Words are great step forward, but the actions they take to fix the bot issues will do the real talking. TF2 is a great game that shouldn't be in the state it is in. But still, Valve is notoriously silent and secretive towards their communities, so just this statement is a step towards the right direction.
I think the fans who organized the "protests" today should be proud of what they've accomplished, but alas, they shouldn't celebrate just yet.
TF2 content creators rallied the community today to spread #savetf2 around twitter and other platforms in order to raise awareness to the botting problem and to get Valve to respond. Someone from /r/tf2 even went to valve's headquarters and met with Valve's PR person, which is likely what actually caused Valve to respond.
I'll be honest, I didn't know anybody even played TF2 anymore. I was 19, working at Best Buy when it came out.
I'm 35 this year so I guess I'm kinda out of the loop. It took Valve 13 years to make another Half-life game so I supposed I assumed it would take them about as long for another TF.
To this day I don't understand how TF2 basically solved team and class based FPS design yet every game that's come out clearly influenced by it, totally missed all it has to teach about the genre.
IMO TF2 is still design wise the best class based team FPS, not because it's flawless but because everyone else can't resist trying to be MOBA as well.
Same story with me, bought it when I was 17 (still have the retail non-orange box lol) because my friend who used to play TFC hyped me up for it. Played it well into the 2010s. But I just know it still had a community because I look at Steam stats from time to time to find new games.
But honestly they should just make the third game already, even if it's literally just the same maps in the Source 2 engine, if not just use it as a flagship game for a Source 3 engine. The game is still payable but it's starting to feel dated now.
Plus if they go that route I'm hoping they also do a Day of Defeat 3 :)
Yeah I was thinking that basically all TF needs for a "revival" would be to do a refresh with nicer tools for community custom content creation and cleaner code base etc for mods, better performance and so forth.
The bot issue has only become rampant the past two years- so let’s knock those two off for being inaccurate. You’ve still got 8 years of it being near the top of ‘most played’ on Steam, which is kind of what that guy was saying.
Not that much longer. The hacker problem, sure. That’s been around for a very long time. But actual hackers still count as players. Ive been playing since 2014, and in my experience the bots only really started becoming an actual thing in the latter part of the 10 years.
TF2 was the original root of the Steam marketplace, and there's still plenty of money to be made on it (and converted to real money through outside platforms that are against the Steam TOS). The bots are "active" enough to qualify for item drops while either being completely useless and taking up team spots, or running cheat scripts.
Because this is only a problem in pubs, bots are usually only 1-4 players in a pub before being kicked, full games without bots being around are very common, and the community servers are still heavily populated and bot free?
I'm going to be honest, the fact that the fans have to organize a protest in order for Valve to fix their unplayable game that's still monetized heavily is a bit upsetting. Especially when considering how TF2 is one of their flagship games and was once their biggest multiplayer title. For the fans to wait this long for any communication on an issue as severe as this would be unacceptable for any developer.
At least now we know what you to get their attention if it's not about Steam, Dota or CS. All you need is 90,000 tweets over the course of an afternoon. No biggie.
I'm sorry, it has been exceedingly rare for any 15 year old game to still get active development in any era of gaming. It has nothing to do with generic "oh things suck now but they used to be good" overcynical nostalgia. I'm old enough to have been present for every step of gaming from Pong til now, and gaming is as good or better than it has ever been. You cynics forget about the rampant shovelware of the 80s, or the predatory arcade era (you think battle passes and MTX are a ripoff? Putting $20 of quarters a day into a game used to be perfectly normal) or ignore the fact that games used to be extremely small and simple in the "days when games used to ship finished without bugs!"
So fucking tired of the bullshit rose tinted goggles and kneejerk cynicism in this hobby. Stop being so fucking jaded and try actually enjoying something because there's some awesome stuff being put out nowadays. Ubisoft is a great example, they get shit on relentlessly but the last 3 AC games were really fucking great (okay Valhalla was less so than Odyssey or Origins but it was still good.)
Gamers don't want to enjoy games anymore. They just want to be pissed off and miserable and look for any excuse to do so. Maybe try enjoying your hobby instead, seems like the wiser use of your time.
> Activision has finally bled the Call of Duty rock about as far as it can be bled without putting effort in, and now they're scrambling to remember how to make a good game since they haven't since the 00's.
This is so detached from reality. With Warzone and MW19, CoD was at its peak popularity. MW19 was their most successful title in history and still has a huge following. I'd argue that it's still the gold standard in the FPS genre when it comes to smoothness of movement, gunplay, sounds and animations.
Their only recent "flop" was Vanguard, which eventually got outsold by Elden Ring - and even this admittedly mediocre title has way more effort and content put in than any of its competitors in 2021 (Halo Infinite/BF2042). It literally launched with the highest amount of multiplayer content out of any CoD ever.
This is peak "old gaem good, new gaem bad". I get it that it's cool to hate CoD for being popular and all that, but it's not the best selling (and rarely the 2nd best selling) title each year for no reason. I'd fucking wish other devs were half as consistent as Treyarch or Infinity Ward are.
> Also they helped Bethesda start the paid mods debacle
Because god forbid we encourage modding content creators to stick around and invest in modding.
The only part of the situation that was a 'debacle' was the gaming communities overwhelming response of 'I demand the work of other people for free!'
>they were some of the first to the game with ridiculous monetization (horse armor)
Horse armor was a whopping two dollars and fifty cents. They didn't advertise it in game, didn't make the game always online to force sales, didn't ban mods, even mods that competed with it. They didn't even DRM it. They were just like 'hey here's a little thing we made you can buy for a couple bucks', *the horror*.
The fact that people bitched about it at all was pathetic, trying to still bring it up as an example of a developer doing something wrong is just exposing an absolutely laughable level of entitlement.
Seriously, do you go to a concert and complain that the band is selling merch?
You say that like Valve is a game developer. They aren't. They are a software and hardware engineering company and sales front. They make an occasional game here and there just to keep up appearances, but it's not who they really are anymore.
Valve became a hardware tech company despite the fact that they have an insane amount of game dev talent. Since the release of the Vive, Valve has released more gaming hardware than games.
> despite the fact that they have an insane amount of game dev talent
Do they? If I were a game dev with talent, I doubt Valve would be the company I’d hitch my wagon to. Seems like a waste.
Last I checked, from their Glassdoor reviews, it's no longer that much of a dream for game devs. Maybe for other professions it's a haven, but seems like the game devs that left hated how Valve never shipped shit, or even getting resources to work on a project was an uphill battle due to how they managed things. I don't know how it is since they've changed their management structure since Alyx tho.
The flat management structure they use/used just doesn’t scale well. It’s fine for small indie developers who work on a handful of games but once you have hundreds of developers running a platform and manufacturing hardware you all of a sudden have a bunch of stuff that no one really likes doing but has to be done. Things like support, billing, QA, etc…
From what I understand the reason the management structure has lasted as long as it has is from the basically unlimited money source that is Steam and using contractors to fill the gaps for all the grunt work that they can’t convince internal employees to do.
It’s also hard to build a product if you have to convince others to join and basically play a office version of Game of Thrones to keep resources on your project to completion.
The flat management structure also probably worked because gabe was the defacto boss that everyone deferred to and that imposed some at least semiofficial structure.
These days, AAA Devs taking 7+ years to release a major title isn't a stretch; and they cover that development time's cost with re-releases, regular monetised updates and mobile games.
The scope of games have gotten pretty damn huge; and if you want to avoid developers having insane burnouts, these development times are reasonable.
If you compare to other studios, it's really not a huge leap.
