The stock market crashed, Trump got shot, Mr Beast turned evil, Rooster Teeth got shut down by Warner Brothers... This year has been a complete shit show.
bro has to handcrank a bunch of gears to generate energy for cobweb covered servers that are not connected to the electricity of the rest of the building somewhere in the depths of valve basement
@@zero1action27 Because tf2 are like mistreaded wives, valve abuses them for years and years because they are willing to see the "good" side in the partner they used to love (valve), then they get tired of the abuse and start missbehaving, the abuser seeing that he no longer has control does a couple good things and the punished consumers now love their husband like the first time they felt in love
The fact that TF2 even after nearly 20 years is still this shining example of a multiplayer game that holds so many different kinds of people’s attention… it just seems foolish to not want to take advantage of it or at least be able to find people who do care.
It’s a massive downgrade on team fortress classic and fortress forever as far as I’m concerned. The grenades were amazing; you could short fuse them while moving and shooting; not to mention bunnyhopping, conc jumping etc. TF2 is just so basic.
Yeah but, let's be honest here, tf2 is their small golden goose that makes some money, steam is their big golden goose that makes ALL the money. I don't blame them for not giving tf2 much attention. But then again, tf2 was never my thing, same with half life honestly.
@@littleshoes3293 tf2 has a huge install base of people who are already ready to spend money on it though. It's wasteful to have neglected it this long and indicative that the company isn't truly investing in itself
Been playing TF2 since the Beta in 2007, I always thought the meme, while funny kinda made no sense considering probably half their updates are bug fixes, which seems to constitute treadmill work. The bot crisis was so unbelievably absurd though, despite many qualms throughout the years it was the first time in 16+ years I felt I needed to say something having witnessed this game's whole rollercoaster ride 1st-hand from the rip. If anyone is interested in this type of perspective I worked hard on a vid on my channel if you are bored.
@@SnackPatrol Same experience as you. But they should just revert Casual back to Quickplay already, not because of this "treadmill work" but because good vanilla community servers bring a much, much better experence than Casual. The community are malnourished with Casual to the point they were leaving the game entirely because of the bots (when they had community servers as an option even). So not only i gave up Valve on TF2, i gave up the community as well, they're conformists and they're the reason we got this ridiculous Valve time loop (you know, people get mad, protests, Valve does something, community happy, and repeat).
@damsen978 Oh trust me I think people definitely tend to rely on Casual too much, I've stuck primarily to community servers through the years but Casual def. has its benefits- one of the biggest ones being not having to sit and fill a server from the start with no guarantee it'll ever reach a full match. I am a huge proponent of community servers though, I ran a fairly successful one for a year and a half around 2012-2013 and they definitely provide experiences not found in Casual. Btw bro I might have buried the leed, check out mastercomfig's Quickplay- dude basically made Quickplay again. It's kind of amazing.
@@SnackPatrol difference is, the anticheat treadmill needs daily attention. It really does. I am sick of anticheat taking a week or a month or more to do something about a cheat that was released today.
@@ToyokaX wow - that just grabbed and dragged a memory so far out of my brain it feels like one of those ultra strong and long boogers that you pull out "from behind the eye"
4:44 that giant spike there is scrap/case farming bots, NOT aimbots. the player count suddenly triples in size like that can only happen when the game is heavily botted. farming bots are an entirely separate issue from aimbots, but aren't nearly as bad as they only affect the economy and don't actively ruin the game.
@@icravedeath.1200 case/scrap farming bots idle on the menu 24/7 or on private servers. they never engage with public servers; they are just there for money. why do bot hosters like ruining the game? idk, some people enjoy watching the world burn.
@@icravedeath.1200Same reason people use hacks / bot in any multiplayer game. Some mix of main character syndrome, edgelord “omg lul ruined ur day noob,” and doing it because it’s possible. Lots of games are sufficiently protected to make it nearly impossible, so the ones where it is accessible attracts all those who want to do it.
@@piedpiper1172 There was also one that was the most toxic type I consider, because his excuse to the dude who interviewed on his reasons was "duh, this is just another way to play the game", yeah right play the game by ruining the others' experience.
All I would want to know is, is it automated or manual. Cause if this ban wave is all automated, that's honestly incredible if it's detecting cheaters on the spot and not just a list of player IDs
@@angzarrpsyco It's a mixture of both. VAC is Automated, but it's very old and not updated anymore. Outside the free version of LMAObox from Eight years ago it doesn't actually flag anything and all premium cheats bypass it. Mostly what the Ban Waves have always been is largely Trade Bots and it's usually really easy to figure out who they are.
they catch public cheaters, for example cheating on CZcams, being in cheating groups on steam and having your steam linked on cheating forums, bot hosters are hardware banned iirc and also reports started working again so you can get banned for rage cheating, vac is still not working.
if valve gets their shit together, then maybe it's amazing that they thought that voice commands, voice chat, and text chat were the real problems here even after seeing that this doesn't work, they kept it so they could milk the stagnant game even more
@@spaceacepl4636it actually was a real problem, cause bots would spam earrape music, and there would be EIGHT OF THEM A simple fix in my eyes? Just make it so that steam accounts or tf2 accounts that are of a certain age just aren’t muted
I am a staunch believer that as long as a game is still profiting off its playerbase via microtransactions, bugfixes and updates must be addressed. Granted it's hard to codify "How much profit" that would dignify an update or expansion, etc., but I think at the very least if an issue is preventing people from playing at a nominal baseline (again hard to codify but one would expect being able to queue, get in a game, and play a match or two to completion) then it is the right of the customer (even if they got the game for free) and the duty of a developer or publisher holding the rights to fix the issues either with or without assistance from their community/playerbase. A lot of games exist on Steam and other places that are effectively "Dead" but still make money via their stores (mobile game ports expecially). Again this is hard to codify and bring up to a governing body since sweeping changes would affect not only games but other sources of media, entertainment and even areas of industry that you'd never normally think. But it's kind of infuriating to me as a software dev and purveyor of video games that companies get away with making money off of unsupported software, especially games and especially games that are multiplayer by nature.
They MUST be addressed, agreed, sadly I think that's not how it's worked out, historically. Simple fact is, as long as the game is still profiting off the playerbase's microtransactions, Valve has LESS incentive to work. Players have to vote with their wallets, and they are voting that TF2 is fine in it's current state when they continue to buy.
of course the problem is because TF2 is a free game it gets more complicated because you aren't paying money for the product unless you decide to buy. its not like certain games where you HAVE to spend some money to not have to grind for 500 hours, you can pretty easily get the non-stock weapons pretty easy within 20 hours of play or less. hell most veteran players would be happy to gift a bunch of common weapons to new players as most have multiple copies of the same weapon, if TF2 cost money to get i would agree 100% but it gets more into grey area for a fremium app
@@sovietunion7643 I don't think it's a gray area & strongly disagree with the "Free 2 Play not warranting maintenance" argument. They release cosmetic updates. Things are presented as functional. Think of a new player to the game. They join in an oasis period (like the 64-bit update), potentially unaware of the ongoing bot crisis for 5 years. They enjoy the game and buy items. A week later (this really happened) the bot hosters implement a 64-bit version and release the kraken again. A new player was never presented with any sort of warning that there is an ongoing issue with hackers purposefully causing their game to be unplayable a solid 70% of the time (any seasonal update might as well have been 100% where they all pooled into the new map queue). This person in my mind has been ripped off. And before you say anything, not everyone has access to community servers (Asia & Australia literally have 1 option even remotely close to Vanilla), and they are not the same. The bottom line is: when money is involved, things should work as they're expected to. I go into all this & literally every criticism of the bot crisis warranting intervention in a literal 52 min video on my channel because I was tired of replying to them with what I feel are pretty reasonable counter-arguments. I have been playing since the Beta in 2007 btw and this was the first time I felt the need to speak up about the state of the game, despite having many qualms with it over the years.
"Bot problem is being tackled" Tf2 has had that statement made dozens of times in the last 6 years. That's all i need to know to see its not a change in anything but temporary.
Some of the people botting live in sh hole economies and its their way to pay for bread. To me tf2 is just a game and less important than some poor guy surviving. So i dont mind the botters. Not sitting on a moral high horse, just sharing a viewpoint that is often forgotten
@@Crocalu Unfortunately one of the major bot hosters were harassing people and worse things so they had to be cleaned out as part of it. Those idle bot hosters can still go to MMOs like WoW for money if needed.
