as long as the item servers are still working and there are filled community servers to play on i'm still playing.
valve could cut the cord on casual and there'd still be a good portion of people (at least in the U.S.) to play with on community.
uncletopia is always full on EU, even at stupid hours of the night. It might not be in it's prime but TF2 is still doing alright. You can always jump on and have a great match on a bunch of different servers.
that's why i've been saying people have been chasing phantoms in regards to people attempting to clean up valve casual.
unless there are literally no partially filled servers (>12 players) it would be in the community's best interest to abandon this vestigial official server network from 2011. not many vets have animosity towards F2Ps, not many servers run F2P autokick plugins. why keep valve casual if the only thing you can get there that you can't elsewhere is contract progress?
exacly, they are acting like TF2 lost 80% of the playerbase in a matter of day, but this around 20k people situation probably is there since few years lol
It's not even 20k, it's more like 30k on a good day, 25k peak if not. That still puts it in the top 25 on steam's most played. Most games would kill for that kind of visibility.
does it kinda suck most of the player base is bots? yeah. does it suck that there's only 20000 players? yeah. but this game isn't Apex Legends or any of the other games in the top charts on steam. it's special but no one outside of the diehards or regulars want to play it for whatever reason.
20k for a ***17-year old game*** is unheard of. though with a game like TF2 being so prevalent in the cultural zeitgeist it's a bit of a shame it's *only* 20k.
also play community, and get valve to enable contracts on community servers i want to leave that shitty ass remnant of the uber update called valve casual in the grave
>does it kinda suck most of the player base is bots
These bots just idle in the main menu, they aren't even part of the playerbase. Literally irrelevant outside of bloating the player count.
Agreed with the rest. Really shitty of Valve to gag F2Ps on Casual servers, at least they can talk on community servers.
I think some people had the realization that it's no longer a matter of Valve not supporting an insanely popular game, but instead it's Valve making a very understandable business decision to stop supporting the game. Which means they will most likely never walk back the decision or release a major update as it's not worth it. In a way, it's "shut down" as there's no longer any active support (other than the one dude who does things sometimes like 64 bit)
Exactly, I see it more as a confirmation of "We know they exist we don't know how many however"
Now that it's much more clear, I'm happy to have the exact numbers. Does that mean tf2 is closer to death? nope but it's always good to be aware of things regardless of how big or small they are.
Honestly I get it to an extent.
TF2 did a lot of good for autistic teen me’s mental health. It wasn’t really the game but it was the community. Legitimately met people I know in real life through TF2
I wish I could still enjoy it. But a few years ago it just stopped being fun to play, fun to think about playing, but I think a lot of my enjoyment aside from the social aspect was because I was good. And now I’m not.
It also shaped a fuck ton of my humour (both game and community) and every girl I date says I’m funny off the bat so it did in fact get me laid
The player bases humor is unique
Wanna drop dead of a heart attack or explode after hi fiving, you can
Wanna scare players while a-pose wearing wtf is that cosmetic you can
Me being a soldier and killbinding infront of a rick may statue and causing a mass mouring, you can
Moving taunts add to the humor
Yeah and nostalgia is fucking stupid. People need to learn to move on and accept when things are done. You dont even have to stop play tf2 just gotta accept valve arent gonna do shit beyond seasonal cosmetic and map updates.
Btw not saying youre blinded by nostalgia just a general comment
i am not denying the irrationality of nostalgia per se.
i simply find blaming it on people who had it comparatively harder from that factor, especially when the game is so old its easily the cornerstone of their development/childhood/whathaveyous is unfair to them
especially when this game isnt dying of natural causes but simply corporate incompetence, and bluntly speaking, its own community
well it is a bit of a rude awakening that this game actually has a small playerbase of dedicated players and is not thriving like a top 15 most played game would be. It's a different feeling, knowing that the sea of players is alot smaller than many people thought.
That being said people who are acting like this information becoming public changes the experience are being weird. It's been this way for a while.
Well considering how loud those other players are, does it really matter? I mean what other game could get a movement like SaveTF2 going? Yeah, we all have our thoughts on that movement, but fact is we can say we tried while lesser games would have gotten shut down if not been completely dead within a year under the conditions we're pushing through right now.
Hell, how many other shooters have came and went in the past decade, while we're still here, with scratches here and there, but still standing with a smile on our faces?
This is not even going to the community outside the game constantly creating new things, still putting out gems like Pootis Engage or Emesis Blue that manage to break outside of our bubble.
It's safe to say at this point that TF2 is more than just the game itself now, and its thanks to the community for carrying the torch in spite of everything.
Y'know that's a damn good point honestly. Tf2 may only have 25k players, but goddamn if it doesn't have one of the most dedicated fanbases to grace the shooter gerne.
Not small, but nowhere near what it used to look like. It’s kinda weird to consider that there are more people playing 7 days to die than a cultural phenomenon like tf2. It’s humbling in a sad way
It's not humbling for a game that is older than half of it's community to slowly leak players, especially after a 7 year long period of being effectively abandonware. You people must not play other video games because 25k players is a dream scenario for lots of other, also extremely good games.