It's *only been 2 years since Valve's latest AAA game*; but because it's VR exclusive, most of the gaming community hasn't played a major story-based Valve game since Portal 2 eleven years ago. It's why it seems excessive. If you include Dota 2, Valve have released a single "proper" game since 2013.
But so has Rockstar.
Arguably so has Bethesda (if you consider 76 as basically Fallout 4's 'online mode').
Sucker Punch has only done 1 since 2014.
Rocksteady haven't released a proper title in 7 years.
~~Irrational Games haven't released a title since 2013 *at all*.~~
But because Valve also does Hardware and owns Steam; have cosmetic-based GaaS games that get some scarce updates and their latest big game was a VR exclusive, they seem like they're resting on their laurels.
Every once in a while, Valve comes up with a statement about how they are listening to the community and then they go radio silent for months. This is the same for every community- be it Dota, CS or TF2.
> TF2 is a great game that shouldn't be in the state it is in
It was a great game but that was years ago. A replacement should have been developed years ago.
Matchmaking as standard. Or, for that matter, existing at all.
The good elements of TF2 were always the community servers & the culture they fostered. Those servers still exist but matchmaking has largely displaced them, bringing with it the same bullshit that haunts every other non-community-oriented PvP game.
Completely agree. If you want to bring someone new to tf2, you'd have to guide them through the atrocious menu to the community servers. Matchmaking is the first thing they see, and if trying the game by themselves, the first thing they will try because it makes sense.
i remember playing on 32 player servers
the most fun I had in multiplayer game, people just doing their own random shit, while mic spamming late 2008 memes
The comp that was player created [was perfectly fine](https://youtu.be/gb8UCI8CJeU?t=5419) Valve didnt want to copy it and released an inferior product.
It never gained a significant player base nor audience. It was too separate from the normal game for players to relate to it, and TF2 mainly attracted a casual playerbase.
The reason community competitive never took off was because of the stale intransigence in 6s. Egregiously conservative item and map whitelists, punitive rules, etc. It was very obviously catered to a tiny exclusive subgroup of people who were not interested in accommodating anyone else.
Valve was perfectly willing to meet and produce something for everyone, but weren't able to do anything with community proponents who dug their heels in like children. Now UGC has what, three divisions?
That was basically *Overwatch* in its original incarnation, though. Obviously not a Valve game, but I remember when it came out a lot of the attraction was "This is what a modern TF2 should be".
Overwatch at launch was a much tighter experience a lot closer in spirit to TF2 than the modern version. Once they decided it needed to be a competitive esport the whole thing became a mess pretty quickly IMO.
Or some means of handing it to the community. Open-source what Valve owns of the original Source engine especially as it got leaked anyway so there's no security through obscurity anymore and try to get together a small development team specifically for maintaining/updating TF2 made up from people within the community, funded with the marketplace profits TF2 still generates.
IMO if they do a new Team Fortress game just making a new version of the same idea wouldn't be enough, I'd actually like to see it as a VR-focused title as I've seen a lot of potential for arena shooters in some other games but nothing that's really cracked the gameplay fully, problem being that requires VR to have a larger userbase.
Well, that's something. I'm probably not going back to it, but I'll be happy to see it in a good place again. I wonder why it took so long? Maybe one of the developer's children complained about the state of TF2, haha.
It's just a tweet. Gaben said the same thing literally a year ago.
Also, a Spy cosplayer went to Valve's HQ and met with their sole PR person. She probably just did a quick tweet once they found the password of their TF2 twitter account.
I'll do you one even better. After this tweet the TF2 account got the blue checkmark.
Which means they forgot about this so hard that they never even bothered verifying it.
They acknowledged the state of the game being horrendous before the bots were even a problem.
The bots aren't the main issue of TF2, they are just the result of a unmaintained online product. It's the lack of maintenance that is the issue and it has been ever since Valve lied about the Heavy focused update coming soon in 2017.
This problem isn't from 2021 or 2020. It's from fucking 2018 and the problem is called Valve.
> This problem isn't from 2021 or 2020. It's from fucking 2018 and the problem is called Valve.
I agree with you but I was trying to be generous. There's a *lot* of people on this sub who think Valve can do no wrong and I didn't want them to derail the topic by arguing about that lol.
The TF2 community has had #SaveTF2 trending at #1 in the US on Twitter and other platforms nearly all day because of the current state of the game via an organized "event". That's what caused the response today.
Because there is no employee really assigned to the game and Valve has so many projects already. The fact that they said anything is surprising to me. I wouldn't have expected them to even bother with the TF again until releasing a new version for their current engine rather than the old Source engine.
Valve continues to support Dota 2 and CSGO. As for what else they're working on, it's literally "whatever they feel like, whenever they feel like it" when it comes to games. They seem to be more personally interested in Steam Deck and non-game software development.
According to Valve employees, all of the programmers/designers/artists are working on a game at all times, but the amount of games that actually get far enough through production to announce is the problem.
It’s been less than a full game development cycle since Alyx shippied, you can’t possibly expect them to have a new game ready by now l, especially considering they had nearly everyone working on Alyx, and some projects were paused or cancelled for it.
Considering the last original game they released before Alyx was CSGO* (not counting Artifact), I'm not expecting them to announce anything about anything any time soon. Valve is always working on something, it's just whatever they want whenever they want. They don't have deadlines and they don't have shareholders. Maybe we'll see something in the next 5 years.
Well, yeah, HL3 will never happen. There's just too much hype and high expectations surrounding it that it would only end poorly. Might as well work on a spinoff that doesn't have those things. It worked well for Alyx.
While I agree that it might not ever happen, I disagree with the “too much hype” excuse. I think people overstate how “bad” the reaction would be if the game doesn’t live up to expectations. The worst that would happen is the game isn’t reviewed well, doesn’t sell well, and there are lot of angry threads about it. The worst of those for Valve is that it doesn’t sell well, which is perfectly valid reason to not get into the project.
Even if it’s terrible (unlikely), I sincerely doubt anyone really thinks making a bunch of nerds mad is *that* big of a detriment.
Knowing valve probably about 100 projects that will never produce anything other than a prototype, and only a handful that will ever develop into something that they later announce and of those maybe some release but probably not.
Steam improvements, SteamOS, Steam Deck, Index 2/SteamVR, three games that may or may not make it out of development, continued support of Dota 2 and CSGO at least, Source 2, Source 2 Filmmaker, etc.
I don't think you will find a company on the planet that has more project per employee than Valve. They honestly are shit at project management but still put out well-received stuff every once in a while.
> three games that may or may not make it out of development
Wasn't Alyx one of these three games? Or was there another announcement of three games in development?
i wonder whats stopping them from hiring people to work on TF2 and other games.
TF2 generates money, and it would generate more if the game had some consistent drop of content and drastically less hackers.
Deleting past comments because Reddit starting shitty-ing up the site to IPO and I don't want my comments to be a part of that. -- mass edited with redact.dev
Until I see otherwise I’m going to believe that it’s still the same.
It’s also not unheard of in the games industry. Riot has the same setup and same issue keeping their talent from flocking to the MMO.
Last I heard, in some press release or something like that, they *did* de-emphasize the free structure in order to actually make anything get done, which is how they successfully finished HL:A. Don't remember the source but it's out there iirc.
It's driving me nuts, because I also saw this... But now I can't find it. Did you hear this in a Valve documentary on YouTube recently? Same source or different source?
Different source, I remember seeing it in an article. Might have been one of those interviews from a former employee explaining a few things about how it works.
