Because Its Developers refuse to lift a Finger to Help it.
This post, believe it or not isn’t about World of WarCraft, but one of the only other games to mantain a massive fanbase despite being (almost) as Old as WoW.
Team Fortress 2.
For anyone who Doesn’t Know, TF2 is a Free, massively sucsessful First Person Shooter created by Valve Software that first saw release in 2007. It’s a very long standing game that a lot of people, myself included, have a very deeply rooted nostalgic connection for.
Despite being a masterclass of FPS design, and being one of the most Popular games on Steam, TF2 has been under attack by a wave of botters for a long time now, leaving this incredibly historic game in a nearly unplayable state.
So Today I want to Bridge the gap, from one Long standing Fanbase to Another.
Today, May 26 is the Day of a peaceful protest of the TF2 Community to save their game with the Hashtag #savetf2.
The WoW community is one of the only communites I know who understand what it means to stick with a game for over 15 years, and If there’s any Overlap with Team Fortress 2, its through this.
The Botting Crisis is a major problem in WoW, but it is literally killing TF2, and the Developers refuse to listen. So if there are any long standing fans among you all, I invite you to post the Hashtag #savetf2 on Social media, and Join our Peaceful Protest.
Thank you to anyone who reads this.
#savetf2.
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TF2 botting is a time honored institution. You’re playing the most wrong possible game if you don’t like botting lol
Calling bots in TF2 a crisis, or new, or coming in waves, is really funny. The game was built from the ground up to be botted, and has one of the largest and most open and most accepted botting cultures of any game.
The game has always had them, but at least in the past they had active GMs that would be on the look out for them. Now a days Blizzard has basically removed in game GMs and now relies upon us to tell them what is wrong or in many cases, what we think is wrong.
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This is because Valve doesn’t make games anymore. Steam is profitable and they don’t care about any of their original IPs.
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As someone who has played TF2 since its Free to Play release over 10 years ago, you are right. Botting is a serious and prolific issue within the community and it has been for years now. And it’s not worth causing much fuss over. At least it wasn’t before now.
However, I assume you haven’t been playing the game recently if you aren’t aware of the gravity of the situation.
This isn’t having an Bot player join, get a bunch of free kills, annoy everyone, then get kicked from the match.
This is 24/7, Every single match is primarily filled with bot Players.
The game is in a completely unplayable state and still being actively monitized by a company that has done nothing to make the game even function.
The intent of the protest isn’t to magically fix the botting crisis. It is to get Valve acknowledge it, or even say ANYTHING to the community after years of radio silence.
I thought the video was funny at least. Thanks for sharing!
Valve don’t play like that. Gabe will almost certainly tell us the HL3 launch date before the TF2 bot ban wave date. I think they made a mistake nerfing headless bots, it accelerated the active player bot development. In the olden times you could farm your weekly drop cap with a custom console only client, and you could just sit in a private match with no graphics loaded and fill your bags. They changed it so you had to have the full client loaded and click accept for each item, and be in a VAC server, so the bots had to become more advanced.
There’s also another problem to contend with, the game itself kinda sucks, is ancient, unpopular, extremely difficult to play and learn, and has a severely depressed economy. The bots have to work much harder than they used to to run a profit, and there’s a dwindling number of people who actually want to play a not particularly robust Half-Life 2 mod. Game development just isn’t really Valve’s business model at this point in time, and I hope they leave TF2 be and preserve that little corner of software debauchery.
98% of Online/MMORPG community has bots. Even after 20+ years, and even after it was released yesterday/week ago/month ago/6 months ago/last year.
I get that rant is a thing, but denial from reality is not.
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CSGO/CS/MW bots rise again.
You can’t eliminate botting without making the game insufferably annoying for players. Every hoop you require one to jump through to filter out bots is another annoyance players need to put up with.
Bliz can do something against the bots but they rather nerf fun.
Someone that has been logged in or logging in for 23+hrs every day isn’t a sign I don’t know what is. Also always in one area or spot…
it is a financial decision for the companies, it isn’t cheap combatting bots and it is even more expensive when you are trying to avoid design decisions that make botting more expensive but also irritate the players
they will never be removed entirely, they can only be reduced and it becomes harder as a game becomes dirt cheap or f2p because endless new accounts can be created and the bots barely need to survive for very long to make it worthwhile
hopefully the tech to combat bots improves but the bot tech also keeps getting better and cheaper with time
it is not an easy solution but it can be pretty obvious when a company has clearly decided to give it minimal attention
bliz had minimal attention until partway into MoP when they hit like a tidal wave, and then it took them years to get a big chunk of it under control
nowadays some of their design decisions are specifically to make it more expensive to adapt bots to a zone or activity (i.e. expensive in time)
