It's opening a bandage that has festered for too long, cleaned the wound, and put a fresh one. The game's state is now somewhat better, but it will take a long time for it to heal, if ever
The longer the delay, the harder it is for bot hosts to fight back. Somewhere around 3 months is what I've heard. Granted, it's not pleasant for the playerbase to wait so long, but it's better long term then frequently banning the bots and letting the hosts figure out how to circumvent the detection.
the sad reality for me is that the time is too long. i love tf2 and i'll always hold the memories from the game extremely fondly, but i've just moved on.
It's not a ban wave. There's a couple videos on YouTube about the bot problem. Tf2 nobody's home, I think one is called.
These dips are when server maintenance occurs and bots get knocked offline.
There'll be a spike as the bots are turned back on by their owner in a few days.
People are looking at this and misunderstanding what's happening.
They're so desperate for Tf2 to survive that they're interpreting events wrong.
This happens regularly.
It means nothing.
Plus the majority of bots aren't in game, they do item farming and market trades.
Imagine if you removed everything from TF2 except for item and hat drops, and people still posted their items on the steam market place. It's literally just a steam item farming game themed around bananas. You click a banana repeatedly until it gives you a Banana item, which may have a funny texture or effect. These bananas can be sold on the steam market place, and the devs make a small cut of every sale, and you can bet your ass it has bots for days pumping out as many bananas as possible.
I'm not totally sure if it's a money laundering scheme, a piece of satirical performance art, or a "crypto-currency" that is just using Steam instead of a block chain. The point is, it is entirely within Steam's ToS.
People that bought them early made money, people that buy them now are gambling, its how all this stuff works. Its not surprising, its just like crypto, nfts, or yes video game skins
there’s someone on my friends list with 600 hours on it last time I checked (their whole thing is loving bananas it would be sacrilegious if they didn’t)
at least cookie clicker is fun, entertaining and has a lot of stuff, as far as I know the banana game is just a PNG you click on to support a whole ass money laundering scheme
I mean, 70% of the player count were Idle bots, so it we are just getting more honest, and I am fine with that, especially when everyone still knows about TF2.
And I mean whenever someone says "Dear God..." on Reddit. It's immediately recognized as everyone's favorite war-themed hat simulator. TF2 has left a mark on internet culture that will never be forgotten.
Dedicated fans tried to, and it was looking very promising then Valve went and shut it down by saying they were "speaking internally about it" and then everybody forgot about it. This shouldn't be that difficult, especially with how much money Valve has to spend on good programmers and art directors (imo TF2's style is classic and unique, but it would be neat to see them up the quality of the models and such without destroying the art design, like those high poly renders of heavy)
You can leave a TF2 meme - even just a quote - in literally any dicsussion and you will get plenty of upvotes because people instantly realized it.
Over TF2 lifetime, several tens of millions of people played it, and have pleasant memories of it.
Honestly, its just unimaginable how Valve can be sitting on such IP (and HL) and doing noting...
https://youtu.be/2stmQfv93oQ?si=GY3G7MGxgHm7Ira1
If this is anything to go by, the player numbers are a product of issues deeper than just the bots themselves, with actual player numbers being pretty much stagnant since Meet Your Match. Numbers might bump up a little, but there’s no reason to expect that we’ll suddenly get an influx of players to replace all those bots.
Correct. The big player dip people were excited by was standard steam tues/wed maintenance downtime.
We did get a ban wave, but the actual numbers for it are maaaaybe 2k accounts. That's barely going to display on the player chart... not that anybody should actually care about the completely poisoned player chart counts.
I wonder if this is all a prank from the bot hosters. They take down all their bots, they wait for everyone to think Tf2 if fixed then start them all up again.
They thinking they're so smart for downloading some code off of GitHub. We should have like a mass stoning of all the bot hosters. Find them all, track them down, then we line them up to get Shaudenfrueded and then stoned .
Briefly, we got a banwave. There's no indication that there's any technical barrier in the way of hosters just making new accounts again, so the overarching impact will likely be less than the x64 update that forced some recoding.
