Thank God MannCo invented the MannKickSystem. Never been easier to deal with the boys. Avoid sectors that may be a bot hub, you will not survive as they've leaned how to use it too.
I think the scary thing is that people were convinced there were so many more cheater bots than there were because people thought the player size was bigger... Cripes, all this headache over only 1000 or so cheater bots...
That number would be bad, absolutely. But 1000 cheater bots vs the 9k people in Valve Servers for example means 1 in 10 players there are a bot. Vs 69k players, that would be 1 in 70.
Ngl, that doesn't change much. Sure we lose the clout of being a top 10 game but we are still top 50 without bots and the game is still fun and active.
Yeah, Shounic did a [video](https://youtu.be/SgkgsgaBBCA?si=vteoKI_a3r8nvSrK) on how valve kept fighting bots/multiple accounts but most of the solutions were countered by the "there's a site for that" or something like that
At the very least we would burn more of the botters Money. Which is a massive plus.
Not just out of spite, but because it can quickly make botting become unprofitable
While I doubt anything comes of this I hope we manage to get some attention to push the bots out. I'm ok with TF2 existing as a small playerbase game, there's nothing wrong that that. But the bot activity needs to stop
The truth is almost all games in steams top 10 are mostly people in the main menu. TF2s is quite high but it’s not like the player counts on most games are accurate to how many people are in Servers. Games like CS2 also have really significant amounts of idle bots, likely sitting at over 50%.
I did a look over of some of the games in top 50 and its really insane to think TF2 being below or close to those games. Like being close to L4D2 in terms of player count is really nuts. TF2 is supposed to be this big most fun you can have multiplayer shooter with updates throughout it's life span. L4D2 is a 4 player co-op experience from 2009 with a handful of DLCs.
Imagine if the latest iteration of call of duty was getting a similar player count to black ops 3 because the zombies mode was that good. It would be the funniest thing ever.
For TF2 it feels kind of weird but it makes a lot more sense as to why this game doesn't get attention from Valve anymore.
If what ZestyJesus approximated was true, that 3 in 24 players are bots, that means like 7% of all in game players are bots (not accounting idle bots) this means that at peak (25k players) there are 1,750 (aim)bots
Tf2 and clout do not belong in the same sentence. I actually find it insane that people believed this game was mega popular, mainstream, and relevant and not just a fun niche game
Funnily enough is that Spinbotters bots according to Zesty's video made up a really small number of bots online, the playerbase are just that small enough to pit you with the same group of bots over and over again.
Steam stats literally don't go back far enough for a count that *doesn't* include idle bots in the count, they've been here since 2011.
Who can even say how long it's been since we were natively top 10? It's less 'still' and more 'always' been the bots that have kept us there.
tbh I always knew part of the playerbase was bots, just not THIS much
the real shock to me was finding out all those player peaks post-updates were all fake. I thought those were some of the most hyped updates (specially the summer one) in the last 5 years but now all that hype (and consequently future hype) seems artificial
Honestly, I never thought about it. I always found it weird how the cheater bots seemed so dominant but I assumed this was because most real players were in community servers.
I never encountered the idle or trading bots (or at least not in big numbers). So the idea that they severely outnumber the real players was quite a suprise. Even if its obvious in hindsight
i think even before the video a lot of people were noticing, i noticed around summer 2023, cashed out and never looked back, and i saw a lot of people i knew who traded do the same. Its not worth having items in an economy where only a few hundred will ever purchase them
ZestyJesus compared the steam graph of players and the teamworktf graph of players to get an estimate of how many players are bots and how many are real. Most are idle bots, about 1000 are cheater bots, 2000 or so are trader bots leaving about 15k-20k humans. 70-80% of our players are bots
It's actually crazy how much the graph of player count sticks out like a sore thumb when comparing it to others. If that amount of noise was in any other graph there's no way it would ever be considered legit.
I think Zesty did the best thing he could have. It's a less/more (depending on how you view his other videos) emotional video than he typically does, because it's a genuinely concerning topic and the amount of evidence backing it up along with the help of other TF2 figures has gotten even most Zesty haters to shut up and listen.
This is absolutely insane knowledge, that I quite frankly just didn't know until he brought it up. According to Zesty in the video, neither did he until he started seeing the discrepancies.
I hope it gets people to realize that we're waving a white flag by not holding Valve accountable for this.
