~I hate you campers; everybody bloody hates you!
I keep wanting to make Omori posts about random thoughts I've had but I have SO MANY that I forget them when I want to write them down lol. BUT IN THE MEANTIME
The bot problem in TF2 is so incredibly bad you guys, there have been lots of videos and posts made about it but the bots make the game unplayable on official servers. They play Sniper and instantly kill anyone from across the map and they spam constantly in the text chat AND voice chat. Like you can't do objectives, you can't even leave your spawn. It's just hopeless. Your only option is to try and vote them out but there are usually so many of them that they can defeat your vote and vote YOU out instead. Your only hope is that there are enough real people that you can slowly chip away at their numbers to get the bots down and hope enough real people come in to fit the gaps they left so you can have almost a normal game, except for how you still have to check for bots and kick them every minute or so.
And it's been like this for YEARS. It was like this when I started playing again and it was like this all the way through, with brief quiet periods that lasted like a day or so after a new update.
At least until two days ago.
So, the bot problem got SO bad that the community started up a movement called #savetf2 like a year or two ago, complaining about the state of the game. Valve made a tweet saying they heard everyone and that they were aware of the problem and were going to do something. They then went completely radio silent and did nothing, unsurprisingly. So THIS year the community decided to try again with #fixtf2, this time with more solid plans to do a petition and send it to Valve and more organization and an official site and all that. The petition currently has like 340k signatures btw. #fixtf2 got a ton of attention, including some coverage from game news outlets and youtube videos about how negligent Valve has been. Even cr1tikal got in on it!
The bot-hosters, enraged by people trying to fight back against them, tried to dmca the site multiple times and went ham with their bots in the game, giving them names like #killtf2, spamming links to their discords claiming they were part of #fixtf2, doxxing people (I ran into a bunch that had a phone number in their name, which I assume was from a doxxing), impersonating people, and advertising CP and accusing people who started the petition of being pedos. One bot hoster constantly spammed in chat that they made 95+ bots in response to #fixtf2, they have sites on Neocities openly advertising bots and laughing at anyone who gets mad at them (which I found trying to find more TF2 sites to link to my own). Like their goal is just to destroy in their own words, and it really seemed like Valve was just going to let it happen at this point. People tried the #fixtf2 protest anyway, because it was better than sitting and doing nothing, but hopes of something actually happening were on the floor.
So everyone was really confused when about two days ago, all the bots seemingly vanished.
I didn't believe it myself when I heard about it at first, but lo and behold, when I went into Casual to check, it was clear. No bots. None. I couldn't believe it. I queued up for several different Casual matches just to check. I saw one or two that got instantly banned. I ran into one round where the bots outnumbered real people and we couldn't quite get them out. But I played for hours and nothing. No bots. It was surreal almost. Since I started playing again like a year or so ago, they've been a constant, unending problem! To actually play the game THE WAY IT'S MEANT TO BE PLAYED was astounding. It was SUCH a better experience. I could just queue for games normally! I didn't have to decide each round if it was better to stay on a server that was holding on by a thread against bots or just try again and hope for one slightly better. I could just requeue! Every game had real people in it!
I checked in again later. Clear. Only one or two bots, instantly banned. I checked in again later. Clear. I checked in again this morning. Clear! Played for hours and nothing! No bots!
Everyone in the community is abuzz about this as you can imagine. Valve has said absolutely nothing about what happened, which isn't a surprise. There's reportedly been a huge banwave of bots and bothosters, although how it went down is still unclear. Some think that it's a new automated thing Valve put in, because it seems like bot accounts are STILL being banned when they reappear, which is unlike previous ban waves they did where they'd clean it up once and leave and then the bots would just come back instantly. Some people think it's being done with hardware ids, but at this point no one really knows for sure. The only thing that we know is that Casual has no bots in the first time in what... months? A year? The closest thing I can think of was the last Summer update with the seal where the matches were MOSTLY clear but there were still bots, there were just enough people to kick them most of the time.
The thing is of course that it's only been like, two days. I fully expect the bots to come back again in force soon, in a few days or maybe a week. Like, with their determination to destroy TF2 as a power trip or whatever, I don't think they'll give up that easily. But whatever Valve did, it worked. Even if just for this brief period of time, it worked! On one hand, it makes it absolutely infuriating that it took them YEARS to even try, but on the other, no one even knows how exactly they're doing it. Everyone is skeptical and cautious about whether or not this is sustainable.
