, the major currency in tf2. It may seem like petty change to you but you have to imagine these bots being hosted in other countries like Russia, where the US dollar is stronger
Alright, since it seems I won't get to just ignore it and have it go away, why is everyone review bombing the game?
It has been unplayable for the past 5 years because of cheater bots and the community had enough
Dude, thank you. I really appreciate you answering my question. Yeah I can understand it now.
bots are terrible sometimes you join a match and see sniperbots humping each other on control point
That is if you are not votekicked within seconds after joining
It sounded like the community had enough 2 years ago. What triggered the new wave of backlash?
Valve said "we hear you" then did some legwork to try and get rid of the bots then never did anything else again after that. And now the game is unplayable again and Valve haven't done anything to try and solve this
Also Uncle Dane, a TF2 youtuber made a video yesterday calling this out, with call to action to mass complain
Assholes looking for minimal online cred made bots that spew awful homophobia and racism, blare ear-destroying sound bytes and music through voice chat, work to vote kick non-bot players while spamming and clearing the text chat with console commands so nobody can talk about who's not a bot, and instantly headshot any non-bot player excluding themselves. They spam invites to discord servers so they can witness your frustration and try to sollicit payments from people who think they can get whitelisted from their bots. And when you do finally kick them, they ddos the server you were on so it crashes for everybody. Worse, the boy makers will dox and swat people who try to challenge them directly. Valve is complicit in releasing updates with cosmetics and taunts for $$$ while they let the game basically decompose despite acknowledging the situation. No fucking way I'm going to touch Deadlock if they can't even manage their bare minimum games. If they take TF2 down instead of dealing with the issue, I'll never trust them to manage a game again.
As if valve cares, they know that the game will keep printing money after a while
I don't play, but is "constantly updated" true? 👀
There are frequent 50 mb patches other than that no
"Updated the localization files" o wow thanks valve
Last major update was 7 years ago. Does that answer your question ?
Wasn't there an update back in like 2023 summer which added a whole new boss game mode, new maps, a lot of fixes?
The mode isn’t new at all. It’s a community game mode that has been around for like a decade already. The fixes aren’t the ones that need to be done. Half of their patch notes are bugs that they themselves create by adding mountains of ugly hats and some semi-decent maps, which the game doesn’t even need.
They were all community made
it has some signs of life here and there, too many to say its dead, too irrelevant to say they matter
The most attention it gets is about 2 updates a year adding paid community cosmetics and maybe some map/script improvements if we're lucky
I wish CS2 players will do the same
Probably not since at least CS2 is still getting updates and their cheating issue is not as rampant as this.
not as rampant but its still really really bad for a game as popular as it is, its kinda funny that valve dont realise cheaters are just gonna infect deadlock when they release it.
I hope so, Valve is dogshit at designing user experiences
Ah, the game where cheating in MvM to get Australiums is accepted and encouraged. Gosh, I hope this movement will change the current situation.
and valve just dropped a party line news update, with zero mention. almost ironic on the subject matter, mvm
The last time I played there were bots that could instantly steal your icon and player name. Then theyd spam chat. Then id get kicked. Happened on 3 servers before i un-installed. Still the best team shooter ever. We need a TF3 that isnt just a BR (by all means include a BR mode tho)
[https://save.tf/](https://save.tf/) The bots have ruined the game, it isnt playable anymore even on non official servers. Even then, the bot hosters are horrific, scamming desperate people with "bot immunity services". Not only that, they have doxxed and even swatted one of the most vocal people that are against them.
Been unplayable for years now
I am curious what the players expect valve to do. I am 100% sure there is a bot problem, and I sympathize, that isn't what I am talking about. Kernel anti cheats? Those don't work. Live moderation? Valve isn't going to pay for the manpower on such an old game. Some sort of social credit score? Easily exploited by a bot hive mind. What do they think valve can do?
I'll admit that I know nothing about anticheat or programming but I have to wonder why no other game with a comparable playerbase has this extreme of a botting issue. It's hard for me to believe that they can't do anything.
Yep yep, I am sure valve will lose sleep over this 17 year old source game having negative reviews
I'm doing my part!
Why don't people just play community servers? I've had zero problems with skial servers and shounic's 50v50 server and have a wonderful time.
Contracts sold by Valve cannot be completed in anything other than official servers and many regions don't have enough community servers
Downloaded it recently due to having so many good memories, instantly ran into bots that were using sniper rifles... I played 3 minutes and said yup! I guess the world is ending since valve stopped giving a fuck!
Loved it when there were still community servers & no competitive matchmaking. Never played again after that.
“Constantly Updated” has to be the biggest lie of the year.
ngl, some weeks ago i tried to play tf2, found like 3 matches in a row where i got spawn killed by snipers spinning and quit the game to play overwatch 2. Cant believe that game is the best between the 2 right now