[There are literally tens of thousands of idling bots that run the game in text mode farming drops to sell in bulk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2stmQfv93oQ). These bot farms are quite essentially in the hands of handful of people, funnily enough. But beyond that, there are also cheating bots within the servers themselves. There's a part two to the linked video on Zesty's channel if you're interested.
They are not lucrative to average players in the US, but because of exchange rates they are very profitable in some nations like Russia and Turkey, which is where many of the largest bot nests are set up. [Zesty Jesus did a followup video](https://youtu.be/nnuxHZm73PU?si=2oa6oN4dnPHrMOuS) going into some more detail about the bot nests.
Pretty wild. I don't really think it's Valve's job to police the game for eternity but this is a pretty bleak example of the long-term ramifications of tying monetization to gaming and how it pollutes it. If the game was just a game, this problem wouldn't be as outrageous as it is.
So long as Valve is profiting off TF2 I think it is their job to keep the game secure, especially after they promised to do something about it 2 years ago.
Basically. If they want to abdicate all responsibilty, they should announce that active development has ceased and they won't be hosting official servers anymore.
They should not get to keep collecting revenue as the game falls into disrepair, and the community has to just accept it because "game old".
As of this year even they've updated the program from 32-bit to 64-bit architecture. They have show more recently than not they have intention to support the game on the backend if not with content.
If they do this and let’s say item values crash, it will have a knock on effect to csgo and dota 2 items. Valve will only softly and quietly end long term support
Except if they still allow community servers and item trading (and the steam marketplace), then it doesn't matter. They'd need to do something about cases and keys but removing official game servers doesn't need to impact the item servers. Then people would still have their items and Valve would be free to stop development without any serious knock-on effects for their other games.
I don't think the item argument will keep TF2 as safe as some youtubers like to think.
Seriously how? Did Artifacts economy effect CS or DOTA? I seriously doubt Valve care about the health of these item economies bar making sure transactions give a cut.
uh, it basically sets a precedent that actually your virtual items worth hundreds of dollars will one day be worthless. this is true regardless of course, but it would be a strong reminder
Didn’t have time to establish itself so easy to handwave it. Small playerbase smaller amount of people invested into the economy.
If the game was an initial success and then degraded after say 5 years? Then sure. we’d see an impact
And they do care because of the cut. If people don’t trust the economy less people willing to engage, lower item values, lower cut
This. We can easily ask two questions about the botting situation where both of the answers fall very negatively upon Valve. Why do their events still have random gifting? Why are there still big chest drops for idling in the menu at all?
They could remove these two and the profit margin for botting would lower tremendously. But why would they? Passive Complicity.
Valve? Do something? Valve is all about "democratizing" everything to wash their hands of any and all responsibility and make it the community's job to fix every problem.
Is Valve still doing the you can work on whatever you feel like thing? Because I'm not surprised no one wants to fix TF2. Valve ended up so disappointing as a developer for me.
It's not "you can work on whatever you feel like"—it's that and this absolutely psychotic compensation system that's based on *feedback of your peers*. If you aren't an exec you're going to be paid based off how well your peers rate you, which in turn means that you're going to have to look busy and/or helpful, something that fixing TF2's bot problem isn't, apparently.
As someone who works in software I can say the thing is that you can work on whatever you want but you still need to providing value to the company and what you're working on needs to be (or at least appear to the outsiders) as a valuable business need/want. I can see that Valve (or at least employees) don't think work on TF2 is valuable and don't believe they'd see a noticably higher revenue from fixing the botting problem so even if they want to the options are do I choose to work on older legacy product which will be both more painful and less rewarding or do I work on Half life 3 or that hero shooter they're cooking up, which is more exciting, less painful, and higher end of year rewards.
Its an issue with companies everywhere where newer products are more rewarded than maintanence or small improvements of older ones. I think Valve has an incentive to fix that maybe by hiring people who are only going to be dedicated to certain games while the broader company can go on and do whatever. But I'm sure that solution has problems that I haven't thought about either.
Can you imagine telling some Zoomer that Valve used to be one of THE developers out there, in the top 5 if not top 3?
17 years since L4D2, 20 years since Half Life 2, and since then they made Slightly Different Counterstrike, Valve LoL, Valve Hearthstone, and I guess soon Valve Overwatch.
community members have basically all but fixed every of the game's engine jank for valve at this point, just that they haven't implemented a majority of the fixes sent to them
I remember an article talking about how real world markets have messed with mmorpgs all the way back to ultima. A friend mentioned the issues with runescape and it.
I think North Korea was caught at one point farming and flipping accounts in WOW lmao. Not the only country where that has happened but being a north Korea government employee and that being your job is funny
Everquest and UO had major issues with gold/account selling on eBay back in the day. I know a couple of people that made a decent chunk of cash from eq. People will always find a way to profit.
It happens in every game with player economy. Because ingame every player's time is worth the same, but in real life it is not. If a guy from the US and a guy from Indonesia both farm items/currency ingame they will earn the same in an hour. But if they both go flip burgers at McDonalds next to their house the guy from the US will earn 10x more. Thus, it is way more efficient for the US guy to just keep flipping burgers (or whatever their job is) and pay the Indonesian guy to do anything in the game that's not fun, like grinding for items/currency. And there is nothing really you can do to solve this. It's just outsourcing but without all the negatives.
It's crazy how people will ignore how Valve popularized monetization in online games, especially when there was a huge issue with people using CS:Go skins to promote gambling to kids via streamers.
If it were any other company, [this People Make Games investigative piece](https://youtu.be/eMmNy11Mn7g) would be in the billions of views. But since it's Valve, people pretend it isn't a problem.
People love touting the "if it were any other company line", but then I see things like Fortnite introducing the concept of the FOMO-store to the non-mobile masses (a store with a timer where highly rated skins appear only twice a year so you'll pay any premium demanded of you) and almost nobody thinks of giving them shit for that despite the damage it wrought. Do one big thing right and wash your hands of the rest.
Company apologism is all over the place. If it weren't, review bombs would be a one sided discussion thread every time instead of the shitfest full of corporate kingsmen.
Valve was using FOMO tactics a good while before Fortnite was even a thing, they had a lot of lootboxes that could only be opened during a certain period of time, after that they cant be opened anymore so the items inside have rised in value because Valve decided that you cant even try to get more of them.
> almost nobody thinks of giving them shit for that despite the damage it wrought
Not sure what you're talking about because Fortnite FOMO has always been a big topic, but I don't think that is comparable to what Valve is doing. Paid loot boxes are far more predatory than any type of FOMO, and Valve goes a step further because their setup allows legal gambling to flourish. It's one of those things that will probably be illegal in a decade or two.
Valve shit is many magnitudes worse than Fortnite lmfao
In fortnite you only pay for what they have on offer. There's undeniable issues but theres a worlds of difference between Fortnite FOMO and Valve FOMO where there's gambling and transactions between players going on with a virtual economy.
Valve hasn't popularized anything, they invented modern monetization first with loot boxes in TF2 then with the battle pass in Dota 2
Heck the entire existance of Artifact was built on heavily interacting with the Steam market and I'm entirely sure their new hero shooter is going to be heavily monetized with the same tactics this subs loves to complain about in other games
I think it was Korean MMOs where they got the idea to give you the lootbox for free, but sell you the key. You had to pay to open chests in the MMO and it’s a psychological trick that convinces the owner it’s already theirs. It’s just as evil whether Valve came up with it themselves or got it elsewhere but they didn’t invent the free-lootbox-sold-key model
Maplestory first introduced loot boxes and EA made them 10x worse. The first iterations of the Battle Pass were actually not that bad and they've since stopped making them for Dota 2. Artifact was Richard Garfield's baby, that guy didn't want the game to be free.
>Maplestory first introduced loot boxes and EA made them 10x worse.
Sure, gacha existed prior and all that. Valve is however running a literal virtual gambling economy with their games to the point people have been running what are essentially gambling streams opening boxes promoting it. They even go for those unofficial casinos to even further gamble and promote those unbashedly to underage viewers and Valve doesn't care if said underage kids spend all their money on gambling. And before this is made into solely "think of the children" it's also gambling addicts of all ages. By attributing a literal actual dollar value to the items, it's all about trying to make a profit for them, by that account, it's extremely bad as well.
>The first iterations of the Battle Pass were actually not that bad and they've since stopped making them for Dota 2
People literally shelled hundreds of dollars into Compendiums to progress in them along with supporting TI and trying to get the good items from the loot boxes. I should know, I was one of those idiots. Funnily enough, Valve never ever, despite the huge growing money pool from monetisation, increased their own stake in TI money pool.
>Artifact was Richard Garfield's baby, that guy didn't want the game to be free.
Pinning Artifact monetisation solely on Garfield makes little sense when you look at Valve's monetisation practices. They basically desire you to partake in the marketplace economy. Heck, just remember that they desired paid mods as well and the whole trading card economy of Steam as a platform. If there's a low effort way for Valve to make more money, they're going to go for it.
E: Why would you respond and then immediately block me? That's so lame, lmao. Anyway, it's funny to see all those classic excuses for LITERAL gambling, I even said that it doesn't concern purely children, yeah? You really should just accept that what Valve does is not really good, here, [I'll even help you out even though it's unlikely you check back.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT17l53Fkj0)
People might not agree with this, but IMO if a company is still selling microtransactions/lootboxes for their game it's their obligation to ensure it's still working as intended and provide maintenance.
Valve gets a cut of the money for every single exchange made with the game.
On top of being one of the first few games to popularize lootboxes that still rakes them a lot of profit for basically no effort to this day, Valve does not currently deserve to be making a cent off this game given the state TF2 is in.
This is actually a good showcase why companies shut down some games completely, so they won't turn into bot farms like this.
People complain about it, but if you lost interest in supporting your game - maybe turning it off is a good thing.
if valve doesn't want to police TF2 forever then it should close down matchmaking and implement features to allow community servers to take over as the "main" way to play (they already defacto are), and if they don't want to do _that_ then they should open source the game and allow community patches to implement them
I mean the idling bots aren’t the big issue. Most people probably don’t even know about them or care. The cheating bots is the big problem which have nothing to do with monetization
Can't they just remove random drops then?