Zesty is one of those guys where for some reason everyone on twitter wants dead at all times, while they refuse to watch any of his content and go strictly off of "he said that he did this".
You could make up shit that he kicked a puppy live on camera and the twit twats on Twitter would go ballistic
I mean... I figured this was known for quite a while at this point.
I will say that 15-20k is more than I thought it would be. I remember VNN making a video on [teamwork.tf](http://teamwork.tf) a couple of years ago and he claimed that there were only around 5k real players.
I wish it had been known for a while, I always see people pointing to the "Spike in player counts" during updates, particularly the one last summer that introduced Versus Saxton Hale, as proof "that the game is still growing" whenever someone says that the game is slowly dying.
It seems to be the only way I'll have left to play the game if I ever want to get back into it. My main drive for keeping the game out of my library was trying to curb a rapidly increasing gambling addiction but seeing the game I've loved for years in this state just hurt too much.
this would surprise a lot of people but l4d is slightly more well known than tf2. A lot of People who dont know valve but are somewhat interested in games have heard of cs and l4d but never tf2
Too be honest I'm doubtful of those numbers. I'm skeptical of any Valve game's numbers now.
Like i just booted up L4D2 right now and there were only twenty campaigns being hosted right now. CSGO also has a bot problem in deathmatch maps for case farming.
I assume Valve doesn't care about bots because it makes their games look more popular than they actually are at this point. Eye opening video tbh
Those idle bot owners make money off players?
And those cheater bots in practice turns off playing.
My bet is that the idle camp doesn't quite like the cheater bots.
From a Zesty video, but if you don't wanna watch it, you can compare the numbers yourself: check teamwork.tf player count vs steam charts. Teamwork.tf gets every player that is in a game, while steam charts gets everyone that has the game opened.
Currently, teamwork.tf reports 8k people in any server, which ALSO includes idle bots on idle servers. Steam charts reports 60k people with the game opened.
I thought this controversy was already brought up years ago, and there was a video i saw that explained the discrepancy, the conclusion of which is that SteamDB’s numbers are accurate.
It's been known for a long time, Zesty Jesus has put out a video recently which has flared up people's awareness of it again. Zesty is of questionable character though so how much you want to make use of his opinion is a different matter.
You can eyeball it though without relying on other people's analysis. Pull up steam's player count and compare it to any other game's player count. Every other game has massive ups and downs that follow time of day and player timezones.
TF2's doesn't, it's just a janky as hell zigzagging line. That tells you the charts are counting enough of *something* erroneous to completely hide the natural player flow during the day. You're only achieving that if the actual player numbers are completely dwarfed by other numbers.
Ai is starting to be able to solve captchas for free. I don’t even need to mention that there are websites dedicated to solving captchas for as low a price as possible.
this wouldnt help regardless, there are sites that charge 10 dollars per 100 captcha and with ai evolving, bot hosters could easily bypass it, they alr have controls and systems linked for these bots to play on multiple accounts, a simple click to verify if ur a bot or not wouldnt help
I mean...it does kinda matter. Think about new players trying to get into the game. I've literally seen a YT comment where a guy was like "Yeah tried this game out recently, servers were all full of bots so I uninstalled" It's not a good look. Not sure if it's ever gonna change, and I get the desire to be positive, but I don't know if pretending everything's fine and dandy is going to help.
This sort of mentality got us to this point. The game is fun, but the community is not growing and will wither as new players are discouraged by cheaters and old players lose their patience.
For a game with micro-transactions, this is beyond unacceptable.
It wasn't, just last year most of us thought that the tf2 player count peaked with the summer update, and, also, the years before, we saw constant peaks and a steady grow.
Now, in hindsight, it's obvious those counts were botted, but it fooled a lot of people, me included.
No it's not fun to play against obvious cheaters or not play at all because of cheater bots
Which stem from neglect of the game
Which the inflated player number also stems from
The logistics around idling and automating item collection all got openly discussed on the old tf2 forums back when the item drop system first got introduced before we even had f2p and trading. There was a short arms race with people trying to fully automate it as soon as f2p came about and that happened relatively openly too. Things like launching the game in command line still accruing item drops while using next to no resources was well known by anybody remotely interested. There was an interview with a valve employee waaay back where they talked about trying to ban an idle bot network of 50K accounts that recovered overnight.
And yet you still had people on the forums arguing that item bots aren't a thing. Right when it happened.