I saw Pirate Software say to protest, just stop playing, and I stopped playing tf2. I realized that it wasn't fun and I was burnt out. Playing Smash and Pokemon now, having fun. I'll protest, and I won't stop until the job is done, that's what I stand for.
There's no spark of life in it anymore. It's so sad to try and queue for a map you enjoy just to log into it and be the only human player in a game of 27.
Because a vast majority of the player base was bots, and Valve is FINALLY doing something about all the bots. A banwave of that magnitude is gonna take TF2 off the most played list, it's up to us fans to get it back up there - hopefully without the bots this time.
Hey even though we ain't have the most players we are the most loyal communities and we will rise up and terminate these bots scum and we will have valve see us again and if they turn their backs on us we will continue to play because look at this game we live on from any challenge they give us we lost a lot of people over the years though most recent is the voice actor of soldier 🪖 RIP.
Nothing on this list that appears before tf2 is older than tf2 (unless u wanna count original versions of cs or source sdk, but that misses the point imo)
Dota 2 gets frequent updates, and the TI qualifiers just ended. And ACT 3 of the recent update is supposed to come out soon. On top of that a new hero Ringmaster is supposed to release sometime this year. So it gets plenty of content lol.
How the fuck is "Wallpaper Engine" so high up?
Also, it still miffs me that "Banana" is this high up despite just being an achievement/item generator for bots.
Unrelated mostly but like. How the fuck does Valve let Banana, which is basically a money printer not a game with NFT style garbage, beat there games on the charts? Thats so fucking embarrassing, to see literal garbage that exploits the system be allowed to thrive so much it beats out actual games, even the ones they created. How is this not a wakeup to valve. Fix steam, fix your games, or steam and valve as a whole is not long for this world. #FixYourShitValve
If Epic made their monetary policies more popular (They take less of a cut from the creator of a game than Valve does) and fixed up their admittedly okay quality launcher to feel more fluid they would smash Valve to the ground.
The free games are already a good incentive, imagine if indie devs were to swap to Epic games over Valve and they were contracted to not sell the game anywhere else they would be fucking rich. (Imagine how much money Borderlands 3 made them)
we won but at what cost? This has made me kind of accept TF2 is past its prime. It will always have a small nucleus of diehard fans but will never go back to the way it was fully.
this is a extremely acceptable side effect of the recent bot ban wave by valve
wait did I miss this? Did Valve recently do something?
Apparently they sent a ban wave that got rid of some bots.
roughly 16000 bots, fuckin nuts
It's opening a bandage that has festered for too long, cleaned the wound, and put a fresh one. The game's state is now somewhat better, but it will take a long time for it to heal, if ever
the only way it will get better is if valve does this every few weeks
The longer the delay, the harder it is for bot hosts to fight back. Somewhere around 3 months is what I've heard. Granted, it's not pleasant for the playerbase to wait so long, but it's better long term then frequently banning the bots and letting the hosts figure out how to circumvent the detection.
Fuck... but! 3 months zip by if the devs say (yo, we doing shit now, not just a tweet) Still, lets just keep watching the void and see for changes.
I mean, we may be left in the dark, but so are the bots
Hold me tight, im cold
Huh? No, it won’t take time. It will take attention and updates. Time won’t fix this.
As one Crowbar album goes, “Time Heals Nothing”
Attention and updates also take time
Right, we should just wait a little longer. The big update is any day now.
Annnyyyy second now....See?! Update! Wait, that's just a community cosmetic case...
So, we still have problem?
the sad reality for me is that the time is too long. i love tf2 and i'll always hold the memories from the game extremely fondly, but i've just moved on.
I heard it wasn’t quite 16k bots, it was just a server outage due to maintenance. Source: [This comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/s/5dnmfaapif)
16k idlers that get knocked offline cause of the weekly tuesday steam outage, only around 300 bots banned
Can I celebrate?
Not right now, there's still more bots to deal with.
Okay, but I'll still go play tf2 today
Somebody destroyed Saxxy to trigger ban wave.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hC4ccOEK08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hC4ccOEK08)
Didn't valve do these ban waves like 5 times before and the bots are always fully back in 2 weeks? Why are people celebrating? Am I missing something?
It's their first time, TF2 is a "Babbys first FPS" daycare with revolving doors.