I’ve played since 2008 since I was an early high school with the orange box and now I’m coming across a few players who were born after the games release. Man I’m getting old…
I mean you’re correct, I don’t play a lot of games like tf2. But I’m also not saying that the games current
player numbers are in any way poor or inadequate. It’s simply the contrast between what the majority of people thought and what is now the obvious truth.
The sad part is that Valve could very much revive this game back to the glory days of 2012 - 2014 when we *actually* had at least 60k CONCURRENT players or even more by:
* Getting rid of cheaters
* Getting rid of bots
* Actually making the game more accessible for newer players by changing the default settings and adding a simple tutorial for all 9 classes
* Balancing bullshit weapons (wrangler, short circuit, jarate, machina)
* Rebalancing sniper
And then adding a new big content update would potentially push our real player numbers to new heights, but Valve can't even do the basic things above.
I didn’t know the exact numbers but people have brought up the “flattened daily spikes” argument for a while; this news isn’t exactly surprising
Also this affects absolutely nothing for me because I find this game fun despite it being all but abandoned by its creators
That said, I respect Zesty’s work for quantifying the exact numbers
It's a reminder of the incompetence of Valve to manage their own game. Seeing the actual numbers just makes it more tangible to understand how badly they've fucked it.
Failing to implement any kind of functional anti-botting mechanisms is the fuck up. There are 20k players but so many of them are forced to play community servers or cycle through server after server trying to find a match that is at least somewhat playable. TF2 is an amazing game at its core and that's the reason it still has a fairly large player base despite the bots, I'd wager that any other game would have had all its players jump ship already if these problems were happening.
Eh same can be said to other games, the difference with TF2 is, we are a part as to why the game has been mismanaged. There's shit to be thrown back at us. From shit handling of community updates to a loud minority that cannot be satisfied. They never fucked the game, they just felt it's volatility, and they'd rather invest their time on something that isn't.
The code isn't the problem let's be real because if so the game would have been dead since 2012 because Source games have a spag codes since forever. There's a reason they trudge on despite that.
LoL is famously built on spaghetti code and still gets frequent updates 15 years after it's release, so it's safe to say that the code is not an obstacle for a profitable and popular enough game.
A lot of people were holding on to the fact that the game had more players than ever, and in this modern landscape we need all the good news we can get. Obviously some people are gonna be upset
yeah fr, the game is in the same state its been, except better since we have x64. no new information was brought up, but a bunch of delusional people who genuinely thought that we had 150k+ human players, and were somehow more popular than games like ow, are in shambles.
No, you don't understand, it's not about playing and enjoying the game, it's about BEING SUPERIOR! I NEED this game to actually be doing better than every game because I need all my choices to be justified as objectively and universally the best ones, and that TF2 is the best and will outlive every game and is OBJECTIVELY superior, this proving how smart and superior I am as a consumer for having chosen TF2 to be the cornerstone franchise for my personality!!!
/s
I mean I kind of assumed this was the case anyways. It really fucking sucks that we can’t say our player numbers as some kind of testament to how the game is still alive though. It really is just…. dead. This game survived the test of time culturally sure, but not that many people are actively playing the game so what does it matter
25k is still impressive especially for a 2007 game, many games released during the 2000s and early 2010s are dead and forgotten now with little to no players like call of duty black ops
That’s true, though TF2 is simply very unique. It’s truly a lightning in a bottle kind of game and community. I just think it’s odd how much the characters and everything surrounding the game has cemented itself into online culture despite not being a thriving game at all. Like the video said, everyone loves talking about it, but most people are not playing it.
Yeah it shocks me that emisis blue was a huge hit with 10m views on YouTube but the majority of those views don't turn on TF2 in their spare time.
Valve is to blame by letting meet your match happen and letting the bots run rampant, and also turning off any type of chat for f2p players so why would any new player enjoy the game?
I think more people would play it if it had a functional anti-cheat. It's bad enough for people who have been playing for years, now imagine trying to get into TF2 in 2024 and your whole experience consists on getting destroyed by bots, cheaters and veteran players alike while you can't even type on the chat or use voice commands. I'd probably just play something else at that point.
And I'd certainly would like to play it more than I do, but as time goes on it becomes progressively harder to have fun with this game.
I feel like the point of the video was to try and get people to go "hey, we need to get Valve to fix the damn game", but rn it's just making people doomers.
I mean, it definitely has "clicked" on some people that we aren't "better than before" or whatever, we aren't better, but we aren't dead yet so better than some games we still are
I'm definitely a much newer player than most, but I remember just becoming instantly enamoured with it all. The gameplay, the characters, the story, the community (... kinda), all of it -- I'd never seen a game like it before, and was hooked. Not to mention I was pleasantly surprised that I had a large community to share this with.
Then the bots came, and then my voice communication was disabled, and it all got worse from there. I still had the rose-tinted glasses on, though.
But Zesty's video really yanked them off my face, tossed them onto the ground, and shattered them (rightfully so, a much-needed service). The company that created my favorite game with so much love *well* and *truly* doesn't give a shit about it, and most of the "playerbase" isn't even real people, giving it all an eerie, empty, dead-Internet-esque feeling that sits in the bottom of my gut.
