~What are you going to do, run five miles away and shoot me?
Aahhh I've felt so drained and tired lately, I keep wanting to draw stuff but I get distracted or it just feels so hard to start, or I can't pin any ideas down. When I'm away from the computer I get a lot and then when I sit down I can't get myself to do them! It's frustrating, I feel kind of like I bounce between social media and drawing and then when I don't want to do either I just sort of sit and feel bleh. I gotta broaden my browsing habits! Get back into going through personal sites! Get some ideas for my maze! I just feel so tired lately...
Anyway, in recent news, I've been keeping a close eye on the TF2 bot situation, which I find really fascinating. I mean, of course it is for me since I do play TF2 fairly regularly, but just in general!
So last time, I said that the bots had been gone for two days. Against all odds, defying all expectations, the bots are STILL GONE. You can STILL play Casual mode completely bot-free completely normally! It's been over TWO WEEKS and the game is STILL COMPLETELY PLAYABLE! Believe me, NO ONE saw this coming, particularly since Valve has neglected TF2 so badly for years. Having them come in all of a sudden and take decisive effective action that lasts is just baffling. I keep checking every day to see if the bots have come back like it's too good to be true, and they're STILL GONE!
Like, if you didn't play the game before, it's hard to describe how oppressive it was. Back then, you'd queue up a bunch of times just to get into a server that had enough people to outvote the bots, then you'd spend the whole round kicking any bots that tried to join, because they would ALWAYS keep trying to join. It'd always become a tough question about requeueing because you had no guarantee that any other server you went to would be bot-free enough to actually play. After a ton of work sometimes you'd just have to stick around on a server you didn't like just because it was the only playable one you'd found/made the whole night.
(As for community servers, a ton of them don't play all the maps and a lot of them would be full, making it even harder to get into a game you want)
Now though, you can queue up for a new, bot-free round instantly! Don't like the current game you're in? Just leave! You'll find another full lobby of real people almost instantly! It's so freeing, it's so GREAT. I can do all kinds of obscure game modes that I couldn't check out before because the bots ruined it! If I'm getting rolled or frustrated I can just leave! If people are trolling or being obnoxious I can just leave!
It feels so good to be able to do this after all this time. It's really lovely, honestly. A lot of new players are coming in and older ones are returning as well. News is spreading slowly about the bots being gone, and I can understand people's caution because everyone is waiting for Valve to drop the ball and leave again. Realistically, there's no silver bullet against bots, much like there's no silver bullet against any kind of hackers or viruses or anything like that. It'll always be a war of attrition because they will always be trying to circumvent whatever restrictions you put in place. I don't expect Valve to get rid of ALL the bots forever, that's unrealistic. What I'd LIKE is if they kept the bots at a managable level, where they're rare and easily handled, as opposed to the total free-for-all before where they just left TF2 to rot at the bots' hands.
The amount of real people playing since the banwave I think has gone from 13k at peak to 20k peak on average. The summer update is coming soon, which I'm sure will also grab attention and pull some real people in. I like seeing the numbers go up!
The other major thing is that at some point on the 12th, Valve banned a MASSIVE chunk of accounts, like 70-80k of them just gone. The teamwork.tf stats of real people in servers though has remained untouched, all of which points to Valve taking a huge slice out of the idlers, people who don't actually play the game but just farm for drops to sell in bulk. This is a really weird thing for Valve to do, since idlers don't actually disrupt the game, they just disrupt the hat economy.
I've been trying to track the player numbers to see if this is a normal idle drop or a banwave. Idlers do tend to spin up their botfarms before an update, and the numbers went up sharply after the aimbot ban hit on the 26th. It's strange that it'd suddenly drop off now, before the update dropped. There have been big idler drop-offs before though, but usually they were in response to events like Christmas or Halloween ending. It's odd!