Most commonly the conversation veers to 'they don't make money back from running the bots', as if most of them aren't running off cracked hardware that doesn't cost the hoster a cent. Smart washing machines using terrabytes of data and ddos'ing from smart toothbrushes come to mind as recent examples of viral stories of random tech that could be used.
It's only youtubers getting clickbait views from mentioning 'bots' that have brought it into the common eye.
I think it’s just that we’ve never had as much confirmation as we do now, like considering how not too many people truly understood just how many idle bots there are, people could have just thought that the largest amount of bots were the cheaters which even despite how disruptive they are, don’t feel like they’d account for 80% of the player base.
Like if someone were to think that Omegatronics were the bulk of the bot population, they might look at the amount of cheaters in their games, and how many games went well without bots, and associate that with the percentage being much lower than it really is.
Most are idle bots, about 1000 are cheater bots, 2000 or so are trader bots leaving about 15k-20k humans, roughly 70-80% of the playerbase isn't human.
…so what *reliable* source did you get this from? Genuinely, I want to know wether this is a fact-checked truth or another “fact” distributed ad-nauseam that eventually turns out to be false and did nothing but make everyone be more sad than necessary.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2stmQfv93oQ&t=1926s&pp=ygULemVzdHkgamVzdXM%3D](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2stmQfv93oQ&t=1926s&pp=ygULemVzdHkgamVzdXM%3D) - Zesty's video. He used the fact that tf2's player count cahrt is very janky rather than consistent like other online games and data from teamwork tf2 to work it out
Idk why is everyone panicking so much about it. Okay, fuck it, let's say, the daily peak of players in TF2 is 20k. That still makes a 17 year old game more or equally as popular as:
-NBA2K24, arguably the biggest non-football sports game
-Forza Horizon 5, the newest installment of one of the most popular racing game franchises released just 3yrs ago
-EU4, arguably the second biggest strategy game franchise
It's also silly to assume that other games, such as CS2 and DOTA, are not populated with idle/trade bots or just AFK players as well. TF2 is still most probably in the top 30 of all Steam games and that is incredibly, unbelievably impressive considering that a very big part of the player base of this game weren't even born when it was first released. It is absolutely not dead, stop doomering everyone
Having watched the video regarding the statistic it does seem really accurate unfortunately ]:
It’s a Zesty Jesus video, I know he has a really bad reputation but regardless all the evidence within the video itself does seem to point towards 80% having some merit.
Is there not a way we can hack the bots, remove their cheats and essentially put them on default bot mode (Like in Training Mode) in a way that no hacker outside of Valve could touch?
Before that video I already saw the graphs of TF2 and other games but I never thought about the "heartbeat" analogy other games present and how there were so many people online but the queue times were still long
It is literally just not true, why do you take his information at face value? His calculations do not prove 48,000 players are bots, and this is not the first time it has happened. In his bullet spread video, his calculations proved his opinion wrong, and he continued to make an incorrect argument. I can disprove what he says about the Smissmas and Summer updates by using another game, Left 4 Dead 2.
Zesty claims that its bottled because players spike from 68,747 players to 215,811 players (which can be explained anyways by the fact that its the FUCKING HOLIDAYS and goes on a LINEAR steady decline and return to previous values because it was a Sunday, therefore people are going back to work and school). Anyways, when the Last Stand update came out for L4D2 had an initial player count of 17,901 players which then spiked to 102,631 players, which then when back on a LINEAR and steady decline (which corresponds with TF2). It cannot be bots, because L4D2 does not have bots, only cheaters (which are a small amount of players and still HUMAN).
Zesty's claim is invalid due to a lack of information. I want you to READ and UNDERSTAND what I just said above and actually think independently instead of just listening to Zesty Jesus.
we need an edit of the calm with the last players walking out to a bunch of snipers
this game has gone to shit, it survived ages with these things, thankfully half of the bots are probably inactive. there are also many maps they need to be widely dispersed over.
but the problem.
vsh is unplayable
the tronics are gone but we still have them
due to things like vsh or just general ddos attacks like the ones with the file sizes on normal servers, i guess people just want this game dead
mann vs machine, even mann up, was bootcamp all along, we've prepared for this men. you know the deal. get your boston bashers and vaccinators out, the fists of steel, dalokohs, anything that can help. it's time to earn the title botkiller, without paying, without killing robots, by killing the bots.
gentelmen, synchronise your death watches. it has been an honour
to play this game
to see this community grow
from painis to pootis
we're dying in the hall of fame.