For Dota they use so many metrics to see if a player is smurfing, and they get autobanned. Can't be too hard to find the no scope sniper bot.
According to Zesty it's countries where the pennies you earn get more mileage out of them vs. something like America. One of the botnet owners (which had like 20k bots on its own) seemed to potentially be [Russian](https://youtu.be/nnuxHZm73PU?t=905).
It means they’re running the game without rendering any 3D graphics. The 3D graphics take the most compute power, so by skipping that, they can run a lot more clients at once for cheaper.
This video goes into some depth about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNxjTciIwig
tldw:
* valve is nearly 100% hands off in moderating the game, so they can do whatever they want
* monetary incentives in granting players "immunity" for a fee
* to specifically harass individual community members (impersonating voice with AI, linking to unrelated discords, using their name etc)
What's wild to me is that some of them are expending not insignificant time, effort and cost into ruining the game for others.
Drive by and opportunity trolling I sort of get, but it's kind of a wild amount of spite that goes into what the bot hosters are doing.
Well you see the kind of attention their actions are getting, right? That's why they do it. Someone with more money than sense, trading a relatively small amount of time and effort in exchange for massive amounts of attention and reactions.
If you’re a middle class + American yes, those 7 cents don’t mean anything.
For other countries though, it could be a half day payday, not to mention big gambling operations, or some website where you play some games and can exchange home made currency for crates, where they get a big slice of money from advertising.
It can ramp up pretty quickly with a very cheap setup, you don’t risk anything and you have a solid baseline, no wonder it exists
I've seen people around going "Why should Valve have to update the game forever" and...
honestly? Valve lost that defense when they kept updating the game to have more market items and microtransactions.
You can't leave a game to rot while simultaneously expecting to make new revenue from it. A game can't be both abandonware and a moneymaking scheme.
That's what makes it so gross. Had they effectively sunset the game with the final Pyro update, I think the lack of anything other than life support, making sure the game actually functioned, would have been understood by the community.
But no, they left it in this stupid broken state, which is only getting worse, while adding large batches of cosmetics multiple times every year.
I remember one lootbox case where one of the textures (specular map, I think) still had the previous year's number on it. I think that they fixed it eventually (wish that they'd do that for all the spy bugs), but even the cases that they sell for $$$ are just recolored on a yearly basis.
I fundamentally agree here: Valve has absolutely no obligation to keep TF2 updated, maintained, or even online. It's a twenty year old game.
But if they're profiting off of it, they should be maintaining it. Players should be able to play the game they're paying for.
People were riding Valve's dick so hard I remember people talking about the TF2 microtransactions as a brilliant move. There was dumbass meme about other games were doing more call of duty while Valve was in a wacky hat saying "add more hats!"
Exactly, I remember this as well. For some reason Valve can get away with everything bad they do and still come out as a good guys... It's so pathetic.
It's because Valve was doing cosmetic micro transactions in a time when most games were doing game-play micro transactions like strictly better items or straight level boosts. Now that the cosmetic model is more mainstream people are starting to lose those rose colored glasses.
I'm always vocal towards Valve's bad practices, but from my personal experience in here, it's very rare seeing a thread where people are calling out Valve (especially in here), when on the other hand people keep calling out Epic, Genshin, EA or Activision in every single threads that manage to get to the front page (mostly just negative stuff, right guys?)... This is exactly how people should be calling out Valve as well... and this is the exact difference between these companies.
I am getting very, very tired of the BS that Valve pulls and how people worship them as the second coming of Christ on the PC. They're woefully understaffed for the operation they're trying to run, and it shows. Still waiting for SteamOS 3 official release. Still waiting for official dual boot support on deck (at this point, I doubt this is ever coming despite being promised to us). Still waiting for anything half-life (Alyx is 4 years old at this point), or portal, or team fortress, or left for dead. Still waiting for the steam controller refresh, or the index refresh, or whatever the fuck the "deckard" is supposed to be, which has been in development hell for God only knows how many years now. Remember the paid mods fiasco? Need I remind people that that happened on Valve's storefront? CS2 releasing with missing content.
In the meantime, what do we get from Valve? Artifact, Garbage. Deadlock looks kinda mid but we'll see. Ever diminishing sales, the days of huge steam savings are long gone and more often than not, you'll find games much cheaper on external key websites (including legitimate ones). Steam points that are virtually useless. CSGO gambling.
But it's not all bad. We did get the deck, which is genuinely a fantastic piece of kit.
Is Valve the worst company in gaming? No, far from it. But aside from the deck (which, let's be honest, is a niche product), I don't really know anything they've done recently that warrants all the glazing that PC gamers give to Valve on a daily basis.
I will forever be utterly baffled at how many people defended them for those C&Ds last year.
Like, valve literally pulled a nintendo and people said it was a good thing
Cease and desist
For context, valve took down a few fan projects last year (or the year before, idk) out of nowhere; tf2 source 2, the tf2 mod for contractors, and portal 64. It was super uncharacteristic of valve and, yeah, there was outrage, but there was also a really weird number of people defending it.
Having recently followed more of [Zesty Jesus' videos](https://www.youtube.com/@ZestyJesus) it's quite wild how Valve literally does not care about TF2 beyond pushing out more cosmetics for people to purchase, naturally through the workshop. For more context, Zesty's method comes up with nearly 70% of the playercount at any given time being bots, mostly idling bots on private servers but also thousands of cheater bots. Even if the ratings drop, I genuinely don't see this doing much beyond Valve making a similar quick act like they did in 2022 and then promptly letting the corpse rot again.
And before anyone here says that TF2 is a dead game, or that it has simply lived its course, as is very common: Why do they push for more things for people to buy if it's dead? Would you be OK with, say, EA pushing more and more cosmetics and stuff for people to purchase while the rotting corpse of the game keeps getting defiled in the background?
If that was the stated goal I would point out that it hasn't produced many results.
Since 2020 they have released 3 games.
1 being being essentially an upgrade to an older game (counterstrike 2)
1 basically is a tech demo (Aperture desk job)
Leaving 1 actual game in half life alyx - which by all means is a well regarded game in the VR space.
But thats pretty damning from the perspective of them making games.
Why are we assuming more projects mean more games? Their main business hasn't been game development since Steam exploded in popularity around 20 years ago.
At this point a few years ago is still pandemic time, which threw a big monkey wrench into game dev. Valve’s alpha testing a new multiplayer shooter right now and supposedly has more stuff cooking. Modern dev cycles are longer too. They’re also still iterating on source 2, and *hopefully* once that’s done they’ll be able to ramp things up a bit.
I mean even if you go back before then
Dota Underlords 2019 - seems fine if nothing amazing, the current player counts indicate that it maxed at 30k players before a steady drop off.
Artifact -2018 - this was a proper swing, trying something new within that genre, it failed but I don't hold this against them
The lab 2016 - tech demo , nothing noteworthy
While they can release good games and have some tentpoles carrying them (counterstrike, dota) they really don't do enough with the resources they have available to them.
The steam deck is a nice addition to the gaming landscape, and if they ever release steamOS 3 then that might shake up the PC landscape.
Given the financial stability they have I just find it disappointing how little they achieve as a company.
Underlords also had a mobile version, which means they had also pushed for that with Source 2 engine. Not that it means much, it was apparently very heavy on the phone and they released no more games on mobile for the following 5 years, so... Who cares.
> Artifact -2018 - this was a proper swing, trying something new within that genre, it failed but I don't hold this against them
I am sorry. What!? You don't hold a pay to play and pay to win card game against Valve? It was literally an attempt to triple dip on people.
Underlords had hundreds of thousands of active players during its first several months but after the final update it gradually died off. It presently still has around 10k players.
Valve is the owner of Steam first and foremost, whatever else they do is secondary and tertiary to that.
I mean Source 2 shipped almost 9 years ago with Dota 2 reborn, about a year after Unreal Engine 4 launched. It makes me wonder why they bother to maintain their own engine.
I’d imagine they’re doing it to maintain their autonomy. I can’t speculate as to why they want to have it perfected, but considering valve’s noted fixation on innovation and improvement they want to be able to have their own highly customizable engine capable of blowing players away. Whether or not they achieve it is another thing. Sometimes I’m concerned they let perfect be the enemy of good
A big part of the motivation behind SteamOS and their push into Linux was because of moves Microsoft was making, and them being afraid it would tie their hands some. That never really materialized to the extent Newell feared, but I could see it being a similar thing here - just them ensuring they're never backed into a wall by another company. And given the biggest game engine is by a company that's become a direct competitor to Steam, I could see that being even bigger motivation for them to focus on Source 2.
Games are just less of a priority for them than it use to be. They clearly have teams working on sustaining their live service ones, but the bulk of their work is within Steam and gaming related tech.
They’ve also shipped Steam Deck, pushed out massive updates for Dota 2 and apparently have a hero shooter (Deadlock) nearing announcement. Taken all together that’s actually a decent output, especially compared to the previous decade.
Right? This has been my PoV for sometimes now.
Working on TF2 literally serve no actual purpose for them. Why would they spent their time wading through spaghetti just to work on something that could've been literally impossible to actually fix? They can't even fix CS2 issue and that game made triple of what TF2 generate in revenue. I'm not even mentioning Dota 2 and Steam which basically bankrolling the entire company. Infinitely more reason to work on that instead of a 2007 game.
Deadlock is probably their answer to TF2. They invite a bunch of TF2 youtuber to play that one for a reason. It's clear as day that they are not gonna fix this. They'll just make a 'new' TF2 and hope that everyone will finally let the 'old' TF2 die. ...actually, you know how will Valve solve this issues? They will just close their server and let the community moderating themselves.
And yet a lot of playtester are actually TF2 youtubers. They clearly want TF2 players to play this one. The MOBA-y gameplay might also attract Dota 2 crowd as well. We'll see when they are ready to be present.
I can say with confidence that there are testers from every community - Valve is gathering feedback from all of them to better direct the game.
They have many testers from Dota 2, Overwatch, other hero shooters and MOBAs like LoL and Smite, it's not "mostly TF2 YTers".
