Valve’s free-to-play class-based shooter, Team Fortress 2 , is over 16 years old and yet continues to be one of the most-played games on Steam. However, TF2’s large fanbase is fed up with Valve’s inability or unwillingness to fix the game’s bot issues and has started up a new, large-scale campaign to pressure the developer into doing something. For years now, Team Fortress 2—originally released in October 2007—has had a serious bot problem.
We reported on racist spam bots in 2020 that were filling TF2’s chat with horrible messages. Then, in 2022, we again reported on TF2’s ongoing bot problems. This time, the robots were filling up servers and using their AI skills to destroy human players, making the game almost impossible to play, according to many longtime TF2 fans.
Players sent thousands of emails to Valve and outlets like Kotaku and IGN, trying to get attention on the issue. And it worked! Valve, the company behind Steam and Half-Life, acknowledged the bot problem and said it was working on fixing things. That was about two years ago and uh.
..well, the bots are still here and still making the game hard to play.
On June 3, a new fan campaign started up. And like last time, players are trying to get Valve to step in and do something about all the annoying bots. This time, the “ Fix TF2′′ campaign is asking for player signatures, which will be delivered to Valve in the future.
So far the site has collected over 210,000 signatures and the number keeps c.