Current Events > The Team Fortress 2 community is making an effort to save the game from bots.

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/uwvndd/lets_all_get_together_and_save_tf2_read_comments/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKBhcfhiQ7Q

Basically, for those out of the loop, the game has been damn near unplayable for over two years now, with cheating "bots" joining the game's matchmaking mode repeatedly. The bots play as the Sniper and have perfect aim, so they typically kill people in one or two hits. As of late, they join matches so fast that players can't vote kick them fast enough to stop the server from being filled up with them unless the teams were already mostly full. The only way to play a normal game bot free is on the few community servers that are not running goofy game modes or modifying the game to have 100% critical hits, or something like that.

As per usual, there has been radio silence from Valve, so the community is now trying to get media attention to get Valve to do something, or, at the very least, respond to the community.

Anyone else as doubtful as me as to whether this will work?

I am. TF2's been in a state of rot for longer than late 2019, which was when I first started encountering the bots.
Pre-mannconomy TF2 was a happier time and at some point (I believe casual matchmaking did it) we swapped out the demographics for a new one. Casual matchmaking stops you from doing any community building beyond adding people and joining games as a 6-stack and it also doesn't care about any language barriers it might impede you with. Because of this imagination went out of the window and people started defaulting to more easily recognisable things, spamming the chat with binds, lowest common denominator meme humor that everyone's already seen run into the ground, designated 'funny' playstyles like crouching Heavy with mitts throwing out Sandviches or Soldier with the Rocket Jumper/Market Gardener.

Community servers go the other way, same people every time, smaller community, a way lower chance of seeing something spontaneous, people are either more serious or jaded. Map variety's gone too, for every wacky races v3 or crazy idle server for kicking back we used to have, we now have another boring trade minecraft, orange or formulaic 2fort with a long bridge/hightower with a higher tower, like you can look at them and you can already see the Youtube video title "Hightower BUT the tower is higher!" and so on.

I'd like them to go back to funnelling new players into community servers, we might get some life injected back into the game that way. Community servers on the whole have really done a number on the community. If you thought the bots were the only problem wait til you see the cheaters and the playerbase who'll always stop and entertain the "No bro I'm just good at the time" crap. As is, the only reason I'd actually feel compelled to save them beyond having a history with TF2 and thinking it's a shame to see it fall into disrepair is because I still like to come back for Halloween and make the pilgrimage through the contracts each year and the last two have been miserable. Between them adding an arena mode map which really does not need cheaters' help making it worse, Erebus feeling like it wasn't playtested with collisionless ramps and Hassle Castle having pumpkin bomb objectives but no pumpkin bombs on the map, it's pretty apparent the issue is less bots and more that they just don't give a shit.

Again, send new players into community servers instead of the joyless casual matchmaking void and maybe things will sort themselves out. No guarantee but definitely worth a shot. The game was in a pretty good place until casual matchmaking.

Hey guys can you hear me? Can you hear me? Heeeeeeeeyyyy