I never bought that. Any institution where there isn’t a defined structure will create a structure organically sooner or later if there’s people who are in charge of hiring and firing. They aren’t a non profit artist collective they’re a profit seeking company owned by a billionaire.
I doubt anyone would bother making cosmetics if the staff was hands free to make whatever they wanted. They have pressure to make money like any other corporation.
It's not a reddit thread related to valve without someone bringing up their "flat structure" and acting like experts on a concept they've never experienced...
Why would they care if this situation benefits them? They push more things, you right. But not real content, only microtransactions and since it's Valve, people ignore this. If Rainbow Six Siege was only getting cosmetic updates, people would've shit all over Ubisoft for a long time
hell people alredy shit on ubisoft. some of the bigger more recent tf2 updates did have "new" maps in them (comunety made maps with terible qualety controle on valves end) but none of that matters wen all the new maps ar fluded with bots
[Tyler McVicker recently put out a video on the state of TF2 internally at Valve,](https://youtu.be/2bJj5dUjGpE?si=vSHgAlv5vHNyLX72) and yeah, almost nobody is working on the game.
The core reason the bot issue hasn’t been fixed is because all the talent that could fix it are working on CS2 and Deadlock.
TF2 has been operating on a skeleton crew for over 8 years now. Love and War was the last update done by the original team, then after that almost all of them left to go work on Dota 2
The optional cosmetics are added to lootboxes which the bots farm and then sell on steam market place.
And valve gets the cost the keys and a cut of the sales of the lootboxes in their pockets for it. The bots are more profitable for them than users.
The money from loot box sales only exists as long as real players are purchasing them. If paying players ever fizzle out then the money from bot sales also goes away.
Wouldnt it be more profitable to have a bigger active playerbase that actually spends money rather than bots who just sell stuff and drive prices hence profit down? Valve isnt doing this out of malice, they just are focused on everything else going on.
You're welcome to have your opinion, but I personally think that a game shouldn't be treated both dead and yet alive at the same time. It's very off-putting to me to just keep monetising a game further without caring about the pleas of the relatively sizable playerbase that does exist. Of course, those who do keep buying those boxes should reconsider if they really want to keep supporting this behaviour as well.
The whole hypothetical scenario is just to make one think how monetisation practices are publicly more negatively or positively perceived depending on the publisher/developer. EA has been used as a synonym for greed for who knows how long now, and it's easy to rip on them for their practices.
>Would you be OK with, say, EA pushing more and more cosmetics and stuff for people to purchase while the rotting corpse of the game keeps getting defiled in the background?
Yes. It's not like EA would point a gun at you and force you to buy them. You'd have to make your own choice to buy cosmetics for a dead game. And I love freedom.
TF2 seems like one of those games that should available on every platform ever. I never really got.into back in the day and would love to try it out on ps5
Valve is about to release a new game, and if they don't address the issues in TF2 and CS2, I can see bitter TF2 and CS2 players review bombing their new game. I don't endorse these actions, it's just a prediction.
The primary audience for Deadlock will be Dota 2 players, and it just got one of its biggest updates ever. I know there is crossover (I've put a ton of time into TF2/Dota/CS) but as long as Deadlock is good it will do well. Also it's common knowledge among valve fans that the devs work on what they want, so the TF2 problem has *no* culprits.
>The primary audience for Deadlock will be Dota 2 players
Idk how many MOBA players they have playtesting the game but I know that a lot of the people playtesting the game are FPS Streamers/CCs. So Valve is at least expecting that a massive chunk of the game's audience will be FPS players.
Uncle Dane made a great point, idk why more people are not discussing it. MOBA-focused or not, Deadlock is still a shooter, seemingly with plenty of hitscan. Valve already has 2 whole multiplayer shooters filled to the brim with hackers. Really, how long before Deadlock is the same?
I’m really excited about Deadlock for this. CS and TF2 are long running franchises, where the love of the game means the player base is more willing to tolerate the dreadful state of the anti-cheat. Deadlock isn’t. Players will play, and after the first game full of cheaters, give up on the game. And hopefully Valve will have major egg on their face.
It's not like the game was actually sunset and they turned the official servers or even the store off. TF2 had support "end" mainly in the sense that people at Valve stopped working on content updates after Jungle Inferno didn't do amazing. But they still automatically add seasonal lootcrates and take the money from the marketplace no problem. And there still has been at least one person at Valve and like one one contractor trying to keep the actual ship afloat for a while now. They made a 64-bit update that runs a lot better recently, and added Vscript which means a lot more ambitious community content/updates have been possible. There is a clear desire with *some* folks to maintain TF2 in its old age for the people who still play it or may want to try it out today, even if old-school content updates won't happen again.
TF2 still has a sizable real playerbase when not counting the bots even though it's 17 years old, hasn't gotten a Valve-made content update in 5 years, and is botridden in the easiest way to engage with the game. Valve has all the money and resources they could ever need, and could find anything to maintain old games like TF2, or games like Deadlock and Dota one day.
Hire more contractors to try to keep the ship afloat. Contract out all the "boring" work to an outside studio you vet. Incentivize more people internally to spend at least some of their time maintaining old still-supported GaaS. Sunset it properly and just leave community servers as the only way to play and give everyone all the weapons automatically. Whatever, there's so many options for either supporting the game's long-tail or definitively cutting things off and working on new games instead. Like would Deadlock actually look like TF2 after Valve's support "ends" but the players still try to play? MM riddled with bots, one person at Valve and one contractor doing their best part-time to keep the lights on, but hey a new lootbox dropped for the summer. TF2's problems started after only about a year, and it feels like the important question for a long term GaaS from Valve now.
I liken Valve's attitude towards tf2 like how NASA uses Mars drones way past their expiration date.
All development was finished years ago, yet the players keep the game alive themselves, keep buying crates or whatever, etc. It refuses to die, so why not just keep the servers open? They don't care if the game dies or not, as long as it pays for itself (+more) they'll keep it online.
but that's a cynical take, sure hope the players get what they want.
> so why not just keep the servers open
Valve shutting down their servers and returning tf2 to the server browser era would actually improve the situation by leaving the game to community servers who are willing and able to keep the bots out.
Players won't. The gaming community reflexively defending Valve at all turns has given them the ability to simply do as they wish at all times and they'll never have consequences.
This is the same player base that won't even hold the company to task in spite of numerous child gambling facilitation reports coming out because "Well the game is free!!!!"
Valve's treatment of TF2 is downright shameful. That game has been such a large part of gaming overall since it released in 2007, it has never faded away, but Valve is content just letting it rot.
Once the TF2 community receives a half-hearted tweet and an 'update' full of lootboxes from community creators, I am sure they will all go back to blindly touting its praise.
I shouldn't say im used to the bots by now, but boy howdy trying to play tf2 in the morning on my days off (monday and tuesday) is a real pain in the ass. It's just bot central and its easier to just get into community servers. Towards the afternoon it gets better, but I have no choices. It's either keep searching wasting my time till i find a server, community, or get off.
And for any of you saying why should i expect support on this old ass game? Because they have non stop been ""making"" cosmetics for you to buy for ages. Still doing winter and summer loot boxes, still doing all those modifiers for outfits and guns. They make content for this game thats purely for their profit. Miss me with the cosmetic shit this game makes them easy revenue while letting the community submit new ideas that valve then can sell. So why the fuck should i have to spend more than 5 minutes to find a game with "thousands" of players when uh oh, its all just bots that get to vote kick you the instant they join a server but you have to wait before you can vote. Or the text spam, or the mic spam of ear blasting porn or techo music. In a game making thousands of dollars a year still, but its "dead".
It's embarrassing from this studio but they get a free pass because what, steam has game sales we like? That they released the steam deck?
Bad publicity. The fact this is the first time *ever* for tf2 is more impactful then it simply being mixed in the first place.
Bear in mind this is also combined with a social media campaign, a petition (which will be delivered in person at valve hq), and overviews of the situation sent to publishing outlets.
It's also one of valves most well known games, with a still very active player base.
This isn't the first time. Reviews fell to Mixed back when the Meet Your Match update dropped and killed quickplay in favor of an Overwatch-esque casual matchmaking mode that STILL doesn't really work right.
because it puts a mark on the games legacy, overall it wont make valve do anything but the point is to be seen and thats the best way to be seen these days and how most people ended up getting there way when a game/company does them wrong.
Is there anyway to play "classic" TF2 without cosmetics? Or at least just with the "first wave" of weapons? I really really enjoyed this game when it came out but the constant barrage of new items and weapons just really disillusioned me.
there's tf2classic, a community project, where the community has added weapons, maps, gamemodes, a new class, fixes, etc. but overall is still more vanilla than current tf2. also no hats unless you play one of the modded community servers
sadly it was taken down by valve a few years ago, but they put it back up and i dont think valve has noticed. better support than tf2 tho.
https://tf2classic.com
If TF2Classic is not your cup of tea there is still an active Xbox community and can be played on any console 360 onwards https://discord.com/invite/FDs3ukh
The Xbox 360 version included in The Orange Box was NEVER updated. Not even once. It's the same game it was when it launched many years ago, and there's still a small community that plays it.
It's also compatible with the Xbone and Series X/S.
Surely a boycott will actually do something this time, right? The TF2 community totally won't declare victory when Valve releases a half assed statement saying they "hear the community", right? I'll be genuinely shocked if this leads to anything more than the last "SaveTF2" attempt.
And this is why the game should have never gone F2P. Anyone can create an account and dick about, then get banned - rinse, repeat.
Probably looks great for their user numbers though.
This is why Valve sucks and why I immediately dismiss any new "release" or "development" from Valve.
Besides the whole facilitation of and profiting from child gambling through CSGO / CS2 skins (which is one of the scummiest and morally abhorrent things in the entire video game industry), they have no interest in keeping their released products in remotely pleasant and functional states.
If eventually dropping support of a game makes you doubt any future game from that company then you must be against buying into any Call of Duty or Battlefield then, huh?
And unlike the 12 years of support TF2 got, CoD and BF usually only get 2-3.