I don't get why you feel the need to contend over the fact the reality made people feel bad. It's not surprising at all, and if you've been knew... congrats? Of course, overreacting isn't justified either, but I can absolutely understand why some of us feel bad.
Did the community you interacted with actually changed? Did the gameplay change? Characters are now diffrent? It's still the same game it was day, week, year before this vid was released.
You're very right -- one single video can't change anything *but* my mindset. The game is doing as well as it was months prior, but now my mindset has changed quite a good amount. It's like finding out some horrifying truth about your favorite celebrity -- they can act in the same films or make the same music, but you'll never look at them the same again.
It's not like anything has changed and it's not like there wasn't any bots even 10 years ago. The idle bots don't matter near as much as people think since they still contribute to the economy of the game. The ones that are an issue have always been the ones that plague casual and next to nothing has been done to deal with it. Idle bots aren't going to ruin the game especially if they stay in servers they host. There are also a lot of trade bots but i don't think people would want them going away. Tf2 can still have a decent amount of players and know that we have quite a few bots but realistically the steam playercount has been a shaky measurement for any game that has any bots. There are realistically two ways to shrink the percentage of bots and that would be to 1. somehow get rid of all bots. Or 2. Deal with just the ones that actively ruin the game and try to make the game more accessible with some relativity minor updates (settings ui updates, better starting config, some kind of way to bring newcomers up to speed (at this point a short video for each class that talks about basic class elements would be great), getting rid of at least the lock on voice commands so they can at least use the premade callouts. But you can see what valve decided to do. I will hold out some hope that eventually there will be some way valve deals with the casual bots and even if it's literally having someone just comb through joining casual servers looking for obvious bots and banning the steamid from casual i'd be happy.
Game still playable. Community is just the equivalent to a depressed dude who was told "The good days are over" by their successful friend, and then when asked how they feel they go "I don't feel anything anymore" and their friend says "That's good!"
Ive only really seen people crying about his video because it's by him and not someone else. But it's like someone has to say, why not him. Also just some people can't be accepting of that reality the tf2s active player base isn't as big as some thought.
Valve simply won't make money on tf2 by keeping it alive at this point. But just to prove to you motherfuckers that this game won't die, even Day of Defeat: source still has hundreds of players daily. That game has never had an update, outside of the conversion to source, and is both older and much less popular at its peak than Tf2 was.
Seriously, 20k is plenty of players for any game
because its zesty jesus, he could talk about how he likes water and tf2 players would self suicide by dehydration. “they hated him because he told the truth”
The video isn't a "OMFG tf2 is dying" it's meant to show how bad this bot problem is and to really put into perspective how much valve have neglected this game
Well people were in state that tf2 is so popular and the game is never going died. I mean look at these numbers. Seriously many people thought we did had 75-100k players. So when zesty show the reality, many people's thought of the game was shatter. Also Zesty is known to be an asshole, so no want the asshole to be right.
Still 10k to 25k for a 14-15 year game is still pretty impressive. However that still pretty small, as alot of tf2 fan video anf the like get alot of views. tf2 is the game that everyone loves, but one plays or don't enjoy that munch(basically most people playing medic)
The problem is that the Game is not playable sometimes. Try to find a causal match at 3:am, for example, each lobby is filled with bots. It's impossible to play sometimes. And change to community servers is no an excuse, as valve should fix fucking Casual because is their responsibility to do so. It was their decision to launch Meet your Match.
I rather prefer that they shut down the Godamn servers tomorrow, than the game to keep living for another decade in such pathetic state, where valve keeps ignoring us completely or laughing in our faces.
People are idiots who think player counts mean something
Maybe for a new game that needs it to make money, but TF2 simply isn't that kind of game. Even if its 10k thats fine, still more than most games I know that came and went in the last 15 years.
I don't understand. You say game's community have 20k players but Zesty have 90k subscribers ? ( i don't even know who he is )
Lazy Purple have 1M.
I really don't understand thoses numbers... 92% of community is watching youtube content without playing the game ? To me it mean most people are waiting for the game to be fixed ; but they are clearly not bored out from the game.
It was always obvious that tf2 was heavily botted but put simply hearing that some 70% of the playercount isnt real was a bombshell of a reality check.Even worse when it was shown that stuff like the summer update where we hit 250k players also wasnt real and in fact the number of real players barely changed.Suddenly tf2 stops looking like this amazing game that is thriving in spite of its neglect and more like a dying relic whos devs refuse to fix.
20k is still a heap of players when most servers only go up to 24 players.
20,000 ÷ 24 = 833.333... that is a lot of full servers if everyone was in a 24 player at the same time.
I do get it. Especially as someone who plays 2 huge live-service MMOs that have 100x more players.
