You might think a headline like “Team Fortress 2 has bots” is a sort of “water is wet” kind of news story, particularly since this shooter’s bot problem has been covered by us and others before, but some current reporting on the situation has confirmed that there’s less of a bot problem so much as a bot tsunami to the point that the game is being called “literally unplayable.” And that’s said with no sense of irony or hyperbolic misuse of the word “literally.”
First-hand accounts from a recent sojourn into TF2 report being sniped immediately upon spawning over and over again (with half of the friendly team using similar sniper bots), obnoxious music and sounds being blased over comms, a flurry of obnoxious messages and links flooding chat, and bots copying player names and attempting to vote-kick them off, human and bot alike; at one point so many characters were kicked in this way that the game had to reshuffle teams mid-match.
In spite of the dire mess TF2 finds itself in, long-suffering fans are still trying to get Valve to do something. Fans have made suggestions like making the game buy-to-play once more or adding a CAPTCHA system, content creators have made videos calling players to action, and some players just want simple acknowledgment that the game is not going to be updated whatsoever as opposed to the radio silence they’re getting from Valve now. People have even started a thread counting the days until bots are eliminated, which is up to over 14K replies since it was started in May 2021.