@@Crocalu If we want to remove the botting problem, we need to remove the drop system and just give everyone weapons from the get go. Or at the very least, rework the drop system like in CS2 so they can at least slow down the idle bot exploiting the system
hate to play valve defense, but im going to do it. Saying your dedicated to a fix before you are ready to implement it is not valves style, they just don't do that. It is smart, you can never use valves words against them if they don't say anything. Trust can be lost with the bot problem, but trust is lost even faster if you promise something, and you can't fix it. For all the attacks of hollow promises that you give game studios, valve learned a long time ago, just shut up. Valve has done smurfing mitigation with dota 2 in the same way. One day it just happens, and i am thankful for valves strategy.
Honestly.. People seem to not realize that Valve has NEVER given us any communication with this type of stuff. With CS, for example, we're never going to hear if they improve the anti-cheat. It's just one day its going to happen and people aren't gonna be sure where all the cheaters went.
"We're working on it" - Valve, 1 year ago when the bot crisis was brought up, before proceeding to not release a fix or statement or literally anything afterwards until another protest happened. No Jazzy, we cannot trust Valve on their word, as they have broken it once before.
@@oeuftheoeuf you literally proved my point, Commenting on drama without a known solution leads to lost trust. Valve in most cases shuts up. Them commenting on the bot problem is a tactical error in my estimation. Also um did they break their word on this?
People talking about boycotting TF2. I just picture Gabe Newell reading that and wiping the tears away with a wad of $10,000 bills and then throwing them away.
Zesty made a good point about that, regardless of hos much or how little TF2 makes, that amount is still asigned to Valve's total budget and losing it would cause troubles
@@Jasonwithadotyeah, I’ve heard people say that Valve is rich, so they wouldn’t care. What people don’t seem to realize is that in the minds of corporations there’s no “big profit” or “little profit” it’s just all profit. It doesn’t matter if they’re losing five million or fifty million. It’s still money lost.
@@commanderboom2626 Maybe, but it has to be *profit* lost, not income. If they expect that the work required to fix the problem will cost more than the revenue lost from lost players, they will happily let it all burn.
It’s only logical thing anyway. Mönkey made good statements of this. It’s a product and if the player count is still up and money are still flowing it shows that the game is a “ *OK* “ when it isn’t. Stoping to play the game shows that the game is dying. So what will they do? Well certainly not support almost 2 decades old game. If player counts only rise. But revenue falls *drastically* it shows people want to play. But they are not happy with the state the game is in.
holy fuck I haven't though about Day of Defeat in decades. I fucking LOVED that game. My friends and I used to have LAN parties where we played that shit for hours. So many good memories.
@@user-ej4jq5bw4c Right? Just makes me acknowledge i'm an old head. Child of the 80's and 90s. The original Half-Life mods before Half-Life 2 made for some of the best nights in the college dorms back in 2002 and 2003.
I thought DoD came out in '03? either way, glad to see the timelessness of valve games. back in 2013 or so I played dod on my laptop all weekend and even though I didn't really know what I was doing it is still a fun memory
5:04 No, the bots that inflate the player counts are not gone, the spinbots were not what inflated the playercounts, it's bots that afk for items. TF2 has sort of sat around the 20k real active player range for a while now.
The player count on Steam DB are still misleading. 70% are idle bots. That spike during the update, while still coming in part from humans, are primarily bot nets booting up.
Yeah, Zesty Jesus did a great job on enumerating just how many bots were in the game with his bot exposè. Love him or hate him, he brought the receipts.
Well my manager at work, who’s a super tech savvy guy, actually had an explanation for how long it took them to address the bot problem: they were gathering data. All those bots infesting the servers, they were observing them, figuring out how to identify them and track them, in order to make sure whatever solution they implemented would keep them down permanently. And it seems to have worked.
This would be understandable if are talking a months long timespan but when you spend over half a decade that's not the case. I've played old school RuneScape for a decade. That game consistently has been fighting bots the entire time. Ban waves are a tactic used but how it is implemented is you wait a month or 2 to ban people. In many cases it actually ends up being a week or 2. Thing is they have plenty of data. The banwave strategy is more about obfuscating information on what causes you to get banned. If 1000 bot hosters have all their bots banned at once after being up for a bit there ends up being no clear cut information. Whereas if you see that your bot gets banned exactly 48 hours after doing a particular action you know the system is watching for it. In the case of valve they have explicitly said that they don't like "treadmill" work. They don't like an issue that needs consistent tending to. Which is what bots are, bots are an ever evolving thing and it ends up being an arms race between both developers and the devs. Tbh I'm just glad the bot developers for TF2 are pretty dumb compared to OSRS. In RuneScape nowadays we have deep learning AI bots that have been trained on 100's of thousands of hours of gameplay to be able to do the hardest content in the game and do it like a player would. Nowadays every bit of content has bots doing it within the first week.
@@zoidsfan12 Most of the bot hosters that got hit weren't cheating, they were trade bots. Going back to when Valve still cared about the game and had annual ban waves, most of those accountants hit by them were trade bots. We just didn't pay attention because outside of hardcore traders no one knew just how bad botting was back then, sure your cosmetics and weapons became nearly worthless overnight, but if you weren't actually trading regularlly, you didn't care. All you saw was the UGC Snipers getting banned and assumed all those players were cheaters. It's the same thing now, just replace UGC Snipers with Omegatronic bots. People see the handful of malicious bots and assume that's what all those accountants were when in reality, same as in 2013, most of them are Trade Bots. Does banning the bots ever actually do anything? Not really, Those same bot nets are already back.
@@pob-4810 it could if it means implementing a solution that completely stamps out the bot problem permanently rather than getting in an arms race with the bot hosters.
10:00 Actually, I believe since 2016 valve doesnt have a 'desk on wheels' philosophy, i believe this was said as part of some development diary like thing for HL:A
I know the interview you're referring to but I have not seen it myself yet and I suspect that it is talking about the HL:A project itself and not a company-wide shift in policy. They probably kept the 'flatlands' structure for most other things but felt they needed to have a fixed team for HL:A in order to finally buckle down and get it out of the door.
@@Adriethyl i heard people say that its putting whole opetation in a very bad light. Eather way its funny to think valve stepped in becoase of that. Also, i dont think many people like beying potrayed as some twink in gay corn
I personally do not believe TF2 will ever get a resurgence. Source 1 is an old engine, and the game is held together by shoe strings, and while it may be profitable, CS:GO will always be a larger cashcow. One thing I am seeing is hate towards Deadlock, without understanding that it likely isn't pulling many resources from other games.
you're right, no one at valve can or wants to work on source 1, they don't want to hire new people who can and want to work (like the TF2S2 team that got a dmca for example), for one simple reason: they don't see the payback in it project, they believe that the game is dead both physically and morally, and the community fully supports them in this by buying new slop from the summer/autumn/winter “update”
The issue is "games as a service" they neglect their other services to put out a new one while still making money off the old ones. A game as a service is a promise of upkeep. And valve failed to do that for 6 years.
un-repealable bans are a pretty lame policy. I know a bunch of people that have been banned in various games when they never broke any TOS and they just can't even repeal it. I got banned from MW2 and couldn't repeal the ban, and I had to send a letter to get them to review my ban and overturn it.
@@bubbleman2002 "...got banned *WHEN THEY NEVER BROKE ANY TOS*", learn to read. The point of ban appeals is to mitigate the problem of undeserved bans, since the systems often screw up. I do agree with your statement, but this isn't about rulebreakers coping and seething after getting justly destroyed (unless op is lying and he did deserve his ban, but mistaken bans do in fact happen).
9:40 I've always found looking at the far past achievements of a game studio as a sort of foolish exercise, to put it bluntly, the Valve of 2004 is NOT the Valve of 2024, companies are these massive shifting entities with people moving in and out over time, a sort of Ship of Theseus if you will. So the long past achievements of a studio often times say very little about the current capabilities of that same studio.
A great example of this is Pixar. The Pixar of old who made all those great classics is no more and the current one is closer to Disney in the way they operate and make movies.
Lol no, you're ridiculous, first of all you're just making up that second of all with the statistics thats literally impossible, if it rose from 60k to 150k do you think they all of a sudden added a ton of new idle bots? No probably not, meaning that change in population is players so at minimum the population would have to be 90k
@@cynicalmemester1694 guy is right too Why would they suddenly create over 50k idle bots? It wasn't update with cases , whats was purpose to? There are real players.