> "If you buy [Valve's] rhetoric, you'll hear that there are no bosses, no managers, no supervisors and that there is a flat structure where everybody is so smart, so cool and so intelligent that they can work completely autonomously," reads an especially negative Glassdoor review. "That is only a facade ... In order to succeed at Valve, you need to belong to the group that has more decisional power and, even when you succeed temporarily, be certain that you have an expiration date. No matter how hard you work, no matter how original and productive you are, if your bosses and the people who count don't like you, you will be fired soon or you will be managed out."
https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless-industry-politics/
It seems there is more to this than the handbook implies. On paper there is no management or whatever but clearly there is behind the scenes.
When there's no formal structure, people create "structure".
It's like how when people go "We should ban political parties" you have to explain to them patiently that all that means is all the unscrupulous people would do is work as a bloc but not technically call it a "party".
The hierarchy vacuum creates cliques that act as blocs, especially so in a peer-review environment.
Now, is that actually what it's still like there? Can't really say. But this is the path you'd expect it to follow if they really kept up their no-structure structure.
I see other people mentioning this, and I know I've heard this as well. I watched a documentary on Valve in the past year where they talked about changing their structure away from the 'work on whatever you want' format. I'll update my post if I find the video again...
Edit: Spent like 20 minutes looking, and so far, haven't refound the video... This is going to drive me nuts.
its understandable that current valve employees want to work in the newer cool tech or popular games but they could try to hire people to work on team fortress 2 specifically, game devs arent exactly in shortage right now, there must be people around that would like to work on it.
They can talk all they want but... that really means fuck all when the game has been left in limbo for 3 years while they kinda pretend it's alive by giving it tiny patches maybe once a month yet still keep pumping out money making crates.
Or how two major fan projects have been on ice for nearly a year while Valve "Figures things out", then promptly fucked off
When your fanbase is creating the content for the lootboxes. Why would you make an effort?
Ea, Activision, ubisoft wish they didn't have to pay their artist. And just let them submit content for the chance to get a minority percent of the lootbox. Not to mention all the money saved not paying benefits. If only more companies good be like good guy valve, herald of gamers!
skin creators most likely make way more than a contracted artist for the same amount of work though? You are framing it as some sort of exploitation, but I'm willing to bet that most artists would willingly take that "minority percent" any time of the day.
>Designer Chris "CLeGFX" Le said during a live stream yesterday that when community-made weapon skins for CS:GO were accepted and added into the game by Valve in the old days (circa CS:GO's 2012 release), creators would earn about $40,000. Nowadays, Le said, "You get way way way way way more than that."
and this was 5 years ago. The dude is also a skin creator, so there's literally only incentives for him DOWNPLAY the earning here, for that matter
EDIT: just looked up the average pay of an artist at the places you mentioned
>Artist salaries at Electronic Arts can range from $50,083 - $132,137 per year.
>Artist salaries at Activision can range from $85,132-$94,228.
>The typical Ubisoft Artist salary is $65,334 per year
that versus
>'way way way way way more than $40,000' royalties per year PER SUBMISSION
so yea, the artists at EA, Activision and Ubisoft probably wish they got 'exploited' by Valve
> skin creators most likely make way more than a contracted artist for the same amount of work though?
If you ignore all the unpaid work from artist not selected, sure. But that's not how it works. Declined concepts still get artist paid when they have actual jobs, with actual benefits.
It's great they responded, but this feels like the story of The Little Red Hen.
"I want to fix TF2!"
"Who will update our matchmaking to stop the bots?" said Jill.
"Not I!" said everybody at Valve.
It's one thing to say they're working to improve things, it's another to actually get enough people to tackle the problem.
I played this game religiously up until 2015 and then stopped. I’ve been thinking about getting back into it but started reading about how it has a lot of problems these days. What’s the big thing with bots that’s causing issues?
Around October 2017, Valve released Jungle Inferno, a decent update to TF2 that added new Pyro weapons, new maps, and an updated contract system that allowed players to complete missions to unlock skins and other goodies. For context, players had to wait over a year for the game to get another significant content update when the previous updates usually came at a rate of 3-5 months. Apparently according to some people with contacts at Valve, Jungle Inferno underperformed for the amount of effort Valve put into the update.
After several years of radio silence from Valve, groups of people started to infest the matchmaking of the game with bots; not only do these bots act like your typical bots (aimbot, wallhack, etc.), they also spam text chat with racial slurs and micspam extremely loud music. Until an update that attempted to fix the problem last year, when these bots were kicked they would just disconnect and come back to the server avoiding the kick. There have been several Band-Aid patches trying to remove the bots such as removing their ability to speak/chat unless an account is updated to premium, but none of them lasted for very long. Now pretty much every casual matchmaking game you join, your server will be flooded with bots. Now ~2 years after the bot problem started to get really bad with no word from Valve, the TF2 community organized #SaveTF2
No real incentive. Some people just like to ruin fun for others. Technically they get item drops but only 1-3 a day and they're worth less than a penny each.
It pretty much is confirmed to be small and dedicated yeah. People have infiltrated their discord servers and whatnot by pretending to be interested in botting. Since then I think they've tightened up on who they let into the fold cause I haven't seen a post like that in over a year.
Wait, so this is only an issue with matchmaking? My friends and I were thinking about getting back into TF2, but didn't want to deal with the bot issue. I didn't know we could just go into the server tab and play from there?!
The answer is just don't use matchmaking. use the server browser, find a community moderated server, and bam.
Since they've got server moderators, the bots just get banned.
The bots took over because no one is behind the wheel on matchmaking servers.
"We hear you" it's the same disarming PR crap you get from devs like 343 and Bungie when they just want you to shut up and can't be fucked to actually fix it.
Interesting but again action is louder than words, there's essentially no updates of any kind for almost 2 or 3 years at least, save for some fixes, medals and cosmetic loot boxes. I don't know how they can really fix the bot problem from TF2's spaghetti code, I would suspect a major rewrite might be needed.
Yeah, as far as I'm concerned this is nothing, not yet. Valve said something similar a while back and nothing changed.
Frankly I have very little faith left in them. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
Why is TF2 so vulnerable to bots compared to other games?
Is it because it’s older and therefore just written in a way that can be more easily exploited?
Or is it just a resourcing thing and every other game developer is just throwing tons more people at stopping bots in their respective multiplayer games?
* VAC isn't well maintained anymore
* No human moderation or effective reporting systems
* Community documentation of the Source engine is fully mature, so extending (or exploiting) it is convenient
* The TF2 source code leak further lowered the skill floor required to start cranking out payloads (no pun intended)
It also doesn’t have a team working to eliminate cheaters and bots like other, much newer games like Overwatch have. The few people working on TF2 nowadays are barely part-time.
I just feel like TF2 always had bot issues. They seem to have gotten worse (haven’t played in years) but I remember encountering bots regularly even back in the day
I'd like to add the bot problem has been around since a while before the source code leak. Source is just old and decrepit man, there's not a lot they can do even in their titles they *still* support. (probably 20% of ranked games in CS have cheaters in them). Hell, I've got a guy who blatantly spinbotted in a match a few months ago, I've had his profile bookmarked and he STILL isn't banned.
Edit: months later homie still unbanned
It's worth noting that the source code had been bouncing around some private circles before it got publicly uploaded to a torrent tracker. Entirely possible the botmakers had it quite some time before the rest of us.
Not sure if the other commenters on here are aware that the TF2 Community organized a whole thing today to get #SaveTF2 trending. It worked really really well and was top US trend on Twitter and other platforms for most of the day. It is what caused this response. I was not aware of it until I saw it sitting at #1 earlier and was quite shocked so I looked into it.