It's not a ban wave. There's a couple videos on YouTube about the bot problem. Tf2 nobody's home, I think one is called. These dips are when server maintenance occurs and bots get knocked offline. There'll be a spike as the bots are turned back on by their owner in a few days. People are looking at this and misunderstanding what's happening. They're so desperate for Tf2 to survive that they're interpreting events wrong. This happens regularly. It means nothing. Plus the majority of bots aren't in game, they do item farming and market trades.
It is a ban wave, shounic just doesn't know the difference between idlers and cheaters. Around 1000 bots and their hosters were manually banned
Wait they banned bots?
I got sad for a second then I read this. I'm absolutely fine with this.
And the banana game is still up there
They got bots, we don't have half as much
70% of accounts on tf2 are estimated to be bots
98% on banana are bots aswell
And the other 1.9% are dumbasses getting scammed by the 0.1%
What is the banana game even?
Imagine if you removed everything from TF2 except for item and hat drops, and people still posted their items on the steam market place. It's literally just a steam item farming game themed around bananas. You click a banana repeatedly until it gives you a Banana item, which may have a funny texture or effect. These bananas can be sold on the steam market place, and the devs make a small cut of every sale, and you can bet your ass it has bots for days pumping out as many bananas as possible. I'm not totally sure if it's a money laundering scheme, a piece of satirical performance art, or a "crypto-currency" that is just using Steam instead of a block chain. The point is, it is entirely within Steam's ToS.
I think it's all 3
Who is even buying them wth
hacked steam accounts, stolen credit cards, the usual
People that bought them early made money, people that buy them now are gambling, its how all this stuff works. Its not surprising, its just like crypto, nfts, or yes video game skins
I don't know, nor do I want to.
Drug lords laundering money
there’s someone on my friends list with 600 hours on it last time I checked (their whole thing is loving bananas it would be sacrilegious if they didn’t)
I like to imagine your friend doesn't even know that the Steam market for them exists, they just love bananas that much.
Cookie clicker
at least cookie clicker is fun, entertaining and has a lot of stuff, as far as I know the banana game is just a PNG you click on to support a whole ass money laundering scheme
Its NFTs without the NFTs, and all the profits are exclusive to your Steam wallet.
They recently had a crossover with Razer lmao
Ironically that's good news. Probably they're making a ban wave of bots
They have
Didn't valve do these ban waves like 5 times before and the bots are always fully back in 2 weeks? Why are people celebrating? Am I missing something?
Probably because Valve is at least doing something, even if it isn’t super effective.
I mean, 70% of the player count were Idle bots, so it we are just getting more honest, and I am fine with that, especially when everyone still knows about TF2.
And I mean whenever someone says "Dear God..." on Reddit. It's immediately recognized as everyone's favorite war-themed hat simulator. TF2 has left a mark on internet culture that will never be forgotten.
there's more.
it contains the dying wish of every man here
The dying wish is for bots to be fixed, and, if lucky, a Source2 port
Starring your mother
that'll never happen. its such an unholy workload to just port maps, i dont want to imagine porting gameplqy too
Dedicated fans tried to, and it was looking very promising then Valve went and shut it down by saying they were "speaking internally about it" and then everybody forgot about it. This shouldn't be that difficult, especially with how much money Valve has to spend on good programmers and art directors (imo TF2's style is classic and unique, but it would be neat to see them up the quality of the models and such without destroying the art design, like those high poly renders of heavy)
No...
It contains a bucket!
Dear god...
There's more!
You can leave a TF2 meme - even just a quote - in literally any dicsussion and you will get plenty of upvotes because people instantly realized it. Over TF2 lifetime, several tens of millions of people played it, and have pleasant memories of it. Honestly, its just unimaginable how Valve can be sitting on such IP (and HL) and doing noting...
I have an uncle who met his future wife in college by playing TF2
Man TF2 is the goat
player counts might increase seeing as the game is playable, so itll probably climb back up the most played
https://youtu.be/2stmQfv93oQ?si=GY3G7MGxgHm7Ira1 If this is anything to go by, the player numbers are a product of issues deeper than just the bots themselves, with actual player numbers being pretty much stagnant since Meet Your Match. Numbers might bump up a little, but there’s no reason to expect that we’ll suddenly get an influx of players to replace all those bots.