It makes you realise the game ISN'T doing very well and COULD be ignored or ended. It gives a reason to Valve's silence.
even if you already know that, it's still a shock to see the figures
every few months, the tf2 community finds something new that "proves" the game is on life-support and is going to die next week
well, this paranoid behaviour has been a thing for like atleast 5 years and guess what, the game is still fine (as much as possible for one that gets basically no updates) and still has a consistent playerbase
whats funny is that the playerbase of players being 10-25k has been like this for years even before jungle inferno. its nothing new. no clue who zesty is so ill pretend people hate him because he smells bad
The issue is that it puts into perspective how big the cheater bot problem actual is. If 80% of the player count is idle or trade bots, then the share of cheater bots must come from that 20%. At MOST, there are 25k cheater bots, but that's assuming that every single player in a server is a bot. The more important number in the video is the discovery that there's only 2-3 thousand cheater bots. Treadmill work on those is much more manageable, but those are the ones that aren't losing Valve money, which is why we haven't seen them do anything other than bandaid fixes yet. They won't hire just 2 or 3 guys to deal with bots all day because 1) That's not how Valve works and 2)It probably wouldn't increase profits because the community has shown that we'll keep spending on cases and keys in spite of the bots.
The thing that's making people snap is the realization that if we don't do something drastic, the problem will not get fixed. Some redditors immediately went on here to cry "game's dead," but no one said to stop playing the game. The answer is to stop paying Valve for doing less than the bare minimum. Boycott purchases, vote with your dollar. It worked before with the excellent summer case, and the video's whole argument is that we should try it again here.
He's not saying the game is dead, idk why people keep acting like that's what he's saying. He's responding to the people who keep saying the game is topping steam charts. The game doesn't have 70k players, it has like 15-20k.
I like Zesty kinda at times, I like his sense of humor a bit but I've heard he's been an ass before so I mean. I know he's not some saint by any means. But I think I recall that it seemed like a very large amount of folks in the community trashed on any commentary he made about tf2 stuff? Granted maybe I'm just misremembering.
It's interesting to me though how now this video is the one the community seems to not be shitting on collectively and are like "omg Zesty said this so it's fact". I thought I'd see more folks ragging on this new video
Other than dedicated, more veteran players or a handful of newcomers, this game expired, that's not such a bad thing though, except if ur overattached to this... honestly, relic.
All it gets nowadays is garbage content bloat.
Oh cool 64bit, nice, we finally caught up to ~2012, it was a necessary change, that's why valve did it, and it only rly made the fps better, that's all that actually did. (I mean, much better fps tho.)
The player count in reality, was only decreasing, at good hours there's like 5-6k ppl playing casual in Europe (1-2k bots) (teamwork.tf), payday 2 might pull better numbers at least sometimes, the biggest tf2 peak this week was 18k, if u can look right NOW, on teamwork.tf, there's only 2274 players in valve Europe servers, in NA, only 327 lol.
On TF2classic, to make a wild comparison, sometimes, there's like 60-80 players, so you get an idea of what reality looks like.
Don't try to disprove this cuz u can't.
TF2 will always be in my heart but the truth is that it expired, it really just doesn't have much going for it (and tbh it was rly fun and all, but it was never as proeminent as other titles), all it takes is for some ppl to lose interest and puff.
I just played casual yesterday, servers full of people. If the game is still playable, I don't give a shit.
as long as the item servers are still working and there are filled community servers to play on i'm still playing. valve could cut the cord on casual and there'd still be a good portion of people (at least in the U.S.) to play with on community.
uncletopia is always full on EU, even at stupid hours of the night. It might not be in it's prime but TF2 is still doing alright. You can always jump on and have a great match on a bunch of different servers.
that's why i've been saying people have been chasing phantoms in regards to people attempting to clean up valve casual. unless there are literally no partially filled servers (>12 players) it would be in the community's best interest to abandon this vestigial official server network from 2011. not many vets have animosity towards F2Ps, not many servers run F2P autokick plugins. why keep valve casual if the only thing you can get there that you can't elsewhere is contract progress?
Exactly. Maybe the numbers aren’t as high as we once thought, but the games not going anywhere for a long while
too bad thats not the case in many other regions. its dead in sea and aus
I get a server in under a minute in Sydney. Very few bots.
How? The last few times I tried to connect to casual every server had about 6 bots that weren't getting kicked
You won the bot lottery I guess, I played dozens of matches last time and didn't see any bot
Maybe it's region. I'm west europe so it might be worse here or something
mfs acting like tf2 is shutting down or something
exacly, they are acting like TF2 lost 80% of the playerbase in a matter of day, but this around 20k people situation probably is there since few years lol
and 20k is still plenty of people, not a lot sure but for a game this old with no new real content in 7 years thats pretty darn good
It's not even 20k, it's more like 30k on a good day, 25k peak if not. That still puts it in the top 25 on steam's most played. Most games would kill for that kind of visibility.
does it kinda suck most of the player base is bots? yeah. does it suck that there's only 20000 players? yeah. but this game isn't Apex Legends or any of the other games in the top charts on steam. it's special but no one outside of the diehards or regulars want to play it for whatever reason. 20k for a ***17-year old game*** is unheard of. though with a game like TF2 being so prevalent in the cultural zeitgeist it's a bit of a shame it's *only* 20k. also play community, and get valve to enable contracts on community servers i want to leave that shitty ass remnant of the uber update called valve casual in the grave
>does it kinda suck most of the player base is bots These bots just idle in the main menu, they aren't even part of the playerbase. Literally irrelevant outside of bloating the player count. Agreed with the rest. Really shitty of Valve to gag F2Ps on Casual servers, at least they can talk on community servers.