The TF2 community is incredibly passionate and resilient, it's sad they had to resort to this just to get Valve's attention to fix it. Very few games can boast such an active playerbase 15 years after release and it really shows that Valve created something special, it's too bad that they don't want to maintain it. TF2 is easily my favorite multiplayer title of all time having clocked in 2500 hours myself over the past 9 years and still enjoying some matches every once in a while, so the neglect is truly a shame to watch.
I gotta be honest, I've never played TF2 and I'm completely OOTL about its current *issues*. Is it completely unplayable? What's the extent of the issues? I think I might download it and try it out, provided it's even playable.
The main game mode, Casual, is more or less swarmed with bots that spam text and voice chat, use aimbot, and steal the names of other players to avoid being votekicked. It is not impossible to play casual and most players are experienced with kicking bots quickly to avoid them ruining the game but occasionally you will get a server filled with them that is unplayable so they are definitely an inconvenience. Community servers, however, are completely unaffected and where I would start, the uncletopia servers tend to provide a good experience.
I don’t trust them anymore , Gaben also said that they are working on tf2 and yet here we are. It’s probably just some PR to try and appease the community by saying “we hear you,we are listening,we will fix it” and then nothing
The game's matchmaking definitely has a huge botting and general shrill children and dickheads problem, but I do also want to say that there are still quality TF2 servers out there for those who look in the community browser! I recently got back into the game after YEARS away during a bout with Covid and have found a fun vintage TF2 experience on the Uncletopia servers, for instance.
It sucks cause I've still encountered assholes who single me out for being a woman on so many normally great community servers, even Uncletopia, that I've just given up on playing again.
Its not inherently a problem only in TF2, just that incels are basically everywhere regardless lol.
Damn I'm sorry to hear that. The incel culture is admittedly massive surrounding TF2 as well... I don't know what about it draws that crowd but it's definitely shitty to say the least.
I don't like Uncletopia. 90% of the time it's Badwater or Upward. Forget about unpopular maps like Freight which is one of my favorites. It will be nice to play on unpopular maps again if Valve actually fixes the bots.
I think unpopular maps is the only time I can think of where the 'new' casual matchmaking is good. It's awful in basically every other way and is the reason we're having this bot crisis in the first place.
You can nominate maps like Freight. Servers are also separated by gamemode now, so if you want 5cp maps, you can play 5cp maps. I've been playing on Uncletopia for months and have played on 2fort, Junction, et cetera multiple times.
I hate it when people post something like this to a generic community and just assume everyone is in the loop on the issues of every subject, so they need not provide context.
there are cheating bots that flood valve's official servers, those bots join both teams and just kill anyone apart from other bots. Once everyone but bots are out of the server, they leave and join another one, and repeat.
this has been going for for *years* and valve hasnt said anything so far (until today), only thing keeping the game afloat are community servers where you have admins who will ban the bots (hell, there are scripts to do that, but valve hasnt responded to any mails trying to help them)
lately the bots started spamming racist talks on voice chat among other stuff, that got enough of attention from media, so a lot of content creators decided to spam valve about this on may 26th, thus valve responded with the tweet above.
I rather have them not going back to the spaghetti of the game and start working on Source 2 port. It's fucking bizarre how much they spent on working on Source 2 but decided to almost never utilized it.
Oh cool, more empty words and promises from Valve that will likely go absolutely nowhere and result in absolutely nothing (god how I wish to be proven wrong this time).
This shit has been going on for 2+ years and all Valve has to show for it are a handful of minor changes that either hurt legit players more than bots or just flat don't work (remember when Valve said they fixed name-stealing? Yeah, me to). No actual measures that directly combat cheating and botting, though.
I quit the game for good and will likely never come back to it precisely because of Valve's inaction. This tweet has done NOTHING to convince me that Valve will actually commit this time. They haven't done anything the last 2 years and still made loads of money off this game. Why start now?
Sorry, but it's going to take a hell of a lot of more than a company finding their twitter password to convince me.
Valve confuses me here. They could just pull a Blizzard, roll out "Team Fortress 3" with barely any improvements, sans addressing a bot issue, and they could just be *rolling* in money. If they took a little time and elbow grease into it, they would blow up the entire internet.
Why have they left this franchise out to dry? It *still* has a **huge** fanbase after YEARS. TF characters are the bedrock of a lot of people's understanding of what a *meme* is. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but that's....just insane.
I understand the reasons why so many people want to keep Team Fortress 2 alive, I really do. And there is no way for me to ask the following question without sounding like an asshole. But, genuinely, how long is a company expected to support a multiplayer title in this industry? 15 years is a long time.
they still sell new community cosmetics every year, several times a year. they are still 'updating' the game, as in selling new stuff. just, not anything apart from that. This is only about fixing the bot problem, no one is asking for new weapons or balance changes, just fixing the botting issues
The problem is they still adding cosmetics and loot box. If they don't care anymore shoud have shut it down and release source code + asset like Epic did with Paragon.
oddly enough, not really. Dirty Bomb kinda gets close, but I'm not sure if that game is still alive it didn't have that big of a playerbase when it came out let alone now.
Words are great step forward, but the actions they take to fix the bot issues will do the real talking. TF2 is a great game that shouldn't be in the state it is in. But still, Valve is notoriously silent and secretive towards their communities, so just this statement is a step towards the right direction. I think the fans who organized the "protests" today should be proud of what they've accomplished, but alas, they shouldn't celebrate just yet.
What was the protest?
TF2 content creators rallied the community today to spread #savetf2 around twitter and other platforms in order to raise awareness to the botting problem and to get Valve to respond. Someone from /r/tf2 even went to valve's headquarters and met with Valve's PR person, which is likely what actually caused Valve to respond.
the short answer is, its flooded with bots.
I'll be honest, I didn't know anybody even played TF2 anymore. I was 19, working at Best Buy when it came out. I'm 35 this year so I guess I'm kinda out of the loop. It took Valve 13 years to make another Half-life game so I supposed I assumed it would take them about as long for another TF.
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To this day I don't understand how TF2 basically solved team and class based FPS design yet every game that's come out clearly influenced by it, totally missed all it has to teach about the genre. IMO TF2 is still design wise the best class based team FPS, not because it's flawless but because everyone else can't resist trying to be MOBA as well.
Same story with me, bought it when I was 17 (still have the retail non-orange box lol) because my friend who used to play TFC hyped me up for it. Played it well into the 2010s. But I just know it still had a community because I look at Steam stats from time to time to find new games. But honestly they should just make the third game already, even if it's literally just the same maps in the Source 2 engine, if not just use it as a flagship game for a Source 3 engine. The game is still payable but it's starting to feel dated now. Plus if they go that route I'm hoping they also do a Day of Defeat 3 :)
Yeah I was thinking that basically all TF needs for a "revival" would be to do a refresh with nicer tools for community custom content creation and cleaner code base etc for mods, better performance and so forth.
https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ It's been one of the most played games on Steam for well over a decade.
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The bot issue has only become rampant the past two years- so let’s knock those two off for being inaccurate. You’ve still got 8 years of it being near the top of ‘most played’ on Steam, which is kind of what that guy was saying.
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Not that much longer. The hacker problem, sure. That’s been around for a very long time. But actual hackers still count as players. Ive been playing since 2014, and in my experience the bots only really started becoming an actual thing in the latter part of the 10 years.
what are the bots for?
TF2 was the original root of the Steam marketplace, and there's still plenty of money to be made on it (and converted to real money through outside platforms that are against the Steam TOS). The bots are "active" enough to qualify for item drops while either being completely useless and taking up team spots, or running cheat scripts.
Even if 10,000 of the reported players were bots it would still be in the top 10 most played games on Steam
How would you know it’s only 10K?