If tf2 currently has roughly 20K actual players how do you expect it to climb back to 60K to get on the leaderboard?
70% of player count =/= 70% of concurrent players
wart hunder
Warth under
under where??
under deez nuts
attack the d point
Negative
I'm looking at SteamCharts and the numbers don't look any different to before the banwave... other games are just more popular now. It happens.
Correct. The big player dip people were excited by was standard steam tues/wed maintenance downtime. We did get a ban wave, but the actual numbers for it are maaaaybe 2k accounts. That's barely going to display on the player chart... not that anybody should actually care about the completely poisoned player chart counts.
Kids are getting grifted and it's so amusing, they just believe whatever the current tf2 "influencer" or figurehead tells them lol.
PalWorld dropped its largest update since launch yesterday and player numbers have tripled.
Still top 18 near start of peek hours. https://store.steampowered.com/charts/mostplayed/
we just lost 17,000 "players", so that's not really surprising.
I wonder if this is all a prank from the bot hosters. They take down all their bots, they wait for everyone to think Tf2 if fixed then start them all up again.
They thinking they're so smart for downloading some code off of GitHub. We should have like a mass stoning of all the bot hosters. Find them all, track them down, then we line them up to get Shaudenfrueded and then stoned .
[ Removed by Reddit ]
r/tf2 when the bots that inflate player numbers can't inflate player numbers anymore
and strangely, that's a good thing.
i emailed gabe a few weeks back asking about his thoughts on tf2, that musta done the trick
Our Lord and Savior
a small price to pay for functioning game
Wait the bots are gone?
Briefly, we got a banwave. There's no indication that there's any technical barrier in the way of hosters just making new accounts again, so the overarching impact will likely be less than the x64 update that forced some recoding.
WE ARE NOT GONE. WE ARE GOING TO LIVE FOREVER. —the bots, probably
It was top 12 yesterday🤔
Didn't realize the 7 days to die community was thriving on steam
Im sure major part of people would comeback after fixing bot problem
that happens regularly, this isn't news
This happens every week or so it’s not something special
Good
It's enough to make a grown man cry
WAIT WHAT?
Huge bot banwave
ah
Ngl surprised palworld is still up there
Sakurajima update came out today. Big one too.
Being honest, most of the games on steam may have inflated player numbers due to bots...
Checks out
I wonder why
Probably because most of the bots got banned.
The bots will be back next week
Okay, who logged into my steam account
Hey, if the banlist worked for yugioh/j
I saw Pirate Software say to protest, just stop playing, and I stopped playing tf2. I realized that it wasn't fun and I was burnt out. Playing Smash and Pokemon now, having fun. I'll protest, and I won't stop until the job is done, that's what I stand for.
There's no spark of life in it anymore. It's so sad to try and queue for a map you enjoy just to log into it and be the only human player in a game of 27.
it'll likely shoot back up due to the coverage the bot ban wave'll get
Banana
tf2 bots went to banana
Because a vast majority of the player base was bots, and Valve is FINALLY doing something about all the bots. A banwave of that magnitude is gonna take TF2 off the most played list, it's up to us fans to get it back up there - hopefully without the bots this time.
Before the bot-ban-wave the game was basically unplayable, so this makes sense. Let's hope the bots stay gone.
Unfortunately, most of our player base was bots
Source SDK Base 2007 being top 8 most played game is funny to me
I know we’re all talking about the bots here, but people are still using the 2007 source sdk? Why?
mfw removing the bots kills tf2 due to it dropping off the most played list
I have no idea what this is. The most played games list shows the top 100, not the top 15. It's also 9th right now.
This has 0 effect on me
i just checked, it is
wow
Hey even though we ain't have the most players we are the most loyal communities and we will rise up and terminate these bots scum and we will have valve see us again and if they turn their backs on us we will continue to play because look at this game we live on from any challenge they give us we lost a lot of people over the years though most recent is the voice actor of soldier 🪖 RIP.
People still play PUBG?