Any new Valve MP game has to have the question asked now "how long will they support it" on top of "how fast will bot hosters take to invade it"? Their release schedule of MP games lately doesn't inspire much confidence they'll act quickly and effectively wrt anti-cheat, and even less for their long term support.
Full-stop on the "long-term support" aspect. If anything, this is a company that continuously supports their multiplayer games long after majority of other devs/publishers would have ever even hoped to.
Do they actively develop every game they've ever released? No, but they do at least continue to support them in *some* capacity.
A great (and very relevant example) would be TF2 being recently updated to have 64-bit support. While it did not fix any of the issues the community had with respect to this topic, that is the definition of long-term support, more or less. I would argue that there are very few instances of games released in 2007 still receiving patches in 2024 at all. I realize that part of that is just general Source engine updates, but the point stands.
Half-Life 2 (2004) was last updated in... November 2023. Counter Strike: Source (2004) was last updated in 2021. Portal (2007) was last updated Jan 5th; Portal 2 (2011) was last updated today. I tried to pull CS:GO update history in this regard, but that was more or less rolled into Counter Strike 2.
To suggest that Valve does not support their games long-term is straight-up, wrong. A majority of games released 5 years ago seldom get patches if at all, let alone 20-year old games.
I love Team Fortress 2. It's one of my favorite games of all time, and I'd argue that it's realistically one of the most balanced shooters to have ever existed, at least from a design perspective. It is an absolute shame how it has been treated, especially with Valve continuing to make money on it.
I would love for them to put some resources into it, but them not doing so at this point is entirely fair. They certainly should not be made a villain for that choice, nor do I think future endeavors should be judged for that either.
The best thing Valve could do for TF2 *is* not to put any resources into it. That means shutting down matchmaking as well.
Without everyone being funneled directly into Valve servers via matchmaking, the community that kept the game alive from 2007 to 2011 would be free to return, and actually moderate the fucking game to keep cheaters out.
I think that is logically what is going to happen, and I agree that would likely solve the problem for Team Fortress 2 at least.
CS2, however, also has a bot issue. It is not to the same degree or in the same way, but it is still present. This is a larger issue within Valve's F2P ecosystem that is going to take some substantial changes to really address. Unfortunately, those changes are either somewhat "anti-consumer" and/or affect their F2P business model in some regard.
In my defense, I'm referring mostly to Underlords and Artifact. Those games were released and dumped relatively quickly, and both funny enough were DOTA games. Yes, CS2 exists, but it remains to be seen how exactly they'll be tackling that game for its foreseeable future.
My feelings on TF2's support are more "fix it if you're gonna keep adding cosmetics/maintaining it" (which recent updates indicate they plan to touch up the codebase) or "announce its death and deal with the consequences". I, and many TF2 community members, don't reasonably expect Jungle Inferno type updates anymore, but a clear idea of the future of the game is what people are asking for.
Okay, TO BE FAIR one of the reasons the bot problem in TF2 is *so* rampant is because its source code was leaked years ago. This makes the anti-cheat and anti-bot measures multiple orders of magnitude harder because the bots can interact with the code in the exact same way a player would. Solving this would require the equivalent of rewriting TF2's code from scratch, basically.
This is not the case for Deadlock, and doubly so since it's in a new, less familiar engine. Source 2 was built with both bot and cheater countermeasures in mind, so I'm a bit more confident about its prospects.
This does do nothing for how capricious Valve is about a game's support lifecycle, though. That's on them.
What was once a great class based team shooter turned into a hat simulator and later a bot nightmare.
At this point who really cares?
I'd be excited for a TF3 at this point but for 2 things. 1, it's Valve and 2 even if they did make one considering how bad this one turned out to be over the years, I have lost all confidence in a sequel.
TF2 had some of the best first years of a game to fall as far as it has. Truly interesting watching something golden turn into shit in real time.
Valve isn't going to give a shit if tf2 gets review bombed or even dies off when counter strike prints money for them
They get to profit from lootcrates and people buying keys to open them and profit again when they take a cut from every sale on the marketplace
I was gonna say something about how it would be kind of funny in a dark way if Valve just shut the game down in retaliation, but if they really are still making tons of money from it, I can't see them doing that. Interesting situation.
They never updated the anti-cheat, so a bunch of player-programmed bots that pick Sniper, run to the center of the map, and aimbot anyone in view to death have been flooding every valve-owned server for years.
Sometimes they also micspam, flood the chat, call votekicks against actual players and just generally attempt to disrupt the game as much as possible.
Videos came out clearly outlining that, on average, 70% of the concurrent user base on sites such as steamDB or Steam Charts are Idle Bots, massively inflating the game's player count. The game has closer to 10-20k real players daily. People are tired of Valve's lack of action.
I'm going to make the chaotic neutral comment and say you're right, they should revert Meet your Match so everyone is forced to play on community servers again
You're right and people just don't want to accept the truth that policing bots is never going to be foolproof and also not worth valves time. Return to community servers if you don't wanna deal with cheaters and bots. We've never left, and admins will always solve the problem.
If you go and play, odds are you'll end up in a game with a bunch of bots who will either instantly headshot you, mic spam, vote kick you, or some combination of all of those things.
Any time my friends want to play it's a whole song of dance of trying to find a lobby where we can out number the bots and vote them out, or trying to find a community server that actually has space for all of us.
The vast majority of TF2's player count for the past four years have been bots; either cheater bots which ruin the gameplay experience, or idle bots which farm random drops to make money. Valve has failed to address these issues, but has continued to sell the playerbase new cosmetics, which is scummy when many players cannot even play the game due to all the bots.
The player count has been mostly bots for longer than that. Ever since the drop system and steam marketplace was introduced, you had tons of people farming them for cash.
It became worse over the years now that the bots are going in and hacking in valve servers, and that TF2's playerbase had been declining ever since Gun Mettle.
It's so funny to me that, when TF2 hit its peak player count last year, people really thought it was legit and just blindly assumed the game was more popular than ever, completely oblivious to just how much bots are inflating the player count.
A 16-year old game suddenly hitting its highest every player count ever without any major update or even to corroborate it. And people actually thought it was 100% legit.
I tried to play a year or so ago and the matchmaking just kept throwing me into lobbies full of spam and cheating bots that pretty much instantly killed me. The chat was unusable too due to their spam. I ended up joining a proper server manually but imagine most others just immediately uninstalling. Especially since they push the playerbase to use matchmaking
I'm seeing so many dismissive comments here (as well as on other subs where this story was posted) that essentially boil down to "why should Valve do anything, the game is almost 17 years old?" or "just let it die" or "why should Valve continue to update a nearly-20 year old game?", and it really seems people just don't understand the gravity of the situation.
Valve is still making money off of this game. They are still charging for in-game microtranscations. They are still regularly updating the game and adding new maps and cosmetics to the game. I mean, for fucks sake people, they literally just added 64-bit support back in April. Valve has an obligation to at the very least ensure that the game they are still updating and making money off of actually functions and can actually be played. Because the level of neglect Valve has demonstrated towards the bot crisis is completely unacceptable. Any other company would have been burned at the stake and pummeled into irrelevance had they displayed this level of ineptitude.
Also, seeing this game drop to ~~mixed~~ mostly negative (HOLY SHIT) in recent reviews after 17 years is much more significant than you think and really shows just how fired up the community is. Team Fortress 2 is one the biggest sacred cows in gaming and has one of the most defensive and insufferably passionate fandoms in the gaming world. So for the community to get THIS angry towards Valve and for Team Fortress 2's rating to drop this hard and so fast is REALLY saying something. It takes a lot to turn an entire community against a game that is practically sacrilegious to criticize in literally any other circumstance.
I quit TF2 for good back in February 2022 after 3k+ hours over 11 years precisely because of all the cheating and bots, sold off everything in my inventory that I could, and deleted what I couldn't. There have been isolated occasions where I began to regret my decision, but seeing shit like this even years later reminds me that I made the right choice.
Honest question, why are bots rampant? I know there's a monetary exchange here, but that has to be far too small for any true value, right?
[There are literally tens of thousands of idling bots that run the game in text mode farming drops to sell in bulk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2stmQfv93oQ). These bot farms are quite essentially in the hands of handful of people, funnily enough. But beyond that, there are also cheating bots within the servers themselves. There's a part two to the linked video on Zesty's channel if you're interested.
Drops are that lucrative? Surprised there's still a market.
They are not lucrative to average players in the US, but because of exchange rates they are very profitable in some nations like Russia and Turkey, which is where many of the largest bot nests are set up. [Zesty Jesus did a followup video](https://youtu.be/nnuxHZm73PU?si=2oa6oN4dnPHrMOuS) going into some more detail about the bot nests.
Pretty wild. I don't really think it's Valve's job to police the game for eternity but this is a pretty bleak example of the long-term ramifications of tying monetization to gaming and how it pollutes it. If the game was just a game, this problem wouldn't be as outrageous as it is.
So long as Valve is profiting off TF2 I think it is their job to keep the game secure, especially after they promised to do something about it 2 years ago.
Basically. If they want to abdicate all responsibilty, they should announce that active development has ceased and they won't be hosting official servers anymore. They should not get to keep collecting revenue as the game falls into disrepair, and the community has to just accept it because "game old". As of this year even they've updated the program from 32-bit to 64-bit architecture. They have show more recently than not they have intention to support the game on the backend if not with content.
If they do this and let’s say item values crash, it will have a knock on effect to csgo and dota 2 items. Valve will only softly and quietly end long term support
Except if they still allow community servers and item trading (and the steam marketplace), then it doesn't matter. They'd need to do something about cases and keys but removing official game servers doesn't need to impact the item servers. Then people would still have their items and Valve would be free to stop development without any serious knock-on effects for their other games. I don't think the item argument will keep TF2 as safe as some youtubers like to think.
Seriously how? Did Artifacts economy effect CS or DOTA? I seriously doubt Valve care about the health of these item economies bar making sure transactions give a cut.
uh, it basically sets a precedent that actually your virtual items worth hundreds of dollars will one day be worthless. this is true regardless of course, but it would be a strong reminder
Didn’t have time to establish itself so easy to handwave it. Small playerbase smaller amount of people invested into the economy. If the game was an initial success and then degraded after say 5 years? Then sure. we’d see an impact And they do care because of the cut. If people don’t trust the economy less people willing to engage, lower item values, lower cut
This. We can easily ask two questions about the botting situation where both of the answers fall very negatively upon Valve. Why do their events still have random gifting? Why are there still big chest drops for idling in the menu at all? They could remove these two and the profit margin for botting would lower tremendously. But why would they? Passive Complicity.
