Valve Acknowledges Team Fortress 2 Players' Complaints

pcmag.com:

Valve has finally acknowledged the complaints of Team Fortress 2's players.

Team Fortress 2 was released in October 2007, and Valve made the game free to play in June 2011, so it might be surprising to learn that people are still playing the game at all. But data from Steam Charts shows(Opens in a new window) that Team Fortress 2 still has tens of thousands of concurrent players. The problem is that not all of those players are living, breathing humans sitting in front of a monitor.

Team Fortress 2 has a botting problem bad enough that its Wikipedia page(Opens in a new window) has been updated to cite "a spike in activity for these bot accounts" that have been "forcibly crashing servers, spamming copypastas in the text chats of matches, assuming other players' usernames," and using aimbots to automatically headshot actual players as soon as they spawn in to a match.

Players allege that complaints about this problem have fallen on deaf ears, so on May 24, a group of Team Fortress 2 content creators announced(Opens in a new window) their plans for "a peaceful TF2 protest."

That was enough to get Valve's attention. The company tweeted the following on May 26:

Valve hasn't explained how exactly it plans to address the Team Fortress 2 community's concerns, however, so it's unclear how effective the #SaveTF2 protest actually was. Prompting actual change for a nearly 15-year-old game would be a noteworthy achievement; causing someone at Valve to send a single tweet would be a letdown for the game's remaining players.

Valve didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

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