But right now, the vibes in the game itself are just amazing. In every match I joined, people were talking in the text chat about how happy they were to just play the game again. How much they missed it, how good it felt to play with real people, just how GOOD the game was when it was functioning properly. How much of a relief it was to not have to deal with bots, how much they missed being able to play, how unbelievable and unreal it feels to play the game properly after all this time. It's all so positive and happy, everyone just enjoying this momentary reprieve. Everyone can play good rounds again! I saw actual noobs playing, which I never saw before because the Sniperbots would always scare them off. At one point five people on my team went Scout and were bonking something invisible, so I went Scout to join in, and then everyone else on the team went Scout as well, all spontaneously without any coordination (well, there was one Engie). This could NEVER happen on a Casual server before! The bots would ruin it!
The real heart of TF2 are the little interactions you have with other players, which the bots absolutely ruined and stamped out. The only thing you could do was play on Community servers, which were all customized to their owners' specs and often didn't run all the maps or ran very specific parameters, and if you could find one it was usually full. Now it's spreading back out, Casual is filling with people again. People are coming back, reinstalling the game, all of them jumping in during this quiet period while they can!
Being able to play again just feels so good, haha. It's hard to explain if you haven't played it yourself, but it was SO BAD when the bots were there. SO BAD. I'd try to fight them a lot when I ran into them, and I fought them tooth and nail during the Halloween event to fill my contracts, and they always cast this dark cloud over everything. And now that it's gone there's just such a sense of relief and joy among the players, it's so nice. Everyone knows it's not going to last, but just having even this brief moment of sunlight in the storm feels really good.
Right now, no one's really sure what's going to happen. Like I said, people are skeptical, but so far, it seems like Valve is keeping up with it. They're keeping up the banwaves, people are still reporting totally clear games even in the early hours of the morning and in other countries with smaller playerbases - a common defense while the bot problem as happening was "just play on a community server" which was not an option for players in smaller countries without any of their own servers (which have to be privately owned and managed by an actual person willing to shell out the time effort and money). Now they can actually play again on Casual servers!
Is it an automated thing? Is it just one Valve employee going through on a ban spree? Do they have their own information about bot hosters and their accounts, or did they get them from a community member? What's happening, exactly? How will the bots get around this? One of the things that's become a meme in the community right now is that in an interview a while back about dealing with bots, a Valve employee described it as "treadmill work" because you have to do it constantly and it never ends, and they didn't want to get involved in treadmill work. So now they're routinely mocked about treadmills, and now people are wondering whether or not they actually stepped on the treadmill and are willing to walk on it. They've ignored the problem for years now until it got to a deplorable state. That they turned around and are suddenly doing something is so unexpected and bizarre. I want to hope! I want to believe! But I don't want to be too optimistic given Valve's track record.
I want to know what's going on! Everyone does, haha. In the meantime, many are enjoying Casual again or reinstalling and coming back. The first reports of the banwave were around midday on the 26th, with more reports about the bans continuing afterwards as bot hosters made new accounts to try and get back in (amusingly, saw some called Ban-proof Bot that I have not seen since, presumably because they got banned). Latest news from 8 hours ago is that everything is still clean. I haven't checked myself but I plan to after I post this, haha.
So on the 26th Wednesday, the concurrent player count in TF2 was 7700 or so in Casual servers around noon. On the 27th Thursday, it was 9700. On the 28th Friday, 10500 (including people on community servers, the numbers go 13000, 14500, 16000). This is already higher than the previous high last Saturday (a ton of which were bots anyway). A net gain of almost 3k real people. REAL people! One of the good things about this is that if the bots DO come back, more human players means more people to vote them out and keep control of the rounds.
On the official charts Steam has for TF2, which are massively skewed by idle bots and traders (see this video for a very interesting breakdown of how the vast majority of official Steam stats for TF2 are bots, as well as this follow-up about finding more of these massive botnets), there's a drop on the 25th at around 10pm from 68k to 56k. If this is the banwave, more than 10k bots got banned. Right now the stats are at 121k, and if the bots haven't come back yet, that's a pretty big jump, almost double what it was a week ago. A lot of it is idlers/traders of course, since we know how many are actual people from the more accurate stats above, but still. The numbers of this all is fascinating to me. I wonder what it's going to look like in a week or so if things keep going like this? As word keeps getting out that the game is playable again?
(Frankly I don't care about the idlers/trader bots, they don't actually join games, they just sit on the menu waiting for drops or trade items between people. They aren't disruptive at all, the worst thing they do is crash the TF2 economy for hats and who cares about that lol. They can idle and trade all they want for all I care as long as it doesn't interfere with the actual game itself.)