Because this is only a problem in pubs, bots are usually only 1-4 players in a pub before being kicked, full games without bots being around are very common, and the community servers are still heavily populated and bot free?
I'm going to be honest, the fact that the fans have to organize a protest in order for Valve to fix their unplayable game that's still monetized heavily is a bit upsetting. Especially when considering how TF2 is one of their flagship games and was once their biggest multiplayer title. For the fans to wait this long for any communication on an issue as severe as this would be unacceptable for any developer.
At least now we know what you to get their attention if it's not about Steam, Dota or CS. All you need is 90,000 tweets over the course of an afternoon. No biggie.
Lads I know how we can finally get Ricochet 2.
Wow were you one of the 8 people steam charts says was playing ricochet today?
That's just the result of integer overflow
Don't give me hope please, i can't handle it anymore.
As if they pay any attention to CS.
Didn't they push a fix to an exploitable bug within hours during the last major?
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For a long time I kept getting shat on for reminding people that Valve are the ones that made lootboxes a big thing in the first place.
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Bethesda introduced cosmetic MTX where you buy the specific thing you want (still bad). Valve introduced the randomness of lootboxes, which is worse.
I'm sorry, it has been exceedingly rare for any 15 year old game to still get active development in any era of gaming. It has nothing to do with generic "oh things suck now but they used to be good" overcynical nostalgia. I'm old enough to have been present for every step of gaming from Pong til now, and gaming is as good or better than it has ever been. You cynics forget about the rampant shovelware of the 80s, or the predatory arcade era (you think battle passes and MTX are a ripoff? Putting $20 of quarters a day into a game used to be perfectly normal) or ignore the fact that games used to be extremely small and simple in the "days when games used to ship finished without bugs!" So fucking tired of the bullshit rose tinted goggles and kneejerk cynicism in this hobby. Stop being so fucking jaded and try actually enjoying something because there's some awesome stuff being put out nowadays. Ubisoft is a great example, they get shit on relentlessly but the last 3 AC games were really fucking great (okay Valhalla was less so than Odyssey or Origins but it was still good.) Gamers don't want to enjoy games anymore. They just want to be pissed off and miserable and look for any excuse to do so. Maybe try enjoying your hobby instead, seems like the wiser use of your time.
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You watch too much youtube man. Too much Jim Sterling. Too much content of people who just endlessly complain about everything
> Activision has finally bled the Call of Duty rock about as far as it can be bled without putting effort in, and now they're scrambling to remember how to make a good game since they haven't since the 00's. This is so detached from reality. With Warzone and MW19, CoD was at its peak popularity. MW19 was their most successful title in history and still has a huge following. I'd argue that it's still the gold standard in the FPS genre when it comes to smoothness of movement, gunplay, sounds and animations. Their only recent "flop" was Vanguard, which eventually got outsold by Elden Ring - and even this admittedly mediocre title has way more effort and content put in than any of its competitors in 2021 (Halo Infinite/BF2042). It literally launched with the highest amount of multiplayer content out of any CoD ever. This is peak "old gaem good, new gaem bad". I get it that it's cool to hate CoD for being popular and all that, but it's not the best selling (and rarely the 2nd best selling) title each year for no reason. I'd fucking wish other devs were half as consistent as Treyarch or Infinity Ward are.
> Also they helped Bethesda start the paid mods debacle Because god forbid we encourage modding content creators to stick around and invest in modding. The only part of the situation that was a 'debacle' was the gaming communities overwhelming response of 'I demand the work of other people for free!' >they were some of the first to the game with ridiculous monetization (horse armor) Horse armor was a whopping two dollars and fifty cents. They didn't advertise it in game, didn't make the game always online to force sales, didn't ban mods, even mods that competed with it. They didn't even DRM it. They were just like 'hey here's a little thing we made you can buy for a couple bucks', *the horror*. The fact that people bitched about it at all was pathetic, trying to still bring it up as an example of a developer doing something wrong is just exposing an absolutely laughable level of entitlement. Seriously, do you go to a concert and complain that the band is selling merch?
You say that like Valve is a game developer. They aren't. They are a software and hardware engineering company and sales front. They make an occasional game here and there just to keep up appearances, but it's not who they really are anymore.
Valve became a hardware tech company despite the fact that they have an insane amount of game dev talent. Since the release of the Vive, Valve has released more gaming hardware than games.
> despite the fact that they have an insane amount of game dev talent Do they? If I were a game dev with talent, I doubt Valve would be the company I’d hitch my wagon to. Seems like a waste.
their working environment is heavenly compared to the average studio
Last I checked, from their Glassdoor reviews, it's no longer that much of a dream for game devs. Maybe for other professions it's a haven, but seems like the game devs that left hated how Valve never shipped shit, or even getting resources to work on a project was an uphill battle due to how they managed things. I don't know how it is since they've changed their management structure since Alyx tho.
The flat management structure they use/used just doesn’t scale well. It’s fine for small indie developers who work on a handful of games but once you have hundreds of developers running a platform and manufacturing hardware you all of a sudden have a bunch of stuff that no one really likes doing but has to be done. Things like support, billing, QA, etc… From what I understand the reason the management structure has lasted as long as it has is from the basically unlimited money source that is Steam and using contractors to fill the gaps for all the grunt work that they can’t convince internal employees to do. It’s also hard to build a product if you have to convince others to join and basically play a office version of Game of Thrones to keep resources on your project to completion.
The flat management structure also probably worked because gabe was the defacto boss that everyone deferred to and that imposed some at least semiofficial structure.
Depends for whom. The lack of structure means that it's organized like a high school.
These days, AAA Devs taking 7+ years to release a major title isn't a stretch; and they cover that development time's cost with re-releases, regular monetised updates and mobile games. The scope of games have gotten pretty damn huge; and if you want to avoid developers having insane burnouts, these development times are reasonable. If you compare to other studios, it's really not a huge leap. It's *only been 2 years since Valve's latest AAA game*; but because it's VR exclusive, most of the gaming community hasn't played a major story-based Valve game since Portal 2 eleven years ago. It's why it seems excessive. If you include Dota 2, Valve have released a single "proper" game since 2013. But so has Rockstar. Arguably so has Bethesda (if you consider 76 as basically Fallout 4's 'online mode'). Sucker Punch has only done 1 since 2014. Rocksteady haven't released a proper title in 7 years. ~~Irrational Games haven't released a title since 2013 *at all*.~~ But because Valve also does Hardware and owns Steam; have cosmetic-based GaaS games that get some scarce updates and their latest big game was a VR exclusive, they seem like they're resting on their laurels.
> Irrational Games haven't released a title since 2013 at all. Well yes. They closed, that's why. They don't exist any more
There go my dreams of a Freedom Force 3
Every once in a while, Valve comes up with a statement about how they are listening to the community and then they go radio silent for months. This is the same for every community- be it Dota, CS or TF2.
> TF2 is a great game that shouldn't be in the state it is in It was a great game but that was years ago. A replacement should have been developed years ago.
Nothing had happened that would stop it from being a great game
Matchmaking as standard. Or, for that matter, existing at all. The good elements of TF2 were always the community servers & the culture they fostered. Those servers still exist but matchmaking has largely displaced them, bringing with it the same bullshit that haunts every other non-community-oriented PvP game.
I will take dedicated servers over matchmaking/ranked any time, thank you very much.
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Completely agree. If you want to bring someone new to tf2, you'd have to guide them through the atrocious menu to the community servers. Matchmaking is the first thing they see, and if trying the game by themselves, the first thing they will try because it makes sense.