The REALLY BIG NEWS that NO ONE saw coming though is that it turns out the script for the 7th TF2 comic is DONE and the art is actively being worked on??? I 100% thought the comic was dead, it's been SEVEN YEARS since the last one, so this news out of NOWHERE in the midst of an ACTUAL effective banwave the likes of which hasn't been seen before is just mindboggling. What is Valve up to! What is going to happen this summer update? Is it going to be a small one, or are they planning something bigger? Valve has said nothing, unsurprisingly. Is someone at Valve just going through a TF2 period and deciding to take care of the game for a while, or are they testing out some new methods for bot-detecting/banning using TF2?
(They also recently did a Funko Fusion DLC crossover promo, one of the first things they've done with TF2 in a while)
All of it is so mysterious! And also exciting, haha. It's deeply satisfying because boy the bot-hosters are MAD. They've been trying as hard as they can to get back their bots back in TF2 without success. A few can slip through here and there (I saw a couple over the last weeks of playing) but they get taken care of quickly. Nothing like the overwhelming numbers they had before. After years of getting away with destroying TF2 scot-free they're furious that they're actually facing consequences. A number of bot-hosters and cheaters got full game bans from TF2, which renders their in-game inventory worthless, and I know that at least a few of them lost a couple hundred dollars because of this. Those are just the ones that complained publically too, who knows how much other bot hosters could have lost. Personally I hope it was a lot. One of them also went to 4chan for sympathy and got ripped to shreds, idiot. EVERYBODY HATES YOU.
I've been trying to find out more about how the bot-hosters are reacting out of schadenfreude of course, get wrecked scumbags that's for ruining a perfectly good game for no reason, so I've been lurking around the tf2 reddit for news. I've never really hung out on reddit before this point, so I was a bit unprepared for just how much the tf2 redditors are big downer sadsacks about everything. Deeply annoying place!! Don't like anyone there!! It's just an easy source for info on the banwave and such though.
Other rumors have it that the bot-hosters can't find the Valve spy that keeps reporting their new names and such to get banned, and they're turning on each other. Super thematically appropriate! The RED Spy is in the base! All the new accounts they try to spin up get banned, all the new bots they try to spin up get deleted, whatever it is Valve is doing is actually effective. I've heard that some of them are going in-game to pretend to be bots spamming slurs because they can't get their bots in to do it which is just deranged. Absolutely bizarre. I don't get this mentality at all. I am making sure to report ones I see though, since Valve also seems to be reading those and banning cheaters who are getting reported.
How long will this peace last? That's the real question right now and no one knows the answer. I would LOVE it to last until Halloween so we could finally play the event normally. But it'd also be nice if it lasted through the Summer update! Maybe even to the end of July! As it is I've been playing it a lot lately to enjoy the bot-free fun while I can since I know it won't last. HOW long it'll last is the question burning in everyone's minds right now.
I posted a few things for the #fixtf2 and #savetf2 movements I mentioned before, with the big petition about getting rid of the bots, and now that the bots are gone (for now) I think people just aren't sure what to do with all this energy. A lot of people are still mad at Valve for years of neglect, which is fair, and a lot are advising caution about this because Valve will probably leave again, which is also fair.
I've been seeing a lot of it taken to greater extremes though, with people yelling at others for being happy or hopeful because they're "letting Valve off the hook" and that being excited or "letting up the pressure" will let Valve abandon the game again and leave. Some are calling for a boycott of the Summer update, which personally doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. People are insistent that the fans keep up pressure on Valve, but at this point that pressure is just to keep the bots out which Valve is already doing right now. If Valve starts dropping the ball again, I'll go back to complaining, but I don't see much point in complaining right now when things are fine. I got what I wanted! They fixed the issue! When it breaks again I'll complain, but I don't really see a point in yelling at Valve while it's fixed to keep fixing it.