@Nikotheleepic you legit have no idea HOW bad the bot problem is in tf2, dont you? This has been going on for 6 years. These bot hosters are extremely determined to pump the game in with as many bots as possible. Cheater bots are not the only bots too. Like someone else said, watch Zesty Jesus' video about bots.
4:57 that huge bump of players in the chart consists mostly of automated idle/items farming botnets that login to the game at the same time and disconnect at once when item server maintenance occurs
Bellular News probably don't watch essay TF2 videos or do more research than going to savetf2 website, TF2's gameban pages and update pages because they're busy editing or real life tasks like dealing with taxes that sometimes require lots of hours on average or rushing it would be a chance to get free ticket to court room.
I have been following Valve and TF2 for many years and the reason they don't put enough work into TF2 is because. 1. they don't have enough employees (around 300 not industry standard for a company of there size) 2. they can easily get content in by supporting creators in there community With the bot crisis Valve just took a too hands off approach and its great that the casual mode is actually playable so players don't have to rely on community servers. They are apparently working on the TF2 comic again but honestly Valve just needs more employees for the things they want to work on. They are stretched too thin and this is something that those who work at Valve have said such as Robin Walker (co-creator of TF2) and some in the community have noticed this as well. Those who work at Valve want to work on big interesting projects, some want to work on TF2 but the company doesn't have enough employees and ends up being stretched too thin to work on everything that requires attention.
Valve has so many resources they have no excuse. They don't have enough workers? Hire some more! Or hand off their "treadmill" projects to a sub contractor company that can handle bug fixes and anti botting.
@@salsamancer Which could lead to layoffs after becoming bloated or a worse product from not communicating with other studios. We should learn from the recent tech layoffs. Bigger is not better
I think the reason why you don't see much. Is that Valve in all honesty is no longer a game studio. They really don't make any games now. They are more or less a run a store and that is about it. as we are all waiting on that fable half life 3.. a game that will never come out.
well you do still see stuff being made by valve like artifact ...which disappointed everyone and was eventually abandoned by valve or half-life alyx ...which forced people to buy very expensive and very specific hardware and brought nothing new to the story of half-life (it's a prequel!), other than replacing one cliffhanger with another and making people question which version of city 17 was real because of all the new content hell, all that extra new stuff kinda makes it look like the game was taking place in a different, parallel world instead of the one seen in half-life 2 or the yet another multiplayer game that... exists. well, simply put they still make *something*, but it's not what players expect, and not in a good way
@@spaceacepl4636and I don't have a problem with that I don't like almost all of the valve games the only one I liked was spellbreak and tf2 was kinda fun but I prefer them as steam not as valve
It should be noted that the in game bots, the aim, vote kick, and mic spam bots have been banned. There are still THOUSANDS of idle bots that only stay on the main menu to farm times drops. It has been estimated that there are roughly 30k of these bots. At any given moment.
@opti0ns No I 100% understand that. Just wanted to add context to the 60k player number, and the new 150k player numbers. If you subtract 30k you have the average real player count. So the increase is closer to 30k to 120k. That's a much bigger change than at first glance.
@@demoncushion9600 if you are getting this info from the same video I think you are getting that info, I think you got it wrong... It's not 30k idle bots active at any given moment... Its 30k active *players* while the rest are botnets of idlers.
Okay but the idle bots were never much of a problem the worst thing they do is inflate tf2 numbers to make it seem like much more people play than they do
That sounds like a real convenient excuse. They were finally about to potentially start losing money so they rushed to "fix" the problem. I'd be surprised if the bot problem isn't back in full force in two months tops.
Hearing you talk about your own TF2 video takes me back to the days of *TEAMROOMBA.* I think the channel was originally started by two guys. Why they stopped uploading is probably one of the internets greatest mysteries which we'll most likely never be able to find any closure to. Over the years Ive been told that one of the main guy died in a car accident but I have never been able to confirm any of it.... I just cross my fingers that he's alive somewhere and will maybe log in to his account one day to claim the pile of youtube money thats waiting for him.
He's not, I played on his server back in the day (2fort2furious), though I doubt he remembers me. That was a joke started intentionally by, IDK, some rando probably, or maybe him to avoid attention from those videos. The first instance of that "hoax" or w/e you want to call it I found from like 2008, and he's shown up online at the most recent I could find, 2021, so yeah safe to say he's probably ok. He is actually the creator of one of the official maps, which I find a hilarious yin/yang as having both contributed to the community, and severely annoyed a few unlucky people back in the day. His handle is "FLOOR_MASTER" btw. I do agree those videos are GOAT'd. Sucks sprays aren't enabled/uploaded on Valve servers anymore, they were a hilarious, tried & true form of griefing.
He's not, I played on his server back in the day (2fort2furious), though I doubt he remembers me. That was started intentionally by some rando probably, or him, as a joke, or to possibly avoid attention from those videos in the latter case. The first instance that I found of that "joke" or w/e is from like 2008, and he's shown up online at the most recent I could find, 2021, so yeah safe to say he is more than likely fine. He is actually the creator of one of the official maps, which I find a hilarious duality having both contributed to the community, and severely annoyed a few unlucky people back in the day. His handle is "FLOOR_MASTER" btw. I do agree those videos are GOAT'd. Sucks sprays aren't enabled on Valve servers anymore, they were a hilarious, time-tested, "simple-yet-effective" staple of griefing for many years.
So you would rather have a company promise that only for them to UNABLE TO DO IT after all Look at Overwatch 2 "We can't bring the thing that we promised" then later on they CAN actually do it lol Valve knows how to work, to just shut up so what they say can't be used against them
its not a problem you can do something about, valve despite having a lot of resources can not just devote majority attention to a decade old product while they are serving 1 hardware one store and support of every other game they've ever released, all while considering problems that comes with all these products..... it more of a society problem than anything
That happens? I've been playing for a few months and maybe it's that I don't pay attention to the top scores at the end of a match but I've never seen a level 1 top score
Accounts show up level 1 in case of server problems or privated steam profiles. If a "level 1" player is on top, they are not level 1, they are just an experienced player trying to protect their privacy or having internet issues.
They finally, after more than 15 years, fixed Hoodoo so that you can no longer get a Red spy into Blu's spawn on the last stage. Now I don't have any reason to play hoodoo lol
clearly the statement about the issue being worked on was a pr move to get people to shut up and sure, the bots may have vanished, but the game might once again be abandoned shortly afterwards it's like they don't want to touch this game and this world they created with even a ten foot pole they just release new cosmetic items, only available via lootcrates, that's basically it
Damn, I just realized when I saw the graphics that they were "OK". I remember back in the day when I had to buy an expensive graphics card for $250 USD JUST so I wouldn't lag out of the game, because the graphics were just fantastic! I feel old Mr. Krabs (turns to dust)
I don't think it's a good idea. A lot of Tf2 players have weak PCs and wouldn't be able to play the updated version. Also a lot of movement techs that are based on engine glitches would dissapear, which would be sad. I think, the reason that the game lived for so long is the lack of meta changes. As soon as the valve starts balancing items based on players' opinions, the game will become boring.
They have so much money that they just don't care about scaming players - they don't need to... Except that they abandoned one of their most beloved games for many years.
@@jorkan_22 its because they don't have investors like E.A, ubisoft etc. when investors who make money off you company failing don't get a say the company does better.
A common method used by game studios to prevent hackers from learning is to do a ban wave every 1-6 months, and just taking note of bots to ban during the wave, this doesn't let bot makers tweak and test their bots on the current system
This seems like a casual flex of "Vacnet"s actual powers (keeping them out based on machine/infrastructure fingerprinting?) & that's officially not even used in TF2, can we please have this for all games on the Steam platform? 🤷♂
There was this one guy in a community server who obviously had cheats on. But this guy never fired a single shot. Dude named himself the anti-cheat from what I can remember. I hope this guy is still out there protecting others. Best part is, he had the cosmetics of an average bot.
Lmao. Kinda funny the "..." 's actual use for answer space for question you'll see in school, filler or silence in some comics with speech bubble yet this is just wasting the space with no point.
"TF2 community, we hear you! We love this game and know you do, too. We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things." took 2 years but atleast it happened
5:11 please dont spread misinformation it IS mostly bots, around 70%, Zesty Jesus made a video about it with very concluaive evidence Valve DID BAN cheating bots, but not idling bots, which is what is being reflected in the player count
REMOVE MATCHMAKING it is so frustrating that practically no one is attacking the underlying problem. tf2 is an old game that valve is no longer focusing on, with a centralized server system that can only be hack/bot free with constant attention. this problem only started when valve killed off all of the community servers with their soulless matchmaking, and then stopped updating the game. you need HUMAN moderation to keep hacks and bots off the servers in a game like tf2. anything valve does other than removing centralized game hosting is just a delaying of the inevitable, because ALL games get left behind at some point. that is a FACT. give the power back to the players and tf2 will be rid of the bot problem for as long as there are players.