Man I WANT to believe this'll keep up, I really do. I expected nothing out of the movement but I wanted to believe and to actually have something happen is just... amazing, haha. I know it won't last but I WANT TO BELIEVE
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The bot problem in TF2 is so incredibly bad you guys, there have been lots of videos and posts made about it but the bots make the game unplayable on official servers. They play Sniper and instantly kill anyone from across the map and they spam constantly in the text chat AND voice chat. Like you can't do objectives, you can't even leave your spawn. It's just hopeless. Your only option is to try and vote them out but there are usually so many of them that they can defeat your vote and vote YOU out instead. Your only hope is that there are enough real people that you can slowly chip away at their numbers to get the bots down and hope enough real people come in to fit the gaps they left so you can have almost a normal game, except for how you still have to check for bots and kick them every minute or so.
And it's been like this for YEARS. It was like this when I started playing again and it was like this all the way through, with brief quiet periods that lasted like a day or so after a new update.
At least until two days ago.
So, the bot problem got SO bad that the community started up a movement called #savetf2 like a year or two ago, complaining about the state of the game. Valve made a tweet saying they heard everyone and that they were aware of the problem and were going to do something. They then went completely radio silent and did nothing, unsurprisingly. So THIS year the community decided to try again with #fixtf2, this time with more solid plans to do a petition and send it to Valve and more organization and an official site and all that. The petition currently has like 340k signatures btw. #fixtf2 got a ton of attention, including some coverage from game news outlets and youtube videos about how negligent Valve has been. Even cr1tikal got in on it!
The bot-hosters, enraged by people trying to fight back against them, tried to dmca the site multiple times and went ham with their bots in the game, giving them names like #killtf2, spamming links to their discords claiming they were part of #fixtf2, doxxing people (I ran into a bunch that had a phone number in their name, which I assume was from a doxxing), impersonating people, and advertising CP and accusing people who started the petition of being pedos. One bot hoster constantly spammed in chat that they made 95+ bots in response to #fixtf2, they have sites on Neocities openly advertising bots and laughing at anyone who gets mad at them (which I found trying to find more TF2 sites to link to my own). Like their goal is just to destroy in their own words, and it really seemed like Valve was just going to let it happen at this point. People tried the #fixtf2 protest anyway, because it was better than sitting and doing nothing, but hopes of something actually happening were on the floor.
So everyone was really confused when about two days ago, all the bots seemingly vanished.
I didn't believe it myself when I heard about it at first, but lo and behold, when I went into Casual to check, it was clear. No bots. None. I couldn't believe it. I queued up for several different Casual matches just to check. I saw one or two that got instantly banned. I ran into one round where the bots outnumbered real people and we couldn't quite get them out. But I played for hours and nothing. No bots. It was surreal almost. Since I started playing again like a year or so ago, they've been a constant, unending problem! To actually play the game THE WAY IT'S MEANT TO BE PLAYED was astounding. It was SUCH a better experience. I could just queue for games normally! I didn't have to decide each round if it was better to stay on a server that was holding on by a thread against bots or just try again and hope for one slightly better. I could just requeue! Every game had real people in it!
I checked in again later. Clear. Only one or two bots, instantly banned. I checked in again later. Clear. I checked in again this morning. Clear! Played for hours and nothing! No bots!
Everyone in the community is abuzz about this as you can imagine. Valve has said absolutely nothing about what happened, which isn't a surprise. There's reportedly been a huge banwave of bots and bothosters, although how it went down is still unclear. Some think that it's a new automated thing Valve put in, because it seems like bot accounts are STILL being banned when they reappear, which is unlike previous ban waves they did where they'd clean it up once and leave and then the bots would just come back instantly. Some people think it's being done with hardware ids, but at this point no one really knows for sure. The only thing that we know is that Casual has no bots in the first time in what... months? A year? The closest thing I can think of was the last Summer update with the seal where the matches were MOSTLY clear but there were still bots, there were just enough people to kick them most of the time.
The thing is of course that it's only been like, two days. I fully expect the bots to come back again in force soon, in a few days or maybe a week. Like, with their determination to destroy TF2 as a power trip or whatever, I don't think they'll give up that easily. But whatever Valve did, it worked. Even if just for this brief period of time, it worked! On one hand, it makes it absolutely infuriating that it took them YEARS to even try, but on the other, no one even knows how exactly they're doing it. Everyone is skeptical and cautious about whether or not this is sustainable.