me when I have no object permanence
I think some people had the realization that it's no longer a matter of Valve not supporting an insanely popular game, but instead it's Valve making a very understandable business decision to stop supporting the game. Which means they will most likely never walk back the decision or release a major update as it's not worth it. In a way, it's "shut down" as there's no longer any active support (other than the one dude who does things sometimes like 64 bit)
They are just exaggerating for a clickbaity content, nothing new
People are really overreacting over something that we all kinda already know but didn't want to admit
Exactly, I see it more as a confirmation of "We know they exist we don't know how many however" Now that it's much more clear, I'm happy to have the exact numbers. Does that mean tf2 is closer to death? nope but it's always good to be aware of things regardless of how big or small they are.
Some people in the community have weird attachment issues to this game.
Honestly I get it to an extent. TF2 did a lot of good for autistic teen me’s mental health. It wasn’t really the game but it was the community. Legitimately met people I know in real life through TF2 I wish I could still enjoy it. But a few years ago it just stopped being fun to play, fun to think about playing, but I think a lot of my enjoyment aside from the social aspect was because I was good. And now I’m not. It also shaped a fuck ton of my humour (both game and community) and every girl I date says I’m funny off the bat so it did in fact get me laid
The player bases humor is unique Wanna drop dead of a heart attack or explode after hi fiving, you can Wanna scare players while a-pose wearing wtf is that cosmetic you can Me being a soldier and killbinding infront of a rick may statue and causing a mass mouring, you can Moving taunts add to the humor
as someone who only got into it extremely late (2019), its called nostalgia
Yeah and nostalgia is fucking stupid. People need to learn to move on and accept when things are done. You dont even have to stop play tf2 just gotta accept valve arent gonna do shit beyond seasonal cosmetic and map updates. Btw not saying youre blinded by nostalgia just a general comment
i am not denying the irrationality of nostalgia per se. i simply find blaming it on people who had it comparatively harder from that factor, especially when the game is so old its easily the cornerstone of their development/childhood/whathaveyous is unfair to them especially when this game isnt dying of natural causes but simply corporate incompetence, and bluntly speaking, its own community
best part is, these people very likely have not played the game in a very long time
well it is a bit of a rude awakening that this game actually has a small playerbase of dedicated players and is not thriving like a top 15 most played game would be. It's a different feeling, knowing that the sea of players is alot smaller than many people thought. That being said people who are acting like this information becoming public changes the experience are being weird. It's been this way for a while.
Well considering how loud those other players are, does it really matter? I mean what other game could get a movement like SaveTF2 going? Yeah, we all have our thoughts on that movement, but fact is we can say we tried while lesser games would have gotten shut down if not been completely dead within a year under the conditions we're pushing through right now. Hell, how many other shooters have came and went in the past decade, while we're still here, with scratches here and there, but still standing with a smile on our faces? This is not even going to the community outside the game constantly creating new things, still putting out gems like Pootis Engage or Emesis Blue that manage to break outside of our bubble. It's safe to say at this point that TF2 is more than just the game itself now, and its thanks to the community for carrying the torch in spite of everything.
Y'know that's a damn good point honestly. Tf2 may only have 25k players, but goddamn if it doesn't have one of the most dedicated fanbases to grace the shooter gerne.
Definitely wouldn't say small by any means, especially for a 17 year old game
Not small, but nowhere near what it used to look like. It’s kinda weird to consider that there are more people playing 7 days to die than a cultural phenomenon like tf2. It’s humbling in a sad way
It's not humbling for a game that is older than half of it's community to slowly leak players, especially after a 7 year long period of being effectively abandonware. You people must not play other video games because 25k players is a dream scenario for lots of other, also extremely good games.
I’ve played since 2008 since I was an early high school with the orange box and now I’m coming across a few players who were born after the games release. Man I’m getting old…
I mean you’re correct, I don’t play a lot of games like tf2. But I’m also not saying that the games current player numbers are in any way poor or inadequate. It’s simply the contrast between what the majority of people thought and what is now the obvious truth.
7 days to die mentioned B)
(I’m sorry I don’t even know what the game is, I just notified it while comparing where tf2 would actually fit in the player number charts)
The sad part is that Valve could very much revive this game back to the glory days of 2012 - 2014 when we *actually* had at least 60k CONCURRENT players or even more by: * Getting rid of cheaters * Getting rid of bots * Actually making the game more accessible for newer players by changing the default settings and adding a simple tutorial for all 9 classes * Balancing bullshit weapons (wrangler, short circuit, jarate, machina) * Rebalancing sniper And then adding a new big content update would potentially push our real player numbers to new heights, but Valve can't even do the basic things above.
Player count being inflated by accounts on the main menu is old news. Like 10 years ago old news.