I see you don't remember the random p2w servers from quickplay. You know, the type to have it own item system and own micro transactions for those item systems. You trade one evil for another.
@@lordjaraxxus5418 quickplay buttons are basically old school MM, remove it too. only need server browser. then we can avoid all the bad servers. host and admin our own if needed.
It makes sense for Valve to lean more on the community. Give the community more power and in return keep the game chugging along without too much development cost
5:42 misinformation: i heard youtubers were kinda devided in this matter. The website says about it, but very carefully, probably becoase guy who started this movement is a gabling addict
@@freedustin unless you count how a few of them were trying to dox and threaten people, or ya know, how some of them actively sell bot protection and in some cases bot hacks, which does break laws (more so the selling of hacks and cheats, which breaks certain copyright and data protection laws) they might not face jail time, but oh boy could they be sued out of existence
@@freedustin Actually they are. They're causing economic and financial harm to Valve. I'm sure I don't have to tell you the numerous doxxing and death threats they've issued against multiple members of the TF2 community who are actively working against them.
@@Nykomil has nothing to do with the bot software. that's individual users deciding to break the law. just like I can buy remote admin tools and its perfectly legal until I put it on somebody's system without their consent.
I tried to play TF2 YEARS ago, got banned from a server within 2 minutes for something along the lines of "Not playing correctly." Never went back to it.
Random kicks are not bans, but i encourage you to try some other time if you feel like it, look at some youtube stuff about the game and see if you are interested in it at all even
We love our games and they deserve to be treated with care. The difference between a game or a program verses a book or novel is very little. Both deserve to live on the shelf and be looked at every once and a while to spark the good memories we had together.
This is about the 4th time Valve have done one of these massive bot ban waves. They always let them come back. "Banning bots is a treadmill and we dislike treadmills" was their official stance.
tf2 playercount is mostly bots. Like 70 to 80% is trade/idle bots. This is verifiable information that is easily searchable for online.Not that those bots were ever getting banned, but talking about playercount increasing/decreasing is completely useless because of this. No research whatsoever was done for this video, kinda impressive.
stocks crash but TF2 got an update. what a timeline
Coincidence?
@@Idontevenwanachannel probably, valve isn't a public company
@@MaxCEI sure hope it stays that way.
It released 2 weeks ago, and bots were banned 4 weeks ago
The stock market crashed, Trump got shot, Mr Beast turned evil, Rooster Teeth got shut down by Warner Brothers... This year has been a complete shit show.
Shout out to the one janitor and the office plant that keeping TF2 alive and updated.
Janitor of the decade
The real question is weather the janitor that keeps tf2 alive the same one that keeps TF2 Alive
bro has to handcrank a bunch of gears to generate energy for cobweb covered servers that are not connected to the electricity of the rest of the building somewhere in the depths of valve basement
My mann
The office plant does seem to be doing some heavy lifting.
Just remember, Valve let it happen for 6 years.
I am not forgiving till I see long term support. Not just a month of it.
Exactly, I never understood why people are quick to forgive valve after ignoring one of their old IP while trying to profit from it at the same time.
can you donate a dollar to african kids before saying it
@@bwtricksterWhataboutism.
@@zero1action27 Because tf2 are like mistreaded wives, valve abuses them for years and years because they are willing to see the "good" side in the partner they used to love (valve), then they get tired of the abuse and start missbehaving, the abuser seeing that he no longer has control does a couple good things and the punished consumers now love their husband like the first time they felt in love
Even still, they are waiting till it matters again to do it...
The fact that TF2 even after nearly 20 years is still this shining example of a multiplayer game that holds so many different kinds of people’s attention… it just seems foolish to not want to take advantage of it or at least be able to find people who do care.
I don't know how the lack of support for the last 5-6 years is a shining example.
Maybe a dirty unclean example but definitely not shining.
@@Sammyii.He's talking about the quality of the game play formula itself. Which he's correct about.
Hopefully no one else makes their game as pay to win as this "shining example"@@TubeOfLaughes
It’s a massive downgrade on team fortress classic and fortress forever as far as I’m concerned. The grenades were amazing; you could short fuse them while moving and shooting; not to mention bunnyhopping, conc jumping etc. TF2 is just so basic.
@@soylentgreenb okay, thank you sharing, but we didnt ask
Valve has a golden goose on their hands that takes little to no investment, it's concerning that they WILLFULLY IGNORED it for 6 years...
Yeah but, let's be honest here, tf2 is their small golden goose that makes some money, steam is their big golden goose that makes ALL the money. I don't blame them for not giving tf2 much attention. But then again, tf2 was never my thing, same with half life honestly.
@@littleshoes3293 tf2 has a huge install base of people who are already ready to spend money on it though. It's wasteful to have neglected it this long and indicative that the company isn't truly investing in itself
@@littleshoes3293so you dont have any compassion?
That alone tells you everything you need to know.
@@kezif "I don't like waffles."
"OH SO YOU HATE HUMANITY!"
ah yes, Demolition Dude. My favourite character from Group Stronghold 2 by Volvo
I most enjoy Pyromaniac Person. The famous protagonist of Squad Bastion 2 by velvA
These are hilarious, have my like
Personally I main the hefty firearms male from the game Party Bunkers 2 by Viagra
Personally I enjoy playing Operative, easily my favorite french man in all of Company Citadel 2 from Faucet
@@DullahanKai”from faucet” lmfao
We can only hope they stay on the treadmill
Been playing TF2 since the Beta in 2007, I always thought the meme, while funny kinda made no sense considering probably half their updates are bug fixes, which seems to constitute treadmill work. The bot crisis was so unbelievably absurd though, despite many qualms throughout the years it was the first time in 16+ years I felt I needed to say something having witnessed this game's whole rollercoaster ride 1st-hand from the rip. If anyone is interested in this type of perspective I worked hard on a vid on my channel if you are bored.
@@SnackPatrol Same experience as you. But they should just revert Casual back to Quickplay already, not because of this "treadmill work" but because good vanilla community servers bring a much, much better experence than Casual. The community are malnourished with Casual to the point they were leaving the game entirely because of the bots (when they had community servers as an option even).
So not only i gave up Valve on TF2, i gave up the community as well, they're conformists and they're the reason we got this ridiculous Valve time loop (you know, people get mad, protests, Valve does something, community happy, and repeat).
@damsen978 Oh trust me I think people definitely tend to rely on Casual too much, I've stuck primarily to community servers through the years but Casual def. has its benefits- one of the biggest ones being not having to sit and fill a server from the start with no guarantee it'll ever reach a full match.
I am a huge proponent of community servers though, I ran a fairly successful one for a year and a half around 2012-2013 and they definitely provide experiences not found in Casual.
Btw bro I might have buried the leed, check out mastercomfig's Quickplay- dude basically made Quickplay again. It's kind of amazing.
@@SnackPatrol difference is, the anticheat treadmill needs daily attention.
It really does. I am sick of anticheat taking a week or a month or more to do something about a cheat that was released today.
As long as 18 ppl wanna play this game, the community will never let this game die XD
Just like the Ricochet community!
@@ToyokaXRicochet referenced!
@@ToyokaX Ricochet referenced. Billions must starve.
As long as there's two players left on the game, someone's gonna want someone gibbed.
@@ToyokaX wow - that just grabbed and dragged a memory so far out of my brain it feels like one of those ultra strong and long boogers that you pull out "from behind the eye"
4:44 that giant spike there is scrap/case farming bots, NOT aimbots. the player count suddenly triples in size like that can only happen when the game is heavily botted.
farming bots are an entirely separate issue from aimbots, but aren't nearly as bad as they only affect the economy and don't actively ruin the game.
This needs more likes
Then why don't the bot account people use those then.
What do they get out of ruining the game for everyone.
@@icravedeath.1200 case/scrap farming bots idle on the menu 24/7 or on private servers. they never engage with public servers; they are just there for money.
why do bot hosters like ruining the game? idk, some people enjoy watching the world burn.
