Valve has responded to a growing Team Fortress 2 community movement in protect of the game’s massive botting problem, and is reassuring players it is “working to improve things.”
In a tweet today from the official Team Fortress 2 account, Valve said “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.” It is the first tweet from the account since July 2020 (not counting a single retweet of an official Valve tweet from October 2020).
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.
— Team Fortress 2 (@TeamFortress) May 26, 2022
This comes in response to the hashtag #SaveTF2, which the Team Fortress 2 community has adopted in the last few days to draw attention to a massive botting problem that has been ongoing in the game since 2020. The hashtag has been adopted by a large number of Team Fortress 2 streamers and is described as a “peaceful” protest about the state of the game. The bot infestation has caused Team Fortress 2’s casual servers to be overun with spam messages, flawless snipers, and more recently bots that can crash entire games or orchestrate coordinated kicking of human players. Previously, community leaders organized an emailing campaign to reach out to Valve and media outlets to shed light on the issue.
While individuals using the #SaveTF2 hashtag may have different motives, largely the group has simply been hoping for some level of acknowledgement from Valve, ideally coupled with a fix. Others hope that renewed attention on Team Fortress 2 may result in the game getting regular updates again given the large community clearly still interested. Despite being over a decade old, Team Fortress 2 remains incredibly popular and has consistently averaged between 70,000 and 90,000 concurrent players every month for the last year.
For now, it’s unclear what improvements Valve has up its sleeve, but hopefully they can get Team Fortress 2 into a more stable state.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.