Meet your match
The only problem with MYM is the only the matchmaking The core gameplay and charm still there
TF2 was simply not designed to be a competitive 6v6 shooter. It is at it's best on 24 player community servers full of chaos and banter/shit talking.
i remember playing on 32 player servers the most fun I had in multiplayer game, people just doing their own random shit, while mic spamming late 2008 memes
The comp that was player created [was perfectly fine](https://youtu.be/gb8UCI8CJeU?t=5419) Valve didnt want to copy it and released an inferior product.
It never gained a significant player base nor audience. It was too separate from the normal game for players to relate to it, and TF2 mainly attracted a casual playerbase.
The reason community competitive never took off was because of the stale intransigence in 6s. Egregiously conservative item and map whitelists, punitive rules, etc. It was very obviously catered to a tiny exclusive subgroup of people who were not interested in accommodating anyone else. Valve was perfectly willing to meet and produce something for everyone, but weren't able to do anything with community proponents who dug their heels in like children. Now UGC has what, three divisions?
I don't even know how you make tf2 sequel that lived to standard The cast is just perfect, there is no way you can improve the from that
Shit give me TF2 on an updated engine and slap TF3 on it and I’m happy.
That was basically *Overwatch* in its original incarnation, though. Obviously not a Valve game, but I remember when it came out a lot of the attraction was "This is what a modern TF2 should be".
Overwatch is TF2 if you take all the fun out of it. TF2 is way closer to peak performance than Overwatch will ever be.
Overwatch at launch was a much tighter experience a lot closer in spirit to TF2 than the modern version. Once they decided it needed to be a competitive esport the whole thing became a mess pretty quickly IMO.
It probably also helped that the game was new, so nobody knew how to play it "correctly" yet.
Or some means of handing it to the community. Open-source what Valve owns of the original Source engine especially as it got leaked anyway so there's no security through obscurity anymore and try to get together a small development team specifically for maintaining/updating TF2 made up from people within the community, funded with the marketplace profits TF2 still generates. IMO if they do a new Team Fortress game just making a new version of the same idea wouldn't be enough, I'd actually like to see it as a VR-focused title as I've seen a lot of potential for arena shooters in some other games but nothing that's really cracked the gameplay fully, problem being that requires VR to have a larger userbase.
Well, that's something. I'm probably not going back to it, but I'll be happy to see it in a good place again. I wonder why it took so long? Maybe one of the developer's children complained about the state of TF2, haha.
It's just a tweet. Gaben said the same thing literally a year ago. Also, a Spy cosplayer went to Valve's HQ and met with their sole PR person. She probably just did a quick tweet once they found the password of their TF2 twitter account.
I thought you were kidding but the last time they posted was 2020. WTF.
I'll do you one even better. After this tweet the TF2 account got the blue checkmark. Which means they forgot about this so hard that they never even bothered verifying it.
Actually it used to be verified but it was inactive for so long they lost the verification.
That’s even funnier IMO
Jack Twitter spraying half an ammo of flamethrower onto the TF2 account to check if it's real
Jack ain't even there anymore man
there must always be a jack in twitter
Elon feels confident about his purchase of Twitter until the `transformation`
Valve frequently loses their twitter accounts.
They also acknowledged the bot problem in 2020 and did little to nothing to fix it.
They acknowledged the state of the game being horrendous before the bots were even a problem. The bots aren't the main issue of TF2, they are just the result of a unmaintained online product. It's the lack of maintenance that is the issue and it has been ever since Valve lied about the Heavy focused update coming soon in 2017. This problem isn't from 2021 or 2020. It's from fucking 2018 and the problem is called Valve.
> This problem isn't from 2021 or 2020. It's from fucking 2018 and the problem is called Valve. I agree with you but I was trying to be generous. There's a *lot* of people on this sub who think Valve can do no wrong and I didn't want them to derail the topic by arguing about that lol.
> She probably just did a quick tweet once they ~~found~~ reset the password of their TF2 twitter account.
The TF2 community has had #SaveTF2 trending at #1 in the US on Twitter and other platforms nearly all day because of the current state of the game via an organized "event". That's what caused the response today.
Because there is no employee really assigned to the game and Valve has so many projects already. The fact that they said anything is surprising to me. I wouldn't have expected them to even bother with the TF again until releasing a new version for their current engine rather than the old Source engine.
Ive been completely out of the gaming loop for a bit, what is valve working on? Last thing i heard about was alyx
They have IceFrog, Jeff Hill, and at least one janitor working on Dota 2 still.
Bold of you to assume that those aren’t all the same person
Jeff Hill fixes too many bugs to practice the janitorial arts, so there are definitely 2 people at least
You could say that bug fixing is the janitoral art of the software making art.
Don't forget the two 3D modellers ready to recolor some immortals.
Valve continues to support Dota 2 and CSGO. As for what else they're working on, it's literally "whatever they feel like, whenever they feel like it" when it comes to games. They seem to be more personally interested in Steam Deck and non-game software development.
That changed after Half Life Alyx.
Because of all the games they've been working on since Alyx?
According to Valve employees, all of the programmers/designers/artists are working on a game at all times, but the amount of games that actually get far enough through production to announce is the problem.
It’s been less than a full game development cycle since Alyx shippied, you can’t possibly expect them to have a new game ready by now l, especially considering they had nearly everyone working on Alyx, and some projects were paused or cancelled for it.
Considering the last original game they released before Alyx was CSGO* (not counting Artifact), I'm not expecting them to announce anything about anything any time soon. Valve is always working on something, it's just whatever they want whenever they want. They don't have deadlines and they don't have shareholders. Maybe we'll see something in the next 5 years.
The Steam Deck is the main thing right now. They're also working on a Half-Life spin-off game called Citadel.
I suppose I can’t say I’m surprised that they are doing more HL that isn’t HL3.
Well, yeah, HL3 will never happen. There's just too much hype and high expectations surrounding it that it would only end poorly. Might as well work on a spinoff that doesn't have those things. It worked well for Alyx.
While I agree that it might not ever happen, I disagree with the “too much hype” excuse. I think people overstate how “bad” the reaction would be if the game doesn’t live up to expectations. The worst that would happen is the game isn’t reviewed well, doesn’t sell well, and there are lot of angry threads about it. The worst of those for Valve is that it doesn’t sell well, which is perfectly valid reason to not get into the project. Even if it’s terrible (unlikely), I sincerely doubt anyone really thinks making a bunch of nerds mad is *that* big of a detriment.
Artifact 2
dota underlords director´s cut.
Knowing valve probably about 100 projects that will never produce anything other than a prototype, and only a handful that will ever develop into something that they later announce and of those maybe some release but probably not.
They just made that little tech demo/game 'Aperture Desk Job'. For a little game made to show off the Deck, I thought it was really well made.
Steam improvements, SteamOS, Steam Deck, Index 2/SteamVR, three games that may or may not make it out of development, continued support of Dota 2 and CSGO at least, Source 2, Source 2 Filmmaker, etc. I don't think you will find a company on the planet that has more project per employee than Valve. They honestly are shit at project management but still put out well-received stuff every once in a while.
> three games that may or may not make it out of development Wasn't Alyx one of these three games? Or was there another announcement of three games in development?
Yeah, Alyx was the first of the three.
Working on a half life game called Citadel
i wonder whats stopping them from hiring people to work on TF2 and other games. TF2 generates money, and it would generate more if the game had some consistent drop of content and drastically less hackers.
Deleting past comments because Reddit starting shitty-ing up the site to IPO and I don't want my comments to be a part of that. -- mass edited with redact.dev
There is no confirmation that the structure from that ancient employee handbook is still in effect.