@@icravedeath.1200Same reason people use hacks / bot in any multiplayer game. Some mix of main character syndrome, edgelord “omg lul ruined ur day noob,” and doing it because it’s possible. Lots of games are sufficiently protected to make it nearly impossible, so the ones where it is accessible attracts all those who want to do it.
@@piedpiper1172 There was also one that was the most toxic type I consider, because his excuse to the dude who interviewed on his reasons was "duh, this is just another way to play the game", yeah right play the game by ruining the others' experience.
Worst news for OW2 since they scraped PVE
Worst news for OW2 was OW2
Nobody in the Overwatch community cares about the OW vs TF2 war anymore. So its still the scrapping of PVE.
So we basically all got scammed into paying for Overwatch DLC at full price as OW1? Honestly, fuck blizzard.
I really don't think Overwatch players consider the existence of TF2 - if they did, they wouldn't play the former.
@@solomonpro4147yeah, both are ""dead"" and mistreated by their companies
It's still amazing how this game is almost 20 years old and still has a healthier playerbase than most new online games.
If I had a nickle for every game with the acronym TF2 that refused to die, I'd have 2 nickles
which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice
What is the other game?
@@simarkarmani4034I think it's titan fall 2
@@Bupboycorrect
It’s better we don’t know what Valve is using to catch cheaters as the moment we do know the bots will immediately come back and worse
All I would want to know is, is it automated or manual. Cause if this ban wave is all automated, that's honestly incredible if it's detecting cheaters on the spot and not just a list of player IDs
@@angzarrpsyco It's a mixture of both. VAC is Automated, but it's very old and not updated anymore. Outside the free version of LMAObox from Eight years ago it doesn't actually flag anything and all premium cheats bypass it. Mostly what the Ban Waves have always been is largely Trade Bots and it's usually really easy to figure out who they are.
they catch public cheaters, for example cheating on CZcams, being in cheating groups on steam and having your steam linked on cheating forums, bot hosters are hardware banned iirc and also reports started working again so you can get banned for rage cheating, vac is still not working.
@@angzarrpsycothey wouldn’t be hiding code if it wasn’t automated.
It would have to be automated. Would need a small army of people to keep up otherwise.
I wish they unmute me or at least let me call for medic
if valve gets their shit together, then maybe
it's amazing that they thought that voice commands, voice chat, and text chat were the real problems here
even after seeing that this doesn't work, they kept it so they could milk the stagnant game even more
Just like buy a cheap item in the shop
@@spaceacepl4636it actually was a real problem, cause bots would spam earrape music, and there would be EIGHT OF THEM
A simple fix in my eyes?
Just make it so that steam accounts or tf2 accounts that are of a certain age just aren’t muted
@@dustin202 or you know
the built-in mute feature?
Same! XD😂
Long Live TF2!
GOOD NEWS! WE'RE NOT DYING! WE'RE GONNA LIVE FOREVER!
stay australium-pilled
The original? Yes, I agree.
@@vxpdx We didn't say that! We just said we're not filled with bots! -Valve
Can we have more Buff Fortress?
GUESS WHOS BACK.
its the bots. now its worse what they can do.
I am a staunch believer that as long as a game is still profiting off its playerbase via microtransactions, bugfixes and updates must be addressed. Granted it's hard to codify "How much profit" that would dignify an update or expansion, etc., but I think at the very least if an issue is preventing people from playing at a nominal baseline (again hard to codify but one would expect being able to queue, get in a game, and play a match or two to completion) then it is the right of the customer (even if they got the game for free) and the duty of a developer or publisher holding the rights to fix the issues either with or without assistance from their community/playerbase.
A lot of games exist on Steam and other places that are effectively "Dead" but still make money via their stores (mobile game ports expecially). Again this is hard to codify and bring up to a governing body since sweeping changes would affect not only games but other sources of media, entertainment and even areas of industry that you'd never normally think. But it's kind of infuriating to me as a software dev and purveyor of video games that companies get away with making money off of unsupported software, especially games and especially games that are multiplayer by nature.
They MUST be addressed, agreed, sadly I think that's not how it's worked out, historically.
Simple fact is, as long as the game is still profiting off the playerbase's microtransactions, Valve has LESS incentive to work.
Players have to vote with their wallets, and they are voting that TF2 is fine in it's current state when they continue to buy.
It's people still paying for microtransactions that cause the game to not get fixed.
Why fix the money printer that is still printing money?
play on community servers
of course the problem is because TF2 is a free game it gets more complicated because you aren't paying money for the product unless you decide to buy. its not like certain games where you HAVE to spend some money to not have to grind for 500 hours, you can pretty easily get the non-stock weapons pretty easy within 20 hours of play or less. hell most veteran players would be happy to gift a bunch of common weapons to new players as most have multiple copies of the same weapon,
if TF2 cost money to get i would agree 100% but it gets more into grey area for a fremium app
@@sovietunion7643 I don't think it's a gray area & strongly disagree with the "Free 2 Play not warranting maintenance" argument. They release cosmetic updates. Things are presented as functional. Think of a new player to the game. They join in an oasis period (like the 64-bit update), potentially unaware of the ongoing bot crisis for 5 years. They enjoy the game and buy items. A week later (this really happened) the bot hosters implement a 64-bit version and release the kraken again. A new player was never presented with any sort of warning that there is an ongoing issue with hackers purposefully causing their game to be unplayable a solid 70% of the time (any seasonal update might as well have been 100% where they all pooled into the new map queue).
This person in my mind has been ripped off. And before you say anything, not everyone has access to community servers (Asia & Australia literally have 1 option even remotely close to Vanilla), and they are not the same. The bottom line is: when money is involved, things should work as they're expected to. I go into all this & literally every criticism of the bot crisis warranting intervention in a literal 52 min video on my channel because I was tired of replying to them with what I feel are pretty reasonable counter-arguments. I have been playing since the Beta in 2007 btw and this was the first time I felt the need to speak up about the state of the game, despite having many qualms with it over the years.
"Bot problem is being tackled"
Tf2 has had that statement made dozens of times in the last 6 years. That's all i need to know to see its not a change in anything but temporary.
Some of the people botting live in sh hole economies and its their way to pay for bread. To me tf2 is just a game and less important than some poor guy surviving. So i dont mind the botters. Not sitting on a moral high horse, just sharing a viewpoint that is often forgotten
@@Crocalu I need to ask how this pays for anyone's rent.
@@Crocalu Unfortunately one of the major bot hosters were harassing people and worse things so they had to be cleaned out as part of it. Those idle bot hosters can still go to MMOs like WoW for money if needed.
@@gmsp123 Well that's clear. They scam people for "protection" from their bots.
@@Crocalu If we want to remove the botting problem, we need to remove the drop system and just give everyone weapons from the get go. Or at the very least, rework the drop system like in CS2 so they can at least slow down the idle bot exploiting the system
hate to play valve defense, but im going to do it.
Saying your dedicated to a fix before you are ready to implement it is not valves style, they just don't do that. It is smart, you can never use valves words against them if they don't say anything.
Trust can be lost with the bot problem, but trust is lost even faster if you promise something, and you can't fix it. For all the attacks of hollow promises that you give game studios, valve learned a long time ago, just shut up.
Valve has done smurfing mitigation with dota 2 in the same way. One day it just happens, and i am thankful for valves strategy.
Dota 2 doesn't exist, hasn't existed for 10+ years. The game rn is Dota 17. Smurfing has never been a game problem, it's a player problem.
Crownfall is peak and the game become much better after mass smurfing ban and better anticheat.
Honestly.. People seem to not realize that Valve has NEVER given us any communication with this type of stuff. With CS, for example, we're never going to hear if they improve the anti-cheat. It's just one day its going to happen and people aren't gonna be sure where all the cheaters went.
"We're working on it" - Valve, 1 year ago when the bot crisis was brought up, before proceeding to not release a fix or statement or literally anything afterwards until another protest happened.
No Jazzy, we cannot trust Valve on their word, as they have broken it once before.
@@oeuftheoeuf you literally proved my point, Commenting on drama without a known solution leads to lost trust.
Valve in most cases shuts up.
Them commenting on the bot problem is a tactical error in my estimation.
Also um did they break their word on this?
"Long as theres two people left on the planet, someones gonna wanna play Team Fortress 2."
~The Sniper
Just took them *six years* of begging, a bot crisis and so much more.
God that 70 FOV gameplay makes me sick
Crazy how that's the default fov
@@AltumDoloraint it 54?
That's how it should be, I've always played with the default settings.