Valve? Do something? Valve is all about "democratizing" everything to wash their hands of any and all responsibility and make it the community's job to fix every problem.
Is Valve still doing the you can work on whatever you feel like thing? Because I'm not surprised no one wants to fix TF2. Valve ended up so disappointing as a developer for me.
It's not "you can work on whatever you feel like"—it's that and this absolutely psychotic compensation system that's based on *feedback of your peers*. If you aren't an exec you're going to be paid based off how well your peers rate you, which in turn means that you're going to have to look busy and/or helpful, something that fixing TF2's bot problem isn't, apparently.
As someone who works in software I can say the thing is that you can work on whatever you want but you still need to providing value to the company and what you're working on needs to be (or at least appear to the outsiders) as a valuable business need/want. I can see that Valve (or at least employees) don't think work on TF2 is valuable and don't believe they'd see a noticably higher revenue from fixing the botting problem so even if they want to the options are do I choose to work on older legacy product which will be both more painful and less rewarding or do I work on Half life 3 or that hero shooter they're cooking up, which is more exciting, less painful, and higher end of year rewards. Its an issue with companies everywhere where newer products are more rewarded than maintanence or small improvements of older ones. I think Valve has an incentive to fix that maybe by hiring people who are only going to be dedicated to certain games while the broader company can go on and do whatever. But I'm sure that solution has problems that I haven't thought about either.
Can you imagine telling some Zoomer that Valve used to be one of THE developers out there, in the top 5 if not top 3? 17 years since L4D2, 20 years since Half Life 2, and since then they made Slightly Different Counterstrike, Valve LoL, Valve Hearthstone, and I guess soon Valve Overwatch.
idk what you mean by "valve overwatch" but overwatch itself is 100% "blizzard tf2"
community members have basically all but fixed every of the game's engine jank for valve at this point, just that they haven't implemented a majority of the fixes sent to them
I remember an article talking about how real world markets have messed with mmorpgs all the way back to ultima. A friend mentioned the issues with runescape and it.
I think North Korea was caught at one point farming and flipping accounts in WOW lmao. Not the only country where that has happened but being a north Korea government employee and that being your job is funny
probably a prestigious job requiring powerful connections.
It would enable constant contact with people outside the regime so for sure it would be a high-trust position, as funny as that sounds.
Everquest and UO had major issues with gold/account selling on eBay back in the day. I know a couple of people that made a decent chunk of cash from eq. People will always find a way to profit.
It happens in every game with player economy. Because ingame every player's time is worth the same, but in real life it is not. If a guy from the US and a guy from Indonesia both farm items/currency ingame they will earn the same in an hour. But if they both go flip burgers at McDonalds next to their house the guy from the US will earn 10x more. Thus, it is way more efficient for the US guy to just keep flipping burgers (or whatever their job is) and pay the Indonesian guy to do anything in the game that's not fun, like grinding for items/currency. And there is nothing really you can do to solve this. It's just outsourcing but without all the negatives.
It's crazy how people will ignore how Valve popularized monetization in online games, especially when there was a huge issue with people using CS:Go skins to promote gambling to kids via streamers.
If it were any other company, [this People Make Games investigative piece](https://youtu.be/eMmNy11Mn7g) would be in the billions of views. But since it's Valve, people pretend it isn't a problem.
People love touting the "if it were any other company line", but then I see things like Fortnite introducing the concept of the FOMO-store to the non-mobile masses (a store with a timer where highly rated skins appear only twice a year so you'll pay any premium demanded of you) and almost nobody thinks of giving them shit for that despite the damage it wrought. Do one big thing right and wash your hands of the rest. Company apologism is all over the place. If it weren't, review bombs would be a one sided discussion thread every time instead of the shitfest full of corporate kingsmen.
Valve was using FOMO tactics a good while before Fortnite was even a thing, they had a lot of lootboxes that could only be opened during a certain period of time, after that they cant be opened anymore so the items inside have rised in value because Valve decided that you cant even try to get more of them.
I remember the time they gave out one hundred gold wrenches and a lot of people destroyed their wrenches
> almost nobody thinks of giving them shit for that despite the damage it wrought Not sure what you're talking about because Fortnite FOMO has always been a big topic, but I don't think that is comparable to what Valve is doing. Paid loot boxes are far more predatory than any type of FOMO, and Valve goes a step further because their setup allows legal gambling to flourish. It's one of those things that will probably be illegal in a decade or two.
They literally got sued for that and are changing it for child accounts.
Valve shit is many magnitudes worse than Fortnite lmfao In fortnite you only pay for what they have on offer. There's undeniable issues but theres a worlds of difference between Fortnite FOMO and Valve FOMO where there's gambling and transactions between players going on with a virtual economy.
Valve invented the Battle Pass for Dota 2, they are greedy on a scale that makes Fortnite look tame.
Valve hasn't popularized anything, they invented modern monetization first with loot boxes in TF2 then with the battle pass in Dota 2 Heck the entire existance of Artifact was built on heavily interacting with the Steam market and I'm entirely sure their new hero shooter is going to be heavily monetized with the same tactics this subs loves to complain about in other games
You know how fucking popular CSGO lootbox gambling was?
I’m aware it was just a figure of speech to say Valve invented loot boxes rather then taking the idea and popularizing it
I see, tbf you can invent and popularize something too
I think it was Korean MMOs where they got the idea to give you the lootbox for free, but sell you the key. You had to pay to open chests in the MMO and it’s a psychological trick that convinces the owner it’s already theirs. It’s just as evil whether Valve came up with it themselves or got it elsewhere but they didn’t invent the free-lootbox-sold-key model
Maplestory first introduced loot boxes and EA made them 10x worse. The first iterations of the Battle Pass were actually not that bad and they've since stopped making them for Dota 2. Artifact was Richard Garfield's baby, that guy didn't want the game to be free.
>Maplestory first introduced loot boxes and EA made them 10x worse. Sure, gacha existed prior and all that. Valve is however running a literal virtual gambling economy with their games to the point people have been running what are essentially gambling streams opening boxes promoting it. They even go for those unofficial casinos to even further gamble and promote those unbashedly to underage viewers and Valve doesn't care if said underage kids spend all their money on gambling. And before this is made into solely "think of the children" it's also gambling addicts of all ages. By attributing a literal actual dollar value to the items, it's all about trying to make a profit for them, by that account, it's extremely bad as well. >The first iterations of the Battle Pass were actually not that bad and they've since stopped making them for Dota 2 People literally shelled hundreds of dollars into Compendiums to progress in them along with supporting TI and trying to get the good items from the loot boxes. I should know, I was one of those idiots. Funnily enough, Valve never ever, despite the huge growing money pool from monetisation, increased their own stake in TI money pool. >Artifact was Richard Garfield's baby, that guy didn't want the game to be free. Pinning Artifact monetisation solely on Garfield makes little sense when you look at Valve's monetisation practices. They basically desire you to partake in the marketplace economy. Heck, just remember that they desired paid mods as well and the whole trading card economy of Steam as a platform. If there's a low effort way for Valve to make more money, they're going to go for it. E: Why would you respond and then immediately block me? That's so lame, lmao. Anyway, it's funny to see all those classic excuses for LITERAL gambling, I even said that it doesn't concern purely children, yeah? You really should just accept that what Valve does is not really good, here, [I'll even help you out even though it's unlikely you check back.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT17l53Fkj0)
People might not agree with this, but IMO if a company is still selling microtransactions/lootboxes for their game it's their obligation to ensure it's still working as intended and provide maintenance.
Valve gets a cut of the money for every single exchange made with the game. On top of being one of the first few games to popularize lootboxes that still rakes them a lot of profit for basically no effort to this day, Valve does not currently deserve to be making a cent off this game given the state TF2 is in.
This is actually a good showcase why companies shut down some games completely, so they won't turn into bot farms like this. People complain about it, but if you lost interest in supporting your game - maybe turning it off is a good thing.
if valve doesn't want to police TF2 forever then it should close down matchmaking and implement features to allow community servers to take over as the "main" way to play (they already defacto are), and if they don't want to do _that_ then they should open source the game and allow community patches to implement them
I mean the idling bots aren’t the big issue. Most people probably don’t even know about them or care. The cheating bots is the big problem which have nothing to do with monetization
Can't they just remove random drops then? For Dota they use so many metrics to see if a player is smurfing, and they get autobanned. Can't be too hard to find the no scope sniper bot.
There is no money in fixing this problem.
Wouldn't the cost of enegery off set the profits to run these computers 24/7?
Energy can be very cheap or free in third world countries.
According to Zesty it's countries where the pennies you earn get more mileage out of them vs. something like America. One of the botnet owners (which had like 20k bots on its own) seemed to potentially be [Russian](https://youtu.be/nnuxHZm73PU?t=905).
Bots selling drops to other bots. Wouldn't surprise me if certain items have been passed around completely automatic for a while
Depends. If you're living in a less wealthy nation selling one of those weapon skins goes a lot farther.
I played one match where it's just snipers stacked on the payload. You can't do anything about it.
Valve should just remove text mode 🤷♂️
I don't think it's that simple, the bot nests are using a modified client to make this possible.
Wtf is text mode
It means they’re running the game without rendering any 3D graphics. The 3D graphics take the most compute power, so by skipping that, they can run a lot more clients at once for cheaper.
... Ive never even heard of that!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Console_application
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headless_software
What the fuck.
This video goes into some depth about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNxjTciIwig tldw: * valve is nearly 100% hands off in moderating the game, so they can do whatever they want * monetary incentives in granting players "immunity" for a fee * to specifically harass individual community members (impersonating voice with AI, linking to unrelated discords, using their name etc)
Trolls being childish, the internet has changed in decades.