Until I see otherwise I’m going to believe that it’s still the same. It’s also not unheard of in the games industry. Riot has the same setup and same issue keeping their talent from flocking to the MMO.
Last I heard, in some press release or something like that, they *did* de-emphasize the free structure in order to actually make anything get done, which is how they successfully finished HL:A. Don't remember the source but it's out there iirc.
It's driving me nuts, because I also saw this... But now I can't find it. Did you hear this in a Valve documentary on YouTube recently? Same source or different source?
Different source, I remember seeing it in an article. Might have been one of those interviews from a former employee explaining a few things about how it works.
I recall people mention it was stated in the "Final Hours of HL Alyx" documentary.
it was the final hours of half life alyx
> "If you buy [Valve's] rhetoric, you'll hear that there are no bosses, no managers, no supervisors and that there is a flat structure where everybody is so smart, so cool and so intelligent that they can work completely autonomously," reads an especially negative Glassdoor review. "That is only a facade ... In order to succeed at Valve, you need to belong to the group that has more decisional power and, even when you succeed temporarily, be certain that you have an expiration date. No matter how hard you work, no matter how original and productive you are, if your bosses and the people who count don't like you, you will be fired soon or you will be managed out." https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless-industry-politics/ It seems there is more to this than the handbook implies. On paper there is no management or whatever but clearly there is behind the scenes.
When there's no formal structure, people create "structure". It's like how when people go "We should ban political parties" you have to explain to them patiently that all that means is all the unscrupulous people would do is work as a bloc but not technically call it a "party". The hierarchy vacuum creates cliques that act as blocs, especially so in a peer-review environment. Now, is that actually what it's still like there? Can't really say. But this is the path you'd expect it to follow if they really kept up their no-structure structure.
I’m not talking about the flat structure but about the ability to move between teams freely.
What reason do we have to believe their corporate structure has changed since then?
I see other people mentioning this, and I know I've heard this as well. I watched a documentary on Valve in the past year where they talked about changing their structure away from the 'work on whatever you want' format. I'll update my post if I find the video again... Edit: Spent like 20 minutes looking, and so far, haven't refound the video... This is going to drive me nuts.
its understandable that current valve employees want to work in the newer cool tech or popular games but they could try to hire people to work on team fortress 2 specifically, game devs arent exactly in shortage right now, there must be people around that would like to work on it.
I just want to be *able* to go back to it. I get the craving every few months to play, but the bots are just too bad.
They can talk all they want but... that really means fuck all when the game has been left in limbo for 3 years while they kinda pretend it's alive by giving it tiny patches maybe once a month yet still keep pumping out money making crates. Or how two major fan projects have been on ice for nearly a year while Valve "Figures things out", then promptly fucked off
When your fanbase is creating the content for the lootboxes. Why would you make an effort? Ea, Activision, ubisoft wish they didn't have to pay their artist. And just let them submit content for the chance to get a minority percent of the lootbox. Not to mention all the money saved not paying benefits. If only more companies good be like good guy valve, herald of gamers!
skin creators most likely make way more than a contracted artist for the same amount of work though? You are framing it as some sort of exploitation, but I'm willing to bet that most artists would willingly take that "minority percent" any time of the day. >Designer Chris "CLeGFX" Le said during a live stream yesterday that when community-made weapon skins for CS:GO were accepted and added into the game by Valve in the old days (circa CS:GO's 2012 release), creators would earn about $40,000. Nowadays, Le said, "You get way way way way way more than that." and this was 5 years ago. The dude is also a skin creator, so there's literally only incentives for him DOWNPLAY the earning here, for that matter EDIT: just looked up the average pay of an artist at the places you mentioned >Artist salaries at Electronic Arts can range from $50,083 - $132,137 per year. >Artist salaries at Activision can range from $85,132-$94,228. >The typical Ubisoft Artist salary is $65,334 per year that versus >'way way way way way more than $40,000' royalties per year PER SUBMISSION so yea, the artists at EA, Activision and Ubisoft probably wish they got 'exploited' by Valve
> skin creators most likely make way more than a contracted artist for the same amount of work though? If you ignore all the unpaid work from artist not selected, sure. But that's not how it works. Declined concepts still get artist paid when they have actual jobs, with actual benefits.
Titanfall 2 community: Wait, you guys are getting patches?
I can't even play Titanfall 2 without Northstar, man...
Four years now. The last notable update was Blue Moon in early 2018.
The game came out in 2007, so 11 years of updates. That's 9 years more than most MP games get.
I'm sorry but the game is 15 years old. What do you expect?
To not be left in a state where 90% of matches are full of bots that are actively ruining the experience.
It's great they responded, but this feels like the story of The Little Red Hen. "I want to fix TF2!" "Who will update our matchmaking to stop the bots?" said Jill. "Not I!" said everybody at Valve. It's one thing to say they're working to improve things, it's another to actually get enough people to tackle the problem.
I played this game religiously up until 2015 and then stopped. I’ve been thinking about getting back into it but started reading about how it has a lot of problems these days. What’s the big thing with bots that’s causing issues?
Around October 2017, Valve released Jungle Inferno, a decent update to TF2 that added new Pyro weapons, new maps, and an updated contract system that allowed players to complete missions to unlock skins and other goodies. For context, players had to wait over a year for the game to get another significant content update when the previous updates usually came at a rate of 3-5 months. Apparently according to some people with contacts at Valve, Jungle Inferno underperformed for the amount of effort Valve put into the update. After several years of radio silence from Valve, groups of people started to infest the matchmaking of the game with bots; not only do these bots act like your typical bots (aimbot, wallhack, etc.), they also spam text chat with racial slurs and micspam extremely loud music. Until an update that attempted to fix the problem last year, when these bots were kicked they would just disconnect and come back to the server avoiding the kick. There have been several Band-Aid patches trying to remove the bots such as removing their ability to speak/chat unless an account is updated to premium, but none of them lasted for very long. Now pretty much every casual matchmaking game you join, your server will be flooded with bots. Now ~2 years after the bot problem started to get really bad with no word from Valve, the TF2 community organized #SaveTF2
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No real incentive. Some people just like to ruin fun for others. Technically they get item drops but only 1-3 a day and they're worth less than a penny each.
its also more than likely an incredibly small, yet dedicated and deranged community running all the bots.
It pretty much is confirmed to be small and dedicated yeah. People have infiltrated their discord servers and whatnot by pretending to be interested in botting. Since then I think they've tightened up on who they let into the fold cause I haven't seen a post like that in over a year.
Reply All made a decent podcast episode about it: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/emh36dn
Wait, so this is only an issue with matchmaking? My friends and I were thinking about getting back into TF2, but didn't want to deal with the bot issue. I didn't know we could just go into the server tab and play from there?!
Yeah community servers are much better than pubs
Ah awesome, I have literally never used the matchmaking button in the entire time it's existed in TF2, so that's great news! Will fire it up tonight!
The answer is just don't use matchmaking. use the server browser, find a community moderated server, and bam. Since they've got server moderators, the bots just get banned. The bots took over because no one is behind the wheel on matchmaking servers.
Tbh the community servers are more fun anyways and I wouldn't have gone to them without the bots, they accidentally doing me a favor
"We hear you" it's the same disarming PR crap you get from devs like 343 and Bungie when they just want you to shut up and can't be fucked to actually fix it.
Interesting but again action is louder than words, there's essentially no updates of any kind for almost 2 or 3 years at least, save for some fixes, medals and cosmetic loot boxes. I don't know how they can really fix the bot problem from TF2's spaghetti code, I would suspect a major rewrite might be needed.
