It should be obvious at this point that Valve simply does not care about TF2.

There is no one at the organization that does more than the absolute bare minimum to keep the servers up and the loot crate cash rolling in.

At this point, I think it’s best for the player base to just give up on it and let TF2 rest in peace. It had a real good run, but in the end it died due to developer neglect. It’s time to move on.

I signed it. But... This is human nature. To create, lose interest, create new things, stop caring about old things, focus on money...

As a full time creative and someone with creative products in peoples hands... Im allowed to change my interest, let something rot, or go extinct. Yeah, it's my creation, y'all just getting to experience it. Its "not for you", etc etc.

So while I hear the pain in the players voice, consumers don't own creators, even if you paid for it. You dont have buy it. You dont have to support it. You can go create your own vision (maybe).

Yes, it’s their right to let it rot but they should be honest with their players if that is the intention.

In actuality TF2 has a façade of support. Valve is still regularly releasing their gambling based micro transactions and earning millions of dollars while ignoring the needs of the players.

You can say “just don’t buy it” but one could easily think that supporting the game financially means that it will continue to be supported by Valve.

unfortunate assumption, the whole thing is probably automated with a skeleton crew of non-tech people lol

I signed the patition, hope that helps: http://save.tf

I went back to community servers and despite a few minute wait, it's quite pleasant. I guess I haven't played much in the last couple years though.

I didnt know this was a thing. I used ddg and found https://teamwork.tf/ For anyone who's interested

Why is this such a hard problem to solve? is it because of f2p making it trivial for botters to create new accounts once they get banned?

update: pretty exhaustive summary of proposed solutions and their flaws here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgkgsgaBBCA

It’s difficult to automate and TF2 has very little support from Valve.

Valve has been building a new generation of server side anti-cheat, that is powered by neural networks, but it’s only in use for Counter Strike 2 AFAIK.

Is it really?

I mean, I get that if you block current day bots, somebody will make a new bot that escapes detection -- but kicking the current day bots seems like a mighty improvement to me.

The community servers window in TF2 itself shows how many bots each server has, next to the player count. What's that then?

Many of those solutions seem perfectly fine and their objections were non-sequiturs

Thank you Uncle Dane. Uncletopia is my happy place. I know that people say that the solutions to lots of problems are political not technical. But I think in this case there really are simple technical fixes that would be trivial to implement and very effective. Off to W+M1 right now...

Who would spend so much time and computers running these bots? There are like 50_000 bots running the game, there are more bots than human players. That's a lot of computing power and steam accounts. Is Valve a subject to an attack from their competitors?

Note that the bots do not have to run the actual game, just implement the parts of the wire protocol they care about.

Who would the competitor be in this case? The bots hurt the TF2 community but Valve obviously earns the vast majority of their cash elsewhere.

My understanding is that the bots are run by teams of trolls on secondhand hardware that would otherwise be useless.

> That's a lot of computing power

Is it? It's probably a spare computer laying around. I could probably scrape together enough hardware to have four separate machines in a state functional-enough to run TF2.

I was surprised (and pleased) that Valve had supported TF2 so long as of ten years ago. It's not surprising that they would move on to other things, although it would be nice if those other things were more great games that they actually release.