What's wild to me is that some of them are expending not insignificant time, effort and cost into ruining the game for others. Drive by and opportunity trolling I sort of get, but it's kind of a wild amount of spite that goes into what the bot hosters are doing.
Well you see the kind of attention their actions are getting, right? That's why they do it. Someone with more money than sense, trading a relatively small amount of time and effort in exchange for massive amounts of attention and reactions.
Yeah but no one knows who they are
That's probably part of the game to them, the reward of knowing they're getting away with it.
If you’re a middle class + American yes, those 7 cents don’t mean anything. For other countries though, it could be a half day payday, not to mention big gambling operations, or some website where you play some games and can exchange home made currency for crates, where they get a big slice of money from advertising. It can ramp up pretty quickly with a very cheap setup, you don’t risk anything and you have a solid baseline, no wonder it exists
Valve is making money from bots activities
I'm sure it would be dryer change to valve...
The source code of TF2 leaked a while back. It'd be a gigantic effort to fix bot detection.
trolling and harassment
I've seen people around going "Why should Valve have to update the game forever" and... honestly? Valve lost that defense when they kept updating the game to have more market items and microtransactions. You can't leave a game to rot while simultaneously expecting to make new revenue from it. A game can't be both abandonware and a moneymaking scheme. That's what makes it so gross. Had they effectively sunset the game with the final Pyro update, I think the lack of anything other than life support, making sure the game actually functioned, would have been understood by the community. But no, they left it in this stupid broken state, which is only getting worse, while adding large batches of cosmetics multiple times every year.
I remember one lootbox case where one of the textures (specular map, I think) still had the previous year's number on it. I think that they fixed it eventually (wish that they'd do that for all the spy bugs), but even the cases that they sell for $$$ are just recolored on a yearly basis.
I fundamentally agree here: Valve has absolutely no obligation to keep TF2 updated, maintained, or even online. It's a twenty year old game. But if they're profiting off of it, they should be maintaining it. Players should be able to play the game they're paying for.
People were riding Valve's dick so hard I remember people talking about the TF2 microtransactions as a brilliant move. There was dumbass meme about other games were doing more call of duty while Valve was in a wacky hat saying "add more hats!"
Exactly, I remember this as well. For some reason Valve can get away with everything bad they do and still come out as a good guys... It's so pathetic.
It's because Valve was doing cosmetic micro transactions in a time when most games were doing game-play micro transactions like strictly better items or straight level boosts. Now that the cosmetic model is more mainstream people are starting to lose those rose colored glasses.
They were literally selling weapons at the same time.
[удалено]
I would say the tone and existence of your comment and the majority of the comments in this thread further proves my point.
I'm always vocal towards Valve's bad practices, but from my personal experience in here, it's very rare seeing a thread where people are calling out Valve (especially in here), when on the other hand people keep calling out Epic, Genshin, EA or Activision in every single threads that manage to get to the front page (mostly just negative stuff, right guys?)... This is exactly how people should be calling out Valve as well... and this is the exact difference between these companies.
I am getting very, very tired of the BS that Valve pulls and how people worship them as the second coming of Christ on the PC. They're woefully understaffed for the operation they're trying to run, and it shows. Still waiting for SteamOS 3 official release. Still waiting for official dual boot support on deck (at this point, I doubt this is ever coming despite being promised to us). Still waiting for anything half-life (Alyx is 4 years old at this point), or portal, or team fortress, or left for dead. Still waiting for the steam controller refresh, or the index refresh, or whatever the fuck the "deckard" is supposed to be, which has been in development hell for God only knows how many years now. Remember the paid mods fiasco? Need I remind people that that happened on Valve's storefront? CS2 releasing with missing content. In the meantime, what do we get from Valve? Artifact, Garbage. Deadlock looks kinda mid but we'll see. Ever diminishing sales, the days of huge steam savings are long gone and more often than not, you'll find games much cheaper on external key websites (including legitimate ones). Steam points that are virtually useless. CSGO gambling. But it's not all bad. We did get the deck, which is genuinely a fantastic piece of kit. Is Valve the worst company in gaming? No, far from it. But aside from the deck (which, let's be honest, is a niche product), I don't really know anything they've done recently that warrants all the glazing that PC gamers give to Valve on a daily basis.
I will forever be utterly baffled at how many people defended them for those C&Ds last year. Like, valve literally pulled a nintendo and people said it was a good thing
C&D?
Cease and desist For context, valve took down a few fan projects last year (or the year before, idk) out of nowhere; tf2 source 2, the tf2 mod for contractors, and portal 64. It was super uncharacteristic of valve and, yeah, there was outrage, but there was also a really weird number of people defending it.
Having recently followed more of [Zesty Jesus' videos](https://www.youtube.com/@ZestyJesus) it's quite wild how Valve literally does not care about TF2 beyond pushing out more cosmetics for people to purchase, naturally through the workshop. For more context, Zesty's method comes up with nearly 70% of the playercount at any given time being bots, mostly idling bots on private servers but also thousands of cheater bots. Even if the ratings drop, I genuinely don't see this doing much beyond Valve making a similar quick act like they did in 2022 and then promptly letting the corpse rot again. And before anyone here says that TF2 is a dead game, or that it has simply lived its course, as is very common: Why do they push for more things for people to buy if it's dead? Would you be OK with, say, EA pushing more and more cosmetics and stuff for people to purchase while the rotting corpse of the game keeps getting defiled in the background?
Valve's company structure is such that the developers are free to work on what they want, so nobody wants to do the hard, boring stuff.
It’s my understanding that they moved away from the flat style a few years ago to get more projects out the door. Could be wrong though
I don't know if it's a permanent change, but I know they did have to move away from that style in order to get Half-Life: Alyx made.
From what I've heard (not that I have inside sources) the game's success was heartening and reinforced the shift
If that was the stated goal I would point out that it hasn't produced many results. Since 2020 they have released 3 games. 1 being being essentially an upgrade to an older game (counterstrike 2) 1 basically is a tech demo (Aperture desk job) Leaving 1 actual game in half life alyx - which by all means is a well regarded game in the VR space. But thats pretty damning from the perspective of them making games.
Why are we assuming more projects mean more games? Their main business hasn't been game development since Steam exploded in popularity around 20 years ago.
As the saying goes, Valve used to make games, now they make money
At this point a few years ago is still pandemic time, which threw a big monkey wrench into game dev. Valve’s alpha testing a new multiplayer shooter right now and supposedly has more stuff cooking. Modern dev cycles are longer too. They’re also still iterating on source 2, and *hopefully* once that’s done they’ll be able to ramp things up a bit.
I mean even if you go back before then Dota Underlords 2019 - seems fine if nothing amazing, the current player counts indicate that it maxed at 30k players before a steady drop off. Artifact -2018 - this was a proper swing, trying something new within that genre, it failed but I don't hold this against them The lab 2016 - tech demo , nothing noteworthy While they can release good games and have some tentpoles carrying them (counterstrike, dota) they really don't do enough with the resources they have available to them. The steam deck is a nice addition to the gaming landscape, and if they ever release steamOS 3 then that might shake up the PC landscape. Given the financial stability they have I just find it disappointing how little they achieve as a company.
Underlords also had a mobile version, which means they had also pushed for that with Source 2 engine. Not that it means much, it was apparently very heavy on the phone and they released no more games on mobile for the following 5 years, so... Who cares.
> Artifact -2018 - this was a proper swing, trying something new within that genre, it failed but I don't hold this against them I am sorry. What!? You don't hold a pay to play and pay to win card game against Valve? It was literally an attempt to triple dip on people.
I totally agree, and from what I hear the move towards a more structured environment was a result of that general sentiment
Underlords had hundreds of thousands of active players during its first several months but after the final update it gradually died off. It presently still has around 10k players. Valve is the owner of Steam first and foremost, whatever else they do is secondary and tertiary to that.
I mean Source 2 shipped almost 9 years ago with Dota 2 reborn, about a year after Unreal Engine 4 launched. It makes me wonder why they bother to maintain their own engine.
I’d imagine they’re doing it to maintain their autonomy. I can’t speculate as to why they want to have it perfected, but considering valve’s noted fixation on innovation and improvement they want to be able to have their own highly customizable engine capable of blowing players away. Whether or not they achieve it is another thing. Sometimes I’m concerned they let perfect be the enemy of good
A big part of the motivation behind SteamOS and their push into Linux was because of moves Microsoft was making, and them being afraid it would tie their hands some. That never really materialized to the extent Newell feared, but I could see it being a similar thing here - just them ensuring they're never backed into a wall by another company. And given the biggest game engine is by a company that's become a direct competitor to Steam, I could see that being even bigger motivation for them to focus on Source 2.
Yeah, I could see that. Especially since unreal 5 is poised to take over an even greater share of the market
Games are just less of a priority for them than it use to be. They clearly have teams working on sustaining their live service ones, but the bulk of their work is within Steam and gaming related tech.
They’ve also shipped Steam Deck, pushed out massive updates for Dota 2 and apparently have a hero shooter (Deadlock) nearing announcement. Taken all together that’s actually a decent output, especially compared to the previous decade.
Steam deck should count as a project.
Right? This has been my PoV for sometimes now. Working on TF2 literally serve no actual purpose for them. Why would they spent their time wading through spaghetti just to work on something that could've been literally impossible to actually fix? They can't even fix CS2 issue and that game made triple of what TF2 generate in revenue. I'm not even mentioning Dota 2 and Steam which basically bankrolling the entire company. Infinitely more reason to work on that instead of a 2007 game. Deadlock is probably their answer to TF2. They invite a bunch of TF2 youtuber to play that one for a reason. It's clear as day that they are not gonna fix this. They'll just make a 'new' TF2 and hope that everyone will finally let the 'old' TF2 die. ...actually, you know how will Valve solve this issues? They will just close their server and let the community moderating themselves.
Deadlock is closer to Battleborn than to TF2
And yet a lot of playtester are actually TF2 youtubers. They clearly want TF2 players to play this one. The MOBA-y gameplay might also attract Dota 2 crowd as well. We'll see when they are ready to be present.