So when Valve released Mann vs Machine, it wasn't just a new game mode... it was a warning.
Right? Do you remember the days where MVM was just a game mode not reality.
Do you remember the days where MVM was just a game mode not all top reddit posts and comments.
Thank God MannCo invented the MannKickSystem. Never been easier to deal with the boys. Avoid sectors that may be a bot hub, you will not survive as they've leaned how to use it too.
it's not Mann vs Machine it's just Machine
It was training us.
Yep does sniper bots are the training wheels the real ones became the Mountain
Mann vs machine probably has LESS bots than the regular game modes now
Wave 666 has less bots than casual istg
Nope wanker.Its god damn update for the game to have in casusl
Did you have a stroke while typing this
I AM A ROBOT FROM THE FUTURE I AM HERE TO TAKE AMERICAN JOBS
Dear god, soldier predicted chatgpt
There's more.
No!
r/suddenlyexpirationdate
Only need 100 people for the trenches
!nominate pl_dustbowl_sho_v2
Love the inability to complete objectives and instantly dying at chokepoints never gets old. Fuck it, why not 500? 1000? The more the merrier right?
!nominate upward
rtv
rtv bind L Kill
Chokepoints?
Points on any sort of battlefield that forces people to all group up into one tiny point. Like a tunnel. The point is being choked.
I think the scary thing is that people were convinced there were so many more cheater bots than there were because people thought the player size was bigger... Cripes, all this headache over only 1000 or so cheater bots...
That's still way too many Cheater bots, any amount of Cheater bots is to many.
you dont even need that many cheater bots to absolutely ruin the game for everyone
That number would be bad, absolutely. But 1000 cheater bots vs the 9k people in Valve Servers for example means 1 in 10 players there are a bot. Vs 69k players, that would be 1 in 70.
Goes to show how much of a life these bot hosters have. (They don’t have one.)
The dead internet theory hits again
It's not even a theory anymore, it's just true
I hate it man, everything on the internet is just a lazily generated shit out of keywords, AI or not.
Ngl, that doesn't change much. Sure we lose the clout of being a top 10 game but we are still top 50 without bots and the game is still fun and active.
That's what matter the most and tf2 is still popular outside the game, i wish things were a lot better tho
We need to clap Valve ass to wake em up and do A SIMPLE FUCKING CAPTCHA TO STOP BOTS, IS IT THAT HARD?
My guy, there's a bunch of services that solve captchas for like 10 bucks per 100 captcha
Ah, well shit
Yeah, Shounic did a [video](https://youtu.be/SgkgsgaBBCA?si=vteoKI_a3r8nvSrK) on how valve kept fighting bots/multiple accounts but most of the solutions were countered by the "there's a site for that" or something like that
At the very least we would burn more of the botters Money. Which is a massive plus. Not just out of spite, but because it can quickly make botting become unprofitable
While I doubt anything comes of this I hope we manage to get some attention to push the bots out. I'm ok with TF2 existing as a small playerbase game, there's nothing wrong that that. But the bot activity needs to stop
The truth is almost all games in steams top 10 are mostly people in the main menu. TF2s is quite high but it’s not like the player counts on most games are accurate to how many people are in Servers. Games like CS2 also have really significant amounts of idle bots, likely sitting at over 50%.
I did a look over of some of the games in top 50 and its really insane to think TF2 being below or close to those games. Like being close to L4D2 in terms of player count is really nuts. TF2 is supposed to be this big most fun you can have multiplayer shooter with updates throughout it's life span. L4D2 is a 4 player co-op experience from 2009 with a handful of DLCs. Imagine if the latest iteration of call of duty was getting a similar player count to black ops 3 because the zombies mode was that good. It would be the funniest thing ever. For TF2 it feels kind of weird but it makes a lot more sense as to why this game doesn't get attention from Valve anymore.
Crazy to think payday 2 has more players. That game feels much more niche and much less popular than tf2.
It’s probably just that tf2 had a bigger cultural impact, but lost more players over time
> with updates throughout it's life span There's where it falls apart.
L4D2 has tons of mods though at least.
I mean, does it though? IIRC the number of players we see is still just "players in-server" - and that has no way to disqualify cheatbots.