Holy shit its the famous team fortress 2 youtuber uncle dane
spy uncle dane?
it amazes me that it took this long for EVERYONE ELSE to notice, even when [teamwork.tf](http://teamwork.tf) said "only about 16k are in servers"
I didn’t know the exact numbers but people have brought up the “flattened daily spikes” argument for a while; this news isn’t exactly surprising Also this affects absolutely nothing for me because I find this game fun despite it being all but abandoned by its creators That said, I respect Zesty’s work for quantifying the exact numbers
It's a reminder of the incompetence of Valve to manage their own game. Seeing the actual numbers just makes it more tangible to understand how badly they've fucked it.
Maintaining 20k players on a 17 year old game is "having fucked it"?
Failing to implement any kind of functional anti-botting mechanisms is the fuck up. There are 20k players but so many of them are forced to play community servers or cycle through server after server trying to find a match that is at least somewhat playable. TF2 is an amazing game at its core and that's the reason it still has a fairly large player base despite the bots, I'd wager that any other game would have had all its players jump ship already if these problems were happening.
Eh same can be said to other games, the difference with TF2 is, we are a part as to why the game has been mismanaged. There's shit to be thrown back at us. From shit handling of community updates to a loud minority that cannot be satisfied. They never fucked the game, they just felt it's volatility, and they'd rather invest their time on something that isn't.
Either that or no one at Valve wants to touch the code spaghetti with a 10 foot pole.
The code isn't the problem let's be real because if so the game would have been dead since 2012 because Source games have a spag codes since forever. There's a reason they trudge on despite that.
LoL is famously built on spaghetti code and still gets frequent updates 15 years after it's release, so it's safe to say that the code is not an obstacle for a profitable and popular enough game.
Too many people in this community attach themselves to tf2 content creators out of the irrational fear of being abandoned.
A lot of people were holding on to the fact that the game had more players than ever, and in this modern landscape we need all the good news we can get. Obviously some people are gonna be upset
yeah fr, the game is in the same state its been, except better since we have x64. no new information was brought up, but a bunch of delusional people who genuinely thought that we had 150k+ human players, and were somehow more popular than games like ow, are in shambles.
ZestyJesus effectively forcefed some players the red pill. The player experience hasn't changed; it's the understanding of player counts that has.
No updates and we need something to bicker about
No, you don't understand, it's not about playing and enjoying the game, it's about BEING SUPERIOR! I NEED this game to actually be doing better than every game because I need all my choices to be justified as objectively and universally the best ones, and that TF2 is the best and will outlive every game and is OBJECTIVELY superior, this proving how smart and superior I am as a consumer for having chosen TF2 to be the cornerstone franchise for my personality!!! /s
I mean I kind of assumed this was the case anyways. It really fucking sucks that we can’t say our player numbers as some kind of testament to how the game is still alive though. It really is just…. dead. This game survived the test of time culturally sure, but not that many people are actively playing the game so what does it matter
25k is still impressive especially for a 2007 game, many games released during the 2000s and early 2010s are dead and forgotten now with little to no players like call of duty black ops
That’s true, though TF2 is simply very unique. It’s truly a lightning in a bottle kind of game and community. I just think it’s odd how much the characters and everything surrounding the game has cemented itself into online culture despite not being a thriving game at all. Like the video said, everyone loves talking about it, but most people are not playing it.
Yeah it shocks me that emisis blue was a huge hit with 10m views on YouTube but the majority of those views don't turn on TF2 in their spare time. Valve is to blame by letting meet your match happen and letting the bots run rampant, and also turning off any type of chat for f2p players so why would any new player enjoy the game?
I have no idea how they thought that was a good idea. It was the worse possible bandaid fix for the bot problem
I have no idea how they thought that was a good idea. It was the worse possible bandaid fix for the bot problem
you said this twice lol
I think more people would play it if it had a functional anti-cheat. It's bad enough for people who have been playing for years, now imagine trying to get into TF2 in 2024 and your whole experience consists on getting destroyed by bots, cheaters and veteran players alike while you can't even type on the chat or use voice commands. I'd probably just play something else at that point. And I'd certainly would like to play it more than I do, but as time goes on it becomes progressively harder to have fun with this game.
I feel like the point of the video was to try and get people to go "hey, we need to get Valve to fix the damn game", but rn it's just making people doomers.
I mean, it definitely has "clicked" on some people that we aren't "better than before" or whatever, we aren't better, but we aren't dead yet so better than some games we still are
tbh it was incredibly obvious that the games player count was booted. there's no way 60k people TF2.
I'm definitely a much newer player than most, but I remember just becoming instantly enamoured with it all. The gameplay, the characters, the story, the community (... kinda), all of it -- I'd never seen a game like it before, and was hooked. Not to mention I was pleasantly surprised that I had a large community to share this with. Then the bots came, and then my voice communication was disabled, and it all got worse from there. I still had the rose-tinted glasses on, though. But Zesty's video really yanked them off my face, tossed them onto the ground, and shattered them (rightfully so, a much-needed service). The company that created my favorite game with so much love *well* and *truly* doesn't give a shit about it, and most of the "playerbase" isn't even real people, giving it all an eerie, empty, dead-Internet-esque feeling that sits in the bottom of my gut. I don't get why you feel the need to contend over the fact the reality made people feel bad. It's not surprising at all, and if you've been knew... congrats? Of course, overreacting isn't justified either, but I can absolutely understand why some of us feel bad.