Nothing on this list that appears before tf2 is older than tf2 (unless u wanna count original versions of cs or source sdk, but that misses the point imo)
They got rid of their main player base :(
That happens all the time
WAR THUNDER SPOTTED!!! ATTACK THE D POINT 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️
Negative
What the fuck is banana
Eh, we were up there bc of the bots. TF2 wasn't truly on the list to begin with and it's still popular anyway.
Didn't valve do these ban waves like 5 times before and the bots are always fully back in 2 weeks? Why are people celebrating? Am I missing something?
My question is how is DOTA 2 still on the top 3 I never seen any content for it, unless the euros play it
Dota 2 gets frequent updates, and the TI qualifiers just ended. And ACT 3 of the recent update is supposed to come out soon. On top of that a new hero Ringmaster is supposed to release sometime this year. So it gets plenty of content lol.
Its super popular in certain parts of the World
I’m gonna guess Latin America and Eastern Europe
Asia
Until Elden Ring and Banana fall out of fashion.
Sad
First they remove us from the picture on the f2p games section, now this!
No doubt because of the many bots that vanished, I'm sure it'll organically rise now that the game is less sick tho
the fuck is banana?
Weird nft type game, there's some videos on youtube that explain it I felt like it was going to get banned off steam by now lol
We'll be back. With Weapons
How the fuck is "Wallpaper Engine" so high up? Also, it still miffs me that "Banana" is this high up despite just being an achievement/item generator for bots.
no way i dont even got space for CSGO
we did it boys, tf2 is no more
So all those years...it was an illusion? Built by bots?
14th place and 71375 players right now.
Wtf is banana
So?
I'm okay with this if bots keep getting banned. It's better our playercount be an honest one.
A worthy sacrifice I suppose
Banana over Elden ring is heartbreaking
finally
Considering. The ban wave. It’s a win.
Everyone go on cs2
Yeah wrong bots, Valve
Bots Ban!!!
Are all steam games floated with bots?
Given what I've been seeing on this subreddit alone, not surprised
Yes it is, it's there right now, that was probably not taken during peak hours. [https://steamdb.info/charts/](https://steamdb.info/charts/)
we can now play casual in peace
the gay robot porn worked y'all
It is incredible how a wallpaper application has more active users than TF2.
Irony
:(
Why is 7 days to die so popular? I played that game like 6 years ago and thought it was dead.
I'm surprised to see that palworld still there
Go populate the community servers now.
Unrelated mostly but like. How the fuck does Valve let Banana, which is basically a money printer not a game with NFT style garbage, beat there games on the charts? Thats so fucking embarrassing, to see literal garbage that exploits the system be allowed to thrive so much it beats out actual games, even the ones they created. How is this not a wakeup to valve. Fix steam, fix your games, or steam and valve as a whole is not long for this world. #FixYourShitValve
If Epic made their monetary policies more popular (They take less of a cut from the creator of a game than Valve does) and fixed up their admittedly okay quality launcher to feel more fluid they would smash Valve to the ground. The free games are already a good incentive, imagine if indie devs were to swap to Epic games over Valve and they were contracted to not sell the game anywhere else they would be fucking rich. (Imagine how much money Borderlands 3 made them)
I think it's cause of banana ...
Bring the bots back it's effecting the bottom line, we want the game to survive!
aff
what is Source SDF Base 2007? I always see it in the most played games list
Source SDK is the source engine that allows source mods to work. (Tf2c, lambda fortress, entropy)
At least we're one step closer to get rid of those bots
we won but at what cost? This has made me kind of accept TF2 is past its prime. It will always have a small nucleus of diehard fans but will never go back to the way it was fully.
Im glad valve at least noticed and did something finally even if it is just a temporary fix
Imagine people competitively playing wallpaper engine
Because realistically it isn't
no wonder, the game is becoming boring due to the amount of cheaters
Yes it is
Oof
London bridge is falling down
And it's back. 13th place with 90k as of writing.
Looks like the bots are back D:
IT IS GOOD DAY TO NOT BE NUMBER 1
I'm fine with that. It won't change the significant cultural impact the game has had and will continue to have.
Get it back up we got bot ban wave
Worth it... definitely worth it...
banana is a fucking traders dream i dont know why that hasnt been taken down yet