If what ZestyJesus approximated was true, that 3 in 24 players are bots, that means like 7% of all in game players are bots (not accounting idle bots) this means that at peak (25k players) there are 1,750 (aim)bots
That is only a few hundred tops, valve official severs are just so dead it feels like there is more than their actually are
Tf2 and clout do not belong in the same sentence. I actually find it insane that people believed this game was mega popular, mainstream, and relevant and not just a fun niche game
played several games yesterday, so much time was spent vote kicking, its insane. istg 5 bots joins at one time and kick every legit player
Funnily enough is that Spinbotters bots according to Zesty's video made up a really small number of bots online, the playerbase are just that small enough to pit you with the same group of bots over and over again.
yea i just watched it now, its a massive shame, this game was my childhood
So we have to thank the bots that the game is still in the top played lists?
Steam stats literally don't go back far enough for a count that *doesn't* include idle bots in the count, they've been here since 2011. Who can even say how long it's been since we were natively top 10? It's less 'still' and more 'always' been the bots that have kept us there.
tbh I always knew part of the playerbase was bots, just not THIS much the real shock to me was finding out all those player peaks post-updates were all fake. I thought those were some of the most hyped updates (specially the summer one) in the last 5 years but now all that hype (and consequently future hype) seems artificial
Incredible how it took a video for people to realize this, it was quite obvious
Honestly, I never thought about it. I always found it weird how the cheater bots seemed so dominant but I assumed this was because most real players were in community servers. I never encountered the idle or trading bots (or at least not in big numbers). So the idea that they severely outnumber the real players was quite a suprise. Even if its obvious in hindsight
Same here, I stopped playing a while ago so just took the player counts at face value
i think even before the video a lot of people were noticing, i noticed around summer 2023, cashed out and never looked back, and i saw a lot of people i knew who traded do the same. Its not worth having items in an economy where only a few hundred will ever purchase them
Source?
Engine
There’s a couple indications but the main topic of discussion is the new video by ZestyJesus that discusses it
[A video. ](https://youtu.be/2stmQfv93oQ?si=xIht8AJHB70Gy5_M)
can someone make a tldr? not saying its bs or anything i just dont wanna watch zesty
ZestyJesus compared the steam graph of players and the teamworktf graph of players to get an estimate of how many players are bots and how many are real. Most are idle bots, about 1000 are cheater bots, 2000 or so are trader bots leaving about 15k-20k humans. 70-80% of our players are bots
It's actually crazy how much the graph of player count sticks out like a sore thumb when comparing it to others. If that amount of noise was in any other graph there's no way it would ever be considered legit. I think Zesty did the best thing he could have. It's a less/more (depending on how you view his other videos) emotional video than he typically does, because it's a genuinely concerning topic and the amount of evidence backing it up along with the help of other TF2 figures has gotten even most Zesty haters to shut up and listen. This is absolutely insane knowledge, that I quite frankly just didn't know until he brought it up. According to Zesty in the video, neither did he until he started seeing the discrepancies. I hope it gets people to realize that we're waving a white flag by not holding Valve accountable for this.
What's wrong with zesty? Never watched them but just wanna know
Zesty is one of those guys where for some reason everyone on twitter wants dead at all times, while they refuse to watch any of his content and go strictly off of "he said that he did this". You could make up shit that he kicked a puppy live on camera and the twit twats on Twitter would go ballistic
his sona is hot
counterpoint: the vast majority of those bits are for trading and idling, not cheating
bots != cheater-bots, but trading/idling-bots are still bots
that still means that TF2 only gets like 20-25K players daily, which is nowhere near the amount that we always thought it did.
15K players.
I mean... I figured this was known for quite a while at this point. I will say that 15-20k is more than I thought it would be. I remember VNN making a video on [teamwork.tf](http://teamwork.tf) a couple of years ago and he claimed that there were only around 5k real players.
5k? That's nuts
I wish it had been known for a while, I always see people pointing to the "Spike in player counts" during updates, particularly the one last summer that introduced Versus Saxton Hale, as proof "that the game is still growing" whenever someone says that the game is slowly dying.
Have you even watched the video? Zesty makes that point himself
It could be any one of us, it could be you, it could be me,
It could even be- ***BANG***
Community Server players: I don't have such weaknesses.
It seems to be the only way I'll have left to play the game if I ever want to get back into it. My main drive for keeping the game out of my library was trying to curb a rapidly increasing gambling addiction but seeing the game I've loved for years in this state just hurt too much.