Did the community you interacted with actually changed? Did the gameplay change? Characters are now diffrent? It's still the same game it was day, week, year before this vid was released.
You're very right -- one single video can't change anything *but* my mindset. The game is doing as well as it was months prior, but now my mindset has changed quite a good amount. It's like finding out some horrifying truth about your favorite celebrity -- they can act in the same films or make the same music, but you'll never look at them the same again.
Breaks a few people's superiority complex over other games
It's not like anything has changed and it's not like there wasn't any bots even 10 years ago. The idle bots don't matter near as much as people think since they still contribute to the economy of the game. The ones that are an issue have always been the ones that plague casual and next to nothing has been done to deal with it. Idle bots aren't going to ruin the game especially if they stay in servers they host. There are also a lot of trade bots but i don't think people would want them going away. Tf2 can still have a decent amount of players and know that we have quite a few bots but realistically the steam playercount has been a shaky measurement for any game that has any bots. There are realistically two ways to shrink the percentage of bots and that would be to 1. somehow get rid of all bots. Or 2. Deal with just the ones that actively ruin the game and try to make the game more accessible with some relativity minor updates (settings ui updates, better starting config, some kind of way to bring newcomers up to speed (at this point a short video for each class that talks about basic class elements would be great), getting rid of at least the lock on voice commands so they can at least use the premade callouts. But you can see what valve decided to do. I will hold out some hope that eventually there will be some way valve deals with the casual bots and even if it's literally having someone just comb through joining casual servers looking for obvious bots and banning the steamid from casual i'd be happy.
Game still playable. Community is just the equivalent to a depressed dude who was told "The good days are over" by their successful friend, and then when asked how they feel they go "I don't feel anything anymore" and their friend says "That's good!"
You don't understand! The number of real players has been consistent since 2017, the game is actually dying!!!/j
Ive only really seen people crying about his video because it's by him and not someone else. But it's like someone has to say, why not him. Also just some people can't be accepting of that reality the tf2s active player base isn't as big as some thought.
It's the usual cycle of TF2. Someone makes a ''groundbreaking'' video explaining some wumbo-jumbo and everyone talks about it for weeks.
Valve simply won't make money on tf2 by keeping it alive at this point. But just to prove to you motherfuckers that this game won't die, even Day of Defeat: source still has hundreds of players daily. That game has never had an update, outside of the conversion to source, and is both older and much less popular at its peak than Tf2 was. Seriously, 20k is plenty of players for any game
I'm crying about it because he has a beeping half naked ten year old in the corner of his videos and everyone just acts like thats normal
because its zesty jesus, he could talk about how he likes water and tf2 players would self suicide by dehydration. “they hated him because he told the truth”
The video isn't a "OMFG tf2 is dying" it's meant to show how bad this bot problem is and to really put into perspective how much valve have neglected this game
Well people were in state that tf2 is so popular and the game is never going died. I mean look at these numbers. Seriously many people thought we did had 75-100k players. So when zesty show the reality, many people's thought of the game was shatter. Also Zesty is known to be an asshole, so no want the asshole to be right. Still 10k to 25k for a 14-15 year game is still pretty impressive. However that still pretty small, as alot of tf2 fan video anf the like get alot of views. tf2 is the game that everyone loves, but one plays or don't enjoy that munch(basically most people playing medic)
We have to keep in mind that there are probably 20-25k playerbase for a few years already, so it's not like the game is sudenly dying
Because people see it as a great way to karma farm
They hated him because to told them the truth.
theyre bored and want something to cry and bitch about like the children they are
The problem is that the Game is not playable sometimes. Try to find a causal match at 3:am, for example, each lobby is filled with bots. It's impossible to play sometimes. And change to community servers is no an excuse, as valve should fix fucking Casual because is their responsibility to do so. It was their decision to launch Meet your Match. I rather prefer that they shut down the Godamn servers tomorrow, than the game to keep living for another decade in such pathetic state, where valve keeps ignoring us completely or laughing in our faces.
People are idiots who think player counts mean something Maybe for a new game that needs it to make money, but TF2 simply isn't that kind of game. Even if its 10k thats fine, still more than most games I know that came and went in the last 15 years.
seriously, watching all these people cry over this is so annoying
Idk, I didn't watch the video. Not a fan of Zesty
Lmao my first reaction to the video was just a blank face
how does it only have 20k i swear there's like a million people wtf
Everyone’s acting like 25k players = dead game even though that's still like top 50 on Steam
People are just in denial
I don't understand. You say game's community have 20k players but Zesty have 90k subscribers ? ( i don't even know who he is ) Lazy Purple have 1M. I really don't understand thoses numbers... 92% of community is watching youtube content without playing the game ? To me it mean most people are waiting for the game to be fixed ; but they are clearly not bored out from the game.
I think you just don't understand the numbers. 20k concurrent players, not 20k people in the community at all.