@@s.v.berezin1562 jesus man
@@s.v.berezin1562 dude use 90 its way better
People talking about boycotting TF2. I just picture Gabe Newell reading that and wiping the tears away with a wad of $10,000 bills and then throwing them away.
Zesty made a good point about that, regardless of hos much or how little TF2 makes, that amount is still asigned to Valve's total budget and losing it would cause troubles
@@Jasonwithadotyeah, I’ve heard people say that Valve is rich, so they wouldn’t care. What people don’t seem to realize is that in the minds of corporations there’s no “big profit” or “little profit” it’s just all profit. It doesn’t matter if they’re losing five million or fifty million. It’s still money lost.
@@commanderboom2626 Maybe, but it has to be *profit* lost, not income. If they expect that the work required to fix the problem will cost more than the revenue lost from lost players, they will happily let it all burn.
It’s only logical thing anyway.
Mönkey made good statements of this.
It’s a product and if the player count is still up and money are still flowing it shows that the game is a “ *OK* “ when it isn’t.
Stoping to play the game shows that the game is dying. So what will they do?
Well certainly not support almost 2 decades old game.
If player counts only rise. But revenue falls *drastically* it shows people want to play. But they are not happy with the state the game is in.
0:03 nice viewmodel
I rock the same one
Its the default
God forbid someone have a preference in something amirite
Best veiwmodel
min better
Seeing this makes me nostalgic. I miss Day of Defeat and Team Fortress Classic...ahh 2002 was a great year.
holy fuck I haven't though about Day of Defeat in decades. I fucking LOVED that game. My friends and I used to have LAN parties where we played that shit for hours. So many good memories.
oh damn that's quite a long time
people in 2007 nowadays are 17 at this moment
@@user-ej4jq5bw4c Right? Just makes me acknowledge i'm an old head. Child of the 80's and 90s. The original Half-Life mods before Half-Life 2 made for some of the best nights in the college dorms back in 2002 and 2003.
I thought DoD came out in '03? either way, glad to see the timelessness of valve games. back in 2013 or so I played dod on my laptop all weekend and even though I didn't really know what I was doing it is still a fun memory
5:04 No, the bots that inflate the player counts are not gone, the spinbots were not what inflated the playercounts, it's bots that afk for items. TF2 has sort of sat around the 20k real active player range for a while now.
real life mann vs. machine lol
Bro 😂 Valve Vs Machine 💀💀💀
5:20 trade bots, you cant detect all of them
The player count on Steam DB are still misleading. 70% are idle bots.
That spike during the update, while still coming in part from humans, are primarily bot nets booting up.
Yeah, Zesty Jesus did a great job on enumerating just how many bots were in the game with his bot exposè.
Love him or hate him, he brought the receipts.
Same as CS2. 80% bots and cheaters
Where’s my heavy update
i mean this respectfully but it looks like youre trying to wink with both your eyes throughout the video
He might be using an ai that makes it look like he's staring at the camera
This guy blinks like it's his first time blinking...
I did Ctrl+F to see if anyone commented on this lmao, it looks like he's manually blinking.
Well my manager at work, who’s a super tech savvy guy, actually had an explanation for how long it took them to address the bot problem: they were gathering data.
All those bots infesting the servers, they were observing them, figuring out how to identify them and track them, in order to make sure whatever solution they implemented would keep them down permanently.
And it seems to have worked.
For 6 years, someone is drinking their own bathwater.
This would be understandable if are talking a months long timespan but when you spend over half a decade that's not the case.
I've played old school RuneScape for a decade. That game consistently has been fighting bots the entire time. Ban waves are a tactic used but how it is implemented is you wait a month or 2 to ban people. In many cases it actually ends up being a week or 2.
Thing is they have plenty of data. The banwave strategy is more about obfuscating information on what causes you to get banned.
If 1000 bot hosters have all their bots banned at once after being up for a bit there ends up being no clear cut information. Whereas if you see that your bot gets banned exactly 48 hours after doing a particular action you know the system is watching for it.
In the case of valve they have explicitly said that they don't like "treadmill" work. They don't like an issue that needs consistent tending to. Which is what bots are, bots are an ever evolving thing and it ends up being an arms race between both developers and the devs.
Tbh I'm just glad the bot developers for TF2 are pretty dumb compared to OSRS. In RuneScape nowadays we have deep learning AI bots that have been trained on 100's of thousands of hours of gameplay to be able to do the hardest content in the game and do it like a player would. Nowadays every bit of content has bots doing it within the first week.
@@zoidsfan12 Most of the bot hosters that got hit weren't cheating, they were trade bots. Going back to when Valve still cared about the game and had annual ban waves, most of those accountants hit by them were trade bots. We just didn't pay attention because outside of hardcore traders no one knew just how bad botting was back then, sure your cosmetics and weapons became nearly worthless overnight, but if you weren't actually trading regularlly, you didn't care. All you saw was the UGC Snipers getting banned and assumed all those players were cheaters.
It's the same thing now, just replace UGC Snipers with Omegatronic bots. People see the handful of malicious bots and assume that's what all those accountants were when in reality, same as in 2013, most of them are Trade Bots.
Does banning the bots ever actually do anything? Not really, Those same bot nets are already back.
It shouldn’t take that fucking long to collect data
@@pob-4810 it could if it means implementing a solution that completely stamps out the bot problem permanently rather than getting in an arms race with the bot hosters.
10:00 Actually, I believe since 2016 valve doesnt have a 'desk on wheels' philosophy, i believe this was said as part of some development diary like thing for HL:A
I know the interview you're referring to but I have not seen it myself yet and I suspect that it is talking about the HL:A project itself and not a company-wide shift in policy. They probably kept the 'flatlands' structure for most other things but felt they needed to have a fixed team for HL:A in order to finally buckle down and get it out of the door.
0:16 dont forget about ubelivable amount of omegatronic (bot hosters mascot) gay corn. Only after this they stepped in lol
Bot hosters? I cast GAY LASER!!!!!!!!
Weaponized R34 is never something I thought I'd see but here we are
The pornography has already breached their defenses.
Isn't what the hosters want attention? How is making artwork of them, porn or not, achieve anything??
@@Adriethyl i heard people say that its putting whole opetation in a very bad light. Eather way its funny to think valve stepped in becoase of that.
Also, i dont think many people like beying potrayed as some twink in gay corn
I personally do not believe TF2 will ever get a resurgence. Source 1 is an old engine, and the game is held together by shoe strings, and while it may be profitable, CS:GO will always be a larger cashcow. One thing I am seeing is hate towards Deadlock, without understanding that it likely isn't pulling many resources from other games.
you're right, no one at valve can or wants to work on source 1, they don't want to hire new people who can and want to work (like the TF2S2 team that got a dmca for example), for one simple reason: they don't see the payback in it project, they believe that the game is dead both physically and morally, and the community fully supports them in this by buying new slop from the summer/autumn/winter “update”
The issue is "games as a service" they neglect their other services to put out a new one while still making money off the old ones. A game as a service is a promise of upkeep. And valve failed to do that for 6 years.
un-repealable bans are a pretty lame policy. I know a bunch of people that have been banned in various games when they never broke any TOS and they just can't even repeal it. I got banned from MW2 and couldn't repeal the ban, and I had to send a letter to get them to review my ban and overturn it.
Just don't cheat, or at least don't get caught if you do.
@@bubbleman2002 "...got banned *WHEN THEY NEVER BROKE ANY TOS*", learn to read. The point of ban appeals is to mitigate the problem of undeserved bans, since the systems often screw up. I do agree with your statement, but this isn't about rulebreakers coping and seething after getting justly destroyed (unless op is lying and he did deserve his ban, but mistaken bans do in fact happen).
9:40 I've always found looking at the far past achievements of a game studio as a sort of foolish exercise, to put it bluntly, the Valve of 2004 is NOT the Valve of 2024, companies are these massive shifting entities with people moving in and out over time, a sort of Ship of Theseus if you will. So the long past achievements of a studio often times say very little about the current capabilities of that same studio.
Rn the ship is mostly good other than the fact that the front is made of five peices of plywood, some duct tape, and hope.
A great example of this is Pixar. The Pixar of old who made all those great classics is no more and the current one is closer to Disney in the way they operate and make movies.
5:12 False, those are the numbers including idle bots not cheating bots. The real player number is somewhere around 20-40k.