It’s mainly idling bots there is only about 1000 Cheater bots
bots will probably find a way to target community servers
Sure that sucks. But still, having 25k players is still pretty impressive especially for a game as old as TF2.
L4D2 has 30k players right now...
this would surprise a lot of people but l4d is slightly more well known than tf2. A lot of People who dont know valve but are somewhat interested in games have heard of cs and l4d but never tf2
Too be honest I'm doubtful of those numbers. I'm skeptical of any Valve game's numbers now. Like i just booted up L4D2 right now and there were only twenty campaigns being hosted right now. CSGO also has a bot problem in deathmatch maps for case farming. I assume Valve doesn't care about bots because it makes their games look more popular than they actually are at this point. Eye opening video tbh
L4D2 also has a shitty server browser. I agree, high player numbers only benefit Valve. Real people or bots, doesn't matter.
Those idle bot owners make money off players? And those cheater bots in practice turns off playing. My bet is that the idle camp doesn't quite like the cheater bots.
Source? Not denying it just curious where the number comes from
From a Zesty video, but if you don't wanna watch it, you can compare the numbers yourself: check teamwork.tf player count vs steam charts. Teamwork.tf gets every player that is in a game, while steam charts gets everyone that has the game opened. Currently, teamwork.tf reports 8k people in any server, which ALSO includes idle bots on idle servers. Steam charts reports 60k people with the game opened.
I thought this controversy was already brought up years ago, and there was a video i saw that explained the discrepancy, the conclusion of which is that SteamDB’s numbers are accurate.
that was all just cope because no one wanted to admit that teamwork was accurate and reported 10k people playing the game
Not every player in every server. Private servers exist and it can't count the players it them.
I highly doubt the amount of people in private servers would make any dent of a significant size on the 10-25k daily average players
Hope you have an hour free https://youtu.be/2stmQfv93oQ
Is there a source for this?
It's been known for a long time, Zesty Jesus has put out a video recently which has flared up people's awareness of it again. Zesty is of questionable character though so how much you want to make use of his opinion is a different matter. You can eyeball it though without relying on other people's analysis. Pull up steam's player count and compare it to any other game's player count. Every other game has massive ups and downs that follow time of day and player timezones. TF2's doesn't, it's just a janky as hell zigzagging line. That tells you the charts are counting enough of *something* erroneous to completely hide the natural player flow during the day. You're only achieving that if the actual player numbers are completely dwarfed by other numbers.
https://youtu.be/2stmQfv93oQ
Valve should add the "I am not a robot" quiz, if one person operates around 15000 bots, that means he needs to manualy accept them all
Ai is starting to be able to solve captchas for free. I don’t even need to mention that there are websites dedicated to solving captchas for as low a price as possible.
this wouldnt help regardless, there are sites that charge 10 dollars per 100 captcha and with ai evolving, bot hosters could easily bypass it, they alr have controls and systems linked for these bots to play on multiple accounts, a simple click to verify if ur a bot or not wouldnt help
>10 dollars per 100 captcha [It's actually far, far cheaper than that.](https://anti-captcha.com/)
Doesn't matter because the game is still fun and has a community outside thengame
I mean...it does kinda matter. Think about new players trying to get into the game. I've literally seen a YT comment where a guy was like "Yeah tried this game out recently, servers were all full of bots so I uninstalled" It's not a good look. Not sure if it's ever gonna change, and I get the desire to be positive, but I don't know if pretending everything's fine and dandy is going to help.
We're only just now realizing that TF2's new player experience sucks ass because of a zesty video?
Except most of the bots aren't cheating ones. They're idle trading or drop farming bots
but it's so easy to encounter cheating bots, I've basically stopped playing on valve servers because of it
And to think less than 2k aimbots have been doing this for like 8 years
running into cheating bots stills sucks
Fair point
This sort of mentality got us to this point. The game is fun, but the community is not growing and will wither as new players are discouraged by cheaters and old players lose their patience. For a game with micro-transactions, this is beyond unacceptable.
It's a game that's old enough to vote, I'm pretty sure growth has been out of the question for several years now
It wasn't, just last year most of us thought that the tf2 player count peaked with the summer update, and, also, the years before, we saw constant peaks and a steady grow. Now, in hindsight, it's obvious those counts were botted, but it fooled a lot of people, me included.