Like, it'd be another thing if we knew how long Valve was going to keep this up. But at this point no one knows! We have no idea how long this'll be effective! It reminds me a bit of not enjoying something because you know it'll end and ruining it for yourself. At what point of bot-free TF2 are you allowed to be happy about it or stop yelling at Valve about it? A month? Two months? Six months? A year? Does it ever end? Like absolutely Valve SHOULD be doing maintenance to keep the game playable, which they're doing right now. Yelling at them to keep doing what they're doing doesn't really add up to me. There's that and people talk about exerting "pressure" but are pretty vague on what that entails. With #fixtf2, there was the petition, there was the twitter hashtag, there was one person who cosplayed as Scout and went to Valve headquarters where he was politely ignored. And all of that hinged on there being bots to complain about! Like the #fixtf2 tag was where people posted encounters or clips or screenshots of bots they'd run into, or stories about bots ruining games.
Now there aren't bots though! What pressure is there to exert, really? I can't yell about a problem that's already been fixed. Some people want big updates or weapon rebalances or whatever but I'm not interested in those, I don't think Valve owes anyone any of those. They just owe us a game that functions, which we now have! I think asking for more is unrealistic honestly, particularly given how old TF2 is. But again I think people have all this frustrated anger towards Valve that got stirred up by #fixtf2 and now don't really know what to do with it, but they don't want to let it go. And again, I completely understand! I was really mad at them as well! But now the game works again, so...
The proposed boycott is the big debate right now, with the tf2 youtubers behind organizing the #fixtf2 movement/petition and stuff all fighting about whether or not it should have started as a boycott or if a boycott is still necessary or yada yada yada. Petty and inevitable drama that comes from any large scale fandom thing. Personally I'm not sold on a boycott because I haven't seen any proof that a boycott works for Valve in particular. Like has a boycott of a Valve product in the past ever done anything? Valve works in a really weird way unlike other AAA studios, I wouldn't be surprised if boycotting doesn't really matter to them very much.
The other thing is that this boycott doesn't really have any kind of set goal or end. Like a boycott usually has the intent of telling a company to stop doing something. Once the company stops, the boycott stops. Here, the boycott doesn't really seem very focused - what does Valve need to do to make the boycott stop? Keep the bots out? It's already doing that. The idea right now is to boycott the summer update until Valve proves it can keep the bots out, which doesn't really fit a normal boycott as I know it. That's not something Valve can really prove without the time to do it. Valve could make a statement that they will but again that's not proof and I don't think anyone would believe them anyway. The only proof is if bots stay out by the end of the month, and the only way to know that is to wait and see if they stay gone.
I don't know! I don't really see a solid point to it. I already don't buy keys for loot crates as it is though so a boycott doesn't affect me at all.
A few people are saying also that the bot banwave and the comic news are just "distractions" so people don't boycott the summer update and keep buying crates and such. Which to me is proof of how out-of-touch some are with the greater TF2 fandom (where the 7th comic is A MASSIVELY BIGGER DEAL than whether or not you can play the actual game). This logic to me doesn't really add up either. "They cleaned up the bots so the game looks good for the summer update so people buy keys for it" when Valve was very happy to let the bots ruin the game for YEARS, INCLUDING all the previous Summer updates. And Halloween updates. And Christmas updates. YEARS of bots running rampant during big updates with lots of crates and keys without a word from Valve. Valve suddenly deciding to care for this Summer update, of all things, doesn't add up to me. It's possible they were working on this bot-banning software since Christmas and only just finished it now, but I don't know. I don't find the logic of this argument compelling. The idea I keep seeing is that we shouldn't be rewarding Valve for doing the bare minimum of taking care of their game, which is true, but I don't see how further punishing them when they do actually take care of it does anything either.
I DO think the bots will come back eventually, just by the nature of bots vs mods being an unending battle that no site has ever solved. Valve will probably lose interest again as well. The question is how effective these current measures will be in the long-term. How long will it last? And right now there's no way to know. I can get why people are antsy and want to feel like they can make it last longer or have some kind of power over it, but there's just nothing anyone can do but wait. I wish I could hear more details from insiders in the botter communities to see what they think. I know the hosters were talking about working on updated software or new versions of their botting software to get back in, although none of them have succeeded yet.