But right now, the vibes in the game itself are just amazing. In every match I joined, people were talking in the text chat about how happy they were to just play the game again. How much they missed it, how good it felt to play with real people, just how GOOD the game was when it was functioning properly. How much of a relief it was to not have to deal with bots, how much they missed being able to play, how unbelievable and unreal it feels to play the game properly after all this time. It's all so positive and happy, everyone just enjoying this momentary reprieve. Everyone can play good rounds again! I saw actual noobs playing, which I never saw before because the Sniperbots would always scare them off. At one point five people on my team went Scout and were bonking something invisible, so I went Scout to join in, and then everyone else on the team went Scout as well, all spontaneously without any coordination (well, there was one Engie). This could NEVER happen on a Casual server before! The bots would ruin it!
The real heart of TF2 are the little interactions you have with other players, which the bots absolutely ruined and stamped out. The only thing you could do was play on Community servers, which were all customized to their owners' specs and often didn't run all the maps or ran very specific parameters, and if you could find one it was usually full. Now it's spreading back out, Casual is filling with people again. People are coming back, reinstalling the game, all of them jumping in during this quiet period while they can!
Being able to play again just feels so good, haha. It's hard to explain if you haven't played it yourself, but it was SO BAD when the bots were there. SO BAD. I'd try to fight them a lot when I ran into them, and I fought them tooth and nail during the Halloween event to fill my contracts, and they always cast this dark cloud over everything. And now that it's gone there's just such a sense of relief and joy among the players, it's so nice. Everyone knows it's not going to last, but just having even this brief moment of sunlight in the storm feels really good.
Right now, no one's really sure what's going to happen. Like I said, people are skeptical, but so far, it seems like Valve is keeping up with it. They're keeping up the banwaves, people are still reporting totally clear games even in the early hours of the morning and in other countries with smaller playerbases - a common defense while the bot problem as happening was "just play on a community server" which was not an option for players in smaller countries without any of their own servers (which have to be privately owned and managed by an actual person willing to shell out the time effort and money). Now they can actually play again on Casual servers!
Is it an automated thing? Is it just one Valve employee going through on a ban spree? Do they have their own information about bot hosters and their accounts, or did they get them from a community member? What's happening, exactly? How will the bots get around this? One of the things that's become a meme in the community right now is that in an interview a while back about dealing with bots, a Valve employee described it as "treadmill work" because you have to do it constantly and it never ends, and they didn't want to get involved in treadmill work. So now they're routinely mocked about treadmills, and now people are wondering whether or not they actually stepped on the treadmill and are willing to walk on it. They've ignored the problem for years now until it got to a deplorable state. That they turned around and are suddenly doing something is so unexpected and bizarre. I want to hope! I want to believe! But I don't want to be too optimistic given Valve's track record.
I want to know what's going on! Everyone does, haha. In the meantime, many are enjoying Casual again or reinstalling and coming back. The first reports of the banwave were around midday on the 26th, with more reports about the bans continuing afterwards as bot hosters made new accounts to try and get back in (amusingly, saw some called Ban-proof Bot that I have not seen since, presumably because they got banned). Latest news from 8 hours ago is that everything is still clean. I haven't checked myself but I plan to after I post this, haha.
So on the 26th Wednesday, the concurrent player count in TF2 was 7700 or so in Casual servers around noon. On the 27th Thursday, it was 9700. On the 28th Friday, 10500 (including people on community servers, the numbers go 13000, 14500, 16000). This is already higher than the previous high last Saturday (a ton of which were bots anyway). A net gain of almost 3k real people. REAL people! One of the good things about this is that if the bots DO come back, more human players means more people to vote them out and keep control of the rounds.
On the official charts Steam has for TF2, which are massively skewed by idle bots and traders (see this video for a very interesting breakdown of how the vast majority of official Steam stats for TF2 are bots, as well as this follow-up about finding more of these massive botnets), there's a drop on the 25th at around 10pm from 68k to 56k. If this is the banwave, more than 10k bots got banned. Right now the stats are at 121k, and if the bots haven't come back yet, that's a pretty big jump, almost double what it was a week ago. A lot of it is idlers/traders of course, since we know how many are actual people from the more accurate stats above, but still. The numbers of this all is fascinating to me. I wonder what it's going to look like in a week or so if things keep going like this? As word keeps getting out that the game is playable again?
(Frankly I don't care about the idlers/trader bots, they don't actually join games, they just sit on the menu waiting for drops or trade items between people. They aren't disruptive at all, the worst thing they do is crash the TF2 economy for hats and who cares about that lol. They can idle and trade all they want for all I care as long as it doesn't interfere with the actual game itself.)
Man I WANT to believe this'll keep up, I really do. I expected nothing out of the movement but I wanted to believe and to actually have something happen is just... amazing, haha. I know it won't last but I WANT TO BELIEVE
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