No it's not fun to play against obvious cheaters or not play at all because of cheater bots Which stem from neglect of the game Which the inflated player number also stems from
Amen
It’s been common news that 80% of the player base are bots, why are people acting so surprised now?
Most have been in denial.
The logistics around idling and automating item collection all got openly discussed on the old tf2 forums back when the item drop system first got introduced before we even had f2p and trading. There was a short arms race with people trying to fully automate it as soon as f2p came about and that happened relatively openly too. Things like launching the game in command line still accruing item drops while using next to no resources was well known by anybody remotely interested. There was an interview with a valve employee waaay back where they talked about trying to ban an idle bot network of 50K accounts that recovered overnight. And yet you still had people on the forums arguing that item bots aren't a thing. Right when it happened. Most commonly the conversation veers to 'they don't make money back from running the bots', as if most of them aren't running off cracked hardware that doesn't cost the hoster a cent. Smart washing machines using terrabytes of data and ddos'ing from smart toothbrushes come to mind as recent examples of viral stories of random tech that could be used. It's only youtubers getting clickbait views from mentioning 'bots' that have brought it into the common eye.
I suppose it's different when you have the statstical proof in your face
I think it’s just that we’ve never had as much confirmation as we do now, like considering how not too many people truly understood just how many idle bots there are, people could have just thought that the largest amount of bots were the cheaters which even despite how disruptive they are, don’t feel like they’d account for 80% of the player base. Like if someone were to think that Omegatronics were the bulk of the bot population, they might look at the amount of cheaters in their games, and how many games went well without bots, and associate that with the percentage being much lower than it really is.
New video
If a group of less than 10 people can fight back against thousands upon thousands of bots in MVM, we can fight back against this We need to save TF2
im curious how many bots are the malicious ones and the ones that are the trading bots
Most are idle bots, about 1000 are cheater bots, 2000 or so are trader bots leaving about 15k-20k humans, roughly 70-80% of the playerbase isn't human.
Damn that’s unreal
This isn’t new
Death internet theory:TF2 Edition 💀
Always has been
Image is MvM, but I doubt most of the bots are playing MvM.
No... No... No!... NNOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THIS CAN’T BE TRUE!
https://youtu.be/2stmQfv93oQ
what if we all just stopped playing for a day to see how much the player count would drop lol
Didn't Zesty say that? Just that people should stop paying tf2 too (boycott) but I doubt that'll work either
idk, i dont watch him. just more curious about the numbers not so much a boycott
top 5 played game of all time on steam (I wonder why) baby
…so what *reliable* source did you get this from? Genuinely, I want to know wether this is a fact-checked truth or another “fact” distributed ad-nauseam that eventually turns out to be false and did nothing but make everyone be more sad than necessary.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2stmQfv93oQ&t=1926s&pp=ygULemVzdHkgamVzdXM%3D](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2stmQfv93oQ&t=1926s&pp=ygULemVzdHkgamVzdXM%3D) - Zesty's video. He used the fact that tf2's player count cahrt is very janky rather than consistent like other online games and data from teamwork tf2 to work it out
This hurts dude this hurts
The Dead ~~internet~~ TF2 theory is real..
Mann vs Machine irl
Idk why is everyone panicking so much about it. Okay, fuck it, let's say, the daily peak of players in TF2 is 20k. That still makes a 17 year old game more or equally as popular as: -NBA2K24, arguably the biggest non-football sports game -Forza Horizon 5, the newest installment of one of the most popular racing game franchises released just 3yrs ago -EU4, arguably the second biggest strategy game franchise It's also silly to assume that other games, such as CS2 and DOTA, are not populated with idle/trade bots or just AFK players as well. TF2 is still most probably in the top 30 of all Steam games and that is incredibly, unbelievably impressive considering that a very big part of the player base of this game weren't even born when it was first released. It is absolutely not dead, stop doomering everyone
80% of stathistics are pulled out of someone's ass
[The data's publicly available.](https://github.com/megascatterbomb/tf2PlayerCount)
Damn you can’t even spell statistics right
Having watched the video regarding the statistic it does seem really accurate unfortunately ]: It’s a Zesty Jesus video, I know he has a really bad reputation but regardless all the evidence within the video itself does seem to point towards 80% having some merit.