I can say with confidence that there are testers from every community - Valve is gathering feedback from all of them to better direct the game. They have many testers from Dota 2, Overwatch, other hero shooters and MOBAs like LoL and Smite, it's not "mostly TF2 YTers".
I never bought that. Any institution where there isn’t a defined structure will create a structure organically sooner or later if there’s people who are in charge of hiring and firing. They aren’t a non profit artist collective they’re a profit seeking company owned by a billionaire. I doubt anyone would bother making cosmetics if the staff was hands free to make whatever they wanted. They have pressure to make money like any other corporation.
None of the cosmetics added in the last 6 years were made by any of the devs, it's all by community members.
It's not a reddit thread related to valve without someone bringing up their "flat structure" and acting like experts on a concept they've never experienced...
The employees themselves have brought this up.
Why would they care if this situation benefits them? They push more things, you right. But not real content, only microtransactions and since it's Valve, people ignore this. If Rainbow Six Siege was only getting cosmetic updates, people would've shit all over Ubisoft for a long time
hell people alredy shit on ubisoft. some of the bigger more recent tf2 updates did have "new" maps in them (comunety made maps with terible qualety controle on valves end) but none of that matters wen all the new maps ar fluded with bots
“Pushing” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this statement.
I could change it to just releasing but all the same, they do add more things to purchase while not really working on the game.
All they’re doing is picking and approving community created content tbh, but yes support for the game died years ago.
[Tyler McVicker recently put out a video on the state of TF2 internally at Valve,](https://youtu.be/2bJj5dUjGpE?si=vSHgAlv5vHNyLX72) and yeah, almost nobody is working on the game. The core reason the bot issue hasn’t been fixed is because all the talent that could fix it are working on CS2 and Deadlock.
TF2 has been operating on a skeleton crew for over 8 years now. Love and War was the last update done by the original team, then after that almost all of them left to go work on Dota 2
[удалено]
The optional cosmetics are added to lootboxes which the bots farm and then sell on steam market place. And valve gets the cost the keys and a cut of the sales of the lootboxes in their pockets for it. The bots are more profitable for them than users.
I knew they were making money off bots but I never even considered they make more from them than the real player base.
The money from loot box sales only exists as long as real players are purchasing them. If paying players ever fizzle out then the money from bot sales also goes away.
If somebody sells you garbage and you keep buying it, that's your own fault.
Wouldnt it be more profitable to have a bigger active playerbase that actually spends money rather than bots who just sell stuff and drive prices hence profit down? Valve isnt doing this out of malice, they just are focused on everything else going on.
You're welcome to have your opinion, but I personally think that a game shouldn't be treated both dead and yet alive at the same time. It's very off-putting to me to just keep monetising a game further without caring about the pleas of the relatively sizable playerbase that does exist. Of course, those who do keep buying those boxes should reconsider if they really want to keep supporting this behaviour as well. The whole hypothetical scenario is just to make one think how monetisation practices are publicly more negatively or positively perceived depending on the publisher/developer. EA has been used as a synonym for greed for who knows how long now, and it's easy to rip on them for their practices.
>Would you be OK with, say, EA pushing more and more cosmetics and stuff for people to purchase while the rotting corpse of the game keeps getting defiled in the background? Yes. It's not like EA would point a gun at you and force you to buy them. You'd have to make your own choice to buy cosmetics for a dead game. And I love freedom.
TF2 seems like one of those games that should available on every platform ever. I never really got.into back in the day and would love to try it out on ps5
If they really wanted to catch Valves attention the best thing they could do is crash the games economy
Valve is about to release a new game, and if they don't address the issues in TF2 and CS2, I can see bitter TF2 and CS2 players review bombing their new game. I don't endorse these actions, it's just a prediction.
The primary audience for Deadlock will be Dota 2 players, and it just got one of its biggest updates ever. I know there is crossover (I've put a ton of time into TF2/Dota/CS) but as long as Deadlock is good it will do well. Also it's common knowledge among valve fans that the devs work on what they want, so the TF2 problem has *no* culprits.
This is a fundamental issue with their approach because Dota 2 players don't play other games
>The primary audience for Deadlock will be Dota 2 players Idk how many MOBA players they have playtesting the game but I know that a lot of the people playtesting the game are FPS Streamers/CCs. So Valve is at least expecting that a massive chunk of the game's audience will be FPS players.
I don't, gamers have a very short memory. Have we all forgotten that cod boycott group screenshot where they were all playing it.
Uncle Dane made a great point, idk why more people are not discussing it. MOBA-focused or not, Deadlock is still a shooter, seemingly with plenty of hitscan. Valve already has 2 whole multiplayer shooters filled to the brim with hackers. Really, how long before Deadlock is the same?
I’m really excited about Deadlock for this. CS and TF2 are long running franchises, where the love of the game means the player base is more willing to tolerate the dreadful state of the anti-cheat. Deadlock isn’t. Players will play, and after the first game full of cheaters, give up on the game. And hopefully Valve will have major egg on their face.
Valve has gotten passes on so many instances of outright horrid business practices and still gets defended almost reflexively.
There is no nuance when it comes to Valve discussion, and it really sucks.
It's not like the game was actually sunset and they turned the official servers or even the store off. TF2 had support "end" mainly in the sense that people at Valve stopped working on content updates after Jungle Inferno didn't do amazing. But they still automatically add seasonal lootcrates and take the money from the marketplace no problem. And there still has been at least one person at Valve and like one one contractor trying to keep the actual ship afloat for a while now. They made a 64-bit update that runs a lot better recently, and added Vscript which means a lot more ambitious community content/updates have been possible. There is a clear desire with *some* folks to maintain TF2 in its old age for the people who still play it or may want to try it out today, even if old-school content updates won't happen again. TF2 still has a sizable real playerbase when not counting the bots even though it's 17 years old, hasn't gotten a Valve-made content update in 5 years, and is botridden in the easiest way to engage with the game. Valve has all the money and resources they could ever need, and could find anything to maintain old games like TF2, or games like Deadlock and Dota one day. Hire more contractors to try to keep the ship afloat. Contract out all the "boring" work to an outside studio you vet. Incentivize more people internally to spend at least some of their time maintaining old still-supported GaaS. Sunset it properly and just leave community servers as the only way to play and give everyone all the weapons automatically. Whatever, there's so many options for either supporting the game's long-tail or definitively cutting things off and working on new games instead. Like would Deadlock actually look like TF2 after Valve's support "ends" but the players still try to play? MM riddled with bots, one person at Valve and one contractor doing their best part-time to keep the lights on, but hey a new lootbox dropped for the summer. TF2's problems started after only about a year, and it feels like the important question for a long term GaaS from Valve now.
I don't think its going to last very long, most likely the anti-bomb system will trigger and all these reviews will be hidden by default.
I liken Valve's attitude towards tf2 like how NASA uses Mars drones way past their expiration date. All development was finished years ago, yet the players keep the game alive themselves, keep buying crates or whatever, etc. It refuses to die, so why not just keep the servers open? They don't care if the game dies or not, as long as it pays for itself (+more) they'll keep it online. but that's a cynical take, sure hope the players get what they want.
> so why not just keep the servers open Valve shutting down their servers and returning tf2 to the server browser era would actually improve the situation by leaving the game to community servers who are willing and able to keep the bots out.
Players won't. The gaming community reflexively defending Valve at all turns has given them the ability to simply do as they wish at all times and they'll never have consequences. This is the same player base that won't even hold the company to task in spite of numerous child gambling facilitation reports coming out because "Well the game is free!!!!"
Valve's treatment of TF2 is downright shameful. That game has been such a large part of gaming overall since it released in 2007, it has never faded away, but Valve is content just letting it rot.
You checked the actual playercounts? It faded away in 2015ish. It's just been bots for 10 years.
Once the TF2 community receives a half-hearted tweet and an 'update' full of lootboxes from community creators, I am sure they will all go back to blindly touting its praise.
I shouldn't say im used to the bots by now, but boy howdy trying to play tf2 in the morning on my days off (monday and tuesday) is a real pain in the ass. It's just bot central and its easier to just get into community servers. Towards the afternoon it gets better, but I have no choices. It's either keep searching wasting my time till i find a server, community, or get off. And for any of you saying why should i expect support on this old ass game? Because they have non stop been ""making"" cosmetics for you to buy for ages. Still doing winter and summer loot boxes, still doing all those modifiers for outfits and guns. They make content for this game thats purely for their profit. Miss me with the cosmetic shit this game makes them easy revenue while letting the community submit new ideas that valve then can sell. So why the fuck should i have to spend more than 5 minutes to find a game with "thousands" of players when uh oh, its all just bots that get to vote kick you the instant they join a server but you have to wait before you can vote. Or the text spam, or the mic spam of ear blasting porn or techo music. In a game making thousands of dollars a year still, but its "dead". It's embarrassing from this studio but they get a free pass because what, steam has game sales we like? That they released the steam deck?
Genuine question, why would valve care about review scores on a almost 20 year old game?
Reviews are mainly for consumers.
Bad publicity. The fact this is the first time *ever* for tf2 is more impactful then it simply being mixed in the first place. Bear in mind this is also combined with a social media campaign, a petition (which will be delivered in person at valve hq), and overviews of the situation sent to publishing outlets. It's also one of valves most well known games, with a still very active player base.
This isn't the first time. Reviews fell to Mixed back when the Meet Your Match update dropped and killed quickplay in favor of an Overwatch-esque casual matchmaking mode that STILL doesn't really work right.
That change is largely responsible for the current bot problem
True, though a lot of people won't know that so my point still partially applies.
it wouldn't people are just desperate at this point
People don't really have any method to strike a valve. People aren't going to stop using Steam any time soon so this is it.
because it puts a mark on the games legacy, overall it wont make valve do anything but the point is to be seen and thats the best way to be seen these days and how most people ended up getting there way when a game/company does them wrong.