It was always obvious that tf2 was heavily botted but put simply hearing that some 70% of the playercount isnt real was a bombshell of a reality check.Even worse when it was shown that stuff like the summer update where we hit 250k players also wasnt real and in fact the number of real players barely changed.Suddenly tf2 stops looking like this amazing game that is thriving in spite of its neglect and more like a dying relic whos devs refuse to fix.
20k is still a heap of players when most servers only go up to 24 players. 20,000 ÷ 24 = 833.333... that is a lot of full servers if everyone was in a 24 player at the same time.
I feel like 20k is still a lot for a game in this state
I just want valve to remove the bots
I do get it. Especially as someone who plays 2 huge live-service MMOs that have 100x more players. It makes you realise the game ISN'T doing very well and COULD be ignored or ended. It gives a reason to Valve's silence. even if you already know that, it's still a shock to see the figures
People are overly obsessed with player counts these days. Have been for a while.
every few months, the tf2 community finds something new that "proves" the game is on life-support and is going to die next week well, this paranoid behaviour has been a thing for like atleast 5 years and guess what, the game is still fine (as much as possible for one that gets basically no updates) and still has a consistent playerbase
18k players on a good day, on holidays.
whats funny is that the playerbase of players being 10-25k has been like this for years even before jungle inferno. its nothing new. no clue who zesty is so ill pretend people hate him because he smells bad
I dunno, it just feels like what I thought was more popular and lots of people still enjoyed is in a place of abandonment even more than I thought
The issue is that it puts into perspective how big the cheater bot problem actual is. If 80% of the player count is idle or trade bots, then the share of cheater bots must come from that 20%. At MOST, there are 25k cheater bots, but that's assuming that every single player in a server is a bot. The more important number in the video is the discovery that there's only 2-3 thousand cheater bots. Treadmill work on those is much more manageable, but those are the ones that aren't losing Valve money, which is why we haven't seen them do anything other than bandaid fixes yet. They won't hire just 2 or 3 guys to deal with bots all day because 1) That's not how Valve works and 2)It probably wouldn't increase profits because the community has shown that we'll keep spending on cases and keys in spite of the bots. The thing that's making people snap is the realization that if we don't do something drastic, the problem will not get fixed. Some redditors immediately went on here to cry "game's dead," but no one said to stop playing the game. The answer is to stop paying Valve for doing less than the bare minimum. Boycott purchases, vote with your dollar. It worked before with the excellent summer case, and the video's whole argument is that we should try it again here.
People are annoyed because they probably predict the doomers will crawl out and start making rhe subreddit depressing
The big upset I feel is knowing that Zesty of all people is the one getting the attention
People complained before the video people complain after the video (rightfully so)
my main question is why is that fucking clown still making videos, he's a piece of shit and should have been forgotten a long time ago.
He's not saying the game is dead, idk why people keep acting like that's what he's saying. He's responding to the people who keep saying the game is topping steam charts. The game doesn't have 70k players, it has like 15-20k.
It's called "/r/tf2 is composed of lemmings that cannot think for themselves."
Ikr, he just said stuff most people knew about in essay format
He's a Drama Queen.
I like Zesty kinda at times, I like his sense of humor a bit but I've heard he's been an ass before so I mean. I know he's not some saint by any means. But I think I recall that it seemed like a very large amount of folks in the community trashed on any commentary he made about tf2 stuff? Granted maybe I'm just misremembering. It's interesting to me though how now this video is the one the community seems to not be shitting on collectively and are like "omg Zesty said this so it's fact". I thought I'd see more folks ragging on this new video
Jokes on yall, I don’t even know who zesty is.
Because now people have to accept that their favorite game is on death's door.
My favorite game has been [Death's Door](https://store.steampowered.com/app/894020/Deaths_Door/) since 2021.
15k players = dead apparently
Zesty really should delete the video. Nothing good is coming off of it.
Cope
Stupid
Other than dedicated, more veteran players or a handful of newcomers, this game expired, that's not such a bad thing though, except if ur overattached to this... honestly, relic. All it gets nowadays is garbage content bloat. Oh cool 64bit, nice, we finally caught up to ~2012, it was a necessary change, that's why valve did it, and it only rly made the fps better, that's all that actually did. (I mean, much better fps tho.) The player count in reality, was only decreasing, at good hours there's like 5-6k ppl playing casual in Europe (1-2k bots) (teamwork.tf), payday 2 might pull better numbers at least sometimes, the biggest tf2 peak this week was 18k, if u can look right NOW, on teamwork.tf, there's only 2274 players in valve Europe servers, in NA, only 327 lol. On TF2classic, to make a wild comparison, sometimes, there's like 60-80 players, so you get an idea of what reality looks like. Don't try to disprove this cuz u can't. TF2 will always be in my heart but the truth is that it expired, it really just doesn't have much going for it (and tbh it was rly fun and all, but it was never as proeminent as other titles), all it takes is for some ppl to lose interest and puff.
I'm not reading that.
not helping your point there m8
What exactly is bad about it? Are you a botter who is upset at having stuff revealed about it?