Then again, it's only been two weeks, almost three coming up on this Thursday. How much time is that for a hoster to update their botting software? How much time is that for whatever contractors Valve hired to keep on banning people that are getting reported? What's going to happen? I don't know! No one knows! I'm keeping an eye on all of it but there's just no way to know what's going to happen next, which is exciting in a way, haha. Still, a super interesting time to be a TF2 fan, probably the most interesting in years.
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Anyway, in recent news, I've been keeping a close eye on the TF2 bot situation, which I find really fascinating. I mean, of course it is for me since I do play TF2 fairly regularly, but just in general!
So last time, I said that the bots had been gone for two days. Against all odds, defying all expectations, the bots are STILL GONE. You can STILL play Casual mode completely bot-free completely normally! It's been over TWO WEEKS and the game is STILL COMPLETELY PLAYABLE! Believe me, NO ONE saw this coming, particularly since Valve has neglected TF2 so badly for years. Having them come in all of a sudden and take decisive effective action that lasts is just baffling. I keep checking every day to see if the bots have come back like it's too good to be true, and they're STILL GONE!
Like, if you didn't play the game before, it's hard to describe how oppressive it was. Back then, you'd queue up a bunch of times just to get into a server that had enough people to outvote the bots, then you'd spend the whole round kicking any bots that tried to join, because they would ALWAYS keep trying to join. It'd always become a tough question about requeueing because you had no guarantee that any other server you went to would be bot-free enough to actually play. After a ton of work sometimes you'd just have to stick around on a server you didn't like just because it was the only playable one you'd found/made the whole night.
(As for community servers, a ton of them don't play all the maps and a lot of them would be full, making it even harder to get into a game you want)
Now though, you can queue up for a new, bot-free round instantly! Don't like the current game you're in? Just leave! You'll find another full lobby of real people almost instantly! It's so freeing, it's so GREAT. I can do all kinds of obscure game modes that I couldn't check out before because the bots ruined it! If I'm getting rolled or frustrated I can just leave! If people are trolling or being obnoxious I can just leave!
It feels so good to be able to do this after all this time. It's really lovely, honestly. A lot of new players are coming in and older ones are returning as well. News is spreading slowly about the bots being gone, and I can understand people's caution because everyone is waiting for Valve to drop the ball and leave again. Realistically, there's no silver bullet against bots, much like there's no silver bullet against any kind of hackers or viruses or anything like that. It'll always be a war of attrition because they will always be trying to circumvent whatever restrictions you put in place. I don't expect Valve to get rid of ALL the bots forever, that's unrealistic. What I'd LIKE is if they kept the bots at a managable level, where they're rare and easily handled, as opposed to the total free-for-all before where they just left TF2 to rot at the bots' hands.
The amount of real people playing since the banwave I think has gone from 13k at peak to 20k peak on average. The summer update is coming soon, which I'm sure will also grab attention and pull some real people in. I like seeing the numbers go up!
The other major thing is that at some point on the 12th, Valve banned a MASSIVE chunk of accounts, like 70-80k of them just gone. The teamwork.tf stats of real people in servers though has remained untouched, all of which points to Valve taking a huge slice out of the idlers, people who don't actually play the game but just farm for drops to sell in bulk. This is a really weird thing for Valve to do, since idlers don't actually disrupt the game, they just disrupt the hat economy.
I've been trying to track the player numbers to see if this is a normal idle drop or a banwave. Idlers do tend to spin up their botfarms before an update, and the numbers went up sharply after the aimbot ban hit on the 26th. It's strange that it'd suddenly drop off now, before the update dropped. There have been big idler drop-offs before though, but usually they were in response to events like Christmas or Halloween ending. It's odd!
The REALLY BIG NEWS that NO ONE saw coming though is that it turns out the script for the 7th TF2 comic is DONE and the art is actively being worked on??? I 100% thought the comic was dead, it's been SEVEN YEARS since the last one, so this news out of NOWHERE in the midst of an ACTUAL effective banwave the likes of which hasn't been seen before is just mindboggling. What is Valve up to! What is going to happen this summer update? Is it going to be a small one, or are they planning something bigger? Valve has said nothing, unsurprisingly. Is someone at Valve just going through a TF2 period and deciding to take care of the game for a while, or are they testing out some new methods for bot-detecting/banning using TF2?