Lol no, you're ridiculous, first of all you're just making up that second of all with the statistics thats literally impossible, if it rose from 60k to 150k do you think they all of a sudden added a ton of new idle bots? No probably not, meaning that change in population is players so at minimum the population would have to be 90k
@@NikotheleepicWatch Zesty Jesus's video on the botting problem.
@@cynicalmemester1694 guy is right too
Why would they suddenly create over 50k idle bots? It wasn't update with cases , whats was purpose to?
There are real players.
@@user-kh4rz9ce4v They added new taunts and skins didn't they?
@Nikotheleepic you legit have no idea HOW bad the bot problem is in tf2, dont you? This has been going on for 6 years. These bot hosters are extremely determined to pump the game in with as many bots as possible. Cheater bots are not the only bots too. Like someone else said, watch Zesty Jesus' video about bots.
4:57 that huge bump of players in the chart consists mostly of automated idle/items farming botnets that login to the game at the same time and disconnect at once when item server maintenance occurs
Bellular News probably don't watch essay TF2 videos or do more research than going to savetf2 website, TF2's gameban pages and update pages because they're busy editing or real life tasks like dealing with taxes that sometimes require lots of hours on average or rushing it would be a chance to get free ticket to court room.
I have been following Valve and TF2 for many years and the reason they don't put enough work into TF2 is because.
1. they don't have enough employees (around 300 not industry standard for a company of there size)
2. they can easily get content in by supporting creators in there community
With the bot crisis Valve just took a too hands off approach and its great that the casual mode is actually playable so players don't have to rely on community servers. They are apparently working on the TF2 comic again but honestly Valve just needs more employees for the things they want to work on. They are stretched too thin and this is something that those who work at Valve have said such as Robin Walker (co-creator of TF2) and some in the community have noticed this as well.
Those who work at Valve want to work on big interesting projects, some want to work on TF2 but the company doesn't have enough employees and ends up being stretched too thin to work on everything that requires attention.
The most reasonable comment here. I respect any community that keeps a game alive, but it seems like shouting into the void with TF2 🤷♂️
Valve has so many resources they have no excuse. They don't have enough workers? Hire some more! Or hand off their "treadmill" projects to a sub contractor company that can handle bug fixes and anti botting.
@@salsamancer Which could lead to layoffs after becoming bloated or a worse product from not communicating with other studios.
We should learn from the recent tech layoffs. Bigger is not better
@@SpinningSideKick9000 that's just the nature of corporate for profit companies. You hire and fire. It's not a Church.
@@salsamancer Valve is employee owned
I think the reason why you don't see much. Is that Valve in all honesty is no longer a game studio. They really don't make any games now. They are more or less a run a store and that is about it. as we are all waiting on that fable half life 3.. a game that will never come out.
well you do still see stuff being made by valve
like artifact
...which disappointed everyone and was eventually abandoned by valve
or half-life alyx
...which forced people to buy very expensive and very specific hardware and brought nothing new to the story of half-life (it's a prequel!), other than replacing one cliffhanger with another and making people question which version of city 17 was real because of all the new content
hell, all that extra new stuff kinda makes it look like the game was taking place in a different, parallel world instead of the one seen in half-life 2
or the yet another multiplayer game that... exists.
well, simply put
they still make *something*, but it's not what players expect, and not in a good way
@@spaceacepl4636and I don't have a problem with that I don't like almost all of the valve games the only one I liked was spellbreak and tf2 was kinda fun but I prefer them as steam not as valve
It should be noted that the in game bots, the aim, vote kick, and mic spam bots have been banned.
There are still THOUSANDS of idle bots that only stay on the main menu to farm times drops. It has been estimated that there are roughly 30k of these bots. At any given moment.
it’s hard to detect a bot when all they do is stay on the menu.
@opti0ns No I 100% understand that. Just wanted to add context to the 60k player number, and the new 150k player numbers. If you subtract 30k you have the average real player count. So the increase is closer to 30k to 120k. That's a much bigger change than at first glance.
@@demoncushion9600 if you are getting this info from the same video I think you are getting that info, I think you got it wrong...
It's not 30k idle bots active at any given moment... Its 30k active *players* while the rest are botnets of idlers.
I mean, I doubt they are very high on the do list on account of them not really doing much
Okay but the idle bots were never much of a problem the worst thing they do is inflate tf2 numbers to make it seem like much more people play than they do
Well heck, I haven't played TF2 in a decade and this almost tempts me to load it up again.
Never been a better time to do it in the last six years than right now.
I just did it two weeks ago. The difference is impressive - now we can just play the game.
Work on this vac update started around 2 years ago by 1 guy, so I don't think that negative reviews triggered this change
That sounds like a real convenient excuse. They were finally about to potentially start losing money so they rushed to "fix" the problem. I'd be surprised if the bot problem isn't back in full force in two months tops.
this is not vac, they're using other automatd detection methods and manual bans. vac is still not working.
I simply refuse to believe that there is only 1.5% of the company willing to work on the game
"medic? are we back?"
"...
YES!"
*tf2 theme plays*
Hearing you talk about your own TF2 video takes me back to the days of *TEAMROOMBA.* I think the channel was originally started by two guys. Why they stopped uploading is probably one of the internets greatest mysteries which we'll most likely never be able to find any closure to.
Over the years Ive been told that one of the main guy died in a car accident but I have never been able to confirm any of it.... I just cross my fingers that he's alive somewhere and will maybe log in to his account one day to claim the pile of youtube money thats waiting for him.
He's not, I played on his server back in the day (2fort2furious), though I doubt he remembers me. That was a joke started intentionally by, IDK, some rando probably, or maybe him to avoid attention from those videos. The first instance of that "hoax" or w/e you want to call it I found from like 2008, and he's shown up online at the most recent I could find, 2021, so yeah safe to say he's probably ok.
He is actually the creator of one of the official maps, which I find a hilarious yin/yang as having both contributed to the community, and severely annoyed a few unlucky people back in the day. His handle is "FLOOR_MASTER" btw. I do agree those videos are GOAT'd. Sucks sprays aren't enabled/uploaded on Valve servers anymore, they were a hilarious, tried & true form of griefing.
He's not, I played on his server back in the day (2fort2furious), though I doubt he remembers me. That was started intentionally by some rando probably, or him, as a joke, or to possibly avoid attention from those videos in the latter case. The first instance that I found of that "joke" or w/e is from like 2008, and he's shown up online at the most recent I could find, 2021, so yeah safe to say he is more than likely fine.
He is actually the creator of one of the official maps, which I find a hilarious duality having both contributed to the community, and severely annoyed a few unlucky people back in the day. His handle is "FLOOR_MASTER" btw. I do agree those videos are GOAT'd. Sucks sprays aren't enabled on Valve servers anymore, they were a hilarious, time-tested, "simple-yet-effective" staple of griefing for many years.
People shouldn't trust Valve after them letting this problem persist for almost 7 YEARS, do not be complacent, hold them accountable.
So you would rather have a company promise that only for them to UNABLE TO DO IT after all
Look at Overwatch 2 "We can't bring the thing that we promised" then later on they CAN actually do it lol
Valve knows how to work, to just shut up so what they say can't be used against them
its not a problem you can do something about, valve despite having a lot of resources can not just devote majority attention to a decade old product while they are serving 1 hardware one store and support of every other game they've ever released, all while considering problems that comes with all these products..... it more of a society problem than anything
@@somhrshok
@@welderscript9329Valve is also really good at kicking the can down the road. I'd be surprised if this "fix" lasts longer than a month.
What problem has persisted for 7 years??
I just picked a random moment to restart playing tf2 i didnt even know about any of this
no one talks about the lvl 1 accounts top scoring and no one banning them
That happens? I've been playing for a few months and maybe it's that I don't pay attention to the top scores at the end of a match but I've never seen a level 1 top score
someone is either cheating or just a good player on a new account, it happens
Accounts show up level 1 in case of server problems or privated steam profiles. If a "level 1" player is on top, they are not level 1, they are just an experienced player trying to protect their privacy or having internet issues.
@@eliann944 no care they getting vote kicked until they fix it
They finally, after more than 15 years, fixed Hoodoo so that you can no longer get a Red spy into Blu's spawn on the last stage.
Now I don't have any reason to play hoodoo lol
You should try Poodoo, its much superior variant (yes, this really exists).
The gameplay on display is certainly... Yeah it's, it's very. Mhm, yes, it's gameplay.