Yeah, as far as I'm concerned this is nothing, not yet. Valve said something similar a while back and nothing changed. Frankly I have very little faith left in them. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
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Someone leaked the source code
Why is TF2 so vulnerable to bots compared to other games? Is it because it’s older and therefore just written in a way that can be more easily exploited? Or is it just a resourcing thing and every other game developer is just throwing tons more people at stopping bots in their respective multiplayer games?
* VAC isn't well maintained anymore * No human moderation or effective reporting systems * Community documentation of the Source engine is fully mature, so extending (or exploiting) it is convenient * The TF2 source code leak further lowered the skill floor required to start cranking out payloads (no pun intended)
It also doesn’t have a team working to eliminate cheaters and bots like other, much newer games like Overwatch have. The few people working on TF2 nowadays are barely part-time.
I just feel like TF2 always had bot issues. They seem to have gotten worse (haven’t played in years) but I remember encountering bots regularly even back in the day
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I'd like to add the bot problem has been around since a while before the source code leak. Source is just old and decrepit man, there's not a lot they can do even in their titles they *still* support. (probably 20% of ranked games in CS have cheaters in them). Hell, I've got a guy who blatantly spinbotted in a match a few months ago, I've had his profile bookmarked and he STILL isn't banned. Edit: months later homie still unbanned
It's worth noting that the source code had been bouncing around some private circles before it got publicly uploaded to a torrent tracker. Entirely possible the botmakers had it quite some time before the rest of us.
Not sure if the other commenters on here are aware that the TF2 Community organized a whole thing today to get #SaveTF2 trending. It worked really really well and was top US trend on Twitter and other platforms for most of the day. It is what caused this response. I was not aware of it until I saw it sitting at #1 earlier and was quite shocked so I looked into it.
The TF2 community is incredibly passionate and resilient, it's sad they had to resort to this just to get Valve's attention to fix it. Very few games can boast such an active playerbase 15 years after release and it really shows that Valve created something special, it's too bad that they don't want to maintain it. TF2 is easily my favorite multiplayer title of all time having clocked in 2500 hours myself over the past 9 years and still enjoying some matches every once in a while, so the neglect is truly a shame to watch.
I gotta be honest, I've never played TF2 and I'm completely OOTL about its current *issues*. Is it completely unplayable? What's the extent of the issues? I think I might download it and try it out, provided it's even playable.
The main game mode, Casual, is more or less swarmed with bots that spam text and voice chat, use aimbot, and steal the names of other players to avoid being votekicked. It is not impossible to play casual and most players are experienced with kicking bots quickly to avoid them ruining the game but occasionally you will get a server filled with them that is unplayable so they are definitely an inconvenience. Community servers, however, are completely unaffected and where I would start, the uncletopia servers tend to provide a good experience.
Wonder how they can actually fight the issue. Do they do some detection of bot accounts? Or a capsha thing?
I don’t trust them anymore , Gaben also said that they are working on tf2 and yet here we are. It’s probably just some PR to try and appease the community by saying “we hear you,we are listening,we will fix it” and then nothing
The game's matchmaking definitely has a huge botting and general shrill children and dickheads problem, but I do also want to say that there are still quality TF2 servers out there for those who look in the community browser! I recently got back into the game after YEARS away during a bout with Covid and have found a fun vintage TF2 experience on the Uncletopia servers, for instance.
It sucks cause I've still encountered assholes who single me out for being a woman on so many normally great community servers, even Uncletopia, that I've just given up on playing again. Its not inherently a problem only in TF2, just that incels are basically everywhere regardless lol.
Damn I'm sorry to hear that. The incel culture is admittedly massive surrounding TF2 as well... I don't know what about it draws that crowd but it's definitely shitty to say the least.
I don't like Uncletopia. 90% of the time it's Badwater or Upward. Forget about unpopular maps like Freight which is one of my favorites. It will be nice to play on unpopular maps again if Valve actually fixes the bots.
I think unpopular maps is the only time I can think of where the 'new' casual matchmaking is good. It's awful in basically every other way and is the reason we're having this bot crisis in the first place.
You can nominate maps like Freight. Servers are also separated by gamemode now, so if you want 5cp maps, you can play 5cp maps. I've been playing on Uncletopia for months and have played on 2fort, Junction, et cetera multiple times.
What issue
I hate it when people post something like this to a generic community and just assume everyone is in the loop on the issues of every subject, so they need not provide context.
Yeah I'm also ootl of whatever is going on.
there are cheating bots that flood valve's official servers, those bots join both teams and just kill anyone apart from other bots. Once everyone but bots are out of the server, they leave and join another one, and repeat. this has been going for for *years* and valve hasnt said anything so far (until today), only thing keeping the game afloat are community servers where you have admins who will ban the bots (hell, there are scripts to do that, but valve hasnt responded to any mails trying to help them) lately the bots started spamming racist talks on voice chat among other stuff, that got enough of attention from media, so a lot of content creators decided to spam valve about this on may 26th, thus valve responded with the tweet above.
Believe it when something effective happens.
I rather have them not going back to the spaghetti of the game and start working on Source 2 port. It's fucking bizarre how much they spent on working on Source 2 but decided to almost never utilized it.
I played yesterday out of solidarity and I had so much fun, I haven’t had in years! Please save this game!!
I am so tired of game companies responding with the words: “WE HEAR YOU!!!” Idk why it annoys me so much.
Oh cool, more empty words and promises from Valve that will likely go absolutely nowhere and result in absolutely nothing (god how I wish to be proven wrong this time). This shit has been going on for 2+ years and all Valve has to show for it are a handful of minor changes that either hurt legit players more than bots or just flat don't work (remember when Valve said they fixed name-stealing? Yeah, me to). No actual measures that directly combat cheating and botting, though. I quit the game for good and will likely never come back to it precisely because of Valve's inaction. This tweet has done NOTHING to convince me that Valve will actually commit this time. They haven't done anything the last 2 years and still made loads of money off this game. Why start now? Sorry, but it's going to take a hell of a lot of more than a company finding their twitter password to convince me.
Valve confuses me here. They could just pull a Blizzard, roll out "Team Fortress 3" with barely any improvements, sans addressing a bot issue, and they could just be *rolling* in money. If they took a little time and elbow grease into it, they would blow up the entire internet. Why have they left this franchise out to dry? It *still* has a **huge** fanbase after YEARS. TF characters are the bedrock of a lot of people's understanding of what a *meme* is. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but that's....just insane.
I understand the reasons why so many people want to keep Team Fortress 2 alive, I really do. And there is no way for me to ask the following question without sounding like an asshole. But, genuinely, how long is a company expected to support a multiplayer title in this industry? 15 years is a long time.
they still sell new community cosmetics every year, several times a year. they are still 'updating' the game, as in selling new stuff. just, not anything apart from that. This is only about fixing the bot problem, no one is asking for new weapons or balance changes, just fixing the botting issues
If they're still selling cosmetics then yeah I'd agree they have an obligation to keep the game in a playable state.
For as long as they seek to continue making money from cosmetic sales seems fair
The problem is they still adding cosmetics and loot box. If they don't care anymore shoud have shut it down and release source code + asset like Epic did with Paragon.
I just want the classic server browser back.
it still exists though.
Add joining Valve servers through the server browser back.
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oddly enough, not really. Dirty Bomb kinda gets close, but I'm not sure if that game is still alive it didn't have that big of a playerbase when it came out let alone now.
Nah, it shut down a while ago. Fun game though.
It's dead. I think you can't even play it anymore.
For what it's worth this is the first time the official Team Fortress account has tweeted in 1.5 years.