(They also recently did a Funko Fusion DLC crossover promo, one of the first things they've done with TF2 in a while)
All of it is so mysterious! And also exciting, haha. It's deeply satisfying because boy the bot-hosters are MAD. They've been trying as hard as they can to get back their bots back in TF2 without success. A few can slip through here and there (I saw a couple over the last weeks of playing) but they get taken care of quickly. Nothing like the overwhelming numbers they had before. After years of getting away with destroying TF2 scot-free they're furious that they're actually facing consequences. A number of bot-hosters and cheaters got full game bans from TF2, which renders their in-game inventory worthless, and I know that at least a few of them lost a couple hundred dollars because of this. Those are just the ones that complained publically too, who knows how much other bot hosters could have lost. Personally I hope it was a lot. One of them also went to 4chan for sympathy and got ripped to shreds, idiot. EVERYBODY HATES YOU.
I've been trying to find out more about how the bot-hosters are reacting out of schadenfreude of course, get wrecked scumbags that's for ruining a perfectly good game for no reason, so I've been lurking around the tf2 reddit for news. I've never really hung out on reddit before this point, so I was a bit unprepared for just how much the tf2 redditors are big downer sadsacks about everything. Deeply annoying place!! Don't like anyone there!! It's just an easy source for info on the banwave and such though.
Other rumors have it that the bot-hosters can't find the Valve spy that keeps reporting their new names and such to get banned, and they're turning on each other. Super thematically appropriate! The RED Spy is in the base! All the new accounts they try to spin up get banned, all the new bots they try to spin up get deleted, whatever it is Valve is doing is actually effective. I've heard that some of them are going in-game to pretend to be bots spamming slurs because they can't get their bots in to do it which is just deranged. Absolutely bizarre. I don't get this mentality at all. I am making sure to report ones I see though, since Valve also seems to be reading those and banning cheaters who are getting reported.
How long will this peace last? That's the real question right now and no one knows the answer. I would LOVE it to last until Halloween so we could finally play the event normally. But it'd also be nice if it lasted through the Summer update! Maybe even to the end of July! As it is I've been playing it a lot lately to enjoy the bot-free fun while I can since I know it won't last. HOW long it'll last is the question burning in everyone's minds right now.
I posted a few things for the #fixtf2 and #savetf2 movements I mentioned before, with the big petition about getting rid of the bots, and now that the bots are gone (for now) I think people just aren't sure what to do with all this energy. A lot of people are still mad at Valve for years of neglect, which is fair, and a lot are advising caution about this because Valve will probably leave again, which is also fair.
I've been seeing a lot of it taken to greater extremes though, with people yelling at others for being happy or hopeful because they're "letting Valve off the hook" and that being excited or "letting up the pressure" will let Valve abandon the game again and leave. Some are calling for a boycott of the Summer update, which personally doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. People are insistent that the fans keep up pressure on Valve, but at this point that pressure is just to keep the bots out which Valve is already doing right now. If Valve starts dropping the ball again, I'll go back to complaining, but I don't see much point in complaining right now when things are fine. I got what I wanted! They fixed the issue! When it breaks again I'll complain, but I don't really see a point in yelling at Valve while it's fixed to keep fixing it.
Like, it'd be another thing if we knew how long Valve was going to keep this up. But at this point no one knows! We have no idea how long this'll be effective! It reminds me a bit of not enjoying something because you know it'll end and ruining it for yourself. At what point of bot-free TF2 are you allowed to be happy about it or stop yelling at Valve about it? A month? Two months? Six months? A year? Does it ever end? Like absolutely Valve SHOULD be doing maintenance to keep the game playable, which they're doing right now. Yelling at them to keep doing what they're doing doesn't really add up to me. There's that and people talk about exerting "pressure" but are pretty vague on what that entails. With #fixtf2, there was the petition, there was the twitter hashtag, there was one person who cosplayed as Scout and went to Valve headquarters where he was politely ignored. And all of that hinged on there being bots to complain about! Like the #fixtf2 tag was where people posted encounters or clips or screenshots of bots they'd run into, or stories about bots ruining games.