Watch, they'll abandon it again after the summer update
still no heavy update, so what are we celebrating for?
clearly the statement about the issue being worked on was a pr move to get people to shut up
and sure, the bots may have vanished, but the game might once again be abandoned shortly afterwards
it's like they don't want to touch this game and this world they created with even a ten foot pole
they just release new cosmetic items, only available via lootcrates, that's basically it
It's wild to think for every single regular player in TF2, there were 2 bots banned
Damn, I just realized when I saw the graphics that they were "OK".
I remember back in the day when I had to buy an expensive graphics card for $250 USD JUST so I wouldn't lag out of the game, because the graphics were just fantastic!
I feel old Mr. Krabs (turns to dust)
Genuinely would love to see a Source 2 update for the game, giving everyone who played it before something special, like a Limited Time Man Co hat.
I don't think it's a good idea. A lot of Tf2 players have weak PCs and wouldn't be able to play the updated version. Also a lot of movement techs that are based on engine glitches would dissapear, which would be sad. I think, the reason that the game lived for so long is the lack of meta changes. As soon as the valve starts balancing items based on players' opinions, the game will become boring.
@@drefs3035 you can play CS:GO source 2 on a crappy pc, I highly doubt Source 2 would be a problem.
Valve being the only sane company still out there.
They have so much money that they just don't care about scaming players - they don't need to... Except that they abandoned one of their most beloved games for many years.
@@jorkan_22 its because they don't have investors like E.A, ubisoft etc. when investors who make money off you company failing don't get a say the company does better.
Lmao Valve is awful, wtf are you on about
@dankduelzperuvian Like? Look at other companies and tell me that again.
Playing as the demonstration man is always a good time!
6 years and we finally get it. Don't let your guard down I think
A common method used by game studios to prevent hackers from learning is to do a ban wave every 1-6 months, and just taking note of bots to ban during the wave, this doesn't let bot makers tweak and test their bots on the current system
How can Valve be expected to fix anything when they can't even count to three?
He doesn't know which is his good side
Repetiton at/around 11:13. Sounds weird. Listen well what is said.
If theres no bots, next thing is free communication
This seems like a casual flex of "Vacnet"s actual powers (keeping them out based on machine/infrastructure fingerprinting?) & that's officially not even used in TF2, can we please have this for all games on the Steam platform? 🤷♂
There was this one guy in a community server who obviously had cheats on. But this guy never fired a single shot. Dude named himself the anti-cheat from what I can remember. I hope this guy is still out there protecting others. Best part is, he had the cosmetics of an average bot.
5:08 idle bots... exist... farming for items... and bumping up the player counts, seasonal items... also exist, so its very well idle bots...
Your use… of… ellipsis… eludes my understanding by a great… amount
Wow bro, you're just like the edgy 90s JRPG protagonist you like!
Lmao. Kinda funny the "..." 's actual use for answer space for question you'll see in school, filler or silence in some comics with speech bubble yet this is just wasting the space with no point.
They were also banned, that's kinda the point of a banwave, you know?
@@Shad0w-One i dont think they were banned lol
"TF2 community, we hear you! We love this game and know you do, too. We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things." took 2 years but atleast it happened
Keep it going please Valve. I'm gonna protest personally, despite the new items.
Home-slice, thinks he's the Wheatly core
5:11 please dont spread misinformation it IS mostly bots, around 70%, Zesty Jesus made a video about it with very concluaive evidence
Valve DID BAN cheating bots, but not idling bots, which is what is being reflected in the player count
Their decision is final... does that mean they're never officially giving us the good TF2 from 2007 back?
you know what's really tragic? the background footage.
At long last, the light has appeared at the end of the tunnel. We have a future ladies and gentlemen. Don’t let it slip away.
REMOVE MATCHMAKING
it is so frustrating that practically no one is attacking the underlying problem. tf2 is an old game that valve is no longer focusing on, with a centralized server system that can only be hack/bot free with constant attention. this problem only started when valve killed off all of the community servers with their soulless matchmaking, and then stopped updating the game. you need HUMAN moderation to keep hacks and bots off the servers in a game like tf2. anything valve does other than removing centralized game hosting is just a delaying of the inevitable, because ALL games get left behind at some point. that is a FACT. give the power back to the players and tf2 will be rid of the bot problem for as long as there are players.
I see you don't remember the random p2w servers from quickplay. You know, the type to have it own item system and own micro transactions for those item systems. You trade one evil for another.
@@lordjaraxxus5418 quickplay buttons are basically old school MM, remove it too. only need server browser. then we can avoid all the bad servers. host and admin our own if needed.
@@lordjaraxxus5418 You can have quick play with official only servers. This is how it worked towards the end of quick play and it was great.
Y'all know community servers haven't gone anywhere, right? They've always been here.
Valve is a megacorporation too; they suck.
It makes sense for Valve to lean more on the community. Give the community more power and in return keep the game chugging along without too much development cost
I did my part. and im happy to see the result.
Never forget it took mainstream youtubers talking about it to force Valve to do the bare minimum.
5:42 misinformation: i heard youtubers were kinda devided in this matter. The website says about it, but very carefully, probably becoase guy who started this movement is a gabling addict
This happened like 3 weeks ago
They need to ban but also go after the bot creators themselves. Otherwise this will just keep happening and it will never be resolved.
the bot creators are breaking zero laws.
@@freedustinSo the illegal content being shared through in-game chat is not illegal?
@@freedustin unless you count how a few of them were trying to dox and threaten people, or ya know, how some of them actively sell bot protection and in some cases bot hacks, which does break laws (more so the selling of hacks and cheats, which breaks certain copyright and data protection laws) they might not face jail time, but oh boy could they be sued out of existence
@@freedustin Actually they are. They're causing economic and financial harm to Valve. I'm sure I don't have to tell you the numerous doxxing and death threats they've issued against multiple members of the TF2 community who are actively working against them.
@@Nykomil has nothing to do with the bot software. that's individual users deciding to break the law. just like I can buy remote admin tools and its perfectly legal until I put it on somebody's system without their consent.
Good to see you back in the studio
I tried to play TF2 YEARS ago, got banned from a server within 2 minutes for something along the lines of "Not playing correctly." Never went back to it.
skill issue
Weird, I’ve only seen that in mvm (tf2’s PVE mode)
Random kicks are not bans, but i encourage you to try some other time if you feel like it, look at some youtube stuff about the game and see if you are interested in it at all even
scout with the gibbous for the TF2 was chef's kiss
Kind of an unresearched video
We love our games and they deserve to be treated with care. The difference between a game or a program verses a book or novel is very little. Both deserve to live on the shelf and be looked at every once and a while to spark the good memories we had together.
Reminder that Valve has no moral obligation to TF2
Reminder Valve has no moral obligation to my money.
@@mechadeka
TF2 is not their only source of income, and they certainly don't need it...
Reminder that they have to have a moral obligation for as long as this game has a functional market and shop.
*legal, moral is dependent on person.
@@animevisualnovelspeedrunnernot really. Please find me the law that say this.
Learning about all that makes me wanna get or even improvise a gaming laptop.
Not being on steam makes me feel like i'm missing out on A LOT.
After this, I hope for the Heavy Update and last comic.
They've confirmed the last comic is in production right now. There's even a WIP picture posted, confirmed to be real.
@@krumz90 This was the icing on the cake of this ban wave. It's such a great time to play the game right now.
People are basically just wanting TF2 to be maintained like CS2, And they're not giving it but teases the fact they are aware
AND HL3 leaks have been confirmed. lotta news for valve lately
There’s no way you’re using default tf2 fov
@@brickovichfr who cares
@@brickovich csh????
@@hgghfghfghfghf i dont listen to them anymore
@@badcatsgetdissolved4506 you apparently
@@brickovich you are blind to the sins of this world
This is about the 4th time Valve have done one of these massive bot ban waves. They always let them come back. "Banning bots is a treadmill and we dislike treadmills" was their official stance.
It won’t last. It’s not Valve’s style to stick with anything.
I will belive when heavy update comes
no offical statement from valve? then valve did not face reality
They're not a company that does all these press conferences and corporate BS. They just do the thing and go quiet.
Honestly, we’re fortunate that they’re still updating it. Name another game that’s not an MMO that still gets updates and is 17 years old
tf2 playercount is mostly bots. Like 70 to 80% is trade/idle bots. This is verifiable information that is easily searchable for online.Not that those bots were ever getting banned, but talking about playercount increasing/decreasing is completely useless because of this.
No research whatsoever was done for this video, kinda impressive.
What's the point of constantly running the game for trade bots? They are there only for steam inventory management.