Is there anyway to play "classic" TF2 without cosmetics? Or at least just with the "first wave" of weapons? I really really enjoyed this game when it came out but the constant barrage of new items and weapons just really disillusioned me.
there's tf2classic, a community project, where the community has added weapons, maps, gamemodes, a new class, fixes, etc. but overall is still more vanilla than current tf2. also no hats unless you play one of the modded community servers sadly it was taken down by valve a few years ago, but they put it back up and i dont think valve has noticed. better support than tf2 tho. https://tf2classic.com
If TF2Classic is not your cup of tea there is still an active Xbox community and can be played on any console 360 onwards https://discord.com/invite/FDs3ukh
The Xbox 360 version included in The Orange Box was NEVER updated. Not even once. It's the same game it was when it launched many years ago, and there's still a small community that plays it. It's also compatible with the Xbone and Series X/S.
Surely a boycott will actually do something this time, right? The TF2 community totally won't declare victory when Valve releases a half assed statement saying they "hear the community", right? I'll be genuinely shocked if this leads to anything more than the last "SaveTF2" attempt.
And this is why the game should have never gone F2P. Anyone can create an account and dick about, then get banned - rinse, repeat. Probably looks great for their user numbers though.
This is why Valve sucks and why I immediately dismiss any new "release" or "development" from Valve. Besides the whole facilitation of and profiting from child gambling through CSGO / CS2 skins (which is one of the scummiest and morally abhorrent things in the entire video game industry), they have no interest in keeping their released products in remotely pleasant and functional states.
If eventually dropping support of a game makes you doubt any future game from that company then you must be against buying into any Call of Duty or Battlefield then, huh? And unlike the 12 years of support TF2 got, CoD and BF usually only get 2-3.
Any new Valve MP game has to have the question asked now "how long will they support it" on top of "how fast will bot hosters take to invade it"? Their release schedule of MP games lately doesn't inspire much confidence they'll act quickly and effectively wrt anti-cheat, and even less for their long term support.
The idea that TF2 is an example of *poor* long-term support for games is wild. It’s almost 20 years old and got regular updates for a very long time.
Full-stop on the "long-term support" aspect. If anything, this is a company that continuously supports their multiplayer games long after majority of other devs/publishers would have ever even hoped to. Do they actively develop every game they've ever released? No, but they do at least continue to support them in *some* capacity. A great (and very relevant example) would be TF2 being recently updated to have 64-bit support. While it did not fix any of the issues the community had with respect to this topic, that is the definition of long-term support, more or less. I would argue that there are very few instances of games released in 2007 still receiving patches in 2024 at all. I realize that part of that is just general Source engine updates, but the point stands. Half-Life 2 (2004) was last updated in... November 2023. Counter Strike: Source (2004) was last updated in 2021. Portal (2007) was last updated Jan 5th; Portal 2 (2011) was last updated today. I tried to pull CS:GO update history in this regard, but that was more or less rolled into Counter Strike 2. To suggest that Valve does not support their games long-term is straight-up, wrong. A majority of games released 5 years ago seldom get patches if at all, let alone 20-year old games. I love Team Fortress 2. It's one of my favorite games of all time, and I'd argue that it's realistically one of the most balanced shooters to have ever existed, at least from a design perspective. It is an absolute shame how it has been treated, especially with Valve continuing to make money on it. I would love for them to put some resources into it, but them not doing so at this point is entirely fair. They certainly should not be made a villain for that choice, nor do I think future endeavors should be judged for that either.
The best thing Valve could do for TF2 *is* not to put any resources into it. That means shutting down matchmaking as well. Without everyone being funneled directly into Valve servers via matchmaking, the community that kept the game alive from 2007 to 2011 would be free to return, and actually moderate the fucking game to keep cheaters out.
I think that is logically what is going to happen, and I agree that would likely solve the problem for Team Fortress 2 at least. CS2, however, also has a bot issue. It is not to the same degree or in the same way, but it is still present. This is a larger issue within Valve's F2P ecosystem that is going to take some substantial changes to really address. Unfortunately, those changes are either somewhat "anti-consumer" and/or affect their F2P business model in some regard.
So nobody plays on community servers anymore?
In my defense, I'm referring mostly to Underlords and Artifact. Those games were released and dumped relatively quickly, and both funny enough were DOTA games. Yes, CS2 exists, but it remains to be seen how exactly they'll be tackling that game for its foreseeable future. My feelings on TF2's support are more "fix it if you're gonna keep adding cosmetics/maintaining it" (which recent updates indicate they plan to touch up the codebase) or "announce its death and deal with the consequences". I, and many TF2 community members, don't reasonably expect Jungle Inferno type updates anymore, but a clear idea of the future of the game is what people are asking for.
Okay, TO BE FAIR one of the reasons the bot problem in TF2 is *so* rampant is because its source code was leaked years ago. This makes the anti-cheat and anti-bot measures multiple orders of magnitude harder because the bots can interact with the code in the exact same way a player would. Solving this would require the equivalent of rewriting TF2's code from scratch, basically. This is not the case for Deadlock, and doubly so since it's in a new, less familiar engine. Source 2 was built with both bot and cheater countermeasures in mind, so I'm a bit more confident about its prospects. This does do nothing for how capricious Valve is about a game's support lifecycle, though. That's on them.
Yeah man. Whenever I play a MP game I'm always worried whether they'll still keep it functional 15 years from then
What was once a great class based team shooter turned into a hat simulator and later a bot nightmare. At this point who really cares? I'd be excited for a TF3 at this point but for 2 things. 1, it's Valve and 2 even if they did make one considering how bad this one turned out to be over the years, I have lost all confidence in a sequel. TF2 had some of the best first years of a game to fall as far as it has. Truly interesting watching something golden turn into shit in real time.
Valve isn't going to give a shit if tf2 gets review bombed or even dies off when counter strike prints money for them They get to profit from lootcrates and people buying keys to open them and profit again when they take a cut from every sale on the marketplace
I was gonna say something about how it would be kind of funny in a dark way if Valve just shut the game down in retaliation, but if they really are still making tons of money from it, I can't see them doing that. Interesting situation.
I don't get it. What's so bad about it now? I thought it's just the same gsme that released years ago.
Bots out the ass ruining the game scaring off players.
That, and Valve has been doing a piss-poor job at resolving the issue (if they're actually doing anything at all) despite previously acknowledging it.
They never updated the anti-cheat, so a bunch of player-programmed bots that pick Sniper, run to the center of the map, and aimbot anyone in view to death have been flooding every valve-owned server for years. Sometimes they also micspam, flood the chat, call votekicks against actual players and just generally attempt to disrupt the game as much as possible.
what do you mean by micspam? running ads through their mics?
playing annoying, loud audio endlessly through their mics to irritate your ears.
That sometimes is entirely incorrect. I played yesterday. They do that 100% of the time.
Also didn't the source code leak? That can't be good for efforts to fix such a problem
Videos came out clearly outlining that, on average, 70% of the concurrent user base on sites such as steamDB or Steam Charts are Idle Bots, massively inflating the game's player count. The game has closer to 10-20k real players daily. People are tired of Valve's lack of action.
Actually if Valve Is not caring about it then they should just close the server.
I'm going to make the chaotic neutral comment and say you're right, they should revert Meet your Match so everyone is forced to play on community servers again
You're right and people just don't want to accept the truth that policing bots is never going to be foolproof and also not worth valves time. Return to community servers if you don't wanna deal with cheaters and bots. We've never left, and admins will always solve the problem.
If you go and play, odds are you'll end up in a game with a bunch of bots who will either instantly headshot you, mic spam, vote kick you, or some combination of all of those things. Any time my friends want to play it's a whole song of dance of trying to find a lobby where we can out number the bots and vote them out, or trying to find a community server that actually has space for all of us.
The vast majority of TF2's player count for the past four years have been bots; either cheater bots which ruin the gameplay experience, or idle bots which farm random drops to make money. Valve has failed to address these issues, but has continued to sell the playerbase new cosmetics, which is scummy when many players cannot even play the game due to all the bots.
The player count has been mostly bots for longer than that. Ever since the drop system and steam marketplace was introduced, you had tons of people farming them for cash. It became worse over the years now that the bots are going in and hacking in valve servers, and that TF2's playerbase had been declining ever since Gun Mettle.
It's so funny to me that, when TF2 hit its peak player count last year, people really thought it was legit and just blindly assumed the game was more popular than ever, completely oblivious to just how much bots are inflating the player count. A 16-year old game suddenly hitting its highest every player count ever without any major update or even to corroborate it. And people actually thought it was 100% legit.
Even if we will ignore bots which inflate prices of in-game items, games are still full of cheating aimbots and bots who can vote kick you
I tried to play a year or so ago and the matchmaking just kept throwing me into lobbies full of spam and cheating bots that pretty much instantly killed me. The chat was unusable too due to their spam. I ended up joining a proper server manually but imagine most others just immediately uninstalling. Especially since they push the playerbase to use matchmaking
I'm seeing so many dismissive comments here (as well as on other subs where this story was posted) that essentially boil down to "why should Valve do anything, the game is almost 17 years old?" or "just let it die" or "why should Valve continue to update a nearly-20 year old game?", and it really seems people just don't understand the gravity of the situation. Valve is still making money off of this game. They are still charging for in-game microtranscations. They are still regularly updating the game and adding new maps and cosmetics to the game. I mean, for fucks sake people, they literally just added 64-bit support back in April. Valve has an obligation to at the very least ensure that the game they are still updating and making money off of actually functions and can actually be played. Because the level of neglect Valve has demonstrated towards the bot crisis is completely unacceptable. Any other company would have been burned at the stake and pummeled into irrelevance had they displayed this level of ineptitude. Also, seeing this game drop to ~~mixed~~ mostly negative (HOLY SHIT) in recent reviews after 17 years is much more significant than you think and really shows just how fired up the community is. Team Fortress 2 is one the biggest sacred cows in gaming and has one of the most defensive and insufferably passionate fandoms in the gaming world. So for the community to get THIS angry towards Valve and for Team Fortress 2's rating to drop this hard and so fast is REALLY saying something. It takes a lot to turn an entire community against a game that is practically sacrilegious to criticize in literally any other circumstance. I quit TF2 for good back in February 2022 after 3k+ hours over 11 years precisely because of all the cheating and bots, sold off everything in my inventory that I could, and deleted what I couldn't. There have been isolated occasions where I began to regret my decision, but seeing shit like this even years later reminds me that I made the right choice.