Now there aren't bots though! What pressure is there to exert, really? I can't yell about a problem that's already been fixed. Some people want big updates or weapon rebalances or whatever but I'm not interested in those, I don't think Valve owes anyone any of those. They just owe us a game that functions, which we now have! I think asking for more is unrealistic honestly, particularly given how old TF2 is. But again I think people have all this frustrated anger towards Valve that got stirred up by #fixtf2 and now don't really know what to do with it, but they don't want to let it go. And again, I completely understand! I was really mad at them as well! But now the game works again, so...
The proposed boycott is the big debate right now, with the tf2 youtubers behind organizing the #fixtf2 movement/petition and stuff all fighting about whether or not it should have started as a boycott or if a boycott is still necessary or yada yada yada. Petty and inevitable drama that comes from any large scale fandom thing. Personally I'm not sold on a boycott because I haven't seen any proof that a boycott works for Valve in particular. Like has a boycott of a Valve product in the past ever done anything? Valve works in a really weird way unlike other AAA studios, I wouldn't be surprised if boycotting doesn't really matter to them very much.
The other thing is that this boycott doesn't really have any kind of set goal or end. Like a boycott usually has the intent of telling a company to stop doing something. Once the company stops, the boycott stops. Here, the boycott doesn't really seem very focused - what does Valve need to do to make the boycott stop? Keep the bots out? It's already doing that. The idea right now is to boycott the summer update until Valve proves it can keep the bots out, which doesn't really fit a normal boycott as I know it. That's not something Valve can really prove without the time to do it. Valve could make a statement that they will but again that's not proof and I don't think anyone would believe them anyway. The only proof is if bots stay out by the end of the month, and the only way to know that is to wait and see if they stay gone.
I don't know! I don't really see a solid point to it. I already don't buy keys for loot crates as it is though so a boycott doesn't affect me at all.
A few people are saying also that the bot banwave and the comic news are just "distractions" so people don't boycott the summer update and keep buying crates and such. Which to me is proof of how out-of-touch some are with the greater TF2 fandom (where the 7th comic is A MASSIVELY BIGGER DEAL than whether or not you can play the actual game). This logic to me doesn't really add up either. "They cleaned up the bots so the game looks good for the summer update so people buy keys for it" when Valve was very happy to let the bots ruin the game for YEARS, INCLUDING all the previous Summer updates. And Halloween updates. And Christmas updates. YEARS of bots running rampant during big updates with lots of crates and keys without a word from Valve. Valve suddenly deciding to care for this Summer update, of all things, doesn't add up to me. It's possible they were working on this bot-banning software since Christmas and only just finished it now, but I don't know. I don't find the logic of this argument compelling. The idea I keep seeing is that we shouldn't be rewarding Valve for doing the bare minimum of taking care of their game, which is true, but I don't see how further punishing them when they do actually take care of it does anything either.
I DO think the bots will come back eventually, just by the nature of bots vs mods being an unending battle that no site has ever solved. Valve will probably lose interest again as well. The question is how effective these current measures will be in the long-term. How long will it last? And right now there's no way to know. I can get why people are antsy and want to feel like they can make it last longer or have some kind of power over it, but there's just nothing anyone can do but wait. I wish I could hear more details from insiders in the botter communities to see what they think. I know the hosters were talking about working on updated software or new versions of their botting software to get back in, although none of them have succeeded yet.
Then again, it's only been two weeks, almost three coming up on this Thursday. How much time is that for a hoster to update their botting software? How much time is that for whatever contractors Valve hired to keep on banning people that are getting reported? What's going to happen? I don't know! No one knows! I'm keeping an eye on all of it but there's just no way to know what's going to happen next, which is exciting in a way, haha. Still, a super interesting time to be a TF2 fan, probably the most interesting in years.
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