More than 200,000 players have now signed the petition for Valve to address the ‘Bot Crisis’. Additionally, players have started rating Bomb Team Fortress 2 on Steam, dropping the game’s recent review score to ‘Mostly Negative’.
What you need to know
- Team Fortress 2 (TF2), Valve’s 2007 class-based shooter that remains very popular today, has been plagued by a “Bot Crisis” for five years.
- Bots equipped with aimbot cheats have flooded TF2’s Casual matchmaking servers for years, instantly killing other players with Sniper headshots, voting them out of games, and spamming in-game text and voice chat.
- The people hosting these bots have even programmed them to leak personal information in some cases, and one TF2 content creator says the perpetrators even went so far as to ‘whack’ them by making fake emergency calls to the police, so officers started investigating their home.
- In response to Valve’s radio silence on the issue, players have organized a #FixTF2 movement and created a petition for the developer with over 150,000 signatures. Below you will find a link where you can sign it.
- Update: The petition now has more than 200,000 signatures. Additionally, players have started rating Bomb Team Fortress 2, with the game’s recent reviews on Steam now being “Mostly Negative”.
Original article: Valve’s beloved 2007 free-to-play class shooter Team Fortress 2 (TF2) stands tall as one of the most popular multiplayer games and as one of the best PC games ever made, but for five whole years now it’s being crippled by what fans are calling the ‘Bot Crisis’: an endless swarm of fake players equipped with aimbot cheats. These bots often overwhelm matches in TF2’s Casual matchmaking by spawning as the Sniper class and instantly killing anyone they encounter with headshots, all the while taking advantage of their numbers and Steam’s name-changing system to avoid being targeted by human players voted.
Since the bot crisis began in late 2019, Valve has responded to the issue just once in 2022, promising that it was “working to improve things” after the gaming community started trending a #SaveTF2 hashtag. The problem then improved significantly for a while, but soon became as serious as it once was, if not worse. That’s the state the game remains in today, with the culprits now also programming their bots to spam TF2’s in-game text and voice chat, impersonate other players and even steal personal information. leaks from individuals critical of their actions (this video goes into more detail about this). One TF2 content creator even says that bot hosts went so far as to “whack” them, or make a fake emergency call to law enforcement so that officers would be sent to their home.
Once again, Valve has remained radio silent since 2022 despite these illegal actions and the continued proliferation of bots, while continuing to profit from TF2’s microtransactions and its item trading economy. This has angered and frustrated fans to the point where they have now come together under the banner of a new #FixTF2 movement, creating a petition for Valve with over 150,000 signatures and counting. If you want to sign it yourself, you can do so on the Save.tf website.
This is TF2’s botting crisis. Most matches are like this. It’s been like this for years! Valve has done nothing. #FixTF2 #SaveTF2 @valvesoftware pic.twitter.com/2GkenKamVnJune 3, 2024
NOT YET SECONDS AFTER JOINING A GAME 💀💀💀#FixTF2 #SaveTF2 pic.twitter.com/DGyw3Z6O3AJune 3, 2024
Here’s a snippet of the current state of TF2#FixTF2 pic.twitter.com/nFKoVJA1nmJune 3, 2024
“On June 3, we will all come together to take a stand against Valve’s inaction in dealing with the bots. We’re going to expose the absolute magnitude of this problem to the online masses. Screenshots, videos and personal stories around the bots in action, all accompanied by the tag #FixTF2,” reads the movement’s mission.
“Next is our petition, which will serve to represent the sheer magnitude of the number of players who have negatively impacted Valve’s inaction. We plan to forward each signature to them at a later date. We hope to attract the attention of as many mainstream players as possible. gaming news channels, further putting the issue in the spotlight. TF2 is not dying, it is being killed on purpose.”
Initially organized in late May, #FixTF2 (as well as #SaveTF2) is already trending strongly on Twitter (X), with players sharing numerous clips and screenshots showing just how serious the Bot crisis is. Posts about the movement are also receiving thousands of upvotes and views on the TF2 subreddit, as well as YouTube videos talking about it and the petition.
Speaking as someone who has been a hardcore TF2 player for almost 15 years, I’m hopeful that meaningful, positive, and long-lasting change will come from #FixTF2, though I can’t help but be a little skeptical after how little completed the original #SaveTF2 push. Still, there’s no reason not to try, and this time it’s going to take more than a single “we hear you” post to appease players and ease them up a bit.
Ultimately, I just want one of my all-time favorite games to actually be playable outside of player-moderated community servers again, especially since despite the bot nonsense it maintains a healthy average concurrent player count of 80,000-100,000 (according to SteamDB data) – very impressive for a 17 year old game. Whether or not Valve responds to this petition or takes further action against the cheaters remains to be seen; I’ll update this article if that’s the case, but in the meantime, make sure you sign the petition and post on social media with #FixTF2 if you want the bot crisis to end.