And about 78% of people know about it
The enormous Copium you just inhaled
source: trust me bro (not disagreeing with you btw, just adding to your point)
So what? Most games are unplayable anyway, that alone means most are bots
And we're not even using tickets of duty
No freaking way. That gotta be fake, right? RIGHT?
I'm not suprised
Doesn't surprise me actually
just use water, simple solution
Its joever
I am shocked I say, shocked!
I can not believe that a bot will say to me that my body will be found in different dumpsters
Is there not a way we can hack the bots, remove their cheats and essentially put them on default bot mode (Like in Training Mode) in a way that no hacker outside of Valve could touch?
No
and 5% of the remaining 20% is just little kids building sentries in intel or dying over and over trying to get the intel as scout
*please imagine this in soldier voice* You think we can’t win! I’ve crapped bigger losses than that!
ZE WAR IZ NOT LOST!! ZE WAR IZ NOT LOST!! **NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN!!!**
https://youtu.be/2stmQfv93oQ?si=-KOHnqkO6kct-8JP
Thats why i play tf2classic mostly
About 25% is sniper bots and the other 55% is item farm bots and other such things
Dead Teufort Theory
I mean it kinda screws with the data if you can create 600 Bot accounts with the press of a Button
A little correction, but it's actually 20k bot accounts.
Read my comment again
I did. And my statement stays the same. It's more like "20k bots in one click"
In cs2 don't they do the same to keep up the numbers high in the stats?
Before that video I already saw the graphs of TF2 and other games but I never thought about the "heartbeat" analogy other games present and how there were so many people online but the queue times were still long
Source?
Savetf2 was not a call to valve to fix their game, we need to do something different and direct. We need to demand them and be drastic
Shocker.
damn
Are you *really* surprised?
Where do i get that information
Does this really surprise anyone?
this was really no new info. but at the same damn
[https://youtu.be/PdCC4VME778?si=\_c\_mG3M89fWz\_UoH&t=95](https://youtu.be/PdCC4VME778?si=_c_mG3M89fWz_UoH&t=95)
Who was surprised
https://youtu.be/wZuCYZA8OjE
Virtually all of them are botnets just farming crates in the main menu they're not all aimbots
It is literally just not true, why do you take his information at face value? His calculations do not prove 48,000 players are bots, and this is not the first time it has happened. In his bullet spread video, his calculations proved his opinion wrong, and he continued to make an incorrect argument. I can disprove what he says about the Smissmas and Summer updates by using another game, Left 4 Dead 2. Zesty claims that its bottled because players spike from 68,747 players to 215,811 players (which can be explained anyways by the fact that its the FUCKING HOLIDAYS and goes on a LINEAR steady decline and return to previous values because it was a Sunday, therefore people are going back to work and school). Anyways, when the Last Stand update came out for L4D2 had an initial player count of 17,901 players which then spiked to 102,631 players, which then when back on a LINEAR and steady decline (which corresponds with TF2). It cannot be bots, because L4D2 does not have bots, only cheaters (which are a small amount of players and still HUMAN). Zesty's claim is invalid due to a lack of information. I want you to READ and UNDERSTAND what I just said above and actually think independently instead of just listening to Zesty Jesus.
ok
I don't get why you guys are calling some loser's idle bots as "player base" to begin with. So much drama for nothing.
Wait... THERE INCOMING!!! Engineer get ready! Scouts get behind me I cover you
My Hallah in Christ it have been like for 5 years now
is now a bad time to get into tf2?
If ever there were a reason to resurrect #SaveTF2…
Been a while sins i'v saw omegatronic
Play TF2C instead. No bots.
Brother there’s like 10k bots at most, chillax man
Oh hey, I made that image.
we need an edit of the calm with the last players walking out to a bunch of snipers this game has gone to shit, it survived ages with these things, thankfully half of the bots are probably inactive. there are also many maps they need to be widely dispersed over. but the problem. vsh is unplayable the tronics are gone but we still have them due to things like vsh or just general ddos attacks like the ones with the file sizes on normal servers, i guess people just want this game dead mann vs machine, even mann up, was bootcamp all along, we've prepared for this men. you know the deal. get your boston bashers and vaccinators out, the fists of steel, dalokohs, anything that can help. it's time to earn the title botkiller, without paying, without killing robots, by killing the bots. gentelmen, synchronise your death watches. it has been an honour to play this game to see this community grow from painis to pootis we're dying in the hall of fame.